Yellow Wasps

The Yellow Wasps paramilitary unit was allegedly formed on 12 April 1992 by Brana Grujić, president of the Zvornik Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), and a man known as Marko Pavlović, commander of the Zvornik Territorial Defense unit (TO), at a session of the Zvornik municipal assembly. Consisting of about seventy men, the unit was commanded by Vojin Vučković, nicknamed "Žućo", born in 1962, an electrician from the town of Umka, near Belgrade, martial arts expert and former coach of the Serbian Interior Ministry judo team. During the ICTY trial of Momčilo Krajišnik evidence was given that Marko Pavlović was an intelligence officer named Branislav "Branko" Popović, a major with the Zvornik Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army who subsequently transferred to the Serbian army. The "Yellow Wasps" paramilitary group was one of three paramilitary groups responsible for the "ethnic cleansing" and looting of Zvornik. They targeted not just Bosniaks, but anyone rich, including Serbs. They captured the Serbian mayor of Zvornik and tried to take control of the town using weapons from the territorial defence force. The Bosnian Serbs arrested them and sent them back to Serbia, but they soon returned. ==War crimes==

The village of Divič, on the left bank of the river Drina, near Zvornik, was one of the first Bosnian towns to be ethnically cleansed of its Bosniak population of about 3000. On 26 May 1992, the Bosniak residents were transferred out of the village on buses and kept overnight in Zvornik. The next day the women and children were driven to the Bosnian government-controlled city of Tuzla. The able-bodied men (a total of 180) were initially detained in the Drina stadium before being taken to makeshift prison in a former office building. Two days later on 29 May most of the men were transferred to the Dom Kultura community centre in Čelopek, others disappeared. On 10 June 1992, Dušan Vučković and ten other soldiers visited the Dom Kultura. They forced fathers to commit sexual assaults on their sons and beat them dead or shot a total of fifteen prisoners. Survivors were given ten minutes to clean the blood, prisoners ordered to carry out the bodies were not seen again. Subsequently, Vučković and his companions visited Čelopek almost every night to beat, torture and kill prisoners. On 27 June 1992, Vučković fired a machine gun at prisoners at random, killing twenty-five. The prison was closed two days later, and eighty-four survivors were transferred via Zvornik to the Batković concentration camp, near Bijeljina. ==Arrests and trials==

In August 1992 about seventy Yellow Wasp members were arrested and accused of robbing and murdering Serbian and Bosniak civilians. They were detained in Bijeljina, where they were allegedly beaten and forced to sign confessions extracted under torture. They were transferred to Serbia before being released. Subsequently, the Vučković brothers were arrested by the Serbian Interior Ministry on 5 November 1993 and indicted on 28 April 1994. At the trial in 2008 former Yellow Wasp member Miroslav Nikolić testified that the unit under Vojin Vučković's command had been responsible for the village of Kozluk. After a period away from the unit Nikolić returned to find Kozluk deserted. Grujić and Popović were also accused of knowing about but doing nothing to prevent Yellow Wasp members killing at least 19 Bosniaks from Divič inside the Dom Kultura in Čelopek and at least three others in the Ekonomija and Ciglana districts. ==In film==

The unit was the subject of a 1995 film by Ilan Ziv. ==See also==