WHO ARE THE SKORPIONS:
SERBIAN VOLUNTEERS OR NATO AGENTS?
www.slobodan-milosevic.org -
June 5, 2005
Written by: Andy Wilcoxson
A videotape depicting the execution of prisoners of war was played at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic last Wednesday. The prosecution claims the victims were Muslims from Srebrenica, and the executioners were a unit of the Serbian Interior Ministry (MUP) known as the Skorpions.
I have been getting a lot of e-mail asking me about this Skorpion group. The short answer is that the Skorpions were not a unit of the MUP of Serbia in 1995, which is when the videotape was said to have been filmed.
Natasa Kandic, the director of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center, told the June 3rd edition of Belgrade's Politika newspaper that she is the one who provided the ICTY prosecution with the copy of the videotape.
The Skorpions were a volunteer unit from in Djeletovci in Eastern Slavonia. Their leader was a man named Slobodan Medic aka “Boca.” The Skorpions were established on the initiative of Milan Milanovic, the Deputy Defense Minister of the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK). Milanovic, who testified as a prosecution witness at the Milosevic trial on October 14, 2003, claims that he proposed to the director of the Krajina Petroleum Industries oil company that Medic should establish a security force to guard the Djeletovci oil fields, and that is how the Skorpions were established in May of 1992.
The Skorpions also participated in other operations. The Skorpions were essentially a mercenary group. They went to the Bihac area, and while they were in Bihac they were subordinated to the command of the Army of the Republic of Serbian Krajina, according to Milanovic's testimony.
Milanovic testified that the Skorpions went to the area of Trnovo in Bosnia-Herzigovina in 1994. While they were there, he said, they were subordinated to the MUP of Republika Srpska.
On May 14, 1996 the Skorpions were forced to vacate their base at Djeletovci by UNTAES forces. According to statements given by Slobodan Medic the Skorpions were disbanded at this point.
By all accounts, the Skorpions were inactive until NATO attacked Yugoslavia in 1999. When NATO began bombing and a state of war was declared in Yugoslavia, a mobilization order was issued. The government sought volunteers to help with the war effort, and this is when the Skorpions reconstituted themselves and allegedly became involved with the Serbian Interior Ministry – four years after Srebrenica (although nobody had any idea that they had anything to do with Srebrenica until the videotape surfaced).
According to Milan Milanovic's testimony, when NATO attacked Yugoslavia, the Chief of the Public Security Department (RJB) Gen. Vlastimir Djordjevic, called him asking if he could get any volunteers to help out in Kosovo.
Milanovic says that Slobodan Medic also called him asking if he could arrange for the Skorpions to go to Kosovo as volunteers. Medic specifically said that he wanted the Skorpions to go as part of the MUP, and not as part of the Yugoslav Army (VJ).
Milan Milanovic testified that he proposed Medic and the Skorpions to Gen. Djordjevic. The Skorpions went to Kosovo right after the bombing began.
According to the February 14, 2003 testimony of prosecution witness Gen. Aleksandar Vasiljevic, who served as the former head of military security in the Yugoslav Army, the Skorpions were affiliated in some way with the SAJ (anti-terrorist unit of the MUP). Slobodan Medic has also given statements claiming that the Skorpions were used as a reserve unit of the SAJ.
For its part, the SAJ denies that it used the Skorpions as a reserve unit, or that it even had a reserve unit.
Unfortunately, some members of the Skorpions committed serious crimes against Albanian civilians in Kosovo. In May 1999 the Serbian authorities launched an investigation against two members of the Skorpions, Dejan Demirovic and Sasa Cvjetan, on the suspicion that they had massacred 19 Albanian women and children in the village of Podujevo. The investigation was led by Dusko Klikovac, a homicide detective at the Nis SUP. Klikovac brought Demirovic and Cvjetan in for questioning, but he did not have enough evidence to hold them.
At that point Gen. Djordjevic ordered Medic and the Skorpions out of Kosovo, but Slobodan Medic is rumored to have returned to Kosovo later on, according to Milanovic's testimony.
The district court in Prokuplje filed formal criminal charges against Demirovic and Cvjetan in 2002 when Goran Stoparic, a former member of the Skorpions, agreed to testify that he had witnessed the men perpetrate the killings.
On March 17, 2004 Sasa Cvjetan was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Dejan Demirovic is currently living in Windsor, Ontario. The Canadian government is refusing to honor the Serbian Government’s requests for his extradition.
Demirovic is not a Canadian citizen, and the Canadian government says he entered Canada illegally. It is strange that the Canadian government is so keen on protecting him. One wonders if Demirovic isn’t some sort of spy.
It is unlikely that Demirovic would have gone to Canada unless he was sure that the Canadian government would give him protection. He has family in Canada, so Canada is the first place that somebody would come looking for him. It would have been more logical for him to go to some corrupt little Central American country where he could bribe the police to ignore the Interpol warrants that are out for his arrest.
If Gen. Vasiljevic is right, and the Skorpions were in some way connected to the SAJ, then maybe it was them who took those bodies to the SAJ base in Batajnica.
NATO bombed every SAJ base in Serbia except for the SAJ base in Batajnica. The regular SAJ members evacuated the Batajnica base thinking that it would be bombed too.
If the Skorpions were working with NATO, and if they had infiltrated the SAJ, then they would have had access to the base in Batajnica, and they would be secure in the knowledge that NATO would not attack the base.
The idea that regular policemen could dig-up bodies in Kosovo and transport them to Batajnica without being noticed and subsequently attacked by the KLA, or getting bombed by NATO, defies belief. If NATO and the KLA were in on this, then everything becomes much more plausible.
The KLA could supply the bodies and the freezer trucks. The Skorpions would then take the bodies to the Batajnica base and bury them. They would not have to worry about being attacked by the KLA or NATO, and their SAJ credentials would get them past regular Serbian police. If the need arose, NATO could send jets to fly over an area so that any Serbian forces who might be around would seek shelter.
NATO would know that the bodies were buried at the base, and they could reveal this “incriminating evidence” whenever they needed to. As it happens they chose to reveal this when the Serbian government needed political justification to illegally hand Milosevic over to the Hague Tribunal in 2001. Nobody said a single word about bodies being taken from Kosovo and buried in Serbia-proper before that.
According to the testimony of protected witness B-071, who testified against Milosevic on April 2, 2003, the Skorpions wore camouflage NATO uniforms when he saw them in Bosnia during the war.
Of course the idea that the Skorpions were a fifth column working for NATO to generate “evidence” of Serbian crimes to justify the aggression is speculation on my part. Only a full and transparent investigation will reveal who brought those bodies from Kosovo to Batajnica, but I would not be surprised if that investigation led to the Skorpions.
Something similar can be said about the videotape. It is
strange that somebody would make a videotape of themselves executing of
prisoners of war. Only an exceptionally stupid criminal would film himself
committing such a horrific crime. It is difficult to believe that nobody who
took part in the killings depicted on that tape would object to the video being
made, unless the whole idea was to make a tape. On the tape the cameraman is
heard complaining that the battery in the camera is dying and telling the other
men to carry on with the executions anyway – why would he think the camera going
dead would cause the men to stop the killing?
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/smorg-rpt060505.htm
