Rumours of The Hague Investigations Spreading

AIM Zagreb, January 9, 2001

Another snowball of rumours on the investigations launched against the Croats in The Hague has started to roll. The snowball was let down the steep slope a few days ago by Dobroslav Paraga, president of the controversial Croat Party of Right 1861 (HSP) who seems to be going back to his pre-partisan vocation of an activist engaged in protection of human rights. He declared that an investigation is conducted in The Hague against a few state and party leaders from the time of Tudjman, and he mentioned some of them: Hrvoje Sarinic, Franjo Greguric, Ivic Pasalic, Miroslav Tudjman, Vice Vukojevic (the latter being still on the state payroll as a member of the Constitutional Court, and so was Pasalic until recently as deputy chairman of the Assembly).

As Paraga sometimes tends to give “tabloid” information – strong declarations with no foundation in verified information – this one was also received with suspicion at first, until one of the listed men confirmed that it was founded. This was Hrvoje Sarinic who declared that he had learnt from well-informed sources that he was indeed a subject of investigation. Thanks to this Paraga's snowball started to grow, so Republika daily published that Croatian Government had received a letter from The Hague in which interest was expressed for fifty persons from the former state leadership with whom Franjo Tudjman could have elaborated the strategy of ethnic cleansing of the Serb population in Croatia. That is why notes were demanded from the talks which he had had with his state and party associates that are known to have been recorded and stored in archives marked as strictly confidential.

On the same day as Republika, Vecernji list daily also appeared with its version of the story and added to the snow ball by writing about no less than a hundred names of persons from the state and party leadership who in one way or another were subject of the investigations going on in The Hague. This spilled the already full cup of patience of Goran Granic, head of the Government office for relations with The Hague, who, annoyed, called these speculations schizophrenic and insane. And as for The Hague, it is its custom not to comment on such information or to say very little based on which it is sometimes possible to discern what is cooking over there. This time the latter was chosen. The spokeswoman of the Tribunal Florence Hartmann denied as “stupid and fabricated” the rumours that investigations were conducted against one hundred Croatian officials, moreover she accused a part of Croatian media of intentionally discrediting and “criminalising” the work of the Tribunal by such “yellow” information.

However, Hartmann did not wish to explicitly deny that a letter of the mentioned content had been sent to Zagreb in the past few days, because she said that she had no information about “every sent letter and I don't know whether something was sent in the past few days”. She only knew, she declared, that new indictments would be issues, without revealing against whom and for what crimes. Therefore, the arrival of Chief Prosecutor of The Hague Tribunal, Carla del Ponte, is awaited with feverish interest. She is expected to come to Zagreb on January 15. This visit should shed more light on the latest short circuit in relations between Zagreb and The Hague, for which perhaps for the first time a part of the responsibility lies with the latter, because it has obviously overestimated the cooperativeness of the coalition authorities in Zagreb and at the same time failed in the estimate of the climate towards the Tribunal in Zagreb, and finally in the comparative analysis of the conditions prevailing here and in Yugoslavia.

In any case, in relations between Zagreb and The Hague new winds have started to blow but of the kind which do not disperse but on the contrary accumulate the fog of numerous open questions and various speculations. The already mentioned Sarinic added a significant contribution to this by having launched a private investigation which he claims has shown that in the end of last year a letter has indeed arrived from The Hague to Croatian Government in which the Tribunal expressed interest for a hundred leading Croatian politicians of the former regime. Another person from Paraga's list launched the same investigation, Franjo Greguric who was the president of the coalition government of democratic unity which was in power in the first year of the 1991-95 war and which is linked to a part of the crimes against Serb population which The Hague is interested in.

In several newspapers information appeared which does not lack credibility that Greguric even convened a meeting of the ministers from the time in order to clear the name of the “wartime government”. This immediately met with public support of some members of that government, so the current Deputy Chairman of the Assembly Zdravko Tomac declared that raising doubts about this government meant raising doubts about “the right of Croatia to defend itself from aggression”. Tomac also believes that this is an opportunity to settle accounts with those in the Croatian media who denounce honourable and pure men, but admitted something that is probably the closest to the essence of this latest affair. He declared that the hysterical atmosphere in the country was probably created by those “whose hands are not clean, who are really guilty of certain crimes, so it suits them well to lay the blame on everybody, because that would enable them to get away by crying out 'stop the thief'”.

The ones Tomac implies should by logic belong to the state, military, security, diplomatic and other structures of the authorities of the former, Tudjman's regime. But, thanks to the great fear of the new authorities not to be reproached that it is seeking revenge, many of them have survived political changes in the elections last year. This makes the claims of some newspapers quite credible that the letter with the list of fifty leading persons of the Croatian state has indeed arrived to Zagreb but not from The Hague, but from domestic sources, some say from the Croatian mission in the United Nations. Two such letters have arrived from there, it is claimed, one which says that Carla del Ponte is preparing indictments against 100-150 leaders of the states founded after dissolution of former Yugoslavia, and another which lists 30-50 such persons from Croatia.

Regardless whether this is true or not, it is obvious that somebody in Croatia is trying to simulate the moves of The Hague Tribunal and make them exactly at the moment (like in the case of Stipetic) when this can disturb the relations between Zagreb and The Hague or discredit those in this country who are most tenaciously persisting to maintain good relations with the Tribunal. That is how a thesis appeared in the past few days, which is supported by the persons from the lists, but discreetly also by certain members of the ruling coalition, that the lists were made on the basis of Mesic's testimonies in The Hague, and that he himself is not on the list because he had “redeemed himself”, or rather bought the benevolence of the Tribunal in The Hague.

This was the climax of several-month long reproaches of Mesic that he had introduced a parallel mechanism of cooperation with The Hague – by obstructing the Government which is in charge of it – reproaches which were so persistent that Mesic declared that he was interrupting contacts with the representatives of the Tribunal and that he was passing it fully on to the Government. Although Mesic had indeed very liberally interpreted the Constitutional Law which regulates these issues, especially before Constitutional amendments limited his presidential authority, this can be understood as a defeat of Croatian policy towards the Tribunal in The Hague and an announcement that from now on it will take a changed and not always predictable course. On the right wing of the political scene it was understood as opening of a new maoeuvring space, so Vladimir Seks is noisily announcing that whole of HDZ was proclaimed a criminal organisation in The Hague.

This is, of course, far from probable, because the Tribunal does not try states so it is even less probable that it will do that to political parties, but this is obviously an attempt to deprive it even of the right to try criminal members of these parties.

Marinko Culic

(AIM)