According to the newest information from Nacional’s source in police circles, the 4 April arrest of Ivica Rajić was made possible thanks to Ante Belak, Chief of the Split Crime Police. It would appear that this is the true reason why HDZ Member of Parliament Ljubo Ćesić Rojs launched an attack on Belak at the last parliamentary session. In the television broadcast of the parliamentary session, Rojs accused the police of financial malversations in the purchase of rubber patrol boats, and he called the Split police criminals.

When former Commander of the Kiseljak HVO, Ivica Rajić, the executor from Stupni Dol was arrested on 4 April on charges raised by the ICTY, he was under the protection of SIS, HVO and Ljubo Ćesić Rojs, and later by the spy-police network created by Markica Rebić in 1998 as the secret action ‘Hague’ in the Croatian military counter-intelligence agencyNacional has received insight into documents which prove that Ljubo Ćesić Rojs was directly involved in covering up the whereabouts of the former commander of the HVO Kiseljak who was indicted in 1995 by the ICTY for the massacre of Muslim civilians in the village of Stupni Dol. In 1996, immediately after the ICTY indictment, Ćesić placed Rajić, of course under a phony name, as director of the Split military hotel complex Duilovo. Considering that the recent Rajić arrest has re-opened the topic of sponsors of Hague fugitives for the second time in three years, it is clear that the MP formerly from Herceg Bosna was extremely upset by Belak’s revelations.

Information for Job Security

According to unofficial police sources, Ante Belak informed his Zagreb bosses that the Hague fugitive was hiding out in Šimićeva Street at the time when his career fell into a dramatic crisis. A month and a half ago he was the subject of an internal conflict between Šime Lučin, Police Minister and Ranko Ostojić, Zagreb Police Chief. One wanted to replace Belak together with Guštin, while the second man defended him, convinced that he was a professional man of his trade. Belak made efforts, allegedly, to resolve that conflict in his benefit and, perfectly aware of his rocky position, he delivered the sensational information on Rajić’s whereabouts to the Zagreb police. And, in fact, while the check into Rajić’s identity and movements, acquaintances and contacts were being checked out, the manhunt was finalized last week with a police ambush set up at the entrance of the military building where the fugitive has been living unhindered with his wife and six children for the past several years.

Regardless of how paradoxical it may seem, Belak’s fateful decision in arresting the Hague fugitive was also the key motive for the daily newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija, and other police circles, to suspect the Split Police force of participating in the years of covering up Rajić’s location. The argument was as follows: if he was saving his position, then that means that this experienced crime detective, excellently informed in all the goings on in the Split area, must have known for a long time that Rajić was living in his zone of responsibility. However, Belak keep quiet with this information, right up until this sensational and well-timed news was used to fix his shaky position. With the priceless assistance of Belak for the Račan government, instead of Gotovina, they have another fugitive to offer to the ICTY as a respectable replacement. Which also resulted in removing Belak’s removal from the Chief of Split Crime Police off the daily agenda.

Obviously aware of the rumors which, in a very awkward pre-election time, were shaking the Parliament, party headquarters and newspaper offices, the Police Ministry sent out equally disturbing counter-accusations that the story on the manipulations surrounding the successful end to the hunt for Rajić are the product of the domestic secret services, which is attempting to compromise the most deserving people in the police manhunt. The reason for this, they say, is logical and transparent: in doing the work which falls under the jurisdiction of the spy sector, the police have proven that the secret service is incapable and that the hesitations by Premier Račan and President Mesić to appoint their current, interim directors as permanent are justified. That covered up battle between those who decided to arrest Rajić and those who did not know if now was the right time, holds the meaning that will only become clear in the future: which state agencies and institutions, agents and police, SIS, SZUP, HIS and police agents – in addition to Belak – had access to documents and written evidence of where Rajić has been hiding for the past eight years, and that no one was willing or ready to say they knew.

