Captain Dragan Vasiljkovic faces justice in Croatia

Balkans paramilitary commander Dragan Vasiljkovic will be the first successful extradition of an ­accused war criminal from ­Australia.

Former Serbian paramilitary commander Dragan Vasiljkovic, the alleged war ciminal known as the notorious Captain Dragan, leaves NSW Supreme Court in Sydney after losing his defamation case filed under the name of Daniel Snedden, against The Weekend Australian Newspaper, published by Nationwide News Limited.

Balkans paramilitary commander Dragan Vasiljkovic will finally face questioning in Croatia over war crimes allegations after an ­extraordinary decade-long legal saga and what will be the first successful extradition of an ­accused war criminal from ­Australia.

Almost 10 years since the one-time ally of Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic was con­fronted by The Australian on a golf course in Perth and declared, “I would like to answer any war crime question”, Croatian prosecutors are preparing to interrogate the man they have long sought.

This morning, Mr Vasiljkovic, who was once known as Captain Dragan, will be escorted by ­Croatian police on to a plane at Sydney airport for the long journey to face his accusers.

He will be arrested on arrival in the capital Zagreb and the 60-year-old will immediately be transported to a county court at the Adriatic coastal town of Split.

It is a moment the Australian citizen — described in the inter­national press as a soldier of fortune when he sailed on a yacht to a port in Montenegro on his way to join what would become a genocide in the self-declared Serbian republic of Krajina in the early 1990s — has been fighting to prevent for nine years.

From the moment of his arrest in January 2006 — triggered by the The Australian’s September 2005 report — until just a few months ago, the accused war criminal has waged a near-constant battle to halt his extradition in a barrage of legal actions that have twice stretched all the way to the High Court.

The delay has cost taxpayers millions of dollars while the Belgrade-born former Australian Army reservist was held in a Sydney prison awaiting extradition, with the lag in the case also potentially jeopardising the possibility of a successful prosecution.

“This is a victory for justice for the victims of Captain Dragan’s unit, to finally see him brought ­before a court to answer charges,” said war crimes justice campaigner Mark Aarons, the author of a seminal book on Australia’s longtime willingness to harbour accused war criminals. This would be historic because it would be the first successful ­extradition of an accused war criminal from Australia after several previous attempts failed, largely due to Australia’s dilatory responses.

“It’s a great victory for Australia, to finally be able to say that it has taken action against one of the many accused war criminals who have found shelter in this country.”

Mr Vasiljkovic is wanted for questioning over three allegations: that in 1991 he commanded troops from the so-called Red Beret brigade, the Kninjas, who tortured and killed prisoners of war; that he commanded a deadly assault on the town of Glina in which civilians were killed; and that in 1993 he committed breaches of the Geneva Conventions during an assault by his troops at the town of Bruska near Benkovac.

Mr Vasiljkovic has denied all of the charges and insisted he trained and commanded a disciplined group of soldiers, brooking no criminal behaviour or ill-­discipline.

Exposing war criminals living in Australia has been a longstanding campaign for The Australian. In 2004,the newspaper revealed that Perth pensioner Charles ­Zentai was accused of beating to death a Jewish teenager during the last days of World War II in Hungary.

That report prompted another legal saga that lasted eight years and ended with a High Court ruling in 2012 that Mr Zentai should not be forced to go to Budapest to face the criminal allegations.

Mr Zentai has maintained that he had nothing to do with the 19-year-old’s death in November 1944 and that he left Budapest a day before it happened.

Mr Zentai was 90 years old when the matter was settled and the failed attempt to extradite him was regarded as the last opportunity for Australia to compel an accused war criminal from the Nazi era to face trial.

In 2005, The Australian ­exposed the case of Lajos Polgar, an official within the fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross regime. Polgar died not long after publicly defending himself over his past.

The exposure of the series of cases came after the Keating government disbanded a special ­investigations unit established to prosecute alleged war criminals on Australian soil.

