Gosic and Varivode: 31 Years On, No Convictions

Exactly 31 years after the killing of seventeen Serb civilians in two villages in the Bukovica area near Knin, Croatia’s judiciary has yet to name a single person responsible or hand down one final conviction. The Documentation and Information Center Veritas released the finding today, together with a full list of the victims and a timeline of the court proceedings, which ended when prosecutors dropped the case. For Belgrade, the anniversary is not only a matter of historical memory: prosecuting war crimes remains one of the benchmarks Brussels uses to judge Zagreb’s progress in the judiciary chapters of its EU accession talks, and unpunished crimes against Serbs are routinely raised in Serbia’s diplomatic protests to European institutions.

In the village of Gosic near Knin, on August 27, 1995, seven Serb residents were shot at close range on the doorsteps of their own homes: Savo Borak (70), Vasilj Borak (68), Grozdana Borak (75), Marija Borak (81), Kosovka Borak (77), Milka Borak (75) and Dusan Borak (56). A month later, on September 28, 1995, ten more civilians were killed in nearby Varivode: Jovan Beric (75), Spiro Beric (55), Radivoj Beric (69), Marija Beric (69), Mirko Pokrajac (84), Dusan Dukic (59), Marko Beric (82), Milka Beric (67), Jovan Beric (56) and Ugljesa Ilijasevic (54), whose body was found in a local cistern. The average age of the victims in both villages was close to 70, and neither village saw any fighting during the war, before or at the time of the killings. All of the victims were civilians who had stayed in their homes, trusting the official safety guarantees given at the time.

Croatian police secretly buried the bodies in the Knin cemetery, marked “unknown.” Investigators from the Hague Tribunal did not exhume them until the spring of 2001, among a group of 301 bodies of people killed during and after Operation Storm, and families identified the victims in 2002.

How the Trial Collapsed

Under international pressure, the Zadar County State Attorney’s Office filed charges as early as 1996 against six former members of the Croatian army: Nikola Rasic, Ivan Jakovljevic, Pero Perkovic, Ivica Petric, Zlatko Ladovic and Nediljko Mijic, accusing them of murder for material gain. Four of the defendants confessed during the investigation, but the Zadar County Court acquitted all six that same year, citing a lack of evidence. Croatia’s Supreme Court overturned the acquittal, and a retrial followed in Sibenik. There, on February 13, 2002, the prosecutor withdrew the indictment altogether, announcing that a new investigation would be opened against other possible perpetrators. No one was ever prosecuted under that promised investigation, and 31 years after the killings in Gosic and Varivode, as with many other crimes committed in the surrounding Krajina villages after Operation Storm, not a single person has been convicted.

Villages the Crime Emptied

The consequences of the unpunished killings also show up in the census figures. Gosic had 107 residents in 1991, 106 of them Serbs, but by the 2021 census only 21 people remained in the village, none of them under 40. Varivode had 477 residents in 1991, 472 of them Serbs; by 2021 only 61 people still lived there, none under 25. The memorials that the Kistanje municipality and the Serb National Council raised to the victims in their home villages have repeatedly been vandalized and desecrated, Veritas notes.

By everything published so far, Gosic and Varivode remain among the starkest examples of unpunished crimes against Serb civilians after Operation Storm. Zagreb marks the date with silence, the new investigation announced in 2002 never produced an indictment, and the question of responsibility for the seventeen murdered residents stays open, with no date left to wait for.