Croatia Forum

[gonia]

A night-time attack on the houses of four Serbs in Croatia spurred top Croatian officials to publicly denounce such crimes for the first time, while the police, with unprecedented swiftness, arrested the suspects.

Late on Tuesday, four houses in the village of Biljane Donje, near the Adriatic town of Zadar, belonging to returned Serb refugees, were stoned and the windows broken, while the perpetrators even set the dry grass around the houses alight.

The police immediately arrested and detained the suspects, who were under the influence of alcohol when apprehended.

"Croatia must be a state of equal citizens and that is a goal we cannot forgo," Croatian President Stjepan Mesic stated, while Ratko Macek, spokesman for Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, said that "the Croatian government severely condemns this incident."

"That's what happens when people have an excess of alcohol in their system and a shortage of good sense," Mesic said Wednesday, while on a visit to the Serb victims. He was accompanied by Deputy Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor.

"But it's not nationalism. They want to intimidate you so that you will run away and they can take your property. They are bandits," " Mesic explained in a conversation with the Serbs, the Croatian HTV reported.

Mesic said the attackers had in fact assaulted the Croatian state and its legal order. Kosor added that "Croatian soldiers, who defended Croatia in the war, should act in a dignified manner in peace."

Croatian Interior Minister Ivica Kirin announced energetic police drives if such cases happen again, but the intervention of the top- level officials comes only after a long series of serious incidents of the same nature.

"This was the eleventh attack on Serb returnees to the Zadar area since the beginning of the year," Veljko Dzakula, president of the Serb Democratic Forum, a non-governmental organization dealing with the rights of returning refugees, told Deutsche-Presse Agentur dpa.

"Last year we recorded 59 attacks of various kinds on the returnee population. In the majority of cases, the perpetrators were not found," Dzakula said.

"The police and top state echelons were forced to react this time, since as many as four houses were attacked at the same time, and they could not ignore that," he went on to say, adding that all political parties in Croatia should take up the same position toward ethnically motivated violence if the incidents are to be stopped.

Dzakula explained that the police had treated most post-war outbreaks of violence against Serbs as disturbances of the peace or robbery, not ethnically motivated crimes.

"The media also have an unsuitable position toward this problem - if incidents are not ignored, then justification and extenuating circumstances are very often found for them. That must be changed," he said.

During the 1991-1995 Croatian war for independence from the former Yugoslavia, around 300,000 Serbs fled Croatia. Before the war, approximately 550,000 Serbs lived there.

Since 1995 to date, according to the official Croatian statistics, 118,000 Serbs have returned. In reality the figure is smaller.

"According to our records, roughly 70,000 people really returned to Croatia. The others picked up all documents on citizenship, regulated their status, but still reside in Bosnia, Serbia or elsewhere," Dzakula explained.

"Serbs find it hard to find jobs in state services, more than a hundred villages are without electric power, while the news of incidents such as this go far and influences many refugees to postpone or avoid the decision to return," Dzakula said.

The positive response by Croatian officials this time was facilitated by the increasingly better relations between Croatia and Serbia, as seen in the frequent and more and more friendly meetings between Mesic and Sanader and their Serbian counterparts, Tadic and Vojislav Kostunica.

However, many obstacles will still have to be surmounted if ethnic tension is to be banished. During Mesic'a visit to the Serbs in Biljane Donje, Croats from the neighbouring village of Skabrnja, where Serb units had massacred several dozen Croats during the war, held an energetic protest.

Surrounded by police officers, the loudest among the protesters said incidents would continue as Serbs have no place in Biljane Donje.


taken from http://www.playfuls.com/news_00000001793_Croatia_Denounces_Crimes_Against_Serbs_For_First_Time.html