Former chairman of the Party of Democratic Action in Bosanski Samac Sulejman Tihic contends that the members of the Special Operations Unit ‘were the masters of life and death, they knew how to fight and handle weapons’. Tihic was detained in five detention facilities but suffered the most in Bosanski Samac at the hands of the ‘Serbian specials’


Sulejman Tihic, the current president of the Party of Democratic Action and chairman of the House of Peoples in the BH Assembly, is testifying at the trial of the former chiefs of the Serbian State Security Service, Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic. Tihic spoke about the torture he suffered in the police station in Bosanski Samac and in various detention facilities in Serbia. Before the war broke out, Tihic was the SDA chairman in Bosanski Samac. Tihic already testified in 2001 about the events that followed the Serbian takeover of Bosanski Samac at the trial for the ethnic cleansing in the town and its environs. In 2003, Tihic testified at the Slobodan Milosevic trial. The transcripts of Tihic’s previous evidence and the three statements he had given to the OTP investigators were admitted into evidence today.

The declaration of the Serbian Municipality of Bosanski Samac was in Tihic’s view ‘a clear political project’ which could not have been accomplished without Belgrade’s support. According to Tihic words, the Red Berets arrived in Samac in a helicopter in February or March 1992; ‘they immediately started bossing everyone around’. Together with the JNA, the local Serb police and the Territorial Defense, the Red Berets launched the attack on Samac on 17 April 1992. As the witness described it, the special unit members commanded the action. They were ‘the masters of life and death, they knew how to fight and to handle weapons’. Tihic noted that ‘everybody was afraid of the specials from Serbia’ because they were ‘prone to crime’.

The next day, Tihic was arrested and detained in the police station together with about a dozen people, on the orders of Dragan Djordjevic Crni. Tihic believed that Djordjevic ‘was the man in charge’. From Samac, detainees were transferred to the JNA barracks in Brcko, and then to Bijeljina. A number of prisoners were then flown to Batajnica near Belgrade in helicopters. Tihic ended up in prison in Sremska Mitrovica. On 14 August 1992, he was finally exchanged.

Although he ‘was beaten more severely in Sremska Mitrovica’, the witness said that ‘Samac was the worst’. Nine persons were detained in a two-square meter room there, and were constantly beaten. There ‘was a danger that they would be executed by firing squad’. Unlike in Samac, ‘there was order’ in Sremska Mitrovica, the witness noted. Detainees were beaten regularly after breakfast and dinner but ‘at least it was impossible to take people out and killed them’. Among the Red Berets in Bosanski Samac in 1992, Tihic singled out Zvezdan Jovanovic as particularly brutal. Tihic recognized Jovanovic in a well-known recording of the Special Operations Unit parade in Kula. Zvedan Jovanovic was sentenced to 40 years in Serbia as one of the people who killed Prime Minister Djindjic.

The indictment alleges that the Special Operations Unit, or the Red Berets, was an elite unit of the Serbian State Security Service, established by the accused in 1991 to conduct secret operations outside Serbia.

Sulejman Tihic continues his evidence tomorrow.

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