"As a patriot I went to the Dubrovnik battlefield, and now as a patriot I don't want Montenegro to suffer because of me".
This is just 15 days before he went to The Hague for the weekly Vreme in 2001 spoke Pavle Strugar added: "Woe to the country where the army passes".
He was the first officer of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) who, 20 years ago, voluntarily surrendered to the Mechanism for Criminal Courts in The Hague, then the International Tribunal for War Crimes in the former Yugoslavia.
He was a turner in 2005. convicted to seven and a half years in prison for shelling the core of the Croatian city of Dubrovnik in 1991.
Just a few days before voluntarily going to trial, from the Prosecutor's Office in The Hague they said that "they expect the general to surrender himself soon or for the Montenegrin authorities to extradite him".
- "Montenegro's greatest shame": Thirty years since the siege of Dubrovnik
- How war criminals live and work in the Balkans
- Who is suing everyone for genocide in the Balkans
Voluntary surrenders on charges of war crimes in the Balkans often had a political dimension, Nataša Kandić from the Humanitarian Law Fund told the BBC.
"On the one hand, we have voluntary surrenders, which were agreed in advance, and on the other hand, confessions for crimes," says Kandić.
"The question is how much the war criminals sincerely repented, and how much it was just pragmatism, in order to get a lesser sentence".
Carla del Ponte or compassion
The people of Dubrovnik remember the fall of 1991 as the worst days in the life of the Old Town.
Shells fell on Dubrovnik in an attack commanded by the former Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), whose task until then was to defend the borders of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ).
This operation was commanded by Lieutenant General Pavle Strugar, commander of the Second JNA Operational Group, whose headquarters was in Trebinje.
The inhabitants of Dubrovnik spent close to 240 days under siege by the JNA, in which 116 civilians were killed. the data is of the Center for Coping with the Past Document from Zagreb.
194 Croatian fighters and 165 members of the JNA from Montenegro also died.
- How Radovan Karadžić was arrested: "Crazy house" and pancakes, 13 years later
- Everything that marked the trial of Slobodan Milosevic and why it is important today
- A decade since the arrest of Ratko Mladić
A decade later, again in the autumn, the chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte visited the former Yugoslavia.
An indictment had already been filed against Strugar and a warrant issued for his extradition.
Del Ponte then objected to Yugoslavia because of the "reticence of the Yugoslav government regarding cooperation with the Hague tribunal". he conveyed Voice of America.
Nevertheless, Strugar explained his decision to go to The Hague with the hope that he would "communicate his arguments and remove heavy accusations from himself".
"I want to explain to the local and Croatian public how the events unfolded during my involvement in the Dubrovnik operation," Strugar said at the time.
He added that "suffering was hard for him" and that he "sympathized with the people of Dubrovnik", but that he was "comforted by the belief that his actions contributed to them not being much greater".
Apart from the statements of the court officials in The Hague that Yugoslavia must cooperate, Nataša Kandić says that there is no concrete evidence that Pavle Strugar "received concrete benefits from the state for himself or his family through voluntary surrender".
"The details have never been known to the public since the beginning of the cooperation with the Mechanism for Criminal Courts in The Hague," she says.
When it's Pavle Strugar
- He was born in Peja in 1933
- He graduated from the Army Military Academy in 1952
- He served in the Yugoslav People's Army in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia and the Socialist Republic of Serbia
- He became the commander of the Territorial Defense forces in the Socialist Republic of Montenegro. In December 1989, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general
- In October 1991, he was appointed commander of the group formed by the JNA to conduct a military operation in the area of Dubrovnik.
- He went to The Hague in 2011 and was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison in 2005 for attacks on civilians, destruction of religious institutions, historical monuments and anti-war attacks on civilian objects in Dubrovnik.
- Due to his poor health, he was released earlier in 2009, and upon landing in Montenegro, he was met only by his family and the media, while there were no representatives of the authorities.
- He died in 2018 in Belgrade
Biljana Plavšić's tactics
Some of the suspected politicians and participants in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s confessed to the crimes committed during the trials.
Thus, in 2001, Biljana Plavšić, the former president of Republika Srpska, one of the two post-war entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, voluntarily surrendered to the Hague Tribunal.
In December 2002, she admitted to the court in The Hague that she participated in the persecution of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs.
"Our enterprise has had countless innocent people as victims," she said then Plavšić.
Seven years later, she withdrew this recognition.
The crime is, she reasoned, initially confessed "only so that the other counts of the indictment, including genocide, would be dismissed and to avoid a trial that would otherwise last at least three years".
"The case of Biljana Plavšić openly shows how sincere some confessions were," says Kandić.
"First, she accepted all the violations of the Geneva Convention that were established, and then she said that she did not believe in these crimes and that she would not testify."
This kind of move by a former high-ranking stateswoman, Kandić believes, shows how many women accused of war crimes "were not ashamed to say what they didn't think in front of the court just to get a better result".
According to her, such is the case of Momir Nikolić, former assistant commander for security and intelligence affairs of the RS army, Kandić assesses.
He is admitted that he ordered the killing of several hundred Muslims in the village of Kravica, near Srebrenica, and a group in the village of Sandić near Brčko, but later changed his mind and retracted his statement.
"Momir Nikolić even admitted to crimes for which he was not responsible due to personal pragmatism," Kandić explains.
"He was hoping for a lighter sentence, but that didn't happen."
The Hague Tribunal voluntarily surrendered and Vojislav Šešelj, former leader of the Serbian Radical Party, in February 2003, on trial on charges of murder, inhumane acts, persecution on political, racial and religious grounds, extermination and attacks on civilians in the territories of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
"Sincere remorse, apology and self-criticism" Kandić says she only saw in the case of the testimony of Goran Stoparić, a former member of the Serbian paramilitary unit. Scorpions.
He is testified yes they are Scorpions and people in paramilitary units Željko Ražnatović Arkan, suspected of war crimes and later killed, were useful units for the State Security of Serbia.
"Stoparić said that he went to war under the influence of Vojislav Šešelj's speech and that he believed that the Serbian people in Croatia were under threat," says Kandić.
"Then he said that he saw what was happening on the field and realized that he had made a mistake."
- And war has rules that should be followed
- Mesić told the BBC: "So much war has been fought and blood has been shed, and the borders have not changed even a millimeter."
- Sanda Rašković Ivić: "My father is a common war victim of Milošević and Tuđman
Before the Mechanism for Criminal Courts in The Hague she was accused 161 persons, and 125 procedures were completed.
Of them, 91 were convicted, and a total of 59 served their sentence.
The only woman on trial was Biljana Plavšić.
A total of nine people died after the trial or while serving their sentence, while 19 were acquitted.
27 defendants who were in Serbia voluntarily surrendered to the court itself or to the authorities in Serbia. the data is Belgrade Center for Human Rights.
A total of 19 accused it admitted guilt before the Mechanism for Criminal Courts in The Hague, according to this court's data, which means that every eighth person convicted admitted to being guilty of war crimes.
Many of them also expressed their remorse in writing, but also provided the court with detailed information about their own crimes and the crimes of others.
Watch the video about Ratko Mladić, wartime commander of Serb forces in Bosnia, sentenced to life imprisonment
Follow us on Facebook i Twitter. If you have a topic proposal for us, contact us at bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
Bonus video:
