(3 of 8)
As items on his indictment are ticked off, Lugar chain-smokes and dismisses them one by one. That killing didn't happen, he says: "If anyone did such things, they would have been court-martialed immediately." The Gray Wolves didn't exist, and anyway I wasn't a paramilitary, he says: "No, no, I was in the regular army, Second Posavina Brigade." I wasn't in charge, he says: One of the other men indicted was the local police chief, and "there's no way I could have commanded him." It wasn't me, he says: "Anyone could use my name, some Serb envious of me." I wasn't there, he says: on May 6 when he allegedly pulled the trigger on the detainees, "I think I was attending a funeral in Montenegro for one of my poor dead 18-year-old soldiers." The enemy committed war crimes, not us, he says, slamming down fuzzy, undated photos that he claims show Serb men decapitated by Muslims and Serb bodies mutilated. "No one is being accused at the Hague for that!"
Lugar is worried that his government will sell him out. He claims that the Belgrade secret police (who originally recruited him, the lawyer later suggests) variously want to arrest him and hand him over to the Hague or kill him to prevent him from surrendering to the tribunal or discredit him so he cannot testify against his superiors. He is bitter about his treatment. "In Croatia people like me have been rewarded," he complains.
The Lugars of the war were tools--often enthusiastic ones, to be sure--in a deliberately orchestrated campaign of extermination devised by political leaders and executed by hired gangs and local authorities. Instead of soldiers killing soldiers, civilians murdering civilians was the main act of the war. Pero Skopljak was one of that sort too, a Bosnian Croat who apparently succumbed to authority--or peer pressure or the hysteria of the moment--to enforce Croatian dominance over his neighbors.
He is one of six Croats indicted for complicity in the vicious ethnic cleansing that took place in 1993 around Vitez in central Bosnia. The tribunal says that local civilians, including Skopljak, together with Bosnian Croat General Tihomir Blaskic, were in charge when Croats sacked the village of Ahmici, tossing grenades into cellars where villagers sought to hide. To dislodge holdouts in downtown Vitez, Croats filled a tanker truck with explosives, tied a Muslim to the steering wheel and propelled the vehicle into a block of houses, killing and maiming dozens.
Skopljak was the police chief back then, and he acknowledged to TIME last November after being indicted that bad things happened. "I am not denying there were crimes on our side," he said, "but I am honestly innocent, as stupid as it sounds." While the Croats of Vitez rallied round, denouncing the Hague, Skopljak charged that "the tribunal believes stories invented by the Muslims. This is a staged process, a dirty political game." The former Franciscan monk insists that he "protected Muslims by hiding them, and I tried to find out who did Ahmici, but I didn't succeed." Confident Croatia's leaders would protect him, he declared, "I am staying here."