Veselin Sljivancanin, a former security chief of the Yugoslav army's (JNA) guard brigade convicted by the Hague war crimes tribunal to 10 years' imprisonment for the Ovcara atrocity and recently released after serving two-thirds of his sentence, has said that if he had suspected in the least that Croatia would become independent, he would never have gone to war.
"If I had suspected in the least that an independent Croatian state would be formed, I would never have gone to war. As far as my overall conduct as a JNA member is concerned, I acted exclusively in line with the law and the regulations that were in force at the time," Sljivancanin told the Belgrade daily Politika of Sunday.
He stressed that every day during the conflict in Vukovar and its area in the early 1990s, he insisted on meeting with the officers who he said had deserted the JNA and joined Croatian paramilitary units, to talk to them and convince them not to shoot and to solve everything peacefully.
"I found out about Ovcara from the media. It never would have crossed my mind that someone would take captive soldiers of paramilitary units and execute them. That's the worst evil that someone can commit," Sljivancanin was quoted as saying.
The Hague tribunal released him based on a decision adopted on July 5. He was initially sentenced to 17 years' imprisonment, but the Appeals Chamber reduced the sentence to 10 years in 2010, allowing the argument by Sljivancanin's defence that he had not known about the withdrawal of military police from Ovcara, a farm in eastern Croatia, and that he was therefore not accountable for the murder of 194 Croatian prisoners of war committed there in November 1991, but that he was responsible for the torture of POWs.
