The 10-page report was compiled on October 19, 1995 by an inter-agency working group on the Balkans, including staff from the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA). It was declassified on March 26, 2004.
The report was released as part of a regular periodical review that made publicly available thousands of documents that had earlier been classified as confidential, a CIA spokeswoman told Hina on Monday.
Asked to explain a 33-month gap between the declassification and the publication of the document, she said that declassified documents sometimes contained mistakes and were not immediately made public.
It is a periodic review of documents which is done automatically and it is not unusual for a long time to elapse from the declassification of a certain document until its actual publication, the spokeswoman said.
She declined to give her name, explaining that it was agency policy that spokespersons should be mentioned by their office rather than by their name.
The report refers to Mercep as a Croatian legislator and former paramilitary commander "widely regarded, even within Croatian government circles, as directly responsible for serious human rights abuses and other illegal acts during Croatia's 1991 war of secession."
Numerous allegations of atrocities committed by Mercep or those under his supervision surfaced after 1991, some of them being corroborated by international organisations and surviving witnesses.
"Nevertheless, the Croatian government, apparently fearing Mercep's support among influential right-wing political leaders and his former troops, has avoided investigating the charges or moving to curb his influence," the report says.
"Mercep appears to have begun gaining prominence in 1991 when, at the order of the HDZ, he organised the first unit of 2,000 volunteers to fight for Croatian independence. During that same year, while serving as National Defence Secretary in charge of Vukovar, he is alleged to have committed or directed numerous atrocities, including the torture, killing and disappearance of thousands of ethnic Serbs in Vukovar, Pakracka Poljana, Gospic and Zagreb," the report says, quoting Croatian press sources as alleging that Mercep was also involved in war profiteering and black-market arms sales.
The report says that the bulk of the charges against Mercep concern events between September 9, 1991 and March 29, 1992.
"In the past few years, reports have emerged from survivors, international human rights organisations and the press, indicating that the systematic killing of Serbs during that period probably occurred."
Pakrac and Pakracka Poljana are the subjects of the most serious charges against Mercep. The report cites a letter sent by Helsinki Watch to President Franjo Tudjman in 1992 in which the human rights watchdog alleged summary execution of civilians and disarmed combatants, torture and mistreatment of detainees, arbitrary arrests and disappearances and the destruction of civilian property.
"West European press reports estimate that in the fall of 1991, about 75,000 Serbs were expelled and over 180 Serb villages destroyed. As many as 3,000 Serbs are missing from the area," the CIA says.
Citing witness accounts, the report says that at least 24 civilians were killed around Pakrac, and that UN investigators identified mass grave sites in three places near the railway station in Pakrac in 1993. Bodies from two of the graves were subsequently removed by Croatian officials before observers could exhume them and trees were planted over the site, according to official UN reports.
"Investigators believe that the third site, to which Croatian authorities denied access, may hold as many as 1,700 bodies," the CIA says.
In Gospic, Marcep's troops arrested 150 Serbs on October 16, 1991. The bodies of 24 of those arrested were returned to their families in January 1994, while the others remain unaccounted for, the report says.
Allegations of atrocities committed in Vukovar are based largely on reports from Serbs expelled from the area in October 1991 and Serbian and Croatian press reports.
The report says that Krajina Serb officials informed the UN that they had found several mass graves of Serb civilians. It also cites Croatian press reports on the contents of a confidential letter sent to Tudjman in 1993 by a former Croatian government representative to Vukovar, alleging that Mercep played a key role in atrocities committed there.
Among other crimes allegedly involving Mercep, the CIA cited the murder of the Zec family in Zagreb on December 7, 1991, the abduction and killing of Milos Ivosevic and Stevan Brajenovic, and the abduction and disappearance of Ina Zoricic Nuic, a Croatian woman.
The report says that Mercep, despite widespread accusations, was promoted to Assistant Minister of the Interior in 1992, and that attempts to investigate his role in the war and to arrest him were foiled by his superiors and allies.
The CIA quoted a press report as saying that Tudjman had expelled Mercep from the inner circles of the HDZ leadership stating that the HDZ had no room for individuals of Mercep's reputation, despite his "valuable wartime services".
"Nevertheless, Zagreb is likely to continue to avoid taking any serious action against Mercep and will downplay his ties to the government, in the hopes that keeping his profile low will limit attention to his case. Zagreb is only likely to alter its stance in the face of concrete evidence of Mercep's role in atrocities, along with strong international pressure to redress those crimes," the CIA report concludes.
On Tuesday, Hina asked Mercep for a comment on the CIA report. "I don't want to comment on it in detail," he said in a telephone interview, dismissing the report as nonsense.
Mercep is currently president of the Association of Croatian Volunteers of the Homeland War.