Genocide in Croatia

I refer to Croatia joins effort to secure Milosevic handover (The Jakarta Post, 1 March).

To remind readers, Croatia filed a genocide case against Yugoslavia at the world court of over 15,000 killed or missing people from the 1991-1995 conflict in Croatia between Croat secessionist forces and ethnic Serb "rebels" backed by Yugoslav federal forces.

No doubt genocide took place in Croatia. Actually there were two: one took place during World War II, when the Serb population of what was the Nazi sponsored "independent Croatian State" was decimated, with at least 600,000 killed in the system of Croatian death camps.

This genocide laid ground for a Croatian independence bid in 1991, which was based on an ethnic Croat referendum ignoring fears of a repeated genocide among the Serb minority.

This Serb fear, well-grounded in recent history, led to the Serb rebellion against the new "independent Croatian State" which offered no institutional guarantees for the remaining Croat Serb population, in a form of autonomy or similar forms.

The 1991-1995 civil war resulted in the expulsion of over 150,000 Serbs from Croatia, effectively finishing the project started by Croatian Nazis in 1941. All these people found refuge in Serbia and are still largely denied their right to return home.

Maybe some of the missing persons Croatia is now looking for are among those refugees.

I would like to see Croatia dealing with its own genocide on its own population. It would make it easier to take the genocide charges against others more seriously. Claiming that 150,000 casualties (which needs to be proven) in a five-year long civil war is genocide and disregarding almost complete annihilation of an entire ethnic group on a by far larger scale, makes this claim mere political propaganda.

BRANIMIR SALEVIC

Tangerang