Croatia one step from shedding war crimes as hot issue
By Boris Raseta, dpa
Zagreb -- With one foot at the threshold of the European Union (EU), Croatia is still struggling to pull the other one from the quagmire of the "Homeland War," which ended 11 years ago.
Croats see the 1991-1995 conflict, which ended with the pounding of insurgent Serbs, as a glorious fight for freedom. But they also increasingly face up to the dark side of the war, including corruption and even cold-blooded murder of innocent people.
Croatia has made an effort to progress further and faster in dealing with its difficult past than its former foe, Serbia. Incidentally or not, it is much closer to membership in EU and NATO.
The latest step on the way, though reluctant, was made with the war crime indictment against Branimir Glavas, a high official in the late "father of the nation" president Franjo Tudjman's regime.
Now a deputy, Glavas was the defence commander in the eastern city of Osijek, which tottered on the verge of destruction by the Yugoslav army, which was the fate of Vukovar just 40 kilometres away in 1991.
Under the murky shroud of war authority, Glavas allegedly ordered the torture and execution of several Serb civilians. His power kept prosecution at bay for a long time, until parliament finally stripped him of his immunity, leading to his arrest in October.
He is the highest-ranking official of Tudjman's regime to stand a war crimes trial. But he went on hunger strike in protest at his detention and, 37 days later, the judge in the trial relented to pressure, stopped the trial and ordered Glavas' provisional release.
While the declining Croatian far-right rejoiced, Croatian media and most local media, which rarely agree, described the outcome as a "collapse of the legal state." Now bringing Glavas back behind bars and trying him is a test of the Croatian judiciary.
Sorting out atrocities - which were abundant on all sides and in all combat zones in the former Yugoslavia - remains the tallest order for the Croatian judiciary, even if numbers alone may indicate otherwise.
"According to the state prosecution, 1,107 indictments were raised," Igor Palija, a minority issues expert of the Zagreb-based Serb Democratic Forum, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
However, "in 90 per cent of the cases, the defendants were Serbs and in just one out of 10 they were Croatian soldiers," he said. Only three officers were sentenced, though hundreds of Serb civilians were executed and tens of thousands of Serb homes were torched or mined.
While courts liberally slapped 20-year prison sentences on many Serb war crime suspects - often in absentia, secretly and often for crimes much less vicious than those Glavas was charged for - Glavas could not even be kept behind bars.
"The Glavas case shows just how hard it will be trying Croats for crimes committed against the Serbs," Palija said. "It shows that Croatia is still not a legally stable country in which anybody may expect the same trial conditions, regardless of ethnicity."
The political side of the Glavas case could however cement Prime Minister Ivo Sanader's drive to shift his Christian Democratic Union HDZ from the Tudjman-era far-right to the current centre-right.
Though Tudjman's heir at the helm of HDZ, Sanader has spearheaded changes sometimes called "de-Tudjmanization" - a drive which already included a risky move against a popular soldier.
Facing a choice of EU or "patriotism" in late 2005, he "sacrificed" general Ante Gotovina - considered a far greater war hero than Glavas - by helping track him down in Spain, where he was arrested and sent for trial at the UN tribunal in The Hague.
That not only unblocked Croatia's EU membership bid, but also crucially proved that the "patriots" were not capable of toppling the government, as some feared. In addition, latest surveys indicate that HDZ is entering 2007 as easily the most popular party in Croatia.
The Glavas case is probably the last one of that magnitude in terms of public attention in Croatia, as it is expected to turn to issues of the future ahead of parliamentary elections in 2007, which the nation hopes would be the last held outside the EU.
Zagreb has been pressing for an EU entry date by June 2009. The EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said this month that "the end of the decade was (a) realistic" aim, while European Parliament president Josep Borrel said that 2009 should remain the target date.
In any case, it is not war crimes, but problems like institutional corruption which could hamper Croatia's EU accession bid, as the European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said on December 6.
Serbia's approach to EU meanwhile remains blocked since May over its reluctance to arrest its own dubious hero, the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic. // © 2006 DPA
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