No. 93

STATEMENT OF TWO REFUGEES FROM MRKONJIĆ GRAD ON THE KILLING AND DEPORTATION OF THE SERBS, THE UPRISING AND THE MASS CRIMES OF THE CROATIAN ARMY.^[1]

15/4^[2]

Two refugees state:

According to the 1931 census, the Mrkonjić Grad District had a population of 27,000. Of that, 21,000 were Serbs and 6,000 Croats and Muslims together.

After the founding of the Independent State of Croatia, Budimir Simo, a former member of the National Parliament, Roljić Đorđe, a municipal official, and Pajić Branko, the owner of a bus company, were taken from Mrkonjić Grad to Banja Luka and imprisoned there. After that, Roljić Đorđe was killed by the Ustashas, Pajić Branko was allowed to go home, while Budimir Simo was further transported to Gospić and nothing more was heard about him.

On July 26 of this year, by the orders of the Ustasha commander GUTIĆ from Banja Luka, 78 Serbs from Mrkonjić Grad were arrested. On the same day, all 78 of us Serbs were to be killed. URUMOVIĆ KOSTA, judge and Lieutenant Matekalo Milan, prevented this plan, set up guards in front of the prison and ordered that no one should be let through. One by one, we were released from prison, so on August 27, of this year, 18 more Serbs remained in prison, they, however, were freed by the Chetniks, considering that these occupied this town on the same day.

On August 5 and 6, the Ustashas came from Mrkonjić Grad to the nearby village of Podrašnica, where they killed 28 persons, women and children, for no reason, and then burned 17 houses.

After this murderous act, DRENOVIĆ UROŠ, a teacher from the village of Baraći, organized an uprising to protect the Serbs and their villages. He immediately organized 20 people, who were armed with only 4 rifles, and the other peasants had 2 m long bars, at the end of which iron tools were attached. Within a short time, as many as 1500 people gathered, and they had a total of 19 rifles, while the forks for hay, scythes, knives, etc. were always in abundance. All Catholics and Muslims in our district were well armed.

On July 20 of this year, Croatian authorities sent 500 soldiers, 100 gendarmes and 100 Ustashas from Banja Luka. There was 1 field gun, 8 heavy and 12 light machine guns and 8 rifles. This army occupied the village of Borovići. The positions of the teacher Drenović were bombed every day.

On August 25 of this year, Drenović managed to surround the Croatian army and disperse it. On this occasion, 1 field gun, 3 heavy and 8 light machine guns, 300 rifles and some ammunition fell into the hands of Drenović. 41 soldiers were captured, to be released a few days later.

On August 27 of this year, Drenović entered Mrkonjić Grad. The Chetniks remained calm. A board of 6 people was appointed; there were 2 Serbs, 2 Croats and 2 Muslims. All civilian administration was handed over to this board.

On September 1 of this year, the Croatian armed forces – 3,500 people – marched under the command of Colonel Lukac.^[3] The Chetniks were forced to withdraw.

On September 2 of this year, Colonel Lukac issued a proclamation warning the Serbs to lay down their weapons at noon. He threatened: “All of you, including your children and everything that is Serbian, will be destroyed!” At the same time, he gave the order for the Ustasha and the army to destroy and kill all Serbs in the Serb villages.

On September 2, the Ustashas broke into Mrkonjić Grad, and immediately killed a Serb peasant and 1 peasant woman, whom they found on the road. On the same day, the following were killed: Gašić Pera, bricklayer, Perak Mika, barrel maker and his son Stojan. Dr. Čareta Rafael, a Croat lawyer, took the Serbs under his protection. He personally sent a request to Colonel Lukac that Serbs from Mrkonjić Grad be taken under protection, because they had protected the Croats when the Chetniks took over the town.

In all Serb villages in the Mrkonjić Grad District, at least 5,000-7,000 persons, women and children were killed. This number is increasing day by day. At the same time, 1,200 Serb homes were burned. The surviving population fled to the forest. On the night between September 12 and 13, of this year, the Ustashas set fire to the Serbian church in Mrkonjić Grad. Previously, the church had been used as a toilet.

In Mrkonjić Grad, they arrested Ćućuz Nikola, a landowner, over whom they committed horrible crimes. Previously, they had broken both his hands, cut off his ears and nose, plucked his eyes and finally slaughtered him. These killings were committed by Ustashas from Mostar and Herzegovina, including many Muslims.

