From Stajićevo and Sremska Mitrovica to Niš: On the trail of camps for Croats in Serbia

Ivana Nikolic

contributing journalist

Stajićevo is a small village with a population of just over 1.700, located right next to the main road that leads from Pančevo to Zrenjanin.

On the right side of the road, often loaded with trucks, there is a muddy dirt path that leads to the former Livade farm, whose stables served as a camp for captured Croats during November and December 1991.

Around 1.200 people were detained there, members of the Croatian armed forces, but also civilians, including women, children and the elderly, as well as medical staff and patients from the Vukovar hospital.

All of them were brought to this and other camps on the territory of Serbia after Serbian military and paramilitary forces captured Vukovar on November 18, 1991.

Among the detainees at Stajićevo was Igor Švraka, a twenty-year-old from Vukovar at the time.

"We arrived in front of those hangars, stables, it was dark. As soon as the bus stopped, they came out and beat you up."

"There are no windows... maybe there were some windows, but they were all unused, it was not a military facility, it was not in function."

"They lined us up like eggs, everyone had to squat, hands behind their backs," says Igor as we sit in one of Vukovar's restaurants.

"But it's okay, in the end, a living head," he tells the BBC in Serbian with a slight smile, as he taps his fingers on the wooden table.

Stajićevo, like other detention facilities for Croats on the territory of Serbia, was established by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) in August 1991, at the very beginning of the war in Croatia.

The detainees, who numbered around 7.000 in total, suffered mental and physical torture on a daily basis: at least 14 died as a result of beatings and lack of medical care - one of them was Igor Švraka's father.

The Prosecutor's Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) charged political leaders Slobodan Milošević and Goran Hadžić with establishing camps for Croats in Serbia, detaining civilians and prisoners of war in them, as well as unlawfully detaining them in inhumane conditions in several detention facilities in Serbia.

Despite the vast Hague documentation, statements from a large number of witnesses and victims, as well as criminal charges filed with the Serbian Public Prosecutor's Office for War Crimes in 2008, only one man was convicted before a court in Belgrade.

Today, 35 years later, camps like Stajićevo are unmarked, while their existence and crimes in Serbia are largely downplayed or even denied.

Legal proceedings related to war crimes in Serbia are very problematic, among other things because the goal is to present the crimes as isolated incidents of individuals, thus concealing the responsibility of institutions, says Jovana Kolarić, researcher at the Humanitarian Law Center and author of the report. Dossier Camps for Croats on the Territory of Serbia, for the BBC in Serbian.

"Responsibility for what happened in detention facilities in Serbia lies with the JNA and extends to the highest positions in the army, as well as political structures."

"Prosecuting those responsible for detention facilities on the territory of Serbia would necessarily confirm what we found in our research, which is that at the very beginning of the war, the state was establishing camps, fenced off with wire, in which people were exposed to torture and humiliation," explains Kolarić.

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Under the JNA

According to the testimony of General Aleksandar Vasiljević, then head of the Security Directorate of the Federal Secretariat for National Defense, the first detention facility on the territory of Serbia was established based on an oral order from the Federal Secretary for National Defense, Veljko Kadijević, dated September 14, 1991.

This was followed by the opening of others, which the military and political leadership of the then Yugoslavia called collection centers, claiming that there were no camps on the territory of Serbia.

The Stajićevo camp at the entrance to Zrenjanin, as well as the Begejci camp in the municipality of Žitište, were actually stables and a hunting lodge, while other detention facilities were mostly part of existing prisons or military facilities in Belgrade, Sremska Mitrovica, Niš, and Aleksinac.

In addition to the camps, there were several transit centers where civilians and prisoners of war were held for a few hours to a few days - in Šid, Bubanj Potok, Paragovo near Novi Sad.

In the fall of 1991, they were all filled with Croatian prisoners of war and civilians - brought in by the JNA in buses and trucks.

These camps also included Croats from Vojvodina, Croatian citizens arrested in Vojvodina, as well as a number of Serbs, mostly military deserters.

Research by the Humanitarian Law Center showed that the guards and guards in the camps were members of the reserve forces of the JNA Military Police, while the people who interrogated the detainees were JNA officers, members of territorial detachments and the militia of the Serbian Autonomous Region (SAO) of Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem, proclaimed in 1991 in eastern Croatia.

