"All documents, which might be submitted by the defence and the prosecution, should be taken into consideration. Let legal impartiality be used to assess his (Budak's) objective guilt and let a final, legally regulated and law-based ruling be proclaimed. All of us will recognise and abide by it (ruling)," read the appeal entitled "On Mile Budak: Ten Facts and Ten Questions", which can be signed subsequently by all who want to do it,
At the beginning of the text, it is said that the appeal was triggered off by "the latest media campaign against Mile Budak which involves in an undignified manner not only notorious ignoramuses but also passionate political haters of him" and that the reason for launching the appeal was also an attempt to "prove credibility of the principle of de-politicisation of the judiciary and the promotion of legal criteria in a law-based state".
In the extensive text, the signatories present their perception of Budak's life.
It is said among other things that Budak held high-ranking positions in the government of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). He was a minister of education and religious affairs but "he was not the initiator of the so-called racial laws, and holding office (of the said minister) he procrastinated as long as he could their enforcement, protecting Jews and Serbs, who were professors at the University of Zagreb, and facts about this have already been presented by Jaroslav Sidak".
As the NDH envoy in Berlin "he had no political influence, and as the foreign minister he had conditioned very much the establishment of the relations with the Italian Social Republic on Mussolini's abandonment of the Rome treaties. As a result, he was forced to resign (from the foreign ministry post) and this was the end of his political activities in Croatia", read the appeal.
He was court-martialled by the then Yugoslav army and sentenced to death on 6 June 1945, and executed on 7 June 1945. It is still not known where his grave is, the appeal read adding that documentation on the investigation and trial of Budak had never been made public or available to researchers.
The appeal was issued a day after the memorial plaque in tribute to Budak was set up in Sveti Rok in the municipality of Lovinac, some 150 km south of Zagreb. The inscription on the plaque reads that it was erected "in memory of Dr. Mile Budak -- a Croatian patriot -- man of letters and novelist, born in Sveti Rok on 30 August 1889, and killed in Zagreb on 7 June 1945", and that the plaque was set up by "Croatian patriots from the diaspora and the Homeland".
The news that the memorial plaque in tribute to Mile Budak would be placed at Sveti Rok has triggered off heated debates in recent weeks. Those who are in favour of Budak's memorial plaque claim he was a great Croatian writer and that the value of his work should be assessed by critics.
Those against it recall that Budak was a minister in the regime of Ante Pavelic during the Second World War, that he was known as the architect of racial laws in the NDH, and that he gave inflammatory speeches inciting ethnic hatred.
The Croatian Lexicon issued in Zagreb 1996 reads, among other things that Budak was a writer and a politician, the minister of education and religious affairs in the first government of the NDH, and that he was the NDH envoy to Berlin from late 1941 to April 1943, when he took the office of NDH foreign minister for a short period.