RED CROSS PRESIDENT ON ANDRIJA HEBRANG CASE

ZAGREB, Feb 20 (Hina) - Croatian Red Cross president Jadranko Crnic has said the Communist Party branch of the Zagreb City Committee of the Red Cross, which asked in 1948 that Croatian politician Andrija Hebrang be killed, should not be identified with the Red Cross and hundreds of volunteers who have done a lot of humanitarian work.#L# Crnic was asked by reporters on Friday to comment on recently discovered minutes according to which members of the Communist Party organisation of the Zagreb City Committee of the Red Cross asked during a Belgrade police trial against Hebrang that he be executed. "I don't justify those who asked something like that. I shudder to think about those people. There's no amnesty for those who tried people without a court, and those who carried out that order were nothing better than those who had made it. I think that the times when people were tried on the basis of directives are forever behind us. God forbid something like that should happen again," said Crnic. Andrija Hebrang was a Croatian politician and one of the organisers of the anti-fascist movement in Croatia. He was killed during a police investigation into alleged treason and collaboration with the Ustasha during the Second World War. His son Branko found in the Croatian State Archives hundreds of party minutes, some of which asked for the death of his father. Among them are the aforementioned minutes of a three-hour 19 May 1948 meeting of the Communist Party cell of the Zagreb City Committee of the Red Cross. Branko Hebrang, who is publishing an essay entitled "Andrija Hebrang: on the Trail of the Truth" in Vjesnik daily, plans to publish a book of documents about his father which will include minutes requesting the death of his father. Andrija Hebrang was born in 1899 and is presumed to have died in 1949. The Croatian parliament politically rehabilitated him in 1992 after the first democratic elections in the country. (Hina) ha sb