JASENOVAC MUSEUM DIRECTOR IN WASHINGTON

WASHINGTON, March 20 (Hina) - The manager of the museum in the Croatian town of Jasenovac, built in honour to victims of the World War Two concentration camp in that area, on Monday arrived in Washington for talks with the heads of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the U.S.capital.#L# The Jasenovac museum head, Mate Rupic, should compare the documents on the looted artefacts from his museum and some artefacts stored in the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum. During the Croatian Homeland Defence War in the early 1990s, rebel Serbs occupied Jasenovac and the nearby area and Croatia's authorities could not take care about the museum. Thus, documents and some objects put on display in the Jasenovac museum were transferred by Serbs into the Bosnian part under control of ethnic Serb there. On 27 November last year, 19 boxes with artefacts, films and photographs were transferred from the Bosnian Serb entity (the Republic of Srpska) into Washington under the agreement of the then Bosnian Serb premier Milorad Dodik and SFOR (international forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina). Zagreb and the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum representatives have signed an agreement under which the Jasenovac museum's material will be given back to Croatia by 26 October this year. Croatian Ambassador to the United States, Ivan Grdesic, has recently visited the Washington museum and held talks with is director, Sara Bloomfield, to thank her for the cooperation of the Holocaust Memorial Museum with his country. Grdesic spoke about the reconstruction of the museum in Jasenovac and added that it would be able to receive back the documents and archives currently kept by the U.S. museum. In the mid-February during his visit to Washington, the incumbent Bosnian Serb premier, Mladen Ivanic, demanded that the Jasenovac artefacts be returned to Banja Luka claiming that the documents belonged to "the heritage of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)." (hina) ms