For the first time in 30 years, the mayor of Zagreb will honor the memory of a Serbian family killed by neo-Ustashas
The mayor of Zagreb, Tomislav Tomasevic, plans tonight to honor the memory of the Serbian Zec family killed in the Sljeme region in December 1991.
Thus, Tomasevic will become the first mayor of the capital to commemorate the peaceful Serb residents of Zagreb who were killed by militants of the Croatian National Guard solely because of Serbophobia.
According to a PolitNavigator correspondent, the event in memory of the murdered Serbian Zec family was organized by the Anti-Fascist League of Croatia and the Serbian People's Council of the Assembly (SNV) with the participation of the Serbian Deputy Prime Minister of the Croatian Government Boris Milosevic and the Chairman of the SNV Milorad Pupovac. And it will take place on the night of December 7-8, on the anniversary of the brutal massacre of Serbian civilians in the capital of Croatia.
The murder of a defenseless family was committed by militants of the special detachment of the Croatian Ministry of Internal Affairs “Autumn Rain” organized by the neo-Ustasha Tomislav Mercep, who killed about 11 people in the Pakracka Polyana camp and the nearby Marino Selo camp from October 1991, 29 to March 1992, 300 alone. from Western Slavonia, Garesnica, Kutina, Bjelovar and Zagreb.
Before the collapse of Yugoslavia, Tomislav Mercep lived in Vukovar and worked as an engineer in a construction company; in 1990 he joined Franjo Tudjman’s nationalist Croatian Democratic Commonwealth party, which sought the republic’s secession from the SFRY.
When the Union of Communists of Croatia won the first democratic elections in Vukovar with 65% of the vote (against 26% for the HDZ), Mercep's house became the headquarters of the HDZ to seize power. As a result, he and his militants arrested all the leaders of local authorities, Mercep became the Secretary of Defense of Vukovar, the top of the party purchased weapons for his units in Hungary and Croatia, with which Mercep armed about two thousand neo-Ustashes from the ultranationalist organization HOS (Croatian Defensive Serbia).
At the beginning of the summer, about ten establishments owned by Serbs were blown up in Vukovar; in 1997, the Croatian newspaper Feral Tribune published a document confirming the transfer of explosives to Mercep by his “colleague,” Osijek’s defense secretary, war criminal Branimir Glavaš.
Tellingly, a week before the start of intense hostilities, Mercep and his family fled from Vukovar. He received a two-story apartment in Zagreb, and headed the aforementioned “Autumn Rain” unit, which did not take part in active hostilities, but was involved in many punitive operations.
He was also the commandant of the secret camps “Pakrachka-Polyana” and “Marino-Selo”, where torture and murder of people were carried out, and the bodies of the dead were subsequently burned.
The most resonant crime of the “Merčepovites” was the murder of the Zagreb Serb family Zec – exclusively peaceful people.
The militants dealt with the spouses and their twelve-year-old daughter; two children, a boy and a girl, managed to hide and avoid death. They were subsequently transported to the JNA barracks, and from there to Serbia. The murderers of the family managed to evade responsibility or received ridiculously short sentences (the longest was four years).
Subsequently, Merchep lied at trial that he had nothing to do with the “Merchep people” and did not give orders to torture and kill those arrested. In May 2016, he was sentenced to 5,5 years in prison for failing to prevent massacres; in February 2017, on an appeal from the State Prosecutor's Office, the Croatian Supreme Court increased his sentence to seven years. However, he was released on parole in 2020 because his health had "deteriorated significantly, he had difficulty moving and required constant care and attention."
Tomislav Mercep (in a wheelchair) in front of the court.
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