In short, Ivica Rajić is the first person indicted by the ICTY whose extradition did not arouse an “uprising” by the domestic right wing, but did cause a split, and worry among unclean consciences, fears, personal envies and institutional conflicts in the state leadership, and a new and very suspicious question of the conduct of Račan’s government. The topic of inheriting Hague fugitives and their protectors, financiers and political sympathizers from the former HDZ espionage-political structures was opened over three years ago. To recall, in September 2000, four HVO soldiers were found hiding in Zadar and Biograd, under phony identities – Vlado Ćosić, Paško Ljubičić, Tomislav Vlajić and Ante Slišković. These men, relatively reliably, carried out the massive massacre of Muslim civilians in the village of Ahmići not far from Vitez. Based on the inherited documentation in the Office of the President, SIS and HIS archives, and the “Rajić file”, created by the united police and intelligence forces since 1996, it was already known that their hiding and cover ups was initiated, thought up and realized by today retired General Markica Rebić.

Markica Rebić

First as director of SIS, and then as Tudjman’s advisor for national security, in 1998, Rebić built, as he personally liked to call it, counter-intelligence protection for at least seven Bosnian Croats with secret ICTY indictments. Covering up the fugitives and ICTY suspects was even part of the official SIS operative operation entitled ‘OA Hague’. This was carried out by Marin Ivanović and Ivica Markota, both still employees of the Defense Ministry, and Stipan Udiljak, currently part of the investigative team serving the defense council of Mladen Naletilić Tuta, convicted of war crimes before the ICTY. The ‘Hague Group’ had the task of securing apartments, jobs and phony documents for the fugitives, in cooperation with Zadar, Split and Dubrovnik branches of the Military Police, SZUP and MUP, and to promptly inform the fugitives of all the moves of ICTY prosecutors and investigators and SFOR arrest plans on the territory of neighbouring Herzegovina.

One of the seven protected men from ‘OA Hague’ was, which must also be known, Ivica Rajić. At first under the protection of Ljubo Ćesić Rojs and then Defense Minister Gojko Šušak, was handed over the Rebić case once the newspapers released that the executor from Stupni Dol was hiding out in the Split military hotel. Also dating back to the same period, 1998, is the official Defense Ministry resolution giving him a military apartment in his wife’s name, supposedly officially employed in the Croatian Army.

The investigation which began in September 2000 and was aimed at finding the Ahmići foursome was more than sloppy. It was in fact extorted information which Anto Nobilo, the Hague defense lawyer for Tihomir Blaškić received from a Bosnian Croat, a long time acquaintance of the four men, and then passed on to the police and SZUP. The arrest quickly followed, and a trial against the local Zadar financiers and sponsors of the Ahmići executions, in which, each of them was set free, one at a time.

Though there was a mass of SIS documents on the ‘OA Hague’ inherited in the Defense Ministry, Markica Rebić was completely left out and given amnesty. In such an atmosphere, the absolute minimum was done: only the small Zadar with SZUP Josip Nakić was uncovered as the most visible member of the octopus, and in other parts of the country, it continued to operate and to protect Rajić for a further two years. Therefore, it should be no surprise if one day it can be revealed that Belak and the police long suspected Rajić’s secret location, but had to wait for a sign from Premier Račan, modeled after all his HDZ predecessors, to extradite the fugitive to the ICTY at the time when such would be politically most profitable. If the ICTY sees this also as Račan’s political strategy, then it will be logical to the prosecution of the ICTY that the government is consciously sidestepping the arrest of General Gotovina.