Kolarić says that all detainees were subjected to humiliation and starvation, while the guards, he claims, were particularly brutal towards those suspected of being members of the Croatian armed forces - the National Guard Corps or the MUP.

"They were exposed to psychological and physical abuse, violence and torture on a daily basis."

"We also documented the sexual abuse of detainees, as well as the deaths of at least 14 detainees as a result of abuse or the lack of adequate medical care," explains Kolarić.

Stajićevo was formed on November 20, 1991 - immediately after units of the Yugoslav Army, Territorial Defense, and Serbian volunteer units captured Vukovar after a three-month siege.

With the fall of Vukovar, which was razed to the ground that November, JNA units, territorial defense units, and Serbian paramilitary formations committed mass crimes against Croatian civilians and prisoners of war: more than 200 people were killed on the Ovčara farm alone during the night between November 20 and 21, 1991.

The crimes committed at the Ovčara farm near Vukovar were tried before the Hague Tribunal and the High Court in Belgrade.

The ICTY sentenced members of the JNA - Colonel Mile Mrkšić and Major Veselin Šljivančanin - to 20 and 10 years in prison, respectively, and the Higher Court in Belgrade sentenced 11 members of the Vukovar Territorial Defense and the Leva Supoderica volunteer unit, who were then part of the JNA, to prison terms ranging from two to 20 years.

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"War for war"

Those who were not killed in Vukovar and the surrounding area were transferred to camps in Serbia.

Among them was Igor Švraka with his father and two brothers.

Igor and his brothers survived, but their father was killed in the camp at the Sremska Mitrovica Correctional Facility.

I meet Igor on a cold December Sunday in a spacious parking lot in front of the abandoned "Dunav" hotel in the center of Vukovar.

It's a few days before Catholic Christmas, and the city is full of New Year's decorations.

We walk towards a nearby restaurant, passing an ice rink and parents walking their children along the Danube River, which is lost in the winter fog.

Igor has three daughters, two grandchildren, is retired, but is an active member of the Croatian Society of Inmates of Serbian Concentration Camps.

He lives in Đakovo, a town about 60 kilometers from Vukovar.

We order a drink, a gray-haired and balding man lights a cigarette, and starts a story.

"If Stajićevo was a collection center then..." he says slowly, adding that the conditions in the camp were terrible.

"We slept on straw, we had nothing. No toilet, nothing. Machine gun nests all around."

"The villagers wanted to kill us there, they gathered and shouted Ustasha."

Collection center, he adds as a rhetorical question.

Igor found himself serving his military service in Vranje when the war in Croatia began.

He manages to escape from the army, and goes to Đakovo to his aunt, and from there to Vukovar, as a volunteer.

"There were 46 of us leaving from Đakovo and two more buses from Našice. It was September 26, 1991, we were the last group to enter Vukovar."

"We were the last to enter," he says quietly, while smoking.

In Vukovar he found his mother, sister, father and brothers.

Until the fall of the city, he remained in Mitnica, a settlement "on the main road at the entrance to the city", which was the last to surrender to Serbian forces on November 18th.

"War is war - wounded, killed, shelling."

"I tried counting the shells falling on the city, but I gave up."

After the fall of Vukovar, Igor is taken to the Velepromet company warehouse, which served as a camp for Croatian prisoners.

There he finds his family, and sees his father for the last time.

"Dad was beaten and killed in Mitrovica."

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Number 004113

Igor, together with his brothers, was mistreated and beaten in Velepromet.

And then they were taken to Stajićevo.

"We were all in winter overcoats, the long Tito coats, like partisans. We were all in it, you know, all equal."

"They gave us straw, we put it under us and slept in those overcoats," Igor remembers.

"We went to a building across the street and they interrogated us there. They broke some things there, there was all sorts of stuff."

Igor takes a sip of juice, and says that he particularly remembers the hunger from that period: in Stajićevo they were given a 'zdenka' of cheese and salami, half a slice of bread, tea and water, which he says tasted like sulfur.

The situation in the camp improved after a visit by the International Red Cross, when the bakery occasionally sold bread to the prisoners.

