Denying that Jovica Stanisic and the Serbian State Security Service had any role in the effort to arm the Serbs and send the volunteer units to Croatia in 1991, the defence put it to the witness Borivoje Savic that he had mistakenly put a number of participants in those events into the SDB; in the actual fact they worked for the Public Security Department or the military intelligence service. The witness responded by saying that ‘all the services were intermingled all over the place; they didn’t know who worked for whom’


In the cross-examination of former Serbian Democratic party official from Vukovar Borivoje Savic, the defence counsel of the accused Jovica Stanisic tried to challenge his claims about the role of the Serbian State Security Service (SDB) in arming Serb people and sending the volunteers to Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem. The defence is not denying that the Serb rebellion in Croatia in 1991 was organized from Belgrade, but is trying to prove that it was all organized by the JNA, Seselj and his men, the Public Security Department, military intelligence… everybody but the SDB which was headed by Stanisic, with the second accused Franko Simatovic as his deputy.

Defence counsel Wayne Jordash put it to Savic that he had simply invented parts of his testimony yesterday, primarily claims about Stanisic’s role in the arming of Serbs in Vukovar, through a man called Ilija Kojic, and the ties of the accused with Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan and Slobodan Medic Boca, commanders of paramilitary groups. The witness never mentioned that in the first statement he gave to the OTP investigators in 2002, yet ‘recalled’ it in the second statement he gave last February. Savic claims that in his first statement he had spoken about the events ‘in general terms’ and had been ‘more specific’ in the second one, although he never explained why he waited six years to get "more specific".

The defence case is that the JNA armed the Serbs in Croatia. Savic didn’t deny it, but he maintained that the arms came in through the State Security Service personnel, too. The defence counsel also noted that in early 1990s, Seselj’s volunteers came to Slavonia through the JNA and that they had been invited by the local authorities. Savic claims they fought under the control of the SDB’.

As the examination continued, the witness admitted that in his evidence yesterday and in the second statement he gave to the OTP he had put some persons in the State Security Service although they actually didn’t work there. He said that the Territorial Defence of Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem was led by Radovan Stojcic Badza, ‘assistant chief of the State Security Service’, and that the campaign to secede from Croatia in that region was led by Ilija Petrovic and Ilija Koncarevic, ‘SDB members’. When the defence counsel put it to him that Badza had in fact been in the Public Security Department, not the SDB, and the latter pair had been members of the military intelligence service, the witness said, ‘Well, they didn’t differentiate between various services, how could I? The services were intermingled all over the place, they didn’t know who worked for whom, they were all using each other as cover’.

Zoran Jovanovic, defending the second accused Franko Simatovic, read out portions of Savic’s 2002 statement, asking him to confirm them. According to the defence counsel, in the statement, Savic clearly stated ‘who is who and who works for whom’, without the vacillation he showed during his testimony. In the end, Simatovic’s defence counsel tried to impeach the witness by producing an ‘official record’ from May 1992 noting that Emil Cakalic, a man from Vukovar, stated he had been interrogated and beaten by Borivoje Savic in the Sremska Mitrovica prison in December 1991. Savic denied it, claiming that the issue had already been dealt with in a court in Croatia. The prosecutor stated that Cakalic himself had specifically denied the allegation in his testimony at the Vukovar Three trial.

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