Vlado Dragicevic, defence witness of Jovica Stanisic

Prosecutor Travis Farr cross-examined the retired Serbian secret service official Vlado Dragicevic. He put it to witness that Jovica Stanisic’s involvement in the effort to set free UNPROFOR staff was not a sincere peace initiative. UNPROFOR personnel were taken hostage in BH in May 1995 by the Bosnian Serb authorities. According to the prosecutor, Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic wanted to speed up the talks about the Contact Group plan. The plan envisaged ‘the consolidation and legalization of [Republika Srpska’s] war gains’. Milosevic therefore sent his ‘special envoy’ on the mission: the chief of the Serbian State Security Service Jovica Stanisic. Rather surprisingly, the witness agreed with the prosecutor.

The prosecutor also noted that when Stanisic spoke to the press he used the term ‘former BH’. The witness dismissed the suggestion that this kind of language implied that Stanisic supported the secession of Republika Srpska from Bosnia and Herzegovina. As Dragicevic said, after Yugoslavia broke up, all its republics were called ‘former’. The prosecutor then asked the witness if he ever heard somebody say ‘former Serbia’, ‘former Slovenia’ or ‘former Croatia’. ‘I think I may have heard’ people say ‘former Croatia’, the witness replied.

The witness denied that he, as the chief of the International Cooperation Department in the Serbian State Security Service, had any knowledge of the involvement of the State Security Service unit known as the Red Berets in the wars in Croatia and BH. Dragicevic claims he met Captain Dragan Vasiljkovic in 2000 and that Vasiljkovic had nothing to do with either Stanisic or the Service. The prosecution alleges Vasiljkovic trained the Serbian State Security Service units.

The prosecutor showed a video recording of a ceremony in the State Security Service training center in Kula, in 1997. Jovica Stanisic decorated members of the Red Berets for their contribution in the wars in Croatia and BH. Captain Dragan was among those who received decorations. In the video, Stanisic greets him more cordially then the others. The recording also shows the witness next to Stanisic and reading out the names of the award recipients. The prosecutor asked the witness if he still claimed that he did not meet Vasiljkovic before 2000 and that Stanisic and the State Security Service had nothing to do with Vasiljkovic. The witness claimed he forgot that Vasiljkovic was in Kula, maintaining that he couldn’t say anything about the actual cooperation between Stanisic and Captain Dragan.

The prosecutor used the Kula recording to show that the special police wore identical uniforms as Stanisic’s security detail escorting him when he went to Pale during the hostage crisis. The witness didn’t deny it. The footage also shows Franko Simatovic, who is on trial with Stanisic for crimes committed by the police and paramilitary units under the control of the Service in Croatia and BH. At the ceremony in Kula, Zivorad Ivanovic Crnogorac presented the report to Slobodan Milosevic and Jovica Stanisic. As the prosecutor noted, a document of the federal MUP from August 1992 speaks of Ivanovic and Captain Dragan as the leaders of paramilitary groups that committed crimes in BH. The witness said he was unaware of it.

In the examination-in chief, Dragicevic insisted that the Serbian State Security Service worked with foreign secret services regularly in the 1990s. Today, the prosecutor showed the statement the witness gave to the defense, where he says that the CIA resident in Belgrade told him Stanisic was ‘the only man in Serbia the American service could talk to’. The prosecutor put it to the witness that Stanisic’s cooperation with CIA didn’t necessarily mean that Stanisic didn’t commit war crimes. The witness agreed.

Dragicevic retired immediately after the assassination of the Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindic, since he was suspected of having leaked confidential intelligence information to the Zemun mafia that was behind the assassination.

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