That unit’s highest-ranking known target was Karlis Ozols, commander of a company of ­Latvian security police accused of having taken part in the slaughter of more than 10,000 Jews in Byelorussia before he moved to Australia. Ozols was never prosecuted.

In 2000 a Melbourne court found Konrad Kalejs ought to be extradited to face trial, but Kalejs had already evaded attempts to prosecute him in Britain, the US and Canada and he died before the matter was resolved.

In the case of Mr Vasiljkovic — who returned to Australia to live a quiet life as a golf instructor in Perth in 2005 — it did not take long before Croatian communities in Australia began to question why a man accused of atrocities during the Balkans wars had managed to escape justice.

In September 2005, The Australian set out to find Mr Vasiljkovic and question him on the allegations of war crimes that had first been published in a contemporaneous report by a UN special rappotuer who had compiled evidence of ethnic cleansing, rape and torture by troops, including those under Mr Vasiljkovic’s command.

When Mr Vasiljkovic was confronted on a golf course in Perth’s suburban Cannington, he declared he was willing to face his accusers.

“I would like to answer any war crime question ... I would really love to see anyone come up with an accusation. I’m prepared to ­answer any question,” he said.

Mr Vasiljkovic, who was then known by the name Daniel Snedden, said at the time: “I won’t say I’m perfect, because nobody is perfect ... but I’m sure I never killed a civilian, I’m sure I never killed a prisoner, I’m sure I never killed anybody that didn’t have to be killed.”

Commenting on the impending extradition, Croatia’s Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic declared that Mr Vasiljkovic, who was widely known in the Balkans during the war as Captain Dragan and was so popular with Serbians that he inspired a red-beret-wearing character in a comic strip, said the accused was “ no captain whatsoever, he’s a man with a name and a surname. He believes that his name and surname are honorable ... the court will decide who is right and who is wrong”.

Both the Australian Attorney-General’s Department and the Justice Minister, Michael Keenan, who has signed off on the extradition, were remaining tight-lipped last night.

“As a matter of longstanding practice the Australian government does not comment on surrender arrangements including the timing of surrender,” a spokesperson for the Attorney-General’s Department said.

But this newspaper has confirmed with high-level sources that the extradition is due to take place this morning, Sydney-time.

Former deputy prosecutor to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Graham Blewitt, welcomed the looming extradition yesterday as a long-awaited step towards justice. But Mr Blewitt said he was concerned that the lengthy extradition delay may compromise the ability of prosecutors to achieve a successful prosecution.

Mr Vasiljkovic’s Australian-based lawyer Dan Mori issued a statement to SBS last night saying he had not been informed of the impending extradition.

But he said he had asked the government to obtain an assurance from Croatia that his client would received a discount from any final sentence if convicted, to reflect time served in prison in Australia.

“I am concerned about the fairness of a trial for Mr Snedden in Croatia,” he said. “Mr Snedden’s safety will rest in the hands of the Department of Foreign Affairs if he is arrested.”

The legal saga that has surrounded the Vasiljkovic case has included a landmark defamation case in which The Australian was forced to defend the truth of the allegations published in 2005. Mr Vasiljkovic pursued the case, ­partly funded by taxpayers via Legal Aid. The civil case, which was ongoing as the extradition matter was caught up in an intractable legal process during a series of often fruitless Federal Court ­actions, saw this newspaper fly witnesses from Croatia to testify in a case that effectively ran as a de facto war crimes trial. The Australian won the case, which proved the truth of a series of imputations on the balance of probabilities.

Mr Aarons said the Vasiljkovic case had “yet again proven that it is the media in Australia which is responsible for bringing to the public’s attention the scandal of the large number of war criminals and those who have massacred the innocent to some form of public scrutiny, and in that way forcing the government of Australia to take notice of something which they have turned a blind eye to for the best part of 50 years”.