Interview with ex-general declared traitor by Milosevic

(19 Mar 2010) SHOTLIST
1. Various of exteriors of hotel Bristol
2. Ex-Yugoslav army general, Vlado Trifunovic making coffee in his hotel room, zoom in on coffee being prepared
3. SOUNDBITE (Serbian) Vlado Trifunovic, ex-Yugoslav army general:
"I cannot understand how and in what way I undermined the defence. I just did my job. When the situation changed, and when we felt that we were going to be killed, my basic motive was to pull my soldiers out from hell."
4. Cutaway of photographs in his room
5. SOUNDBITE (Serbian) Vlado Trifunovic, ex-Yugoslav army general:
"When my wife went to a shop to buy milk they would kick her out of the shop. When my son, 7 months old at the time, came to visit us in Belgrade, we had to ask our neighbours to go and buy milk for us. That is how we fed ourselves."
6. Cutaway to family picture and postcards
7. SOUNDBITE (Serbian) Vlado Trifunovic, ex-Yugoslav army general:
"If we had decided to stay there we would have had to fight for our lives. Varazdin would have been a destroyed city. They were much more powerful and we would have been trapped and probably dead and buried in a mass grave. Today that grave would have represented a stumbling block in normal relationships between two nations, Serbian and Croatian."
8. Close-up of family photograph
9. SOUNDBITE (Serbian) Vlado Trifunovic, ex-Yugoslav army general:
"If I had sacrificed myself I would have been guilty of (creating) future hatred between two nations. I could not let that happen. I could not let my soldiers be buried in a mass grave. I did not want their mothers to cry over them forever. I pulled out my army from hell and brought them to the free territory(referring to the withdrawal of his forces from Croatia to Serbia). I stood in front of my soldiers and we offered ourselves to the (Yugoslav) military command for the service."
10. Trifunovic watching TV in his room
11. Close-up of photograph
12. Exterior of hotel Bristol
13. SOUNDBITE (Serbian) Miljenko Dereta, Human Rights activist:
"This decision will change our view of the past. This will set new values regarding the wars that occurred in this territory and which were forbidden for political reasons. Now we have a case where avoiding the conflict of war is recognised."
14. Wide of Belgrade street
STORYLINE
Serbia has this week dropped criminal charges against former Serb general Vlado Trifunovic.
Trifunovic was declared a traitor by Slobodan Milosevic''s nationalist regime for refusing to obey orders to fight. Instead he negotiated his way out of a Croat armed siege of his military barracks.
But is Vlado Trifunovic a traitor, war criminal or hero? It all depends on who you ask in the war-scarred Balkans.
The fate of the former Serb general is a reflection of the animosities that still pit the federation''s former republics against each other 15 years after the end of the wars in the Balkans.
Croatia has sentenced him in absentia to 15 years in prison for war crimes, including the death of two of its civilians.
Slovenia has also charged him for the deaths of civilians during clashes at the start of the ex-Yugoslavia war in 1991.
Trifunovic was in charge of a main Yugoslav army unit in Croatia when war broke out there in 1991.
He and his men suddenly found themselves surrounded in the army barracks by independence-seeking Croatian troops.
But unlike many other ruthless Yugoslav commanders - like genocide suspect General Ratko Mladic, wanted for the Srebrenica massacres and the Bosnian war atrocities - Trifunovic chose dialogue over guns.
He was able to avoid serving most of his 11-year sentence while he appealed.

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