Members of the CAA executive board adopted a policy position that will direct their lobbying efforts in 2005, and George Rudman was re-elected president of the organisation.
The CAA supports the conclusion of the report of the International Commission on the Balkans titled "The Balkans in Europe's Future", which states that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) should move away from its "focus on specific individuals" and "allow domestic judicial systems to deal with war crimes".
The organisation supports US insistence that the Hague-based tribunal should not start any new trials and that it should complete the current proceedings by 2008 as requested by the UN Security Council in the tribunal's exit strategy.
It says that the ICTY is a political rather than a judicial body, which apportions the blame for the events that took place in the former Yugoslavia. Although the Serbs, led by Slobodan Milosevic, Vojislav Seselj, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, were responsible 90 per cent of the deaths, the tribunal tried to find a significant number of Croats and Muslims as their equivalents.
The UN portrays Croatian General Ante Gotovina as a criminal counterpart to Mladic and Karadzic, "a political device whose sole aim is to placate member states and other stakeholders determined to prevent the assignation of blame to Serbia, a nation with which they still retain strong political, economic and military links," the CAA says.
Recalling that the US plays a central role in extending invitations to join NATO, the CAA believes that the Croatian government should sign as soon as possible a bilateral agreement with the US under which Croatia will not transfer any US citizens to the International Criminal Court in order to remove this obstacle to NATO membership.
The organisation called on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House International Relations Committee to help secure funding for the return of war-displaced Croats to the Posavina region in the Bosnian Serb entity.
The CAA also called on Ambassador Warren Miller, Chairman of the US Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, to retract his disparaging statement about Croatia, which he made in the White House in February this year.
During the signing of the agreement on the protection of cultural monuments between the governments of the US and Croatia, Miller said that Croatia had been the scene of terrible state-sponsored violence against the minorities twice in the 20th century -- in the Second World War and in the ethnic wars of the 1990s.
"Croatia did not perpetrate state-sanctioned genocide during its 1991-1995 war of independence, unlike Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs," the CAA said.