War crimes investigator details work
John Cencich speaks at St. Gregory Byzantine Catholic Church in Upper St. Clair.
John Cencich speaks at St. Gregory Byzantine Catholic Church in Upper St. Clair.
John Cencich with the Rev. Valerian Michlik, St. Gregory priest
John Cencich references his book, “The Devil’s Garden: A War Crimes Investigator’s Story.”
When John Cencich arrived in war-torn former Yugoslavia in 1998, he found he had become a center of attention.
“Everywhere we went, we had foreign intelligence service following us,” the Peters Township resident recalled. “We had elements of organized crime following us. We had satellites trying to track us. Everybody wanted to know what we were doing. And there was a good reason for it.”
As a senior international war crimes investigator for the United Nations, Cencich was part of a team that ultimately achieved its objective: “We ended up indicting the president of a country, the first sitting head of state that’s ever been indicted.”
Cencich spoke Sunday at St. Gregory Byzantine Catholic Church in Upper St. Clair, where he is a member, to launch the church’s new Speaker’s Platform series. His topic was the book he wrote about his experiences, “The Devil’s Garden: A War Crimes Investigator’s Story.”
His story in that regard starts with him reporting to the U.N. center in The Hague, Netherlands, prior to heading to the location of one of the world’s bloodiest post-World War II conflicts.
“I really thought I had seen it all,” Cencich, a U.S. Air Force veteran with a long career in law enforcement, said. “Within minutes, I realized that everything that I had done in my 20 years prior to that paled in comparison to what was about to take place.”
The United Nations was looking into atrocities that occurred during fighting involving many of the ethnic groups that constituted the former Yugoslavia. The breakup of that country in the early 1990s brought long-standing tensions to a head.
“Everybody was turning on one another,” Cencich said.
At the center of the investigation was the Republic of Serbia, with its leaders – including the president, Slobodan Miloševic – facing accusations of promulgating ethnic cleansing.
Cencich and his colleagues faced considerable danger “probably every day. That’s not hyperbole,” he said.
As an example, he showed a slide dated March 16, 1999, depicting a heavily damaged vehicle.
“Here, I missed this car explosion by 10 minutes,” Cencich recalled.
Although the photos he displayed contained no overly disturbing images, his descriptions of some of the incidents he investigated were reminiscent of the most heinous crimes committed during World War II.
Cencich wrapped up his talk by detailing “some of the major perpetrators, not the people who pulled the trigger.” Among them was Milan Bobic, who served as the first president of the so-called Republic of Serbian Krajina, an area that wanted to break away from Croatia.
“He was probably the most remorseful person,” Cencich explained. “We got him to testify against Milosevic, so his sentence was minimized.”
But, he added, Bobic was found dead in his prison cell on the day he was supposed to testify against another Serbian leader, Milan Marti.
“In the end, we convinced a guy by the name of Zoran Dindi, the prime minister of Serbia, to surrender Slobodan Miloševic to us,” Cencich said. As for Dindi: “It wasn’t long after that, he was assassinated.”
As for Miloševic, he died of an apparent heart attack in 2006, while he was on trial.
Cencich, who recently served as a moderator for History’s series “Hunting Hitler,” gave his opinion about the subjects of his investigations.
“I do believe that there are evil forces,” he said, “and what I went face-to-face with were some of them.”