Ivan Jarnjak, who was the head of the Office for National Security (UNS) between late 1996 and the end of 2000, told reporters on Saturday that following a government decision from 1999 he was a member of a commission in charge of listing and sorting out documents at the Office of the President and that there were records about those documents, dismissing claims made by former President Stjepan Mesic that Jarnjak read and set aside documents which seemed interesting to him.
Commenting on Mesic's latest claims about documents from the President's Office, Jarnjak told the press that after going through the documents the commission established which document belonged to whom. "Every document was marked, registered and there are records about its handover in the President's Office," Jarnjak said.
He stressed that Vladimir Seks took documents referring to the Croatian Democratic Union, Miroslav Tudjman took documents set aside for the Tudjman family, and everything else stayed in the President's Office. There are exact records about that, Jarnjak said.
Asked if some of the documents could have been taken away while they were being sorted out, Jarnjak wondered how could anyone know that. He said that Mesic should state which documents had been taken away.
"He should say which documents were taken and how they were taken. I am speaking about what happened when I was a member of the commission. Did someone go through the documents before? Kostovic and Kaspar, who listed the documents together with Culina, would most definitely not have allowed it and they most definitely would have told Mesic who had been distributing those documents and who had been going through them. I most definitely was not there and did not see them," said Jarnjak.
Commenting on Mesic's claim that there were too few transcripts of talks between Jarnjak and the late president, Jarnjak said that Tudjman relieved him of his duties as minister in 1996 and that their relationship was not the same any more.
He said that in 1999, after Tudjman died, the government decided to list and mark all the documents and items in the President's Office and that it entrusted him, the then President's Chief of Staff, Ivica Kostovic, Tudjman's aide de camp, Major General Kresimir Kaspar, and Colonel Vlado Culina with doing it. It was decided that the listed documents should be categorised into those referring to the late president personally, those referring to meetings of the HDZ bodies in the President's Office, and those referring to the work of the President's Office.
"We made this selection according to the list they made before that, the list of all documents found there," Jarnjak said, adding that all documents were in one room.
Asked if maybe one should have waited with sorting out the documents until the new president stepped into office, Jarnjak said the government had decided that everything should be prepared so that the new president could start with a clean slate.
Jarnjak said he had not seen the documents prior to entering the room. He said it would be interesting to hear what Mesic had to say about the materials he found at the office which were not on the list. He said it would be normal if Mesic had gone public with this a month after stepping into office, instead of doing it ten years later.
Commenting on Mesic's position that the public must know the truth, Jarnjak said that if Mesic was so fond of the truth, he should give the transcripts of his secret testimony in The Hague to the attorneys of the Croatian generals and state what he said there.
