Face to Face With Evil

• Share

Even war has its rules. Slobodan Miljkovic, called "Lugar" — the Gamekeeper — would not have been thinking about that when, as eyewitnesses allege, he had 50 Croat and Muslim Bosnian civilians lined up against a wall and took part in shooting 16 of them, when he sliced an old man's throat with a broken chair, when he clubbed and shot another Bosnian man to death, or when he savagely beat a Croat priest and five others with a police baton, a metal wrench and a car jack. From April 17 until Nov. 20, 1992, the witnesses say, Lugar terrorized thousands of non-Serb residents of Bosanski Samac in northern Bosnia until they either fled or died. He stopped only when Bosnian Serb authorities jailed him — unjustly, he huffs — for torturing 11 Serb allies and killing one in a quarrel over loot. Lugar, 34, claims he did not do anything wrong. "I was just a military policeman," he tells TIME, "carrying out normal duties."

For such "normal duties" Lugar has been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague, charged with crimes against humanity. Dozens of witnesses say he committed terrible acts as platoon leader of a Serbian paramilitary unit known as the Gray Wolves. Yet today Lugar is free, if not living particularly well, back home in Kragujevac, a grimy industrial city 95 km southeast of Belgrade.

Six months after the U.S.-brokered Dayton accord said war criminals would be arrested and tried at the Hague, hundreds of Balkan triggermen who carried out atrocities and scores of high-ranking apparatchiks and politicians who ordered the genocide go about their lives as if nothing has happened. National leaders who presided over the savagery remain in power, including the indicted ringleaders of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Only three of the 57 accused war criminals formally charged — 46 Serbs, eight Croats, three Muslims — are in custody in the Hague, though the Bosnian government just arrested two of the Muslims and plans to hand them over this week. It could take years to prosecute even a handful of the suspects.

As it has taken months for the first trial to begin. Dusan Tadic, a Serb accused of abusing and murdering some of the 3,000 civilians at Omarska camp, finally goes before the court this week after delays caused, his lawyers say, by the Serb government repeatedly hindering efforts to collect evidence and interview witnesses.

Bosnia's victims, Muslim, Croat and Serb alike, plead that there can never be lasting peace in the Balkans if individuals who raped and pillaged and slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians are not brought to judgment. But the obstacles are formidable. Despite a recent show of cooperation from Croatia's Franjo Tudjman and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, the two Presidents have largely stonewalled the tribunal. Both have deeply vested interests in preventing investigations and trials that could incriminate their political apparatus or themselves. Western powers sit down and do business with them because both men are needed to make the fragile Dayton agreement work.

The three-year-old Hague tribunal is hampered by a shortage of funds and staff. Watertight legal cases are difficult to construct, and no one has uncovered the kind of paperwork that helped convict Nazi offenders at Nuremberg. Most of the suspects remain safe from arrest at home, and NATO's Implementation Force in Bosnia is resolute against mission creep that might ask its soldiers to hunt them down. "Oh, we hope for justice," says Alija Dedajic, a survivor of Sarajevo, "but we do not believe in it."

So almost all the men suspected of perpetrating the most barbaric acts in Europe since World War II remain at large. To learn more about who they are, how they live and how they answer the charges against them, TIME tracked some of them down. Of course each one denies he is guilty, but long conversations with them provide a glimpse into the minds of men who may have been responsible for Bosnia's atrocities. By some of their accounts, the trail of culpability leads directly to Milosevic, the man the U.S. is relying on most to make the peace hold.

Lugar looks ready to bolt as he steps into a dingy workingman's cafe in Kragujevac. The man who helped arrange the meeting, a shark-faced lawyer in a purple suit, nods in reassurance, but Lugar stares truculently at two TIME journalists, unsure if we are who we say we are. His jacket stretches tightly across his burly chest, barely hiding a bulletproof vest; he keeps a hand on a briefcase that contains a pistol. He has good reason to take precautions. Since he returned from Bosnia, he has been shot at twice, bashed with an iron bar and slammed with a shovel; he has been repeatedly arrested for petty crimes and is fighting a long prison sentence for extortion. He suspects everyone: Bosnians out for vengeance, NATO forces who he fears will deliver him to the Hague, Serb secret police determined to hush him up. "There are so many refugees, agents, spies," he says. "I'm just an easy target."

While Lugar stares at his hands, the lawyer pitches a tale of innocent patriotism at odds with the cold, brawler's face of his client: how a good-hearted truck driver trying to make ends meet for a wife, two daughters, a sick mother, six cats and two parrots, gave up everything to defend his brother Serbs in Bosnia; how he never did anything but "stand guard" and "carry out ordinary military orders"; how in return for risking his life, he is broke and jobless, his children are shunned and his own government is trying to make him a scapegoat. "I didn't go there to kill other people's kids," says Lugar, "but to defend kids just like my own from our enemies."

