CROATIAN AMERICANS WANT HRW TO WITHDRAW REPORT ON CROATIA

WASHINGTON, Sept 10 (Hina) - The National Federation of Croatian Americans (NFCA) called on the Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday to withdraw its report in which it criticised Croatia for failing to take steps to ensure the return of Serb refugees to Croatia. #L# In a letter to the New York-based organisation for the protection of human rights, NFCA president John Kraljic said that the HRW report, published earlier this month under the title "Unfulfilled promises", was based on unreliable information from Savo Strbac and his organisation Veritas from Belgrade. The NFCA said it was concerned about how the HRW gave legitimacy to organisations like Veritas, which it said was nothing but a propaganda tool. Kraljic said that Strbac had stated in 1995 that the return of Serbs to Croatia was out of the question. He referred to a report by the France Presse news agency, which quoted Strbac as saying that "our final goal is unification with other Serbs (in Bosnia and Serbia)." The NFCA president went on to say that a report by the Nedeljni Telegraf newspaper showed that Strbac was using human rights as a front for his propaganda activities. Strbac told the Belgrade- based newspaper that proceedings against Croatian generals in The Hague were an opportunity for Serbs to revive the Republic of Serbian Krajina, a reference to the self-proclaimed Serb statelet in Croatia in the early 1990s. Kraljic said that Strbac and Veritas had also been criticised by non-governmental organisations, including the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, for constantly exaggerating the number of Serb victims of crimes allegedly committed by Croatian forces. The NFCA is a Washington-based umbrella organisation representing more than 20 groups of Croatian Americans with 130,000 members. (hina) vm