A Croatian court confirms seven-year jail sentence for wartime general Glavas for war crimes against Serb civilians, following almost 19 years of trials, retrials and appeals that may not be over yet.
Vuk Tesija
Croatia’s High Criminal Court on Wednesday upheld the 2023 verdict of the Zagreb County Court, which sentenced Branimir Glavas to seven years in prison for war crimes against Serbs in the city of Osijek, eastern Croatia in 1991.
His co-defendants also had their prison sentences confirmed.
The upheld verdict sentenced Gordana Getos Magdic, former commander of a platoon within a special sabotage and reconnaissance unit in the Osijek Operational Zone, to four years in prison. Platoon members Dino Kontic and Zdravko Dragic were each sentenced to three years in prison.
The four defendants were guilty of war crimes against civilians, the High Criminal Court said on Wednesday.
The crimes took place against Serb civilians in Osijek during Croatia’s war for independence. The city was being shelled at the time. During the chaos, Serbs started to disappear.
The earlier Zagreb County Court verdict was issued in October 2023 following a retrial.
At their first trial in 2009, Glavas and the other defendants were sentenced to several years in prison. However, the verdict was overturned by the Constitutional Court. Before the verdict was even pronounced, Glavas had left Croatia. He subsequently served most of his eight-year sentence in prisons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he had fled but was detained.
In 2015, the Constitutional Court overturned the conviction. A new trial then formally began in October 2021. In 2020, meanwhile, the Supreme Court overturned a 2019 Zagreb County Court decision separating Glavas’s retrial from that of his co-defendants.
Glavas was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2023 but released. Judge Drazen Kevric said he was not remanded in custody because he had already served five years, two months and 27 days of his jail sentence – more than two-thirds of the total term.
Glavas was tried as the alleged mastermind behind the so-called “Tape” case, which involved war crimes committed by members of the Croatian Army, who killed about ten Serbs in Osijek in 1991.
According to the court, Glavas, then commander of the city’s defence forces, ordered members of the Croatian Army to arrest individual Serbs in Osijek. They were interrogated about their alleged involvement in the war and taken to the banks of the Drava River, where they were executed and their bodies thrown into the river. All the bodies that were recovered were found with their hands tied and their mouths sealed with tape.
The criminal complaint listed ten victims: Branko Lovric, Milutin Kutlic, Alija Sabanovic, Bogdan Pocuca, Jovica Grubic, Petar Ladnjak, Milenko Stanar, Svetislav Vukajlovic, and two unidentified victims who were killed or disappeared in Osijek in 1991 and 1992.
The crimes were covered up and might never have become public if Drago Hedl, a journalist with the Split-based weekly Feral Tribune, had not begun reporting on the murders of Serbs in Osijek.
“I did my job and finished that story a long time ago. This is merely its judicial epilogue,” Hedl, 76, told BIRN.
“The only painful aspect of the whole story is that it took so long. First, he received ten years, then the Supreme Court reduced the sentence to eight, and then the Constitutional Court overturned everything,” Hedl said, recalling one of the longest war-crimes trials in Croatia.
“In the meantime, he sued everyone who called him a war criminal. This is the essence of evil – a man who exploited and destroyed the people around him,” said Hedl.
In a statement to Hina Agency, Glavas said the case only confirmed that the High Criminal Court was completely unnecessary for the Croatian justice system and serves only to “bless the illegal and unconstitutional verdicts of county courts”.
He announced that the “legal battle continues” and that the next step is the Supreme Court. “After that, the Constitutional Court follows, and then Strasbourg, so we have three more steps in this process,” Glavas told Hina.
“I am not sure whether I will even ask for early release. I will decide on that later; if I do not ask for it, they will still have trouble with me in prison. I am here in Osijek, and I have no intention of going anywhere,” Glavas said.
