Eurasia Press & News
Four Serbs are awaiting the verdict in their trial for murdering 20 passengers who were seized from a train in Strpci in Bosnia in 1993, all of them allegedly fighters subordinate to notorious paramilitary killer Milan Lukic.
Dragana Djekic is no stranger to Belgrade Higher Court, where she has been a defendant in two war crimes cases and appeared as a witness in another.
“We all know each other already,” she told the court after her defence presented its closing argument at the end of January in the trial of four Serb fighters for abducting 20 non-Serb passengers from a train at Strpci station in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993 and then killing them.
The verdict in the Strpci trial is expected on February 7, only 20 days before the 30th anniversary of the crime.
According to the indictment, on February 27, 1993, members of the Bosnian Serb Army and the Avengers, a Serb paramilitary unit, entered the train that was travelling from Belgrade to Bar in Montenegro at Strpci station and checked the passengers’ documents.
They forced 20 non-Serbs, mostly Bosniaks, to get off the train and then took them to an elementary school in the village of Prelovo, where they robbed and physically assaulted them.
They then drove the detained passengers, barefoot and partially unclothed with their hands tied behind their backs, to a burned-out house in the nearby village of Musici, where they executed them.
So far, there have been three trials of Serb fighters for the Strpci crime: in Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and now in Serbia.
A Montenegrin court convicted Serb paramilitary Nebojsa Ranisavljevic in 2004. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, nine people have been convicted in total – the commander of the Interventions Company of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Visegrad Brigade, Boban Indjic, in January this year, plus seven former soldiers from the Bosnian Serb Army’s Second Podrinje Brigade in October 2022 and another Bosnian Serb soldier, Mico Jovicic, who struck a plea bargain and admitted guilt in 2016. Only Ranisavljevic and Jovicic’s verdicts are final, however.
The rest of the alleged Strpci railway station kidnappers are on trial in Belgrade. Along with Dragana Djekic, the defendants are alleged Avengers paramilitaries Gojko Lukic and Dusko Vasiljevic, and Jovan Lipovac, who was a Bosnian Serb Army soldier.
All the defendants pleaded not guilty. They also mostly claimed that they didn’t know all of the other defendants, but they all knew one person: Milan Lukic.
Lukic was the notorious leader of the Avengers and is currently in prison in Estonia. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY sentenced him to life imprisonment for other crimes in Visegrad, but not the Strpci killings.
He was indicted for Strpci by the Bosnian state prosecution in 2019. The elementary school in Prelovo where the victims were robbed and beaten was the same one that Lukic himself attended as a child.
A BIRN analysis showed that during the Belgrade trial, many of the defence witnesses tried to portray Lukic as being solely responsible for the Strpci crime.
The defendants in the case in the Serbian capital are lesser-known individuals, but using materials from trials in Belgrade and from the ICTY in The Hague, BIRN was able to put together profiles of these alleged members of Lukic’s group.
Battlefield nurse or volunteer fighter?
Dragana Djekic was born in 1975 in Belgrade, so when the war broke out in Croatia in 1991 she was 16 years old. While the fighting was ongoing in Croatia and then a year later war started in Bosnia, she was trying to enrol in medical school, but failed.
“I went to the battlefield due to a combination of circumstances – to say the least, very recklessly,” Djekic told Belgrade Higher Court in March 2012, when she was a defendant in another trial, accused of participation in war crimes that were committed in villages around Skocic in Bosnia in July 1992. She was ultimately acquitted.
“I wanted to enrol in medical school, then I failed one exam, then another in mathematics, and then I came up with the idea that it would be easier for me to enrol in school if I got into a hospital and worked a little and then came back with that certificate and then they would take me because of that,” she explained.
She later explained that she “went to Zvornik by bus”, expecting that she could work at Zvornik hospital in order to get the requited experience, but ended up on the frontline instead.
“I was working as a paramedic, actually a nurse, they knew me as a nurse, which I was lying about,” Djekic said.
She told the court that she knew Milan Lukic, as well as some other paramilitaries or Bosnian Serb Army soldiers who were in the Visegrad area at the time.
Then, on October 22, 1992, Lukic and his men abducted 17 non-Serb passengers from the village of Sjeverin while they were travelling by bus from Priboj in Serbia to Rudo in Bosnia and later killed them.
Djekic told Serbian prosecutors in 2002 that she saw the victims in front of the Vilina Vlas hotel in Visegrad, where they were brought after being abducted from the bus. She said that Lukic told her they were ‘mujahideen’ – Islamic fighters – in civilian clothes.
She later saw the victims again, near the River Drina, but by this time they were dead; they had been slaughtered, she said.
