In the cross-examination of the former Red Berets member, the defense of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic contested the witness’s claims that he was drafted in April 1992 into a special unit formed by the Serbian State Security Service. According to the defense, all the units in the Mount Ozren and Doboj areas were under the command of Ratko Mladic and other JNA and VRS officers


The defense of the former Serbian State Security Service chief Jovica Stanisic and his assistant Franko Simatovic today tried to challenge the evidence of protected witness JF-005 in their cross-examination. Witness JF-005 told the court he was a former member of the Special Operations Unit, also known as the Red Berets.

In his evidence last week, the witness said that the Red Berets played a key role in the takeover of Doboj and the ethnic cleansing there in early May 1992. As alleged in the indictment, in 1991 the accused established the Red Berets as an elite unit for secret operations outside Serbia. The witness said that Radojica Rajo Bozovic, one of Simatovic’s close collaborators, was the commander of the unit in that area.

Stanisic’s defense counsel Wayne Jordash repeatedly tried to get the witness to confirm that Bozovic had in fact commanded another police unit operating under a similar name in the Petrovo Selo area, halfway between Doboj and Tuzla. The witness didn’t budge, saying he didn’t know anything about any Bozovic’s involvement there.

Jordash went on to note that Bozovic and the Red Berets did not operate under the orders of Stanisic and Simatovic. According to Jordash, they were subordinated to the VRS Main Staff headed by Ratko Mladic and his officers Milan Ninkovic and Novica Simic. ‘There were a lot of troops around, you couldn’t tell who was doing what’, the witness replied. ‘We received orders from both the army and the police, as needed’.

The defense counsel also contested the witness’s claim that he had seen a paper with Stanisic’s name on Bozovic’s desk. ‘You in fact didn’t see anything, you just heard rumors’, Jordash put it to the witness. The witness told Jordash that he knew what he saw, admitting nevertheless that he ‘didn’t know the context’ in which Stanisic’s name appeared on that paper. The witness didn’t clarify why he mentioned the ‘paper with Stanisic’s name on it’ to the OTP only in 2008 and kept silent about it in his first statement given in 2004.

The witness claimed in his statement that in May 1997 he attended a celebration of the anniversary of the Red Berets in the State Security Center in Kula. President Milosevic was there. This prompted the defense counsel to ask the witness if he himself was on the video footage of the celebration. The court then went into closed session: it remained unknown what the witness replied. The hearing proceeded in closed session for almost half an hour. When the court returned to open session, the defense counsel asked the witness to provide ‘evidence of his status’. The witness replied that once he came home he would send a ‘letter of gratitude’ the State Security Service had given him for his service.

Simatovic’s defense counsel Vladimir Petrovic asked the witness to describe the camp on Mount Ozren where the witness was trained under the command of Raja Bozovic for an attack on Doboj in April 1992. Petrovic also wanted the witness to describe the training. The troops were accommodated in ‘a three or four storey building’, the witness said; ‘two smaller buildings’ were located nearby. The witness received training in ‘topography, fighting, setting and disarming landmines’.

In his reply to the defense, the witness confirmed that he never socialized with Bozovic on Mount Ozren and couldn’t follow his activities. Despite that, the witness was adamant that he had ‘often heard Bozovic speak with Belgrade on the phone’. At least once, the witness ‘saw Bozovic dial 011’, the Belgrade area code. Noting that the witness didn’t know who Bozovic was talking to, the defense implied that ‘it could have been a private conversations’. ‘It is possible’, the witness retorted.

Witness JF 005 will complete his evidence tomorrow. The prosecution will then call its new witness.

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