Igor remembers that he had some money with him, which saved them.

"We, hungry, would have eaten the whole truck. I bought a lot of bread, we ate it warm. Only then did I go to the toilet, two weeks later."

Take a break and light a cigarette.

The youngest brother, who was 17 years old, was exchanged through Bosnia and returned to Croatia.

At the end of December 1991, Igor was taken to the Sremska Mitrovica Correctional Facility, where he would later meet his other brother.

"There were 134 or 136 of us in the prison room in Mitrovica. I knew all the names, I'm sorry I didn't write them down, now I've forgotten."

"The good thing was that I was registered with the Red Cross. My number was 004113."

Do you still remember him, I ask.

Yes, the answer is short.

In Sremska Mitrovica, mistreatment was almost daily, and conditions were poor: there was little food, and walks and swimming were allowed once a month.

Igor was in the Sremska Mitrovica KPD from December 1991 until August 14, 1992, when he was exchanged to Nemetin in Croatia, not far from Osijek.

On that day, on the principle of "all for all", 714 Croatian prisoners were exchanged for 240 Serbian prisoners, according to the Agreement on the release and repatriation of all prisoners, which was reached in Geneva by the Prime Ministers of Croatia Franja Gregurić and the then FRY Milan Panić at the end of July 1992.

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Court proceedings: 'Even to Strasbourg if necessary'

According to HLC research, the actual control over the camps was held by the Security Directorate of the Federal Secretariat for National Defense (UB SSNO), whose head at the time was General Aleksandar Vasiljević.

However, for the military and political leadership of the time, these were not camps, but rather collection centers.

General Vasiljević says the same thing today in a short statement for the BBC in Serbian.

"There are facts that these were not camps but collection centers. There are also SSNO orders on why they were established."

Vasiljević spoke in detail about the establishment and functioning of the camp as a witness at several trials at the Hague Tribunal.

A few years later, in April 2011, he himself was indicted for crimes committed in the camps of Stajićevo, Begejci, Sremska Mitrovica, Niš and Stara Gradiška before the County State Attorney's Office in Osijek.

Under a cooperation agreement, the Croatian prosecution transferred the case to the Public Prosecutor's Office for War Crimes in Belgrade, which, however, stated that there was insufficient evidence to file an indictment.

The Serbian prosecutor's office also assessed that "these were incidents, not organized camp treatment," says Kolarić.

The case was then returned to Croatia, and in March 2023, the Osijek County Court sentenced Vasiljević in absentia to 20 years in prison for war crimes against Croatian civilians and prisoners of war who were detained in camps in Serbia and Croatia.

According to the verdict, Vasiljević ordered the establishment of camps in Serbia, which were run by his subordinates from the State Security Service, although officially the camp commanders were members of the JNA.

Vasiljević, who is retired and lives in Belgrade, tells the BBC that he was not informed of anything, and that he has no contact with the lawyer who represents him ex officio, and who filed an appeal against the verdict in November 2024.

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While several proceedings have been conducted before courts in Croatia against guards and interrogators for crimes committed in camps in Serbia, only one has been conducted in Serbia.

In 2015, the War Crimes Department of the Higher Court in Belgrade sentenced Marko Crevar, a member of the Territorial Defense, to 18 months in prison for crimes committed at the Sremska Mitrovica Correctional Facility.

For Zoran Šangut, a lawyer from the Vukovar 1991 Association and a former prisoner of the camps in Stajićevo, Niš and Sremska Mitrovica, this is an indication that there is no political will in Serbia to prosecute crimes committed in the camps for Croats.

Back in 2008, the association "Vukovar 1991.", together with the non-governmental organization from Serbia, the Humanitarian Law Center, filed a criminal complaint with the War Crimes Prosecutor's Office in Belgrade, which listed 54 commanders and guards in five camps in Serbia by name, surname or nickname.

"I am a witness to four murders."

"I would very much like the War Crimes Prosecutor's Office in Serbia to invite me to testify about what not only I, but many of us, went through," Šangut tells BBC Serbian.

The prosecution, he adds, assured them that it was acting on the report, only to be told in 2016 that "politics won't work" and that "nothing was done on our cases."

The "Vukovar 1991" association filed an appeal with the Constitutional Court of Serbia several years ago due to the delay in the proceedings, says Šangut.

