Dejan Plahuta, defence witness of Franko Simatovic

The trial of the two former chiefs of the Serbian State Security Service, Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, continued with the cross-examination of Dejan Plahuta, who testifies in Simatovic’s defense. Plahuta is a former soldier of the Yugoslav Army and the Serbian State Security Service’s Special Operations Unit.

Stanisic’s defense tried several times to learn from the witness more about the cooperation between the VJ with the VRS and the RSK police, but the witness didn’t know much about it. Plahuta confirmed that the Uzice Corps, the 72^nd Special Brigade, the 63^rd Parachute Brigade and the VJ Guards Brigade crossed into the BH territory in mid-January 1993 and attacked Skelani. The attack came as a response to the assaults carried out by Naser Oric’s forces on the inhabitants of Skelani and the area around the village. The witness, who was a VJ soldier serving at the Perucac border post at the time, claims that the Serbian police didn’t cross into Bosnian territory. The witness knew that based on his daily conversations with the police officers who were securing the border crossing at Bajina Basta.

Prosecutor Grace Harbour put it to the witness that the Serbian State Security Service units did participate in the fighting near Skelani. According to her, the attack was not just a response to an attack of the Bosnian forces but a planned operation, whose objective was to expel Muslims from eastern Bosnia. This is mentioned in the entries in Mladic’s diaries in November 1992. At the relevant page in his diary, Mladic says that the enemy in Zepa, Birac and Gorazde must ‘be driven to exhaustion and experience losses in order to be forced to leave those areas together with the civilians’.

An entry from Mladic’s diary about a meeting in February 1993 that Franko Simatovic also attended speaks about the planning of Operation Udar. As the witness said, he couldn’t have known whether Simatovic was involved in that because he was ‘nothing but a border guard’. Plahuta couldn’t comment on the prosecutor’s claim that Simatovic’s presence at the meeting showed that he ‘participated in the planning of the operation together with the VRS and VJ top leadership’ and that Simatovic’s units, led by Radojica Bozovic, were involved in the attack on Skelani.

In order to contest the witness’s claim that the Serbian MUP personnel didn’t take part in the fighting in eastern Bosnia, prosecutor Harbour showed Plahuta several documents produced by the VRS Skelani Brigade. The documents state that the Red Berets unit of the Serbian MUP under the command of Radojica Bozovic was involved in combat near Skelani. According to the documents, this unit also provided training for VRS troops. The witness said he had never seen those documents or heard of such claims before. He was sure some of his colleagues in the Red Berets unit would have told him they had been in Skelani, if that had indeed been the case. He didn’t know that Bozovic had ties with the State Security Service.

Plahuta will complete his evidence on Thursday when the trial of the former Serbian State Security Service chiefs for the crimes committed by the Serb forces in Croatia and BH resumes.

Sharing