Grubori is one of the hamlets of the village Plavno, located about 15 kilometres from Knin. According to various sources, between 40 and 70 residents lived in the village in 1991, but today no one lives in Grubori.
Description of the crime: At the beginning of Operation Storm, most residents of Plavno and Grubori fled their homes and joined the refugee column heading toward Lika and Bosnia. About ten residents remained in Grubori, mostly elderly people who did not want to leave their homes. Out of fear, many of those who stayed did not sleep in their houses but spent the nights in barns or around their properties. The Croatian Army first entered Plavno on August 8, 1995, and upon arrival ordered the remaining villagers to report on August 25, 1995, to the local school for a UNPROFOR registration process, either to leave for what was then FR Yugoslavia or potentially stay in Croatia. Most of the remaining villagers from Plavno and Grubori headed toward the school that morning. However, a few, fearing for their safety, stayed in their homes. As seven residents of Grubori were walking toward the school, they saw Croatian army members heading toward their hamlet. About half an hour later, smoke and gunfire were clearly visible and heard from Grubori. When the seven residents returned, the entire hamlet was in flames. They found six murdered civilians, killed by members of the Croatian police’s Special Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATJ Lučko).
Victims:
- Grubor, Jovan (Damjan), born 18 January 1922
- Grubor, Jovo (Jovo), born 15 January 1930
- Grubor, Marija (Simo/Janko), born 1 January 1905
- Grubor, Milica (Stevo), born 1 January 1944
- Grubor, Miloš (Marko), born 1 January 1915
- Karanović, Đuro (Luka), 9 May 1954
All the victims were Serbs and civilians, and Dušanka Grubor, a resident of Grubori, testified:
I came to the barn because I saw smoke coming from there. The livestock was burning alive, and I called out for my husband, Jovo. Next to the dead cows lay my husband, his throat had been slit, and half his face was gone. I was in shock and called for help. I rushed to Miloš Grubor’s house; he had been ill and lying in bed. I found him on the floor in his pyjamas, lying in a pool of blood, with spent cartridge cases nearby. I called for my mother-in-law, Marija, but she wasn’t there. Night fell over Grubori, and the next day UNPROFOR took us to Knin. From there, a day later, we resumed our search with other survivors. In the ruins of my house I found my mother-in-law Marija, completely burned, lying on her back. On 26 August 1995, in a meadow we found two bodies: Milica Grubor, who had been stabbed with a knife and riddled with bullets, and a little further away was the body of Đuro Karanović, who also had stab wounds to the neck and bullet wounds to the chest. Jovan Karanović had burned in his house; we saw the charred remains. UNPROFOR photographed and filmed everything and recorded the victims’ names…
Although the crime in Grubori received media attention and became more widely known, especially due to footage recorded immediately after the massacre, it was not the only atrocity in Plavno. Over 25 civilians were killed in surrounding hamlets in the period following Operation Storm.
Legal consequences: The massacre in Grubori was encompassed in the final judgement against Gotovina and others by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The Tribunal found beyond reasonable doubt that Jovo Grubor, Miloš Grubor, Marija Grubor, Milka Grubor, and Đuro Karanović were victims of murder committed as crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war under Articles 5 and 3 of the ICTY Statute but did not establish criminal responsibility of the accused. In the trial before the County Court in Zagreb, the indictment also cited a sixth victim, Jovan Grubor (son of Damjan). Following systematic concealment of the crime, which was testified to by multiple individuals before the ICTY — the Zagreb County State Attorney’s Office submitted an indictment on 15 December 2010 against three Croatian nationals, F.D. (born 1963), B.K. (1957) and I.B. (1973), for committing a war crime against the civilian population under Article 120(1) of the Croatian Criminal Code. As deputy county prosecutor Robert Petrovečki stated in his closing argument on 31 May 2014, at the end of the trial that began on 24 November 2011, “it is undisputed that a war crime took place in which members of the Lučko Anti-Terrorist Unit brutally killed six civilians.” According to the prosecutor, the accused pair held unquestioned command responsibility. “All were found, along with a completely burned village,” he said, and asked the court to convict the two defendants of the Grubori crimes. During the evidentiary process, over 70 witnesses were called, some of whom held senior military and police positions. Two reconstructions of the events in the Grubori hamlet took place, and the third defendant, Igor Beneta, was later found hanged. The indictment accused the first defendant, Franjo Drljo, of the direct commission of crimes against six civilians, as well as failure to prevent subordinates from committing crimes, killing civilians and burning their homes. The second accused, Božo Krajina, was charged solely on the basis of command responsibility. Some witnesses recanted statements made during the investigation, and most of the defendants’ former comrades said they had seen or heard nothing. They claimed not to know who commanded the action or their immediate superiors in the field. Members of the elite unit could not identify who directed their movement and did not inspect the houses in their path, even though the ground-clearing operation aimed to eliminate remaining enemy forces. Investigative actions were deliberately obstructed after the Grubori massacre. The Lučko Anti-Terrorist Unit of the Croatian Ministry of the Interior was divided into four groups immediately before the operation on 25 August 1995. According to the operation commander Josip Čelić (testifying on 13 November 2012 before the County Court in Zagreb), group leaders in the field were Branko Balunović, Stjepan Žinić, Franjo Drljo, and Božo Krajina. Čelić stated that all these group commanders had full command responsibility and that their orders were to be obeyed without question. He testified that soon after the operation began, he returned to the starting positions with one civilian he found, losing contact with the other group commanders. He, along with operational commander Zdravko Janić, went to the final line of the operation, where the named group commanders reported no issues during the action, which Čelić communicated in his first report to the Special Police headquarters in Gračac on the day of the operation. Before the County Court trial, far more witnesses were heard at the ICTY regarding the Grubori massacre than for any other crime in the indictment. Based on statements from police commanders and special forces, the ICTY concluded that the story of an armed clash with “Serb terrorists” was fabricated after the killings. This conclusion was partly based on Čelić’s testimony: he stated that in his initial report on the day of the operation he informed his superiors that there had been no fighting during the action, but was later summoned to Gračac, where Deputy Commander Željko Sačić instructed him that there had been an “armed conflict” in Grubori and that he must draft a new report, which Sačić dictated in a separate room. Balunović, a group commander in the field and a witness at both The Hague and Zagreb, noted that the day after, following a meeting at the special police headquarters in Gračac, Čelić informed him that “on the orders of Mr Sačić,” deputy commander under Mladen Markač, he was to write a new report claiming a clash with remaining Serb fighters, potentially explaining the death of the elderly as crossfire. Čelić testified that he found General Markač in the Gračac Headquarters when Sačić took him into a separate room and insisted, using notes Čelić had made on the back of his original report, that he produce a new report stating that his first account was inaccurate and that “armed clashes” must be included. Čelić later presented his original report, complete with Sačić’s handwritten notes, during the Zagreb trial. The trial court determined that members of the Lučko Anti-Terrorist Unit had committed the crimes but nevertheless acquitted the defendants. A retrial for the war crime against civilians in Grubori began on 15 February 2016 before a completely new panel at the County Court in Zagreb, presided over by Judge Ivan Turudić, and concluded with the same result: an acquittal for the defendants on the grounds that the crimes were “indisputably” committed by members of the Lučko Anti-Terrorist Unit.