By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Dec 18 2000 (IPS)

The new government of Yugoslavia has decided to set up a Truth Commission with the aim of establishing the truth regarding war crimes committed by Serbs against non- Serbs in wars in Croatia, Bosnia and southern Serbian province of Kosovo during the past 10 years.

The wars took the lives of more than 200,000 people, many of whom were victims of atrocities and mass executions. Although, in the course of the bloody wars no nation was immune to atrocities, Serbs were blamed for most of them.

Fingers were pointed at Slobodan Milosevic and his regime for the policy of “ethnic cleansing” of non-Serbs in war-torn areas.

Since 1992, the international community responded with punitive measures, that included expulsion of Yugoslavia from all the international bodies and several rounds of severe economic sanctions.

In 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, bombed the country for 11 weeks because of Milosevic’s repressive measures against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

The official stand of the regime was that no Serb ever committed a war crime. Serbs were merely defending themselves in Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo, and were the victims of others.

If Belgrade helped in any way, it was because of “the Serb national interest”. The punitive measures since 1992 were the result of the international hatred and conspiracy against Serb nation as a whole, the dogma said.

The idea of the Truth Commission came from Goran Svilanovic, human rights activist for more than 10 years and current foreign minister of Yugoslavia. “Serbs were not properly informed on what was going in the past 10 years,” Svilanovic, explained in an interview.

“The broader public should finally get all the information. All the evidence on war crimes committed against non-Serbs, in the name of so-called ‘national interest of Serbs’ should become public. At the same time, the evidence on war crimes committed by others, against Serbs, should also be known to Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo”.

Svilanovic says the Truth Commission should collect evidence for trials in the future. “The individual guilt must be established, so that the collective guilt can be taken off from the name of the whole Serb nation” he added.

Legal experts agree that exposing the truth on wars in former Yugoslavia, together with Belgrade’s and Serbs’ role in them, will lead to the collective catharsis of the nation.

“The truth will help the younger generation go into life without the burden of the past,” Biljana Kovacevic Vuco of the prominent Yugoslav Committee of Lawyers for Human Rights told IPS. “At the same time, the truth should prevent, in the long run, the repetition of similar events in this turbulent area,” she adds.

In the opinion of Vojin Dimitrijevic, the leading human rights activist in Serbia, the truth commission should be established in the whole region.

“The truth commissions should exist in the whole region (of Balkans). We should include the experience of many states that had similar problems – South Africa, Latin America,” Dimitrijevic says.

“The aim of our commission should be to establish who ordered what, when and where. Then, we’ll have to admit that bad things were really done by our next of kin, in our name,” Dimitrijevic adds. “And never again should it happen that people here think that Muslims in Srebrenica were killed by other Muslims or that seven thousands of men are still walking endlessly in the woods of eastern Bosnia,” he adds.

Dimitrijevic was referring to the official explanation in Serbia about Srebrenica, the small Muslim town in Bosnia, overrun by Bosnian Serb army in July 1995. Seven thousand Muslim men were killed then by Serbs. More than 1,200 bodies were recovered in mass graves near the town a while ago.

Official Serbian media said that the massacre was an invention of Western propaganda or explained it in a manner described by Professor Dimitrijevic.

They never carried the news on how one of the participants in the massacre, Drazen Erdemovic, admitted the crime in front of The Hague based Tribunal for war crimes and was sentenced for it.

They did not report on Bosnian Serb general, Radislav Krstic’s, testimony in the same court. General Krstic was heading the operation against Srebrenica and, pressed by evidence, admitted that mass killings of Muslims were done on the spot.

But people know. Many participants in the war in Croatia talk freely about Serb paramilitary atrocities around the town of Vukovar in 1991. Those who took part in fighting against rebelled ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 speak about “open men hunt” against civilians and armed men alike.

But aides of Slobodan Milosevic are fiercely against the establishment of the Truth Commission. They fear that the evidence could bring Milosevic, and also many of them, to the Tribunal. The UN-established court has accused former Yugoslav strongman for war crimes in May 1999.

“That is outrageous. The Truth Commission is the tyranny of new government. Only the history can prove what is the truth,” he angrily told journalists.

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