The head of the Croatian Homeland War Memorial and Documentation Centre, Ante Nazor, said in a statement on Monday that the reaction by most Croatian citizens and politicians to the conviction of two Croatian generals by the Hague tribunal and its allegation of a so-called joint criminal enterprise did not show a lack of readiness on the part of Croatia to face its past, but people's anger against an unjust verdict.
The statement was prompted by statements and figures presented at a conference organised in Zagreb last week by the Croatian non-governmental organisation Documenta - Centre for Dealing with the Past.
Verdicts handed down by Croatian courts against Croatian soldiers and officers for dishonourable acts, texts in history school books and other examples show that Croatia has, to a large extent, already faced the dark side of its past, considering the consequences of the Serbian military aggression on Croatia during the 1991-1995 Homeland War and the relatively short period of time since the end of the war, Nazor said.
The convicted Croatian generals were not involved in a joint criminal enterprise and were not responsible for the killings of civilians, so acceptance of the conviction does not mean facing the past, but coming to terms with the injustice. The perpetrators should be punished and tribute should be paid to the victims, regardless of whose side they were on, or of their ethnic or religious background, but justice was not served by convicting the innocent, nor were the victims given at least symbolic satisfaction, he said.
Nazor said that the public should be impartially informed about what had happened during the war and that full and accurate information should be presented.
When citing the figure of 150,000 Serbs who fled Croatia on the eve of Operation Storm in August 1995, it should not be ignored that their departure was the consequence of Serbian policies since 1990, and that in July 1995 there were 384,664 people in Croatia, many of whom had been expelled from their homes in the Serb-occupied areas in 1991. The Serbs left Croatia in accordance with an evacuation plan adopted by the Supreme Defence Council of the Republic of Serbian Krajina at 4.45 PM on 4 August 1995, the statement said.
According to the statement, the displaced Croats could not have returned to their homes because of the policy pursued by the rebel Serb leadership, and most of the 150,000 Serbs who fled during Operation Storm mainly supported such policy.
Nazor said that the figure of over 22,000 houses burned during and after Operation Storm was exaggerated, stressing that about 200,000 housing units had been destroyed in Serb attacks prior to Operation Storm. He said that the figure of over 600 civilians killed was not precise either, adding that not all of those people were civilians and that Croatian troops were not responsible for the killing of all the Serbs and the destruction of their property during the military offensive as suggested.
Documents explicitly confirm that, whereas for some of the murders the perpetrators have not been identified and the circumstances under which they occurred are not clear, Nazor said, stressing that that did not downplay the responsibility of individuals on the Croatian side for the crimes committed during and after Operation Storm.
Nazor said that 10,594 people, mainly Serbs, had been provided for in the liberated territory and that by 18 August 1995, 1,203 people in 826 households had been given financial assistance, that all the people who stayed in the liberated territory were provided with health care if they needed it, and that welfare centres were immediately set up to provide assistance for the old and infirm.
Nazor said that more Croats had been killed in the UN-controlled areas of Croatia than civilians during and after Operation Storm and that despite the UN presence about half of the Croats who had stayed in those areas after the Serb occupation in 1991 had been expelled from there.
Commenting on the comparison made at the Documenta conference that the figure of 600 civilians killed during and after Operation Storm was three times the number of Croats executed by Serbs on the Ovcara farm outside Vukovar in November 1991, Nazor said that it was necessary to recall that at least 266 people had been taken away from the Vukovar hospital and executed (200 bodies were exhumed from the Ovcara mass grave, 55 remained unaccounted for, while the bodies of the others were exhumed from other grave sites), and that Ovcara was not the only place where Serbs forces committed massive crimes during the battle for Vukovar and after it.
The comparison is not only imprecise but is also inappropriate given the number of white crosses on the Homeland War Memorial Cemetery in Vukovar, Nazor said.