Djekic was a witness in the trial in 2003, and she testified that Lukic told her that his men killed the captives. In the 2005 retrial, however, Djekic changed her statement, claiming she had been put under psychological pressure, which the time Supreme Court described as an “unconvincing” explanation.
The Strpci trial in Belgrade also had problems with witneses who changed their testimonies, claiming they had been pressurised.
According to Djekic’s testimony, she left Bosnia after the Sjeverin abductions and went back to Belgrade.
However, in January 1993, Lukic called Djekic, asking her to provide him with new volunteers for the frontline. She found 15 people, went back with them to the Visegrad area again a couple of days later.
One of them was Nebojsa Ranisavljevic and the other was Mico Jovicic, both of whom were later convicted of the Strpci crime.
Djekic claimed she stayed in Visegrad until March and did not participate in the Strpci kidnappings and killings. She said she heard about the crime the next day became “the whole of Visegrad was buzzing about it”.
At a tense hearing in Belgrade, during which witness Mico Jovicic was confronted by the defendants face-to-face, Jovicic told the court that Djekic was present at the school in Prelovo where the abducted passengers were beaten up.
According to Jovicic, Djekic had a folding automatic rifle with a metal butt and hit one of the passengers in the ribs.
Answering Djekic’s lawyer questions, Jovicic said that “since she’s female, she can’t hit very hard” and that her blows were “more like pushing”.
Another witness also confirmed that Djekic was present at the Prelovo school.
Brothers on the frontline
Gojko Lukic, who is one of Milan Lukic’s brothers, is also among the defendants in the trial in Belgrade.
According to his own testimony, Gojko Lukic was born in Rujista, near Visegrad. But he claimed that when the Bosnian war broke out, he was living in Belgrade, working for the Official Gazette, the journal that publishes new legislation when it is adopted.
He said he only went to Bosnia during wartime to visit his parents: “They kept cattle… I used to go in the summer, to help them mow.”
However, during Milan Lukic’s trial at the ICTY, a protected witness codenamed VG115 testified that “during the war Milan Lukic and his father, mother and brother, Gojko, moved into a house on Pionirska Street” in Visegrad in Bosnia.
One of the most notorious war crimes committed by Milan Lukic, in which Bosniaks were burned to death, happened on Pionirska Street.
Gojko Lukic insisted that he did not participate in the war, nor in the Strpci abductions and killings.
‘I wasn’t involved, I wasn’t there, why did they accuse me, convict someone else [Milan Lukic], kill another person [Novica Lukic] and are getting rid of a third one, me – I don’t know what’s going on,” Lukic told Belgrade Higher Court.
Novica Lukic, the brother of Gojko and Milan Lukic, was killed in 2004 in his house in Visegrad during a raid by police who were searching for Milan Lukic. His family claimed he was in his pyjamas, unarmed, and did not resist arrest. Eight police officers were arrested because of the incident.
Fighting for ‘patriotic reasons’
Two other defendants in the Strpci trial in Belgrade were also brothers, Dusko and Ljubisa Vasiljevic. Ljubisa Vasiljevic died in Belgrade in 2021.
They both claimed that during the war they lived in Obrenovac near Belgrade and that they went separately to Bosnia after the war started in May 1992 to become reservist policemen in Visegrad.
Dusko Vasiljevic told the court he went to war “purely for patriotic reasons”. He explained that his parents lived in the Visegrad area.
“I signed up for this one for Visegrad, because I know that terrain and my parents are there so I could help my parents if there was an attack or anything else,” he said.
Both Dusko and Ljubisa Vasiljevic claimed that did not participate in the Strpci crime because they were not in Bosnia by that time: Ljubisa said he was wounded July 21, 1992 and was having treatment until May 1993, and Dusko said he returned to Serbia on July 10, 1992 because “my wife was pregnant, I came back and had to be with my wife”.
The Vasiljevic and the Lukic families are connected; some of the Lukics have been ‘family godfathers’ – a Serbian tradition – to some of the Vasiljevics “since a hundred years ago”, Ljubisa Vasiljevic told Belgrade Higher Court.
Ljubisa Vasiljevic said that during the war he used to see Milan Lukic on the street but had no other contact with him. Dusko Vasiljevic claimed meanwhile that he did not see Gojko Lukic in Visegrad in 1992.
The fourth defendant in the Belgrade trial, Jovan Lipovac, said he knew Milan and Gojko Lukic from his childhood in the village of Rujista near Visegrad and that “we grew up together”. He claimed he did not know Dragana Djekic or the Vasiljevic brothers during the war.
The defendants who denied having ties to each other claimed that they only met at the beginning of the investigation of the Strpci crime. The court will make its decision about whether they are telling the truth on February 7.
