Croatia is still carrying the burden of war crimes that have not been prosecuted, and war crimes trials last long, it was said at a round table discussion on the prosecution of war crimes, organised in Zagreb on Thursday by Documenta, a nongovernmental organisation which supports efforts to deal with the past in the region.
Almost 20 years have passed since the first crimes, some eyewitnesses have died, others are beginning to forget what happened, and it is not easy to conduct the proceedings, Documenta president Vesna Terselic said.
Since 2004, 46 trials have been finished resulting in final verdicts. More than 20,000 people were killed or went missing in Croatia, and more than 1,800 people are being searched for, she said.
Between 20 and 25 cases are prosecuted annually, she said, adding that trials were still not efficient enough and that the Supreme Court frequently ordered retrials after trial court verdicts.
No one has been convicted yet for war crimes committed during and in the wake of the 1995 Operation Storm, said an advisor at the Office of the Chief State Prosecutor (DORH) department for war crimes, Davorka Radalj. She added that investigations were under way into 24 war crimes in which 156 people were killed. The perpetrators, she said, are not known at present.
A total of 47 murders were reported, 33 people were prosecuted for 21 of those murders, and 14 people were convicted, Radalj said.
"We are not saying that there were no crimes," Deputy Chief State Prosecutor Jasmina Dolmagic said, adding that there was no report against members of the Croatian army or police that had not been acted on.
DORH is determined to investigate and prosecute all crimes regardless of the ethnic or ideological background of the victims, Dolmagic said.
She added that DORH would consider facts and information from the 2001 report of the Croatian Helsinski Committee for Human Rights (HHO) on Operation Storm.
Asked why in cases of final verdicts names were not being disclosed, Dolmagic said this was due to legal restrictions regarding identity disclosure.
The vice president of the association of families "Suza" from Belgrade, Dragan Pjevac, whose mother was killed in Medak Pocket, said that Croatian Serbs should understand that for Croatia, Operation Storm was the end of the war and four-year suffering, shelling and everything else a war brought, and that Serbs "on the other side" were one of the causes of that suffering.
But people in Croatia, too, should understand that Serbs did not leave of their own free will, and that most of them "were forced into the war and had no choice between two anachronistic ideologies," Pjevac said.
We must reach agreement on the condemnation of crimes, regardless of who committed them and to what end, he said.
Asked what was currently going on in the Medak Pocket case, Radalj said that an investigation was under way against an as yet unknown perpetrator in the Medak Pocket case.
DORH is a prosecutorial body and its main task is to prosecute perpetrators of crimes, while the police are in charge of identifying the perpetrators, she said.
War crimes trials, notably trials for war crimes committed by the Croatian side, are important for the Croatian judiciary as well as for the Croatian society as a whole, said the president of the nongovernmental organisation GOLJP, Zoran Pusic.
