Croatia: Haunted by Old Demons

Ex-spy chiefs Mustac (left) and Perkovic. Photos: Beta.

The year opened with the arrests and extraditions of former Yugoslav secret service officials Zdravko Mustac and Josip Perkovic, accused of ordering and organising the murder of Croatian political émigré Stjepan Djurekovic in Germany in 1983.

Croatia received their arrest warrants on July 1, 2013, as the country entered the EU. But Croatian parliament anticipated this move by altering the law on extradition and blocking the implementation of European arrest warrants – a move seen by many as a bid to shield the spy chiefs.

Under an enormous pressure from Brussels, the Croatian government was forced to change the law, enabling all extraditions to start from January 1, 2014.

The Croatian supreme court decided to extradite Perkovic to Germany in January, while Mustac’s extradition was confirmed in April. Their trial started amid enormous media and public interest in Munich in October, with speculation that it could reveal the continued influence of former Yugoslav secret service figures in Croatian society.

Both pleaded not guilty, but there were protests outside the court by members of Croatian emigrant organisations because the case has highly symbolic of around 30 assassinations of Yugoslav emigrants that took place in Germany.

One of the key witnesses, Krunoslav Prates, caused a shock when he testified in November. Prates was sentenced to life in prison in 2008 by the same court for his involvement in Djurekovic’s murder, but he completely changed his prior testimony, refusing to confirm some of key details that incriminated Perkovic.

2014 also saw another trial of former Yugoslav spy, Josip Boljkovac, who went on to become the first Croatian interior minister in 1990.

As an officer of the Department for the Protection of the People, OZNA, Boljkovac was accused of ordering the killing of 21 civilians in May and June 1945 in Duga Resa, a town in central Croatia.

Boljkovac pleaded not guilty, claiming that he did not have jurisdiction over the district police. In May he was acquitted, since no official documents or direct witnesses showing his involvement were presented. He then died in November at the age of 94.

Croatia-Serbia relations deteriorate

Croatia’s legal team at the Intenational Court of Justice. Photo: ICJ

2014 was the year when relations between Croatia and Serbia took another big step backwards, starting in March, when the two countries sued each other for alleged genocide at the International Court of Justice.

Zagreb filed its genocide charges in 1999, citing alleged war crimes against Croats between 1991 and 1995, while Belgrade responded with a counter-claim in 2010, focusing on alleged crimes committed against Serb civilians during the Croatian military’s 1995 ‘Operation Storm’ and after the war.

During the hearings, Croatia tried to prove a coordinated campaign of killings, torture and expulsions of Croats by Serb forces in 1991, while Serbia argued that Croatia committed massive war crimes during and after Operation Storm, contributing to the expulsion of 200,000 Serbs from the country.

Belgrade rejected Zagreb’s accusations by saying that Serbia could not be responsible for what happened while the old Yugoslavia still existed (until April 1992).

Croatian lawyers responded that Serbia’s claims were not supported by verdicts at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, stressing the war crimes acquittals of Croatian generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac in 2012.

A further deepening of the gap between the two countries came in November, when Serbian war crimes defendant Vojislav Seselj was given temporary release by the Hague Tribunal to receive medical treatment.

On his return to Belgrade, Seselj resumed his well-known nationalist rhetoric. When he referred to the violent fall of the Croatian town of Vukovar to Belgrade’s forces in 1991 as a ‘liberation’, politicians in Zagreb were furious.

Croatian President Ivo Josipovic wrote a letter to Hague Tribunal president Theodor Meron, condemning the decision to release Seselj, while justice minister Orsat Miljenic threatened to block Serbia’s EU accession talks if Belgrade did not distance itself from Seselj and comprehensively prosecute war crimes.

The row deepened when Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said that a resolution passed by the European parliament condemning Seselj’s rhetoric was “anti-Serbian”. Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic then cancelled a visit to a high-profile economic summit in Belgrade in December, putting the two countries’ relations in the political freezer.

Veterans march onto political stage

Protesting war veterans in Zagreb. Photo: Sven Milekic.

Veterans of the Homeland War, as the 1991-95 conflict is called in Croatia, continued to show in 2014 that they remain a significant force in the country.

During the year, a group of war veterans called the Headquarters for the Defence of Croatian Vukovar continued their campaign against the introduction for official use of Croatian-Serbian bilingualism in areas with large Serb minorities, such as Vukovar.

In the last two months of 2013, after a series of demonstrations, the Headquarters collected some 526,000 signatures for a referendum initiative centred on amending the constitutional law on minorities – a move intended to halt the official introduction of Serb Cyrillic.

In July 2014, parliament sent the referendum initiative to the constitutional court, which ruled that such a vote would be unconstitutional because it would undermine the rights of minorities.

Soldiers from the 1990s war came into public focus once again in late October, when some of them started a protest in front of the war veterans’ ministry in Zagreb.

The protesters, led by disabled veterans, complained that their rights were being reduced and that they were getting no respect from the government for their role in the 1990s war.

They demanded the resignation of war veterans’ minister Predrag Matic and his team and passing of a constitutional law on war veterans to secure their rights.

The non-stop sit-in demonstration outside the ministry was shadowed by tragedy: one disabled female protester died of suspected exhaustion, while another set himself on fire.

But despite the fact that high-ranking politicians like Josipovic went to visit the protesters and talk with them, their main demands remained unmet, and the veterans minister was not sacked.