FORMER STATE ARCHIVE EMPLOYEE TESTIFIES IN SAKIC WAR CRIMES TRIAL

ZAGREB, May 26 (Hina) - The main hearing in the trial of Dinko Sakic, war crimes suspect and commander of a Croatian World War Two concentration camp, resumed at the Zagreb County Court on Wednesday with the interrogation of former Croatian State Archive (HDA) secretary and legal advisor Frane Glavina. Glavina, aged 68, worked at the HDA for more than 20 years. He said the HDA contains 56 books and 814 archive boxes of material gathered by a national commission established by a former Yugoslav anti- fascist council in 1944 which until 1947 gathered documentation related to war crimes and the Ustashi concentration camp in Jasenovac, which was at one time commanded by the defendant. The archive material also contains six boxes of a so called poll commission for cultural cooperation. Glavina said he was familiar with the material even though he had not directly worked on it. He said he had never heard of Sakic before, nor did he remember coming across his name in the archive material. The witness did not however exclude the possibility that Sakic is mentioned, but said he might have overlooked it given his unfamiliarity with the name. The poll commission had not found any original document about the Jasenovac camp, Glavina said and added all Ustashi archives had been thoroughly plundered after the war. Most documents ended in Belgrade, the federal capital of post-WW2 Yugoslavia. Glavina said the great bulk of the archive, available to all, was completely unusable, given that the poll commission had worked negligently, in partisan conditions, while the work itself had never been based on the penal code. "People were often charged arbitrarily. Sometimes only because they had taught an Ustashi child or exposed paintings for the Ustashi," the witness said. Glavina added the poll commission's task, among else, had been to establish who had committed the crimes and who should account in court, and to gather evidence which would help in extraditing criminals who had emigrated. The witness stated the only authentic material was the one which had been continuously kept in competent institutions. In the contrary, forgery is possible, he said. Asked if he had come across a forgery, Glavina said a weekly had once published an obvious forgery related to a former Ustashi officer from Dubrovnik whose name he was unable to recall. The witness also mentioned an Israeli university professor from Haifa, Zagreb-born, who "went so far in his alleged scientific research into war crimes, that his very university disowned him." "That professor went so far as to claim that there had been no collaborationists in Serbia, he ascribed all the crimes to the Croatian side," Glavina said. He recalled that during the mid-1980s trial of Ustashi Interior Minister Andrija Artukovic, a photograph showing two severed partisans' heads, with an inscription saying the two had been the victims of an atrocious Jasenovac crime, was displayed at a Zagreb exhibition. The photograph was authentic, Glavina said, but emphasised the truth was that the partisans had been apprehended and massacred in Slovenia, and not in the Jasenovac camp. The Zagreb County Court panel of judges today adopted county state attorney Radovan Santek's motion to abandon the testimonies of Renata Terzijan and Dragica Bradovski, who could not testify due to poor health, and of Ervin Rosenberg from Israel and Jovan Stjepanovic from Yugoslavia, who did not want to come to Zagreb. The main hearing will resume on Thursday. (hina) ha