The following Ustashas from Mrkonjić Grad stood out: Taparić Leopold, Bešlić, porter, Duvnjak Anton, blacksmith, Ćurić Niko, carpenter, Tomše Volfgang,^[4] surveyor, Zaimović Sabrija, judge, Stipančić Jozo, law student and his brother Tomislav, merchant.

On September 26 of this year we left Mrkonjić Grad.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 317-318.

^[2] Handwritten date and initials.

^[3] Franjo Lukac, Ustasha colonel; Tko je tko u NDH, 243 (М. Rupić).

^[4] Wolfgang.

Subeditor’s Note

This – English – edition of the book is a translation of the one in the Serbian language, published in 2022 under the title Ustaška zverstva: Zbornik dokumenata (1941–1942). As far as the corpus of the Dossier from the personal fonds of Slavko Odić is concerned – and it makes the essential body of this book – the translation team worked from its Serbian version given in the said book and not from the German original.

The Serbian edition, with the documents translated from German, was printed in the Cyrillic alphabet, which necessitated some explanations provided by the Editor, Dr. Milan Koljanin, with regard to the linguistic traits, orthography and punctuation resorted to by the translators from German into Serbian (Tatjana Janićijević, Akademija Oxford) and the Editor. Naturally enough, numerous clarifications referring to the Serbian edition do not apply on the English one in most of the aspects of translation work. Hence the need to write this Note.

To begin with, the translators basically opted for the varieties of the American English rather than British English.

Personal names in the officially processed documents are most often written in what is today considered inverse order: family name/surname first, followed by one’s first/Christian name, without a comma in between.

Originally, the documents (letters, reports, statements etc.) were written (typed) in bureaucratic style and with a page layout practised by German offices, so these traits have been retained herein, and so have the obvious spelling and/or typing errors (personal names, toponyms); the latter have been corrected in the footnotes. The parts of text/sentences which are underlined or written with spaces between letters as means of emphasis correspond to the German original and its Serbian/Croat counterpart. The same applies to whole words or lines written in capital letters.

Punctuation has been kept almost completely, except when the meaning demanded comma (usually related to the rules of word order in an English sentence). Some marks, such as hyphens, dashes or slashes may impress the Reader as outdated or misplaced. Earlier typewriters did not have buttons with parentheses, and the slash was used instead of them.

Dates are written with differing uses or omissions of period (full stop), whereby month is written in three ways: fully in letters (20 January), in Arabic numerals (e.g. 20.1.) or Roman numerals (e.g. 20.I.). In rare cases, the slash can be found in dates (e.g. 12./X. 1941), but not as a regular separator between their constituents. Years are occasionaly written without the first digit, e.g. 942 instead of 1942, which is a frequent occurrence in oral communication.

Abbreviations, other than official identification means for offices, titles or codenames (VB, MA, RSHA etc.), have been translated (e.g. ’etc.’). The translators chose to retain the Croat/Serbian abbreviation for the name of the wartime ’state’, that is, ’NDH’ is standing for Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia) instead of the less known English name (ISC). Some words were written in a shortened form for the reason of economy of expression, and the habit has been transferred to the translation, including the Editor’s intervention in the Serbian edition: Reg.[ister], Gend.[armerie], Gor[nja] Tuzla.

Footnotes in the English edition partially differ from those in the Serbian version. Some proved to be unnecessary (those that provided original names which were transliterated into the phonetical Cyrillic alphabet). New footnotes have been added by the Subeditor in order to explain/clarify the specific, locally used, words or phrases with which the Reader may not be familiar (such as slava, din, sokolski dom), or to indicate some nuances in the meaning (student, profesor). Here and there, the Reader will find notes in brackets inserted into the main body of the text by translators or the Editor where immediate understanding was needed.

Finally, it is noteworthy that the above-mentioned bureaucratic style of the presented documents mirrors the established conventions of communication in Central Europe and the Balkans of the first half of the 20th century, particularly in state and military affairs, yet also illustrates the specific ’hierarchy’ of various authorities on the occupied territories during World War Two, accentuating the relations between the German organs/institutions in power and the various offices subordinated to the administrative and military system of the Third Reich. As to the information, facts and accounts of events recorded in these documents, they are the subject of the history science and studies related thereto.

A. Č. P.