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ARGENTINA: Serbian War Criminal of Cuska Massacre Fame Arrested

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 26 2005 (IPS) - A new wave of war criminals, this time from the Balkans, has apparently sought refuge in Argentina, which has a sad history of taking in Nazis after World War II.

The embassy of Serbia and Montenegro in Buenos Aires was taken by surprise this week by the arrest of an alleged Serbian war criminal, Nebjosa Minic, who was living in the western province of Mendoza since 2003.

Minic is implicated in a 1999 massacre of ethnic Albanians in the village of Cuska, in what is today the autonomous province of Kosovo.

The ambassador of Serbia and Montenegro in Buenos Aires, Iván Salvjic, told IPS that he did not know if there was an international arrest warrant out for Minic, or if his extradition would be sought by Belgrade.

Salvjic also said he was unfamiliar with the massacre in Cuska, and had never heard of Minic.

"If it’s really him, he wasn’t a high-ranking member of the police. He might have formed part of a paramilitary organisation or a special police unit, but it’s not a household name like those of other war criminals who held high military ranks," said the diplomat.

Minic’s name emerged from an investigation carried out by the New York-based Human Rights Watch in Kosovo, where the human rights group interviewed relatives of victims and survivors of attacks by Serbian security forces on ethnic Albanian villages, showing the witnesses photos and asking them to identify members of the police or militias implicated in war crimes.

The investigation revealed that on May 14, 1999, 41 ethnic Albanians were summarily executed in Cuska by a special Serbian police unit known as Munja or "Lightning". Minic, whose nickname was "Commander Death", was one of the militia’s leaders.

According to the Human Rights Watch report "A Village Destroyed: War Crimes in Kosovo," released in late 1999, the Serbian militia members gathered up the villagers, and separated out most of the men.

They then took three groups of men into three different houses, where the villagers were shot with automatic weapons and set on fire. But in each case, one man survived to tell the story of what happened.

The Lightning unit, described as a mix of police, convicted criminals (Minic fell in this category), and self-proclaimed patriots, also raped women, stole cars, jewelry and other valuables, and looted and burned houses in ethnic Albanian villages.

The human rights group interviewed people who recognised Minic in the photos as one of the men who killed six members of the same family – the youngest was six years old – in Cuska in June.

Minic, a convicted felon, also stole jewelry and money from the family. The witnesses identified him from his face and the tattoos on his chest and arms.

Last March, the intelligence directorate of Mendoza received an anonymous tip that Minic was living in the province under an assumed name.

After a two-month probe, the investigators arrested him on May 13 in the Lagomaggiore Hospital in the provincial capital. He remains under arrest in the hospital, where he was admitted with a terminal illness.

Minic reportedly entered the province of Mendoza from Chile in September 2003 with a passport in the name of Gorán Petrovic, and with enough money to buy a house and open two pizza parlours in downtown Mendoza, which he named "La Bomba" I and II.

Minic, who is at the disposal of the federal courts, is under heavy guard at the hospital.

According to one of the police guards, Minic admitted that he belonged to the police in Serbia, and told hiim that he was "much tougher than you."

The news of his arrest was originally published by the daily "Los Andes" of Mendoza, which reported that he had received support from some of his fellow countrymen operating in South America.

Mendoza Governor Julio Cobos reported Wednesday that Interpol (the International Police) was able to confirm Minic’s identity based on a fingerprint match.

Ambassador Salvjic said he had not yet seen the documents proving that the arrested man was Minic, and that he was waiting for instructions from Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Montenegro, Yugoslavia’s successor state.

"They say it’s him. We’re waiting for the official confirmation, but we weren’t able to clarify yet whether anyone is looking for him, or why they would be," said the diplomat.

Salvjic also said he was "surprised" by the case, and added that the embassy had neither "official nor unofficial" information on the possibility that Serbian war criminals had sought refuge in Argentina.

This South American country has an embarrassing history of providing shelter to war criminals. At the end of World War II, the government of Juan Domingo Perón (1946-1955) helped smuggle prominent Nazis like Joseph Mengele, Adolf Eichmann and Erich Priebke into Argentina under false documents.

War criminals from Croatia’s pro-Nazi Ustasha regime were also taken in, including Ante Pavelic, accused of the extermination of half a million Serbs, gypsies and Jews in Croatia during the Second World War.

Pavelic came to Argentina in 1948 with a false passport, and his closest associates were brought in too. They were later able to bring over the gold held in the Croatian National Bank in Zagreb, according to an investigation by Argentine journalist Uki Goñi, published in his book "The Real Odessa".

Perpetrators of crimes against humanity committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan war of the 1990s were tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia set up in The Hague in 1993.

Former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, arrested in 2000, was tried by the Tribunal on charges of genocide in Bosnia and Croatia, and for instigating "ethnic cleansing" operations against the Albanian population in Kosovo like the ones carried out in villages in the municipality of Pec, including Cuska, Ljubenic, Pavljan and Zahac.

An estimated 250,000 civilians were killed in the war, and thousands went missing.