Goran Hadžić
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Goran Hadžić (Serbian: Горан Хаџић; born 7 September 1958, Vinkovci, Croatia, Yugoslavia) is a Serbian politician.
Prior to the conflict, Hadžić worked as a warehouseman. He became politically active in his youth as a member of the League of Communists. Hadžić later joined the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) before the outbreak of the Bosnian Serb war and quickly rose through the ranks. In 1992, Hadžić was elected President of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina, a territory seized from Croatia by Serbs in rebellion against Croatia’s declaration of independence. He held this position until December 1993.
Hadžić faces 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged involvement in the forcible removal and murder of thousands of Croatian civilians from the Republic of Croatia between 1991 and 1993. His indictment specifically names the 1991 massacre of 250 Croatian and non-Serb civilians from the Vukovar hospital in one of the first atrocities of the war.
In 2004, as he was about to be arrested, Hadžić disappeared from his home in Serbia, and is said to be hiding in Belarus.
His surname Hadžić is Bosniak but he was born into a Serbian Orthodox family.
