The arrest of Croatian war veteran Tihomir Purda in Bosnia and Herzegovina this past week has unsettled the veterans who defended Vukovar at the start of the war in 1991, the head of the Croatian association of former prisoners of Serb-run concentration camps (HDLSKL), Danijel Rehak, said on Sunday.
"The institutions of the Croatian state -- Parliament, the Government and the President -- are the most responsible for the situation in Croatia. Now they have to fight to ensure that all the people who defended the Croatian state are not treated as war criminals," Rehak said, adding that the defenders of Vukovar were calling on the Croatian authorities to take urgent action.
Rehak said that the list of Croatian war crimes suspects which has been posted on a Croatian web portal was compiled by the Serbian authorities based on documents provided by a military court in Belgrade which had launched proceedings after the fall of Vukovar in late November 1991 and after the town's defenders were taken to camps.
"Under terrible torture, people signed various statements because they could not stand beatings any more. I think it's unfair of the institutions to ignore this problem because those people created the Croatian state," Rehak said.
"We didn't commit any crime. We don't want an amnesty, but we want this persecution to stop. I personally don't want to be on an Interpol arrest warrant. We will demand that we be tried by the Croatian state. If that doesn't happen, then let us be tried by the Hague tribunal," said the head of the HDLSKL Vukovar branch, Zdravko Komsic.
