SANADER COMMENTS ON RADIN'S STATEMENT, PLANS FOR DEVELOPMENT

KARLOVAC, Feb 28 (Hina) - The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) leader and Croatian Premier, Ivo Sanader, who attended a ceremony marking the 14th anniversary of the HDZ branch in Karlovac on Saturday, said that the country should maintain and strengthen its national identity as well as develop its economic potentials so as to be ready to enter the European Union and to be competitive on the market with millions of people.#L# Commenting on a statement which a parliamentary representative of the Italian minority, Furio Radin gave yesterday in the Sabor when he claimed that Croatian Serbs were subjected to ethnic cleansing in the first half of the 1990s, Sanader said there had been no ethnic cleansing and the Croatian army won the war which had been imposed by proponents of a Greater Serbia. To claim that there was ethnic cleansing (of Serbs) means to exculpate and give pardon to the greater Serbian policy and Slobodan Milosevic, although it is known that his greater Serbian policy was the cause of the aggression against Croatia and that after (1995) Croatian military and police liberation operation called Storm, he ordered Serbs to leave Croatia, Sanader said. He went on to say that he would testify about this whenever necessary and that nobody, including Furio Radin or the Hague-based UN tribunal, would be allowed to revise the history. Commenting on the development of the infrastructure Sanader reiterated that new 177 kilometres of highways would be built by the start of this summer. He said the new government would continue investing into the modernisation of the railways, and added that it would be also investigated who had ordered the purchase of tilting trains which some now described as not so good. (Hina) ms