Milorad Pejic has lived in the English town of Corby with his family in 1999. He settled in well, taking advantage of the large Serbian community found in the Northamptonshire town but also integrating well, for example finding employment as a locksmith. This is very nice for Mr Pejic. His victims have now been dead for seventeen years, massacred on a farm near Vukovar after surviving an incessant attack for over two months previously.

Pejic is accused of having taken part in the Ovcara massacre in which 200 Croatian residents of Vukovar were murdered by Serbian paramilitaries after being kept in an old hangar for several days. He was arrested after disembarking a plane at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport and now faces the prospect of going on trial alongside a gang of other killers. The British press have picked up this story since Pejic holds a British passport and his tale makes for interesting headlines when they include his twee little job as a locksmith. Corby is, after all, a long way removed from the horrors of Vukovar in 1991. We must appreciate the clear fact that those who carried out the destruction of the city, which was intended to cause as many civilian casualties as possible, and the subsequent massacres which followed were not all three-headed monsters from the fiery pits of Hell. They were normal human beings who could quite conceivably be employed as locksmiths when away from the frontline.

A similar approach was taken by popular media outlets with the case of Dragan Vasiljkovic, better known by his nickname as Captain Dragan. Vasiljkovic moved from Serbia to Australia in 1967 and was granted citizenship Down Under, only to return to his homeland in 1990 with the specific purpose of devoting his personal time to preventing Croatia’s secession. An incredibly murky figure, he was a founding member of the Red Berets paramilitary group and spent time in the company of convicted war criminals like Milan Martic, himself sentenced to 35 years in prison. Possibly the greatest condemnation of Vasiljkovic can be found in the comments of Vojislav Seselj, probably the most shameful exhibit in Serbia’s embarrassing fall into extreme nationalism during the final two decades of the Twentieth Century. Testifying at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, Seselj remarked that Vasiljkovic had a paramilitary training camp near Knin but that he never visited because “I always kept my distance from Captain Dragan, considering him to be an ordinary criminal and a cheater”. Vasiljkovic is currently languishing in an Australian prison while he awaits extradition to Croatia. The Croatian government wishes to place him on trial for torturing, beating and murdering Croatian soldiers and police in Knin but must wait because Vasiljkovic has appealed the decision to extradite him on the grounds that his personal safety can not be guaranteed while in Croatia. Ironically, Vasiljkovic did not take his personal safety into account when he willingly went to Croatia in 1991. There is a litany of evidence which suggests that Vasiljkovic is a far from reputable character, including a crudely worded attack on the former Croatian Justice Minister Vesna Skare-Ozbolt who in a letter to her he called a “housewhore” and advised her “you would be better off closing your knees a bit, promiscuous bitch”. Rather than focussing on all of this, most popular media outlets instead made an effort to stress that the man had been working as a reputable golf instructor for several years.

Whatever the future may hold for Pejic and Vasiljkovic, we should not allow the current facades of war criminals to throw us off course. Once the dust has settled it is not hard for people to create an air of respectability, as shown in the words of Pejic’s wife who unconvincingly argued “There is no chance of him being guilty of anything because he is such a good father, good husband and good guy”. Does Mrs. Pejic believe that all war criminals continue their killing sprees inside their own houses as well? When looking at how to treat suspected war criminals it seems that a great deal can be learned from the Israelis following World War Two. Many Nazi’s escaped and managed to create new lives, for example Adolf Eichmann worked as an engineer and a rabbit breeder in Argentina, but eventually a great number were tracked down thanks to the hard work of Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal and the Israeli state. Whilst exact times, circumstances and the number of dead may be different, the basic violation of human life based around ethnic prejudice is the same whether it occurred at the hands of Nazis in the 1940s or Pejic and Vasiljkovic in the 1990s. For this reason we can have no sympathy for the rabbit breeder, the locksmith or the golf instructor.

Nacional article about Vasiljkovic
Daily Mirror article about Pejic
Guardian article about Pejic
Trial Watch information on Pejic