Čelopek, Zvornik

Čelopek is a suburb of the city of Zvornik, on the Drina river in northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the start of the Bosnian war 1992-1995, in the early stages of the ethnic cleansing of the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) population of the Drina Valley, brutal war crimes were perpetrated by the Yellow Wasps paramilitary group, led by the Vučković brothers, Vojin ("Žućo") and Duško ("Repić"), against Bosniak civilians held in the Dom Kultura community centre.^[1][2][3]

The Dom Kultura atrocities

On 29 May 1992 the 174 male citizens of the village of Divič on the outskirts of Zvornik were taken by bus to the Dom Kultura cultural centre in the village of Čelopek, where they were imprisoned and subjected to extreme physical and psychological abuse.^[4]

On 7 June, the detainees were attacked by Serbian paramilitaries with spiked metal bars and chains. Some were forced to beat one another and three were murdered.^[5] Two Serbian soldiers from Kraljevo murdered Suljeman Kapidžić and Ramo Alihodžić, threatening to do the same to the other prisoners unless they paid 2,000 German marks immediately - the money was collected and handed over by the prisoners.^[4]

On 10 June, a group of around a dozen members of the Yellow Wasps led by Dušan Vučković visited the Dom Kultura.^[5] Vučković ordered seven pairs of fathers and sons from the group to get up onto the stage of the cultural centre, take their clothes off and perform sexual acts on one another while the other men were forced to watch and some were beaten unconscious before being stabbed to death.^[4][5]

Vučković took a semi-automatic rifle and fired at random at the men on the stage and in the auditorium. He also asked a 16-year-old boy, Damir Bikić, to identify his father in the audience. After asking the father whether he had any other sons and being told he did not, Vučković put a rifle in the boy's mouth and killed him.^[5] After that, Vučković and his fellow soldiers came to the Dom Kultura almost nightly to beat, torture and kill prisoners.^[4][5]

On 11 June the Yellow Wasps, headed by the Vučković brothers, came to the Dom Kultura and killed at least five detainees; one man had his ear cut off, others had their fingers cut off, and at least two men were sexually mutilated. Detainees were forced to eat the severed body parts and two detainees who refused were killed.^[5]

On 27 June, St. Vitus's Day 1992, Repić returned to the Dom Kultura alone. He subsequently confessed to firing bullets from a machine gun that killed 7-8 persons, firing bullets from a handgun to finish off the wounded, forcing captives to beat each other with baseball bats, shooting randomly at the captured civilians, aiming at their heads, killing another 10 or so, killing a man with a knife wound in his stomach with another stab in the heart", stabbing 5-6 captives with a knife in the heart, killing them, and then driving 20 corpses to a nearby pond where another two men were killed.^[1][2][5]

Vojin Vučković testified that incidents of rape, killing, prisoners being forced to engage in performing mutual sexual acts and impalings had been committed.^[1]

The Dom Kultura prison was closed on 29 June 1992 and the eighty-four survivors of the original group of approximately 180 men deported from Divič were taken to Zvornik and then to the Batković concentration camp, near Bijeljina.^[5]

The Vučković brothers were eventually put on trial in Serbia for crimes committed in Čelopek. According to his lawyer, Dušan Vučković believed that the Serbian Government had put them on trial in order to distance itself from responsibility for war crimes in Bosnia by distance by show that it was prepared to punish such crimes itself and also to forestall the possibility of the political leaders responsible being indicted for war crimes by international tribunals.^[6]

The trial was carried out in a very relaxed atmosphere, an inept prosecution failed to present evidence of wrongdoing, witnesses failed to appear, and after the judge fell ill the trial was postponed indefinitely.^[7] The Vučković brothers were tried again in July 1996 and Duško Vučković was sentenced to seven years in prison, increased on appeal to ten years in prison for a war crime against a civilian population; his brother was sentenced to four months in prison for illegal possession of firearms, ammunition and explosives.^[1]

Duško Vučković died suddenly in detention in autumn 2005, a week before he was due to stand trial with Branko Grujić and Branko Popović, senior Bosnian Serb officials from Zvornik, and four of his fellow Yellow Wasps before the War Crimes Chamber of the Belgrade District Court, charged with murder, torture and forcible transfer of Zvornik Muslims in May and June 1992. Milan Petrović, the prosecutor in the first war crimes trial transferred to Serbia by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said he had not been able to find an adequate term in the Serbian dictionary for the Zvornik crimes.^[1]

On 22 November 2010, Grujić and Popović, a former territorial defense commander, were sentenced to 6 and 15 years respectively for their role in the group that "imprisoned, inhumanely treated and killed around 700 people" in Zvornik from May to July 1992.^[8] The War Crimes Prosecutor's Office said it intended to appeal the verdicts, regarding the sentences as "inadequate considering the responsibility of the accused, with regard to the number of victims, the mass and brutal character of the crimes."^[9]

See also

Zvornik massacre

References

Coordinates: 44°26′25″N 19°07′10″E / 44.4403°N 19.1194°E / 44.4403; 19.1194