Subject: Croatian veterans asks Hague tribunal to withdraw indictments
against Croats
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

BBC Monitoring International Reports October 1, 2003

Croatian veterans asks Hague tribunal to withdraw indictments against Croats

Source: HINA news agency, Zagreb, in English 1550 gmt 1 Oct 03

Sibenik, 1 October -- The Association of Demobilized Homeland War Veterans (HURBDR) has requested of the UN criminal tribunal in The Hague to withdraw all indictments against Croatian war crimes suspects charged on the basis of command responsibility and to indict people who held posts in government bodies during the war.

Speaking at a press conference in the central Adriatic city of Sibenik on Wednesday, HURBDR president Vladimir Gojanovic said that the request had already been sent to the tribunal and that his organization was expecting an urgent response.

At the same time, the HURBDR also filed a request with the Croatian Constitutional Court to re-examine the competencies and responsibilities of legislative, executive and legal authorities in Croatia during the armed conflict in the first half of the 1990s. The organization expressed suspicion that Croatian soldiers were unjustly and erroneously accused in order to avoid the actual responsibility of legislative, executive and legal authorities who "violated and restricted freedoms and rights of man by issuing orders against the Constitution."

"Our request is based on the well-known fact that the Republic of Croatia never declared war or proclaimed a state of war," Gojanovic said, adding that it was not a war but an armed conflict between a portion of the Serb minority backed by Yugoslavia and Croatian citizens who defended the sovereignty and integrity of Croatia.

"Since war was not declared, the armed conflict was an internal problem of the Republic of Croatia, so the parliament, government, president of the republic and judiciary were not in any way restricted in performing their duties, or rather all civilian institutions functioned normally," Gojanovic said.

He said that all those institutions spread a fear of war in the Croatian public, thus consciously deceiving it.

"It is therefore crystal clear who is responsible for all that happened during the armed conflict between 1991 and 1995, and even a few years after it ended," Gojanovic said.