The former Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) held over 400 Croatian civilians and soldiers in a prisoner of war camp in the southern Serbian city of Nis, of whom at least one person died, Serbian news agency Beta said on Friday citing a report by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN).
BIRN is a network of seven Balkan nongovernmental organisations dealing with media development and promoting investigative journalism. It has correspondents in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria.
According to the Croatian Commission for Missing Persons and Detainees, over 400 soldiers and civilians were held in Nis, and witnesses said that the camp for Croatian prisoners of war existed from mid-November 1991 until late February 1992 and was one of the worst Croatian POWs had passed through while in Serbia.
Commission chairman Ivan Grujic was quoted as saying that at least 477 Croatian citizens had passed through the exchange system in Nis, where they were held in a military remand centre and a correctional facility. The Croatian POWs were transferred to Nis after the detention centres in Stajicevo and Begejci in the northern province of Vojvodina were closed down.
Grujic said that in former Yugoslavia in 1991 and 1992 there were camps and prison facilities that formed part of an integrated prison system under JNA command. He said that such facilities existed in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and the Serb-occupied areas of Croatia.
According to the Croatian commission, 7,666 people were exchanged from those prisons between December 1991 to August 1992, including 219 juveniles, 932 women and 424 people above the age of 60; 46 per cent were civilians and 52 per cent soldiers, while the status of the rest was unidentified.
"In all the prisons in Serbia, prisoners were subjected to mental and physical torture, without exception," Grujic said.
The head of the Vukovar 1991 association, Zoran Sangut, was taken prisoner when he was 21 and spent a total of 130 days in the POW camps in Stajicevo, Nis and Sremska Mitrovica. He said that he and other prisoners in Nis had been punched, kicked and hit with bats, most fiercely on the day when the first countries officially recognised Croatia as an independent state, Beta reported.
In 2008, the Vukovar 1991 association filed a complaint with the Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor's Office against unidentified perpetrators for war crimes committed against prisoners of war in several detention camps, including the one in Nis.
Beta said that the County Court in the eastern Croatian city of Osijek claimed that at least 21 Croatian POWs had been killed in Serbian camps.
The news agency quoted the Serbian Ministry of Defence as responding to BIRN researchers there was no information about the existence of the JNA-run prison for Croatian POWs in Nis.
The chairman of the Serbian Missing Persons Commission, Veljko Odalovic, said that 10 bodies had been found and exhumed from a cemetery in Nis in July 2010 on request from the Croatian commission.
"It was found beyond doubt that one of the bodies was directly connected with people from Croatia who were held in concentration camps in Serbia in 1991 and some of whom were temporarily held in Nis," Odalovic was quoted as saying.
Serbian Deputy War Crimes Prosecutor Bruno Vekaric said that a preliminary investigation was under way and that a full investigation would be launched only when suspects had been identified.
Vekaric said there were some new leads pointing to attempts to cover up the crimes, adding that most of the information gathered so far concerned the Stajicevo and Begejci camps.