As items on his indictment are ticked off, Lugar chain-smokes and dismisses them one by one. That killing didn't happen, he says: "If anyone did such things, they would have been court-martialed immediately." The Gray Wolves didn't exist, and anyway I wasn't a paramilitary, he says: "No, no, I was in the regular army, Second Posavina Brigade." I wasn't in charge, he says: One of the other men indicted was the local police chief, and "there's no way I could have commanded him." It wasn't me, he says: "Anyone could use my name, some Serb envious of me." I wasn't there, he says: on May 6 when he allegedly pulled the trigger on the detainees, "I think I was attending a funeral in Montenegro for one of my poor dead 18-year-old soldiers." The enemy committed war crimes, not us, he says, slamming down fuzzy, undated photos that he claims show Serb men decapitated by Muslims and Serb bodies mutilated. "No one is being accused at the Hague for that!"

Lugar is worried that his government will sell him out. He claims that the Belgrade secret police (who originally recruited him, the lawyer later suggests) variously want to arrest him and hand him over to the Hague or kill him to prevent him from surrendering to the tribunal or discredit him so he cannot testify against his superiors. He is bitter about his treatment. "In Croatia people like me have been rewarded," he complains.

The Lugars of the war were tools — often enthusiastic ones, to be sure — in a deliberately orchestrated campaign of extermination devised by political leaders and executed by hired gangs and local authorities. Instead of soldiers killing soldiers, civilians murdering civilians was the main act of the war. Pero Skopljak was one of that sort too, a Bosnian Croat who apparently succumbed to authority — or peer pressure or the hysteria of the moment — to enforce Croatian dominance over his neighbors.

He is one of six Croats indicted for complicity in the vicious ethnic cleansing that took place in 1993 around Vitez in central Bosnia. The tribunal says that local civilians, including Skopljak, together with Bosnian Croat General Tihomir Blaskic, were in charge when Croats sacked the village of Ahmici, tossing grenades into cellars where villagers sought to hide. To dislodge holdouts in downtown Vitez, Croats filled a tanker truck with explosives, tied a Muslim to the steering wheel and propelled the vehicle into a block of houses, killing and maiming dozens.

Skopljak was the police chief back then, and he acknowledged to TIME last November after being indicted that bad things happened. "I am not denying there were crimes on our side," he said, "but I am honestly innocent, as stupid as it sounds." While the Croats of Vitez rallied round, denouncing the Hague, Skopljak charged that "the tribunal believes stories invented by the Muslims. This is a staged process, a dirty political game." The former Franciscan monk insists that he "protected Muslims by hiding them, and I tried to find out who did Ahmici, but I didn't succeed." Confident Croatia's leaders would protect him, he declared, "I am staying here."

But that was just before Tudjman handed Blaskic over to the tribunal in April. Now the public outrage has evaporated, and Skopljak has fled Vitez. He no longer knows whom to trust, and ifor troops patrol his hometown. Speaking by phone from an undisclosed location, he bemoans his sad state. "I am ostracized, I can't travel, I can't work," he says. "I'm already punished."

The United Nations Commission of Experts, Human Rights Watch/Helsinki and other investigators have documented how the Serbs and Croats carried out ethnic cleansing. According to these reports, the mainly Muslim Bosnian government did not engage in systematic cleansing (some experts argue that the government did not lack the will to carry out such a program, it simply did not control enough territory to do so), but its people too committed atrocities in the course of the war.

In the Serb case, the process worked like this. Regular Bosnian Serb forces and Yugoslav army troops from Belgrade would surround an area designated for ethnic cleansing, shelling the target from afar. As the town fell, the time came for men like Lugar to do their work. Paramilitary units, secretly enlisted by the Serb leadership in Belgrade and the Bosnian Serb leaders in Pale, would seize the territory and "dispose" of all non-Serbs. The paramilitaries razed homes, churches and mosques, terrorizing residents with random killings, rapes, looting; local Serb "crisis committees" took charge to detain, beat and imprison anyone who did not flee, collecting them into camps where abuse and mass killing were routine. Finally the units would massacre any remaining ethnic rivals until no one was left but the Serbs.

More even than the brutal militia members, the Hague wants to nail the men at the top who gave them orders. "The tribunal's primary goal," says deputy prosecutor Graham Blewitt, is "to find where command responsibility is located." Vojislav Seselj is high among the suspects, but he has not been indicted — and he plans to run in Serbia's next election as leader of the far-right Serbian Radical Party. He is a true believer who willingly employed instruments of death on behalf of his country, but denies he committed any war crime. "Ethnic cleansing," he says, "was not a crime but a case of herd mentality"; historic enemies and foreign powers are just "satanizing" Serbs.

A law professor, member of the Serb parliament and virulent nationalist jailed in 1984 for rebellion, the fortyish Seselj served as Milosevic's chief hatemonger, whipping up hysteria at World War II-era grievances and prescribing the direst revenge, all dressed up in myths of Serb superiority. "We will kill Croats with rusty spoons," he would roar, "because it will hurt more." It all suited Milosevic in 1992 when Seselj's propaganda dominated the airwaves, inflaming war fever.

But there is evidence for much more serious charges against Seselj. When fighting broke out in 1992, he became one of the three key Serb paramilitary leaders who provided the shock troops of ethnic cleansing. He recruited and commanded a rabid band of "volunteers" dubbed the Chetniks in honor of Serbia's World War II antifascist squads. Dressed in black jackets, the Chetniks left a well-documented trail of blood as they rampaged across Croatia and Bosnia, all the while bragging they were acting under Seselj's command. They exaggerate, he says. "I just happen to have had the traditional Chetnik title of Duke assigned to me."