Covering events from January - December 2000 CROATIA

Republic of Croatia Head of state: Stjepan Mesic Head of government: Ivica Racan Capital: Zagreb Population: 4.8 million Official language: Croatian Death penalty: abolitionist for all crimes 2000 treaty ratifications/signatures: Optional Protocol to the UN Women's Convention

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Returns of Serb refugees to Croatia increased, although concern about their sustainable reintegration into their pre-war communities remained. The new authorities made considerable efforts to increase cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (Tribunal). A number of Croat and Bosnian Croat military and paramilitary leaders were arrested on suspicion of having committed war crimes in Croatia and Croat- held areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina; scores of Croatian Serb returnees were also arrested on outstanding war crimes charges.

Background General elections were held in January 2000 and resulted in a landslide victory for a coalition of six opposition parties over the governing Hrvatska demokratska zajednica (HDZ), Croatian Democratic Union. Presidential elections, held in February, were similarly won by an opposition politician, Stjepan Mesic. The new government announced its intention to improve Croatia's human rights record, in particular its willingness to enable all Serb refugees to return to their country freely. In November the lower house of Parliament adopted a number of amendments to the Constitution, which limited the powers of the President and established wider-ranging control by Parliament over the government.

In September the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe closed its monitoring procedure, as it considered that Croatia had mostly honoured the commitments regarding democratization and human rights which it had undertaken when joining the Council of Europe in 1996 and had implemented the provisions of the Dayton and Erdut peace agreements. In November negotiations started between the government and the European Commission on the establishment of a stabilization and association agreement as a first step towards future European Union membership. In May Croatia joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Partnership for Peace.

Refugee returns According to statistics of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), during 2000 more than 18,000 Croatian Serbs returned to the country under the Return Programme, a decree adopted by the Croatian Parliament in 1998. It was estimated that thousands of others returned spontaneously. The increase in returns appeared to be a result of the new government's announced resolve to accelerate the return process and to remove legal and political obstacles that had hampered returns in previous years.

A number of new or amended laws regulating return and reintegration were passed. For instance in June an amended reconstruction law was adopted by Parliament, which removed discriminatory regulations included in the previous version. However, the law was subsequently further amended, giving rise to concern that it might still discriminate against Croatian Serbs in its system for setting priorities.

The inaction of many local housing committees, tasked under the Return Programme to process returnees' applications for the return of private property, continued throughout 2000. By the end of the year, in about 30 per cent of these cases, repossession had taken place. This inaction arose partly from the lack of clarity in how various provisions of the Return Programme should be implemented, as well as legal inconsistencies in the Return Programme. In some parts of the country - primarily eastern Slavonia - the legal situation was confusing as entirely different property laws were applied to enable the return of Croatians.

However, in many cases political obstruction appeared to underlie the failure to reinstate Serbs in their property. For instance, in September, the UNHCR and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) missions presented the government with a list of 88 cases of illegal double occupancy of returnees' houses, asking it to urgently resolve these as a first step. By the end of 2000, only seven households had reportedly been reinstated as a result of this initiative. In the Knin area, where 25 cases of double occupancy had been reported to the authorities, only two cases were resolved.

Prosecutions for war crimes The new government made immediate and significant efforts to ensure fuller cooperation with the Tribunal. In March the authorities surrendered a Bosnian Croat, Mladen Naletilic, to the custody of the Tribunal. He had been indicted for war crimes in Mostar in Bosnia- Herzegovina, and the Tribunal had repeatedly requested his transfer from Croatia, where he was imprisoned pending trial for other crimes.

In April the Croatian Parliament adopted a declaration on cooperation with the Tribunal, pledging to hand over all documents in the government's possession that could be used as evidence by the prosecution or the defence. In addition, the declaration confirmed the Tribunal's jurisdiction over crimes under international law committed during and after the armed conflict.

