Posted on 02/20/2002 10:15:45 AM PST by joan
ZAGREB, Feb 20 (AFP) - A Croatian district attorney requested on Wednesday the exhumation of an ethnic Serb returnee, on suspicions he may have died as a result of being beaten up two weeks before his death.
Ivan Galovic, the district attorney in the southern town of Zadar, told AFP he had asked the Zadar county court to authorise the exhumation of Jovan Bota's body so an autopsy could be carried out.
Galovic said there was "suspicion that his death might have occurred as consequence of an attack", adding that he had issued the request after reviewing a police report on the incident.
The 67-year-old Bota was beaten up by a group of teenagers in the southern town of Benkovac on February 1. He suffered a broken rib and died two weeks later.
A coroner ruled that Bota had died of natural causes but his family told police they suspected he had died as a result of the attack.
Bota returned to his village in the region of Benkovac two years ago. He had left the area in the aftermath of a Croatian military operation in August 1995 which enabled Zagreb to regain control of a key area held by Serb rebels.
Operation Storm, in which hundreds of Serbs were killed or went missing, was instrumental in ending the 1991-95 Serbo-Croatian conflict.
According to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, some 280,000 ethnic Serbs fled their homes in Croatia during and after the conflict between Zagreb and Serb secessionists. So far some 80,000 of them have returned.
A coroner ruled that Bota had died of natural causes but his family told police they suspected he had died as a result of the attack.
The coroner ruled it was natural causes. Perhaps violence against Serbs by Croats is natural.
Again, I understand why we got involved here (to deflect attention from Clinton’s numerous scandals), but WHY did we have to get in on the wrong side???
Owl_Eagle
”Guns Before Butter.”
Actually, I'm more encouraged than dismayed, believe it or not. Big change from my old time there when there would have been no probe at all, and the coroner would have messed up the body enough to make sure no one ever got anything from it if there ever was an investigation (been there, seen that, wish I hadn't). Perhaps the demise of Tudjman and the NDZ's loss of power has made a difference after all, and decent Croats are getting the chance to make their country, well, decent, again.
Anyway, I was dreading reading the article at first just in case it was someone I knew (or, Heaven forbid, even someone I was responsible for returning). Then, when reading, my second thought was "Benkovac?!? Benkovac?!? Was he crazy to return to THAT place or what?" Nearly every place in the world has its share of inbred rednecks, but Benkovac has more than its share.
I am sorry for the man's death, of course, but I'm encouraged to learn that rule of law is again pressing, even in the likes of Benkovac. That bodes well for Croatia as a whole.
I could tell you what the coroner in Sisak did to the body of a young Serb mother who was married to a Croat, and murdered by a rogue Croat with mental problems. He shot her through the window as she sat on the sofa with her 18-month-old child in the home of her Croat father-in-law one evening in Glina in late Sept. 1995. The father-in-law hid under his bed in fear all night while the baby cried and clung to the body of his dead mother for ALL THOSE HOURS until the next morning.
I went with the girl's father to pick up her body for burial at the Sisak morgue after the coroner was done with her. You wouldn't believe what they did to her body. I won't tell it because it would give folks nightmares. I wish to high Heaven I could have gone in alone and identified her body to keep her poor father from seeing that. How can a loving father ever recover from such a thing?
Yes, I know the marks of a proper autopsy, which are not pretty, but this was no normal autopsy!
Anyway, after it eventually developed that the murderer was a nut-job the Croats wanted to lock up anyway, the coroner changed his report. Go figure.
Meanwhile, the body of this beautiful young mother was so mutilated. (And that wasn't all -- her tomb was broken into by uniformed Croatian soldiers and police about three weeks after she was buried and more indignities. My heart grieved so for that poor family!)
The authopsy found out that Serb Jovan Bota, a returnee to Benkovac, Croatia, died after he'd been stoned, Director of the Information Centre "Veritas" Savo Strbac says today
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