Veselin Šljivančanin

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Veselin Šljivančanin in 1992

Veselin Šljivančanin (born June 13, 1953 in Pavez, the municipality of Žabljak, Montenegro, Yugoslavia) is a former officer of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA). As a major of JNA, he has taken part in the battle of Vukovar which was fought from the end of August until 18 November 1991. He is accused of being responsible for the mass killing of about 260 non-Serb people that followed the fall of Vukovar.

After the fall of Vukovar, he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and was placed in command of a brigade of JNA stationed at Podgorica, Montenegro. He was promoted to Colonel in the beginning of 1996 and transferred to the Military Academy in Belgrade, where he served as a lecturer in military tactics. He retired from military service in October 2001.

Šljivančanin was indicted in 1995, along with Mile Mrkšić, Miroslav Radić and Slavko Dokmanović, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The indictment accuses him of being responsible for the mass killing at Ovčara, near Vukovar, of approximately 260 captive non-Serb men, on the following grounds:

he was in direct command of Serb forces that took control of the Vukovar Hospital on 18 November 1991 and evacuated people from there over the following days to the Ovčara farm building;
he personally directed the selection and removal from the hospital of about 400 non-Serbs who JNA suspected to be Croatian paramilitaries;
he ordered JNA soldiers under his command to deliver custody of the detainees to other Serb forces who physically executed them.

He was arrested in Belgrade by Serbian authorities on 13 June 2003 ^[1] and was handed over to the ICTY on 1 July. The trial against him commenced in October 2005 and is (as of November 2006) still in progress.