vukovar

Between 18 and 21 November 1991, the town of Vukovar, in eastern Slavonia, close to the Serbian border, fell to the Serbian army, still calling itself the JNA. The low point of this battle came on the 20th when the Serbian army burst into Vukovar's hospital, and started a shooting spree. Those who werent killed at the time were interned and many killed later on at Ovčara (located 5 kilometers southeast of Vukovar). There their bodies were dumped in a mass grave. 200 bodies were exhumed in 1996, in a process which took over 40 days. DNA testing revealed the bodies belonged to teenagers, journalist, a French guy, and several elderly people, among others.
I went to Vukovar several times after the fighting ended. On my first trip, very few buildings had four walls intact, and the place was a ghost town. With my Greek friend Harry and some locals we wandered around the shells of buildings. Bojan, himself a Serb, claimed the Serbs who burst into the hospital that night were high on all sorts of drugs. Their pupils dilated the screamed hysterically and moved irrationally. They were jumpy and shot to kill at the slightest sound. Some were JNA, many more were paramilitaries, or teens who had been given guns and drugs and swept up in the act. It is believed 200 dies in the hospital alone.
The incident is well document and there are plenty of witnesses. Several of the leaders were indicted by the Hague tribunal in the years after the war, at the instigation of requests for the Croatian government. The Serbian government went after many of its own people: in 2004 the Prosecution for War Crimes found three of the JNA leaders guilty of murder and inhumane acts, killing 192 people, and sentenced them all to jail terms between 5 and 20 years. One who escaped all of this, however, was former Yugoslav defense minister Velko Kadijevic. Why? Because he had seen the light and relocated himself to Moscow in 2001. A few months ago, the Croatian started trying to close in on him, requesting his extradition (he was born in what is now Croatia, and the alleged crimes took place in what is now Croatia.) Medvedev responded by making him an automatic citizen through a presidential decree. Today the Russian prosecutor General's office announced officially that he is protected by Russian law and cannot be handed over.
Ok, Russia sees themselves as the defenders of Serbs, as we all know, but even the Serbian courts have concluded that this massacre took place. Kadijevic doesn't deny that either, he only denies "knowing about it at the time." I fail to see what Russia is exactly gaining by protecting such people. It is not the 1990s. These guys can receive a fair trial- in Serbia if anyone has doubts about the impartiality of the Hague tribunal. Jumping over endless laws and having the president personally grant Russian citizenship to prevent someone from facing justice is hardly the "rule of law" way to deal with such a man.