SLOVENIA: Slovenia denied yesterday that its troops had committed the first war crime of the 1990s Balkan wars by executing three Yugoslav soldiers after they had surrendered.
The denial came after Austrian television footage allegedly showing the killings was aired on Serbian television, provoking fury among senior officials in a country that feels demonised by the West for its role in the wars that dismembered Yugoslavia.
The pictures, filmed near the Slovenia-Austria border on June 28th, 1991, during Slovenia's 10-day fight for independence from Yugoslavia, show three Yugoslav army soldiers waving a white sheet in apparent surrender and then suddenly dropping to the ground amid gunfire.
"What we see on that film is undoubtedly a war crime," said Rasim Ljajic, Belgrade's minister for relations with the UN war crimes court at The Hague.
Justice minister Zoran Stojkovic compared the tape to footage of Serb paramilitaries executing Bosnian Muslim civilians outside Srebrenica in 1995, which recently prompted fresh condemnation of Serbia's wartime record. "This is an almost identical case and should not be disregarded or kept quiet about."
But Slovenia insisted yesterday that it had fully investigated the incident and discovered no wrongdoing by its security forces, which defended strategic locations from takeover by Yugoslav troops who advanced on Slovenia after it declared independence.
"Two separate investigations, carried out in 1991 and again in 1999, undoubtedly proved that no war crime was committed" near the border crossing of Holmec, the government of the EU member state said in a statement. "None of the soldiers shown surrendering in the film was killed at the time of the surrender."
Drago Kos, who led a police unit near Holmec at the time of the incident, this week gave his version of events. "Slovenes were firing anti-aircraft missiles at the roof of the checkpoint without knowing that there were Yugoslav army soldiers with a white flag," Mr Kos said. "When shots started to come from the opposite side, the three men fell to the ground to take cover."
Slovenian prosecutors have brought slander charges against the head of the country's Helsinki Monitor human rights group, Neva Miklavcic-Predan, after she called the incident "'the first documented war crime in the territory of former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia".
