Challenge for Croatia's judiciary

Retired generals Mirko Norac (39) and Rahim Ademi (53) go on trial in Zagreb on June 18 for letting their troops get badly out of hand during an attack on rebel Serb territory in 1993.  It’s the first trial to have begun at The Hague and later transfer to a Croatian court, to clear a backlog at the international war crimes tribunal and demonstrate Croatia’s competence at trying its own.  The case has taken two years to prepare; 140 witnesses have been called. 

In the Medak Pocket incident of September 1993, Croats are accused of torturing prisoners, vandalising property and killing civilians, mocking one woman, Boja Vujnovic, as they burned her alive. 

In 2001, more than 100,000 took to the streets in support of Norac when a Croatian court wanted to question him over a separate incident in 1991.  Norac was convicted in 2003 in that case (he appears in court next week from Lipovica prison).  But when Hague fugitive Ante Gotovina was caught in Spain in 2005, there was little fuss.  The difference is that the party now in power, the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), led the independence fight in 1991-95 and can therefore get away with letting war heroes go on trial.  Also, the sting has gone out of the process:  last year, the Puls polling agency found that two-thirds of Croats now accept the previously unacceptable -- that their own troops committed atrocities and should face trial.  When the EU made Gotovina’s surrender a condition for integration talks, it encouraged euroscepticism out of sheer defiance; this is now abating, from 53% of Croats opposing EU membership in 2005, and 49% in mid-2006, to 46% last autumn.