The espionage vision of Croatian-Hague relations, as created in 1998 by Markica Rebić, covered four main points of the SIS secret activities: tracking, wiretapping and directing the Blaškić defense, overall control over potential, secret and public ICTY indictments, covering up the war crimes of HV and HVO and, above all, covering up the Croatian imperialist policies in Bosnia Herzegovina. In the practical application, Rebić’s concept came down to the following: to extradite certain persons indicted to the Hague if deemed necessary, while helping to hide others, while using all possible measures to defend Franjo Tudjman and his “Croatian state policy”. Though a professor of Marxism by profession, Rebić offered the then Croatian President his own personal interpretation of international laws of war and Anglo-Saxon law, claiming that he had reliable solutions for all the those indicted by the Hague to date and in the future. As those well informed claim, he loved to widely elaborate on the theme that there is no point in contesting individual war crimes before the Court, but instead to prove that the Croat-Muslim war in BiH did not have the character of an international conflict: in that case HVO and HV would not be under the jurisdiction of the Hague Tribunal which measures its actions by the Geneva Convention and the International Laws of War.

‘Croatian National Policy’

Considering that the domestic legal experts and all the defense councils ignored his defense, Rebić accused them one at a time for lacking national patriotism, for ignoring Croatian National interests and for acting too independently in selecting witnesses, documents and in cross examination. After a certain amount of time, he proclaimed them to be state enemies, demanding that SZUP follow and wiretap their telephone calls. He was forced to leave the position of assistant minister for SIS and was moved instead to the Office of the President, and his defense and super-secret ‘Hague Group’ was moved to the HIS headquarters and continued to be under Rebić’s personal leadership.

In 1999, Tudjman’s advisor for national security virtually single-handedly came with a “combination” to infiltrate Croatian spies into the International Criminal Tribunal, for manipulating documents and witnesses, taking care first and foremost to place all the HVO documents and evidence in a safe place, far from the reach of the ICTY investigators and prosecutors. Only Mladen Naletilić Tuta, due to his conflict with Minister Šušak, was denied SIS sponsorship. During his second escape attempt from the Zagreb jail in 1999, he came to be a protégé of Ivić Pašalić, Tudjman’s advisor for national policy, who was counting on winning Herzegovinian votes.

Until Rebić included him in his program of counter-intelligence for protecting the Hague fugitives and covering up war crimes, hiding Ivica Rajić was under the auspices of SIS HVO, who Ljubo Ćesić Rojs assisted with the knowledge and blessing of then Defense Minister Gojko Šušak. When he moved to SIS in 1998, Rebić’s ‘Hague Group’ for the ICTY fugitives built a espionage-police network with headquarters in the Split military base Lora. At the top of the local branch of that organization, Mario Tomašević operated on behalf of SIS, with Alojz Šupraha as representative of SZUP, better known to the public as the football referee who rigged the results of football matches to please President Tudjman, an avid Dinamo fan.

The espionage-police organization, along with Rajić also took care of a number of his fellow soldiers from Kiseljak, ensuring they received adequate accommodation, office and business space, homes, apartments and jobs in the Makarska area. Some, as classic criminals being protected from prosecution by the Sarajevo officials, and some being hidden from SFOR, as they could be dangerous informants and witnesses as to the presence of the Croatian Army in the Croat-Muslim War, and on the secret alliance between the Croats and the Serbs and Milivoj Petković, the HVO Chief of Staff who traveled to Kiseljak in 1993 to secure Serbian units. This was an implementation of one of Rebić’s ideas that the role of the Zagreb HDZ branch in the failed division of BiH be covered up before the entire world, and even before Croats.

The role of Markica Rebić in creating the infrastructure of hiding Hague fugitives, could not have been an unknown to the current leaders of the state institutions, in part due to Rebić’s bragging about his own role to all those who were willing to listen. However, since Račan’s government, virtually at the very beginning of its mandate accepted the Resolution on the Patriotic War which stated that in spite of four and a half million of the Croatian population as direct witnesses to the Croat-Muslim War, that Croatia was never in any kind of conflict in Bosnia, Markica Rebić and his Operative Action ‘Hague’, his SIS and his ‘Hague Group’ and Hague fugitives today are not only embarrassing for the HDZ regime, but also for the current government. Which is why it took so much time to arrest Rajić. However, it would appear that no one has dared yet to peek into the secret service documents in which there are very strong indications as to the crimes, who ordered them, who inspired them and the hidden criminals.