Original scientific paper
THE SERBIAN VOLUNTEER GUARD IN THE WAR IN CROATIA 1991
Kosta Nikolić
orcid.org/0000-0002-2451-8918
; Institutu za savremenu istoriju, Beograd
Abstract
The Serbian Volunteer Guard was a Serbian volunteer paramilitary unit, created on 11 October 1990, founded and led by Željko Ražnatović, better known as “Arkan”, that fought in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars and was responsible for numerous war crimes. Ražnatović was on Interpol’s most wanted list in the 1970s and 1980s for robberies and murders committed in a number of countries in Western Europe. Up until his assassination in 15 January 2000, Ražnatović was the most powerful organized crime figure in the Balkans. When the Croatian War of Independence broke out in 1991, the SDG was active in the Eastern Slavonia region, committing crimes against Croat and Hungarian civilians in Dalj, Erdut and other areas. The crimes committed by the Serbian Volunteer Guard and its links with the Serbian police, military and political establishment, were an integral part of the indictments of the ICTY’s Office of the Prosecutor against Slobodan Milošević, Goran Hadžić, Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović. In those judgments, ICTY found that the SDG was involved in murders, persecutions and forced displacement in the area of Serbian Autonomous Region of Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem (SAO SBZS) in 1991 and 1992, in Bijeljina and Zvornik in 1992 and Sanski Most in 1995. However, not a single member of the SDG was prosecuted for these crimes. The Serbian Volunteer Guard was disbanded in March 1996, and its nucleus became the Special Operations Unit of the Department of State Security of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia.
Keywords
Croatia; Željko Ražnatović Arkan; Serbian Volunteer Guard; War Crimes; Jovica Stanišić; State Security
Hrčak ID:
314538
URI
Publication date:
27.12.2023.
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