The association's president, Tom Kacinari, said at a news conference that ten years after the liberation operation "Storm" time had come for the parliament and public to support the adoption of such a law.
"We all have decorations for heroic deeds in the Homeland War, but people who built the Croatian police and army and whose exceptional contribution helped put an end to the Homeland War should be raised above those decorations. We cannot tolerate statements about the Homeland War made in the domestic and foreign public in recent years, which frequently put the war in a negative context," Kacinari said, calling on Sabor Speaker Vladimir Seks and all parliamentary parties to support the proposal.
The Federation of Croatian Homeland War Volunteers has 5,600 members, exclusively volunteers from 1990 and 1991. Kacinari said that there had been 27,000 volunteers at the most at the start of the war. All other figures are incorrect and exaggerated, he added.
Members of the association's senior bodies also warned about the "intolerable attitude of the Croatian public towards suicides among war veterans", stating that the lack of knowledge about the problems of war veterans was the main reason for some 1,200 suicides committed by war veterans.