BELGRADE, Sept 10 (Hina) - Croatian President Stjepan Mesic has welcomed an apology which his Serbia-Montenegrin counterpart offered during his visit to Belgrade on Wednesday. Mesic has said that he believed that he, too, should
apologise "if for nothing then for Paulin Dvor".
BELGRADE, Sept 10 (Hina) - Croatian President Stjepan Mesic has
welcomed an apology which his Serbia-Montenegrin counterpart
offered during his visit to Belgrade on Wednesday. Mesic has said
that he believed that he, too, should apologise "if for nothing then
for Paulin Dvor". #L#
"I accepted (Svetozar) Marovic's apology and I apologised, too,"
Mesic told Croatian reporters in Belgrade.
He said that if some maintained that he should not have apologised,
they should remember the crime in Paulin Dvor outside Osijek where
18 (ethnic) Serbs and one Hungarian were killed.
"In that village civilians were killed, and they were under our
protection, guards protected them so that nothing could happen to
them," Mesic said. "If we rule out everything else, this is one of
the reasons for the apology," he explained.
Asked by a reporter to comment on an article in the Croatian Globus
weekly which claimed that the Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal's
Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte was unsatisfied with his conduct
in the case of the fugitive Croatian general Ante Gotovina, Mesic
answered that he had read the article and that he did not know why
Del Ponte was criticising him.
"My intention has been to help clarify some circumstances. I would
have never hit on this idea, if Gotovina had not said in an interview
that he recognised the tribunal and Croatian institutions and that
the former authorities had not allowed him to contact the
tribunal's investigators," Mesic said. "I only said that one should
make it possible for him to talk," he added.
(hina) ms