NFCA CRITICISES U.S. FOR COMPARING GOTOVINA TO KARADZIC, MLADIC

WASHINGTON, Nov 6 (Hina) - The National Federation of Croatian Americans (NFCA) has criticised the US administration for comparing Croatian general Ante Gotovina to Bosnian Serb wartime leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who are all sought by the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. #L# NFCA president John Kraljic has sent a letter to US war crimes envoy Pierre-Richard Prosper, raising objections to such comparisons being frequently made by US administration officials, as was recently done in a UN Security Council resolution, the NFCA said in a statement on Thursday. The statement said that the work of the Hague tribunal was politicised because it was trying to apportion the blame for war crimes among the Croats, Muslims and Serbs. It called on the United States to take a more critical stance on the tribunal's work. Kraljic said that Gotovina, unlike Mladic and Karadzic, was not charged with genocide, and added that there was absolutely no evidence of General Gotovina, or any other Croatian military or civilian official, ordering war crimes to be committed or that any of those crimes were systematic. The credibility of the indictment is based on the question whether General Gotovina failed to use his command responsibility to stop such crimes or punish those who may have committed such crimes, Kraljic wrote. Commenting on the politicisation of the tribunal, Kraljic claimed that the US allowed the actions of one person, notably the tribunal's chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte, to dictate a large part of US foreign policy towards Croatia. The NFCA is an umbrella organisation of Croatian Americans that gathers some 120,000 members. (hina) vm sb