Who is Goran Zubac: The dance instructor's celebration ends, Dodik has no one to protect him anymore!

Goran Zubac will likely remain the most controversial police officer ever to be part of Bosnia and Herzegovina's security structures!

He was the protector of the most brutal economic crime in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, the main pillar of Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik, whom the opposition accuses of hundreds of millions of convertible marks of embezzled public funds, and the protector of individuals in leading positions at SIPA against whom the BiH Prosecutor's Office is also conducting investigations for war crimes during the conflict in the country.

The first blow to one of the most powerful men in BiH, Goran Zubac, was dealt by the state in March of this year.

The Court of BiH found him guilty of dereliction of duty. On February 7 last year, during protests, he ignored calls to send the SIPA special unit to protect the BiH Presidency building from being set on fire and destroyed.

Five months after the indictment, Zubac was kept afloat by his associates, primarily Žika Krunić, president of the Independent Board of the BiH Parliament, which is responsible, among other things, for appointing and dismissing SIPA leaders. However, in early August, after citizens ousted SNSD from state government in the general elections in BiH with their votes, the political party that had been Zubac's political protector all along, the head of SIPA was dismissed!

CONNECTIONS TO DODIK

- This is the beginning of the end for Milorad Dodik and the beginning of shedding light on the most serious forms of crime in Republika Srpska – the opposition announced in the first hours after the news leaked that Zubac would be removed from the leading position at SIPA.

Goran Zubac was born in Sarajevo in 1961. He graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1986, but quickly turned to police work. The then leadership of SDS included him in the list of promising cadres, whom they sent to the Military Center of the then JNA in Pančevo in 1991, where they were trained in special skills, handling anti-tank weapons, conducting sabotage operations... In his free time, Zubac danced, so he also worked as a dance instructor for a while.

In 2013, Slobodna Bosna published confidential documentation from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Republika Srpska, which revealed how Zubac built a lightning-fast police career during the war precisely on Bosniak victims in Sarajevo.

According to the wartime police file of Goran Zubac, the director of SIPA was trained in other JNA barracks after special training at the Military Center in Pančevo, so that he would be ready for war at the beginning of '92.

- He actively participated in the arming of the Serb people in Dobrinja – it is emphasized in Goran Zubac's file, who lived in the Dobrinja II settlement until March 1992, before moving to Ilidža.

He completed the Orašnica operation with six soldiers, and two days later participated in the Ahatovići operation, as a commander on behalf of the military contingent from the Butile barracks,” states the official file of police officer Zubac, definitively confirming that the now former director of the most important police agency in BiH was one of the key actors of the “military-police operation” in the Sarajevo suburb of Ahatovići, which aimed at the brutal killing and persecution of Bosniak civilians.

Journalists from the Anadolija agency previously investigated that a criminal complaint was filed against Zubac with the Cantonal Prosecutor's Office in Sarajevo on suspicion of committing a war crime against the Bosniak population in Ahatovići in early June, but that charge never reached a judicial conclusion.

According to data from the Association of Prisoners of the Sarajevo municipality of Novi Grad, about 550 residents of the Sarajevo settlements of Ahatovići and Dobroševići were held in Serb camps, and nearly a hundred prisoners were killed at various locations. The most horrific, of course, was the crime committed against prisoners from Rajlovac, when 47 prisoners were forced into a bus, which Serb soldiers and police then hit with three projectiles fired from grenade launchers.

However, judging by the director of SIPA's wartime “merits,” highlighted in his personal file, after proving himself in the operation in Ahatovići, Zubac voluntarily transferred to the Special Unit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ilidža at the end of June 1992.

The head of the then Serb Public Security Station Ilidža and his long-time police patron Tomo Kovač then sent him to the most important military-police operations in the area of that Sarajevo municipality.

Zubac particularly distinguished himself in two battles, fought in early August '92, after which Commander Kovač gave him the nickname Osa (Wasp), which he received for his skillful use of an anti-tank grenade launcher. Zubac stood out as an exemplary soldier in numerous operations during the conflict in BiH.

After the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995, Zubac fled to Trebinje, where from 1996 to 2001 he was the head of the Fire Protection Department of CJS Trebinje – MUP of Republika Srpska.

WARTIME ROLE

He was then appointed head of the Police Department of CJS Trebinje, then deputy head of CJS Trebinje, then became head of CJS Trebinje, and in 2012 was appointed director of the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA), thus becoming the main protector of Milorad Dodik and his policies. His reign lasted three years.