Enver Zornić, the SDP's Caco

Written by Vildana Selimbegović, editor-in-chief of Oslobođenje

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What to say except that everyone who spent the war in Sarajevo feels their cheeks burn with shame because of the case that shook the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina last week, and which the current cantonal government indeed resolved quickly, delegating the hot potato to the Supervisory Board and the Assembly of the JP Toplane, which are expected to remove Enver Zornić from the position of director. It should be believed that Zornić will indeed be removed as soon as possible (sometimes one should learn from Fadil Novalić, who removed his advisor Muhamed Gurbeta, former director of BINAS from Bugojno, who was sentenced to six months for forging an official statement, from the cabinet in a short procedure), but that still does not mean that the question of how the government of the six-party coalition ended up with Zornić should be closed.

Especially since a convicted (war) criminal, through a public defense – demonstrated on FACE TV – defending himself in the director's chair, perhaps dealt the biggest slap to the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Ministry of Interior of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the government of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the besieged city. Zornić, namely, claims that not only is "his" case bigger, but that "everything that culminated in the Trebević operation" was a setup?!

"His" case – let's be clear from the start – is the least his own. The District Military Court in Sarajevo – in the name of the people – on August 3, 1993, ruled (the verdict became final on November 1 of the same year) that the then assistant commander for security of the 6th Mountain Brigade of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Enver Zornić, was guilty of ordering the murder of Jagoda Janković and Sreten Ninković, who were first brought to a house at Varaždinska 34, led into the back room, and there liquidated with a single shot to the head from a "previously cocked" TT 7.62 mm pistol. Their bodies were then covered with blankets and pieces of furniture, everything was doused with gasoline and set on fire. He was also found guilty of helping the murderers of Jovan Popović and Josip Gogalo to try to hide the traces of their crimes.

Gogalo and Popović, according to the same verdict, were first killed by members of the 6th Mountain Brigade, and then their remains were set on fire.

Dr. Hazma Žujo and Dr. Ilijas Dobrača, experts from the Institute of Forensic Medicine, confirmed in their findings that the three men – Ninković, Gogalo, and Popović – were first shot, and then their bodies were set on fire. The body of Jagoda Janković was not found, but the Council of the District Military Court, chaired by Muhidin Kapo, after the main and public hearing, conducted investigation, witness statements, and the appearance of the defense – indeed a strong team, led by Zornić's lawyers Ekrem Galijatović and Edin Rešidović – had no doubt that Jagoda was killed and her body set on fire.

Enver Zornić and his comrades were arrested on January 7, 1993, and the verdict, which punished Zornić and six of his comrades, was handed down seven months later.

The highest prison sentence was given to the perpetrator of the murders (15 years in prison), the accomplice in the executions and Zornić as the order-giver were sentenced to ten years and two months, one of the co-perpetrators received five years...

Two and a half months later, on October 26, 1993, the Trebević operation followed, which Zornić, like a cuckoo's egg, foists onto the Army and Police of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with accusations that "since then, our lives have been ruled by the same group of people." The infamous Trebević operation was nothing other than the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina's crackdown on organized criminals in its own ranks, and in fact an operation in which Mušan Topalović Caco, commander of the 10th Mountain Brigade of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and his comrades were arrested, later charged and convicted for Kazani, the pit on Trebević to which members of the 10th Mountain Brigade took and at whose edge they killed, also Sarajevo Serbs and Croats, and a few Bosniaks who got in their way.

The infamous Trebević operation – in which Ramiz Delalić Ćelo surrendered – was an internal siege of the besieged city, in which more than 250 members of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina were detained. Since both Caco and Ćelo had hostages, and since Caco also offered armed resistance, on that October 26, 1993, 14 members of the Army and Police of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina perished, nine of them fighting in the midst of war against their own comrades, for the idea of a multi-ethnic state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Saving the honor of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its goals of defending common life in the daily shelled capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose intersections were under the watchful eye of snipers of the Army of Republika Srpska who showed no mercy, a city exhausted by hunger and deprivation, without electricity, water, and the most necessary medicines, lost their lives military police officers Kemal Kojić, Admir Hebib, Izet Karšić, Elvir Šovčić, Jasmin Čamdžija, and Hamid Humić, and three members of the CSB Sarajevo, Srđan Bosiljčić, Dragan Miljanović, and Slaven Markešić.

That same night, Caco was also killed, who lay for four years in a mound with NN markings, only to be later, with a spectacular funeral attended by 12,000 Sarajevans, passed from hand to hand and buried at Kovači.

For Kazani, a judicial process was also conducted: the initial indictment charged as many as 27 of Caco's comrades with war crimes, but they were tried for robberies, banditry, murders, and cruel murders. Given that they unanimously claimed that it was Caco who ordered the taking away and murders of Ana and Vasilj Lavriv, Milena Drašković, Ergin Nikolić, Duško Jovanović, Marina and Radoslav Komljenac, Zoran Vučurević, Branislav Radosavljević, Predrag Šalipur...

The District Military Court in Sarajevo imposed sentences on them that were debated in public precisely from the aspect of the severity of their crimes. However, they served them, some were pardoned, some were reached by amnesty, but the process and the entire operation remained as an irrefutable argument of the readiness of the government and institutions of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina to deal with criminals even in the most difficult war year, even if they were in their own ranks.

That, after all, was the key argument of The Hague that it did not take Kazani as its own case, because the criminals against Sarajevo civilians were punished. Some of those killed, like Predrag Šalipur, were not civilians: Predrag – many years later his father told me – knew Caco from his youth and was even a member of the 10th Mountain Brigade. Slobodanka Macanović, daughter of Radoslav and Marina Komljenac, who is still searching for the remains of her parents, although the court irrefutably established that they were Caco's victims, was a member of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the same brigade where Enver Zornić was.

Caco's spectacular funeral was organized by the SDA, and Enver Zornić was nominated by the SDP. He was appointed by the government of the six-party coalition, and no matter how they all wash their hands of that act today, it is quite clear that there is no justification. At the head of a public company, in a country where politics chooses directors despite competitions, the appointment of someone convicted of crimes committed during the war against civilians is indefensible.

The fact that the SDP is expelling him from membership is a futile attempt to repair political damage, and the problem remains, and in this case it is called the attitude towards criminals: if the SDP can, out of negligence, nominate Zornić, if Our Party can, for the sake of good relations with the People and Justice, condone Mustafa Busuladžić, then no one has the right to say anything about themselves and their politics.
Because everything is completely stripped bare – there is no politics, there is only a struggle for power and filling chairs. If the six-party coalition wants to show that it is different from the SDA, let it define its own policies and start implementing them. But without post-Dayton murders of multi-ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina and attacks on the values that were preserved even during the war.

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* The column is taken from the print edition of Oslobođenje from September 30, 2019.