The association "Women in the Homeland War" will hold a peaceful protest outside the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague on Tuesday "to raise our voice against unjust judgements of the Tribunal regarding Croatian victims and over the tribunal's work."
About 80 women from throughout Croatia set out for The Hague on Sunday in several buses organised by the association. They will light 20 candles outside the tribunal building, read the names of people who were killed in the defence of Croatia in the 1991-1995 war, and hand out leaflets entitled "We Are the Voice of the Croatian Victim."
The head of the association's Zadar branch, Ivana Haberle, said that the Hague tribunal "has lost touch with what justice is" and that the result of it is that "the criminals have been released, while our liberators are in prison."
The protest will coincide with a two-day conference entitled "The Global Legacy of the ICTY" which opens in The Hague on Tuesday.
Haberle said that, according to her information, demands would be made at the conference for further indictments against Croatian veterans, mostly for their role in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The association's leaflet says, among other things, that the ICTY should have brought justice to Croatian victims in places such as Vukovar, Vocin and Skabrnja. "Instead of indicting and convicting criminals responsible for the destruction of Vukovar, for the deaths of thousands of people and for the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of people, the Hague tribunal has convicted our liberators, Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac, who defended us when the whole world wouldn't."