"We will wait for some more time and if the Constitutional Court of Serbia does not answer us, then we will probably head towards Strasbourg."

Prosecutor of the Public Prosecutor's Office for War Crimes Vasilije Seratlić also called the detention facilities for Croats collection centers in a short written response to the BBC.

The prosecution is "not able to answer the specific questions raised... because all phases of the criminal proceedings, except for the main trial phase, are not available to the public," he added.

(Un)successful attempts at memorialization

Stajićevo is 150 kilometers east of Vukovar, and about 70 from Belgrade.

Tatjana Tabački, a local activist from Zrenjanin, who has spent years researching and writing about camps for Croats in Serbia, takes me to the village.

We find the way from the other: only those who know exactly where they are headed come here.

Tanja heard about the camps in the Vojvodina villages of Stajićevo and Begejci, which in the meantime had changed their name to Torak, almost immediately after they opened, as an eleven-year-old.

"My father received a call from a colleague from Osijek, whose nephew was one of those captured in Stajićevo."

"That really shook me up at the time," says Tanja as we drive along a muddy road past fields and fruit and vegetable plantations on the way to the former camp.

Villagers would enter the camp on weekends and beat the prisoners, she says.

This atmosphere was mostly fostered by propaganda media, such as the text "Wild guests of the tame plain" the local newspaper in Zrenjanin, he recalls.

While researching, she regularly encountered a wall of silence and rejection, as few people actually wanted to talk about the camps for Croats.

We park the car in front of the former camp - a long, abandoned, dilapidated barn in the shape of the Cyrillic letter G, with a few cows visible at the bottom.

There are several similar buildings in the area that look quite spooky in the early winter afternoon.

Not far from the camp is a neglected, dilapidated two-story building with a chicken coop in front of it.

There is a sign at the entrance door. Dijamant Agrar - verdicts, but no one answers the bell.

Although several initiatives have been launched to place a memorial plaque on the camp building, they have not been implemented - many say because there is no political will in Serbia.

Zoran Šangut says that such a record would mean a lot to him.

It was also the reason for the meeting with the then Prime Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, in 2016.

Vučić then said that he did not know that there were camps in Serbia, and promised to help them erect a memorial plaque, Šangut recalls.

"We showed Vučić the text we wanted to post on Stajićeva Street, he said there was nothing controversial about it."

"Since then, we have written to Vučić several times to fulfill the promise he made to us to erect a memorial plaque. Nothing has happened," he says.

Politician Aleksandar Marton also remembers earlier attempts to mark this place, and in 2009, as the president of the Zrenjanin City Assembly, he spoke with former concentration camp inmates from Croatia and supported their initiative to place a monument at the former camp.

"The idea was put forward without malice, hatred, or anything like that. Unfortunately, it was met with a barrage of attacks from false patriots, who live on the politics of division and hatred."

"And so the initiative came to nothing," Marton tells BBC Serbian.

While there is no state commemoration, several non-governmental organizations from Serbia and the region have been visiting unmarked sites of suffering for years.

So last December they visited Stajićevo and Begejci and installed memorial plaques.

The action was led by the Center for Nonviolent Action from Belgrade and Sarajevo, and was attended by young peace activists, such as Dalija Koler from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia.

That was when Dalia, originally from Novi Sad, visited Begejci and Stajićevo for the first time, and as she says, most of the locals of Vojvodina do not know what was happening in their fertile plain.

"We need to talk about this, and we need to be educated about this, and it's really not normal that all of this happened right under our noses, our neighbors, not just neighbors across the border, but literally, neighbors in the house next door," he says, hoping that the day will come when these places are officially commemorated.

Igor would like to go to Stajićevo again, but he is afraid that he would be arrested at the Serbian border.

Upon returning home, he spent several months receiving treatment for his wounds.

He has a 70 percent disability and 30 pieces of shrapnel in his body, which he lives with.

"I wanted to stay in the army [upon returning from captivity], but since I have a severe disability, they wouldn't let me."

"I dragged myself around hospitals, treatments, therapies, committees."

"Then I met a woman, got married, had children and so on, life goes on," he concludes wistfully, refusing to be photographed.

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