Unblemished Omerta

Finally! That was, I suppose, the first thought that came to the minds of most normal people in Bosnia and Herzegovina upon hearing the news that the Special Department for War Crimes of the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH had filed an indictment against the wartime mayor of Bugojno, Dževad Mlaćo, retired General Selmo Cikotić, and the wartime commander of the 307th Brigade of the Army of BiH, Tahir Granić, thirty years after these crimes occurred.

What can be said about this? Except, perhaps, “better late than never!”, as one war veteran from Uskoplje ironically commented on this news on social media.

The List of Those to Be Killed

The Prosecutor’s Office accuses Mlaćo, Cikotić, and Granić of war crimes committed in 1993 against captured members of the Bugojno HVO. The indictment states that Dževad Mlaćo ordered the killing of Croatian prisoners, personally creating a list of those who were to be killed. Following Mlaćo’s order, the captured Croats were taken to the premises of a former bank, where they were tortured, and three prisoners died from the abuse.

The remaining prisoners were taken by members of the Army of BiH military police to the nearby Rostovo mountain, where they were killed at locations personally selected and visited by Mlaćo, after which their bodies were removed and hidden. After the war, the bodies of four victims were found and exhumed, while the search for the remaining victims continues more than 30 years after the crime was committed.

Cikotić and Granić are accused of ordering, as commanders of the Army of BiH, that captured Croats be taken under threat of arms as “human shields” to perform forced labor on the front lines, where they were exposed to mortal danger. Two Croatian prisoners were killed, and several others were wounded. Cikotić is also charged with failing to prevent the beatings, torture, and murders of HVO prisoners, despite being aware of it.

The High Wall of Silence

The Bugojno case is unique in many ways. It was a premeditated crime aimed at completely eliminating the entire military and political leadership of the Bugojno Croats. The high wall of silence erected around this crime is telling. Instead of facing charges, immediately after the war, the two primary defendants, Mlaćo and Cikotić, were repeatedly “rewarded” with high state positions for their atrocities, to which the top of the Bosnian HDZ silently acquiesced.

Additionally, Dževad Mlaćo worked as a mathematics teacher in a Bugojno high school, at a time when the international community and numerous “non-governmental” organizations were campaigning against “two schools under one roof,” without finding anything controversial about Mlaćo’s employment.

Why did this happen? When, ten years ago, in 2012, a trial was conducted at the War Crimes Court against Enes Handžić, assistant commander for security of the 307th Brigade of the Army of BiH, Senad Dautović, wartime police chief in Bugojno, and Nisvet Gasal, commander of the “Stadion” camp, Enes Sijamija, who was a protected witness of the Prosecutor’s Office and who survived several assassination attempts, unequivocally stated for Večernji List that the Bosniak military and political leadership led by Alija Izetbegović was behind the crimes in Bugojno: “Alija Izetbegović knew everything, every step taken during the war in Bugojno,” he said. If this is true, and all indications suggest it is, then the Bosniak leadership, by placing these two in high positions, was effectively “buying” their silence.

The Questionable Role of the Hague Tribunal

The news of the indictment against Mlaćo, Cikotić, and Granić was reported on the “objective” Federal Television in the thirtieth minute of the main news broadcast, while it could not be found on teletext at all. The crimes in Bugojno, along with those in Uzdol and Grabovica, shatter the artificially created myth of the “infallibility” of the Army of BiH, a myth supported by the Hague Tribunal through its inaction in these cases, as otherwise, the political instrumentalization of that court by the international community, which is undeniable, would come into question.

The role of the Hague Tribunal is particularly questionable in the Bugojno case. Why did this court not prosecute the Bugojno crimes immediately after the war, despite having clear and unequivocal evidence? This primarily refers to Mlaćo’s wartime diary, parts of which were published publicly and whose authenticity was confirmed by Mlaćo himself during the trial of Handžić and others. Then there is an authentic document sent by Selmo Cikotić to the higher command, in which he wrote about the planned “special treatment” of captured Croats.

The role of the American Embassy in Sarajevo is also very questionable in the Bugojno case. There are clear and unequivocal proofs that the American side deliberately concealed war crimes in Bugojno, as evidenced by a document leaked in the famous WikiLeaks affair, when then-lower-level American Embassy official Michael Murphy sent a memorandum stating that he had influenced the BiH Prosecutor’s Office to protect Selmo Cikotić from prosecution. Murphy has since become the US Ambassador to BiH, which clearly indicates that he was not acting on his own but was simply implementing US policy, for which he was perhaps ultimately rewarded with the ambassadorship.

Silence in Croatian Media

Interestingly, a local portal has been pointing to this document for years, directly accusing Murphy, and he never commented on it. He acted in the manner of the notorious gangster John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino mafia family, whom the media dubbed the Teflon Don for his resilience.

(Similarly to Cikotić, the American administration, specifically the CIA, protected Jovica Stanišić, head of Milošević’s State Security Service, from prosecution by the Hague Tribunal, as the Los Angeles Times, one of the most influential American daily newspapers, published a major investigative article in 2009 with almost identical reasoning as in Cikotić’s case.)

There is also silence about the Bugojno crimes in Croatian media. An indicative case occurred a few years ago when Cikotić was invited to a scientific symposium at the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb, where he was supposed to be one of the speakers. His participation was canceled after protests by students of Herzegovinian origin. The whole circus around the symposium somewhat resembled “saving Private Selmo.” It would be interesting to know on whose initiative Cikotić was invited to Zagreb and for what reason. Are they the same people who brought the notorious Šefik Džaferović to Vukovar two years ago on the anniversary of its fall?

The Death of a Protected Witness

Indicative also is the silence around the death of Merzuk Aletić, a former member of the Army of BiH, a protected witness of the Prosecutor’s Office in the Bugojno case, who allegedly committed suicide at Rostovo just a day before he was to reveal the location where the bodies of the remaining fifteen Bugojno Croats were buried.

By coincidence, I grew up with Merzuk Aletić in the village of Grnica in the municipality of Gornji Vakuf – Uskoplje, where his father was the village imam for almost two decades. His parents remain in my memory as extremely kind people. I knew them well because they were family friends with my parents.

After high school, I never saw Aletić again. Ana Popović, a journalist for Večernji List who first uncovered the background of the events at Rostovo, wrote in her article in Večernji List last Friday that Aletić was a member of the mujahideen unit stationed at Rostovo, who are most often mentioned as the direct perpetrators of the crimes against Bugojno Croats.

Unblemished Omerta

I do not know how accurate or confirmed this information is. Whether Aletić was a war criminal or simply “the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time,” we will probably never know.

However, even regardless of this, just consider how brave (and ethical) someone must be today to agree to testify against “their own” in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, risking at best a lifelong stigma as a traitor, and at worst, exactly what happened on that fateful day at Rostovo, of which I believe he was aware. And all this in a country where a “harmonious” and unblemished omerta about one’s side’s crimes has reigned all these years.

Will more be revealed about the dark background of the Bugojno crime during the possible trial of Mlaćo and others, after the Court confirms the indictment, a background that seems to far exceed local limits in which it has been forcibly confined all these years? Personally, I am not very convinced of that. Maybe we will learn more about it in about thirty years. Better late than never!