ARRESTS AND RELEASE OF THE INDICTED FOR WAR CRIMES AIM Zagreb, 22 December, 1997

The International Tribunal for war crimes in the Hague raised charges against Vlatko Kupreskic on 10 November, 1995, under suspicion that, as a member of the Croat Defence Council (HVO), he had committed war crimes during attacks on the Bosniac population in Ahmici, Vitez and another eight villages in Lasvanska valley, charging him for the murder of Fata Pezer and wounding her daughter Dzenana. Since he decided not to follow in the footsteps of Dario Kordic, Tihomir Blaskic and other indicted Central-Bosnian Croats, Vlatko Kupreskic had quite certainly expected during the past two years exactly what happened on Thursday, 18 December, around 1.30. To the unannounced visit of fifteen odd members of the SFOR Dutch batallion, Kupreskic reacted by shooting from infantry weapons. Dutch members of SFOR shot back, so Kupreskic ended up wounded in the conflict. After a short stay in a Sarajevo hospital, he was taken to the Hague.

An identical SFOR action took place at the same time in the part of Vitez called Mlakici, with previously unknown Ante Furundzija in the main role, a man who most probably had not expected Kupreskic's destiny. Indeed, until now his name was not on the list of the indicted by the Hague tribunal, at least not on its part accessible to the public. Furundzija was the commander of a special HVO unit - the "Jokers", the members of which are suspected of war crimes committed in Central Bosnia, and he himself is charged with torture and inhumane treatment, violation of war law and customs, and offence of human dignity, including rape. Anto Furundzija was taken to the Hague tribunal just a day after arrest and at the first hearing he said that he did not feel guilty for any of the acts he had been charged with.

A few hours after the double arrest in Vitez, Javier Solana, NATO Secretary General, dialed the telephone number of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman. He explained developments in Vitez to Tudjman and asked him to prevent possible revenge of Bosnian Croats. The fact that Solana phoned to Tudjman and not, let us say, to Soljic, testifies that Secretary General of the NATO knows perfectly well who is the real authority for B&H Croats. Not long after the mentioned phone call, the road Busovaca-Vitez-Travnik was re-opened, which had been blocked for a few hours by members of associations from Vitez founded during the war.

One did not have to wait long for Croatiyn reactions to the arrests in Vitez. Croatian foreign minister Mate Granic raised his voice against brutality of the arrest of Vlatko Kupreskic in Copenhagen where he was at the ministerial meeting of OSCE, while Croatian minister to the UN Ivan Simonovic appealed on the Hague Tribunal to start arresting persons responsible for war crimes against Bosnian Croats. He stated for him the catastrophic fact that the Croats form 73 per cent of those arrested on suspicion that they had committed war crimes. Tudjman's private rightist and president of the Croat Party of Right, Anto Djapic, at the finish of this year's assembly session initiated adoption of a resolution which would condemn forcible arrests of the Croats from Vitez. This Djapic's attempt failed because of the lack of quorum, but after the end of the session, representatives of all deputy groups expressed sharp disagreement with SFOR's methods demonstrated in Vitez. Spokesman of the Croatian government Vlade Neven Jurica joined in their disapproval.

    While Vlatko Kupreskic and Anto Furundzija were

counting their first hours spent in the Hague, Pero Skopljak, Marinko Katava and Ivan Santic were getting ready to leave jail in Suheveningen. Two months ago these three voluntarily gave themselves up to the Hague tribunal, but on 19 December, the indictment against them was abolished, because "after further investigation and consideration of the available data, the prosecutor's office believes that there is no sufficient foundation for a trial and that in the interest of justice the indictments should now be withdrawn".

"I must stress that the prosecutor was exceptionally decent, that he manifested cooperativeness and simply pushed this case in order to have it resolved as soon as possible. The decision on liberation of Marinko Katava re-established confidence in the international tribunal in the Hague in the sense that it is after all a legal institution since it acts according to legal argumentation in reaching decisions", said Petar Pavkovic, Marinko Katava's lawyer after withdrawal of his client's indictment, and Jadranka Slokovic-Glumac, lawyer of Pero Skopljak underlined that it was strange that for two and a half years men experienced Calvary, and then, once they were brought to the Hague, indictments against them were being dropped without any legal proceedings. That is how Croatian rage because of the arrest of Kupreskic and Furundzija mixed within just 24 hours with tears of joy seen on Zagreb airport when Katava, Santic and Skopljak returned to the country.

Apart from the tears of joy, two men who enjoy greatest confidence of Franjo Tudjman were also seen in the welcoming party at the Pleso airport - his son Miroslav, who is also head of all intelligence services, and Ivic Pasalic, the President's internal political advisor. After the welcome at the airport, Gojko Susak, minister of defence, convened a gala lunch for the returnees in Intercontinental Hotel. Probably encouraged by the decision of the Hague Tribunal to release these men, Susak declared to the journalists that he had no doubts that "all those who have voluntarily gone to the Hague, including Tihomir Blaskic, will return home innocent as they have left". The defence minister did not wish to spoil the festivity by the fact that the secret indictment, along with Furundzija's, included other three names and that one should not doubt that these "unknown heroes" would soon board a plane to the Hague.

And in order to prevent the Croat story about war crimes from being reduced to the Hague and the Central Bosnian "heroes", the police administration of the Lika-Senj district raised charges in the district prosecutor's office in Gospic against unknown perpetrators in the events which took place in mid October 1991. According to the knowledge of the police, between 16 and 19 October 1991, from the territory of Karlobag, unknown perpetrators took away seven persons of Serb ethnic origin form their homes: Stojan Bogdanovic, Milo Vujnovic, Momcilo Mandic, Mileva and Milos Orlovic, Janko Pavlica and a female from Loncar family, whose lifeless bodies were later found in Velebit mountain. There is no data about identity of the perpetrators, and the investigation has not been completed yet.

After the Croatian authorities, pressured by discoveries of the media, were forced to open the dossier of war crimes in Pakračka Poljana, it seems that in the foreseeable future another dossier - that from Lika, the main protagonists of which, according to the data revealed so far, were Tihomir Oreskovic and general Mirko Norac, will have to be opened. If these two will not be pinpointed in the mentioned criminal indictments "against unknown perpetrators", it will mean that the whole matter has only one aim - to trick the Hague investigators.

IVICA DJIKIC