Previously, the Croatian authorities had disputed such jurisdiction for crimes committed after Operations Flash and Storm in 1995. In April, Tribunal investigators were allowed for the first time to exhume a mass grave site near Gospic, thought to contain bodies of Serb civilians executed in 1991. Nevertheless, in November the Tribunal's Prosecutor told the UN Security Council that several requests for information from the Croatian government were still outstanding, including some for access to witnesses and documents in connection with Operation Storm.

In August unidentified perpetrators killed former special policeman Milan Levar, apparently in retaliation for his widely publicized statements implicating local Croatian military and police officers in the killings of Serbs in Gospic in 1991, and his open cooperation with Tribunal investigators. Despite the fact that the Tribunal had expressed concern about Milan Levar's safety in a letter to the Croatian Minister of the Interior in 1998, it appeared that the Gospic police had never been formally instructed to protect him. The killing met with official condemnation and a police investigation was opened immediately, although nobody had been charged by the end of 2000.

In September, five Croatian Army officers were arrested in Gospic and an investigation into their suspected involvement in war crimes in 1991 was conducted by the Rijeka County investigative judge. Based on evidence given by these suspects, another mass grave site near Udbina - west of Gospic - was identified in December. The bodies of 18 people, presumed to be Serb civilians, were exhumed.

Also in September, police arrested two former officers of the Bosnian Croat intelligence services who were suspected of having participated in the killing of over 100 Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) civilians in the village of Ahmici in central Bosnia in 1993. These men had apparently been in hiding in the town of Zadar since 1998. Two local Croatian police officers were charged with providing them with false identity papers and driving licences, but were acquitted in November for lack of evidence.

Police also arrested scores of Croatian Serbs for alleged war crimes. Many of those arrested had returned under the Return Programme and some had apparently previously received confirmation from the Interior Ministry that they had no outstanding criminal records or had been granted amnesty. AI was concerned that in several cases the arrests were reportedly based on indictments brought during the armed conflict in which large groups of individuals were charged together, and that some of the charges might have been arbitrarily defined.

● Jovanka Nenadovic, a 67-year-old Croatian Serb woman, was arrested in Pakrac in October for allegedly participating in war crimes against Croatian civilians in that area. Before her arrest she had been a refugee in the Republika Srpska in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but she had visited her home in Pakrac several times. An indictment against her, which was issued in 1999, appeared to be solely based on hearsay evidence given by a local witness, now deceased. Because of her poor health Jovanka Nenadovic was transferred to the Zagreb prison hospital pending trial. ● In July the Osijek County Court acquitted five Croatian Serbs of war crimes after a second retrial. The men, all from the eastern Slavonian village of Sodolovci, had been charged in 1994 with the indiscriminate shelling of surrounding villages. Both their original trial and their first retrial were flawed by violations of international fair trial standards and of domestic criminal procedure. ● In June the retrial of Croatian Serb Mirko Graorac ended with his renewed conviction. He received a reduced sentence of 15 years' imprisonment. AI had criticized the original trial proceedings, which were held in 1996, for serious violations of his right to a fair trial. The renewed conviction appeared to be solely based on evidence given by prosecution witnesses, several of whom had identified the accused in flawed identification procedures held during the original investigation and trial proceedings. In addition, no investigation was ever conducted into allegations that Mirko Graorac had been tortured after his arrest in 1995.

Unresolved 'disappearances' The fate and whereabouts of thousands of people who ''disappeared'' during the war years remained unknown. Despite large-scale exhumations, mostly of mass graves in eastern Slavonia, more than 1,500 Croats were still unaccounted for. Some 600 Croatian Serbs were still missing since Operations Flash and Storm in 1995. The slowness with which cases were resolved was to a large degree due to the lack of progress in negotiations between the government commissions on missing persons of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and Croatia, which met twice during 2000.

In November AI called on newly elected FRY President Vojislav Kostunica to transfer three indicted men who remained on FRY territory to the Tribunal. The three, who were officers in the then Yugoslav People's Army, were allegedly responsible for the abduction of some 260 men from the hospital in Vukovar, after the town fell in November 1991, and their subsequent execution. The bodies of scores of victims were never found.