ZAGREB, Oct 29 (Hina) - The Croatian Christian Democratic Union (HKDU) is requesting a referendum and a parliamentary discussion on amendments to the Law on Cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY), the party's president, Anto Kovacevic, said on Tuesday.
ZAGREB, Oct 29 (Hina) - The Croatian Christian Democratic Union
(HKDU) is requesting a referendum and a parliamentary discussion on
amendments to the Law on Cooperation with the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the party's
president, Anto Kovacevic, said on Tuesday. #L#
A referendum is the most democratic form of defending the truth
about the Homeland War, Kovacevic told reporters.
The HKDU supports General Janko Bobetko's political will not to be
handed the tribunal's indictment and sent to hospital and The
Hague, he said.
The government has not provided any guarantees that Bobetko will
not be handed the indictment while in hospital, he added.
The party is asking of the government not to force the general to
receive the indictment, Kovacevic asserted.
Kovacevic believes that "the government stands in the defensive
because it is supporting Bobetko as an ill person, not an innocent
one".
In the case of the retired general, the government has abandoned a
consensus it reached with opposition parties and is now "searching
for culprits among opposition parties and Bobetko's advisors," he
said.
Kovacevic said that the way in which the government was defending
General Bobetko - as an ill person, not an innocent one - was wrong,
because other indictees, such as generals Ante Gotovina and Rahim
Ademi, could not be defended that way.
Since the two generals are not ill, they can be sent to The Hague
regardless of the content of their indictments, Kovacevic said.
The party believes that the right defence would be to clearly state
that the generals cannot be tried for superior responsibility.
The indictment against Gotovina is more drastic than that against
Bobetko, because the Croatian liberation operation "Storm", which
was endorsed by the entire international community, is treated as
ethnic cleansing, the party said.
Kovacevic said that the Croatian parliament had passed a law on
cooperation with the ICTY because it had thought that the aggressor
would be tried for individual war crimes. He recalled that since its
establishment, the tribunal had changed its statute four times.
HKDU honorary president Marko Veselica said that the tribunal was
neither an international court nor a court of justice, but a
political and geo-strategic court whose aim was to annul the
Croatian state.
(hina) lml sb