Srebrenica Video Vindicates Long Pursuit by Serb Activist

During the conflict in Kosovo in 1999, she said, she traveled by taxi to the provincial capital, Pristina. Ethnic Albanians were being expelled or fleeing in fear from towns and villages. Serbian police looted and burned their homes. At police checkpoints, Kandic convinced guards that she was on her way to rescue Serb relatives, and they let her pass.

Kandic dodged NATO bombs as she traveled from town to town. She collected testimony on expulsions and mass killings. Once, security agents detained her for eight hours on the way to the southern city of Prizren. "First, they said: 'We know who you are. You could be disappeared.' But they let me go," she recalled. "Look at me. I'm little. I'm a woman. I'm not a scary person."

Kandic, 59, considers the waning years of Milosevic's rule, which ended in 2000, the most dangerous period of her career. It was a time of assassinations and roundups of journalists, opposition activists and student protesters. "Until then, Milosevic ignored us," she said. "We were few and served one purpose. He could point to us as proof of democracy."

In 2000, Col. Svetozar Radisic, then the Yugoslav army spokesman, told reporters that Kandic "should be sentenced for what she is doing. A person who puts forth such allegations might be a psychiatric case." She remained free even as she organized legal defenses for Kosovo Albanians held in Serbian jails.

In Sid, she was looking into a mass killing during the Kosovo war when she heard about the Srebrenica tape. Originally, 20 copies were made, she said. Later the Scorpions' commander realized the images could be used against him and ordered them destroyed. However, one Scorpion, who was at odds with his comrades and was not present at the executions, made an extra copy for himself. Fearful, he hid the tape with confidants in Bosnia, Kandic said. She set out to find it.

Other Scorpions, who had learned she was looking for a copy, began to scour Sid for it and harassed anyone they thought might have it. Finally, Kandic found the tape in Bosnia. She agreed to publicize it only when the owner and other informants were out of Serbia. That was accomplished on May 20.

The Scorpion tale provides a key to proving high-level Serbian responsibility for war crimes, Kandic said. "The Scorpions just didn't wander around on their own. They were ordered from place to place. . . . They were integrated into the war machine."

The Scorpions were first dispatched to guard oil fields in Croatia and to fight. They later took part in the siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. When Mladic launched an assault on Srebrenica in July 1995, he used Scorpions to evacuate and kill Bosnian prisoners, Kandic said.

The Scorpions also appeared in the Kosovo town of Podujevo on March 28, 1999, and massacred a group of 14 women and children in the walled garden of a small house. The local commander of the Scorpions unit in Podujevo, Sasa Cvjetan, stood trial in Serbia last year for the killings. He was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison -- a sentence imposed again last week after a retrial. Kandic was deeply involved in bringing the Podujevo case to trial and was on its trail in Sid when the story of the Srebrenica tape surfaced.

The video begins with the Scorpions taking blessings from a Serbian Orthodox priest in Sid, then traveling through the Balkan countryside and sleeping in a wood. Six bound prisoners are shown being transported in a truck. Later the Scorpions force them to lie face down on the roadside. The captors taunt them.

"Did you ever have sex?" asks one commando. "Never?"

"You're innocent?" asks another. "I'd be innocent, too."

There is discussion about whether the video camera has sufficient battery power to record the whole scene and whether the tape needs changing. When all the bodies are in the house, one Scorpion demands permission to fire three more bullets at the corpses.

The tape ends with a pig roast.

Kandic wrapped up the interview after a caller told her the Serbian government was willing to open a war crimes investigation in another case she had worked on. A Serb paramilitary commander named Nebojsa Minic, who allegedly killed numerous civilians in western Kosovo when he ran a unit called Lightning, was under arrest in Argentina. She had fingered him as a culprit.

"All these cases are important," Kandic said and rushed off.