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DeMint: Senator Clinton, just who Is Zdenka Gast? Clinton: Zdenka Gast? Help me out here. DeMint: Let me refresh your memory. Gast played a key role in Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's fatal trip to Croatia in April 1996. Ostensibly at least, Brown went to Croatia to broker a deal between the Croatian government and a certain American corporation. Gast served as liaison between the two. Clinton: Why is this an issue? DeMint: For starters, it was a sweetheart deal the White House coerced Croatia to sign. For another, the White House's Croatian client was President Franjo Tudjman, a notorious anti-Semite....

BELGRADE, Serbia: Serbia will respond to Croatia's genocide suit at the World Court by suing its former foe for war crimes, the foreign minister said. Vuk Jeremic told state television late Tuesday that Serbia will sue Croatia over a 1995 offensive that sent tens of thousands of Serbs fleeing the country. The Netherlands-based International Court of Justice on Tuesday granted Croatia the right to sue Serbia, deciding it has the authority to rule in the case. Croatia argues that Serb attacks during the 1991-95 war of independence, which left thousands of people dead and displaced, were a form of genocide....

How The West Was Won The rapid and unexpected decline of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq was officially recognized this week, when Maj. Gen. John Kelly, commanding the Marine Expeditionary Force, turned operational control of Anbar Province over to the Iraqi army and police. Anbar, a vast expanse of desert the size of North Carolina, had been the stronghold of the Sunni insurgency. For years, foreign fighters loyal to al-Qaida had sneaked across Iraq's northwestern border with Syria, into Anbar and down a "rat line" of safe houses in Haditha, Ramadi and Hit. From Fallujah, the arch terrorist Zarqawi...

BELGRADE, ZAGREB -- Today marks the 13th anniversary of Operation Storm that led to the exodus of over 200,000 Serbs from Croatia. Storm began on August 4,1995 with an offensive by the Croatian army and police in the region of Banija, Lika, Kordun, and northern Dalmatia. A day later, the Croatian Army entered a practically deserted Knin and raised the Croatian flag. The number of victims during the operation has never been established. According to the Veritas Center for documentation and statistics, 1,900 Serbs either died or disappeared during Storm, while the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights claims that...

The funeral of a former Nazi concentration camp director in Croatia was a tribute to anti-Semitism, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said. Dinko Sakic, the last surviving concentration camp director, died last week in prison at age 87. He was convicted of war crimes and sent to prison for 20 years for running the Jasenovac camp, where tens of thousands of mostly Jews and Serbs were tortured and murdered. He remained unrepentant until his death. Croatia was run by a Nazi puppet regime during World War II, the Ustasha. Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi hunter and head of the Wiesenthal Center's Israel...

BY ALISON GENDAR DAILY NEWS POLICE BUREAU CHIEF Thursday, July 24th 2008, 9:08 PM Daily News Zvonko Busic in a 1987 photo. A Croatian terrorist has been freed from a life sentence and shipped to his homeland - to the disgust of relatives of the city cop he murdered more than 30 years ago. Zvonko Busic, mastermind of the 1976 hijacking of TWA Flight 355 and a bombing at Grand Central station, landed in Croatia Thursday in time for dinner, officials said. "He got to go home," said Kathleen Murray, whose husband, Brian Murray, was killed in the blast. Busic,...

After more than three decades in United States prisons — a term punctuated by a brief escape and recapture — a 62-year-old Croatian independence fighter was returned to his native country on Thursday, having served his time for a 1976 hijacking and a bombing that killed a police officer. The fighter, Zvonko Busic, led a group that planted a bomb at Grand Central Terminal that later exploded, killing a city police officer, Brian J. Murray. Mr. Busic left the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Ind., boarded a plane in Chicago and touched down in Zagreb about 2:20 p.m. on...

Dinko Sakic arrived at the concentration camp known as the “Auschwitz of the Balkans” riding a white horse, wearing a tailored black uniform with polished black boots and carrying a whip and a submachine gun, survivors remembered. His brazenness continued even after Croatia went down to defeat with Nazi Germany, its ally. He fled to Argentina, where he lived for a half century under his real name, making no attempt to hide. In his last decade of freedom, he gave interviews saying he was proud of what he had done and would gladly do it again......

Croatian Terrorist Paroled after 30 Years NEW YORK — A Croatian terrorist has been granted parole after serving 30 years in prison for hijacking a jet and planting a bomb that killed a New York City police officer. Zvonko Busic was the leader of a group that commandeered a TWA flight as it left La- Guardia Airport in 1976 in an attempt to draw attention to Croatia’s struggle for independence from communist Yugoslavia. The five separatists took the plane to Montreal, London and Paris before authorities shot out its tires and persuaded them to surrender. Their claim to have explosives...

Zagreb - Dinko Sakic, a former commander of Croatia's most notorious Nazi-era concentration camp during World War II, has died at age 86, news reports said Monday. Sakic was in charge during May-October 1944 at the Jasenovac camp, where tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews and others died under the Ustasha regime, Croatia's 1941-45 Nazi puppet government. He died late Sunday at a prison hospital in Zagreb, the capital, local media reported. Sakic was extradited to Croatia from Argentina in 1998 and sentenced to 20 years in prison for war crimes, the maximum sentence under Croatian law. He was convicted...

24 June 2008 Zagreb _ A former US ambassador to Croatia has accused Zagreb of plotting and sanctioning the exodus of Serbs in 1995 to create an "ethnically clean" country. Peter Galbraith told The Hague war crimes trial of three Croatian generals, that the leadership headed by late President Franjo Tudjman used ‘Operation Storm’ to ‘cleanse’ Croatia of Serbs. “Croatian authorities either ordered or allowed a mass destruction of the Serb property in former (Serb-held region of) Krajina to prevent the return of the population. I consider that to have been a thought through policy,” he said, testifying at the...

Banjaluka, 21 May (AKI) – Al-Qaeda and the Muslim fundamentalist Wahabi movement's operatives have been smuggling weapons and explosives into neighbouring Croatia, Bosnian daily Nezavisne novine reported on Wednesday. Quoting Bosnian security sources, the paper said huge quantities of weapons and explosives have been smuggled into the areas of Croatia with sizeable Muslim population in recent months. The weapons were shipped to the Croatian capital Zagreb, nearby Karlovac and the Adriatic port of Split, according to a document from the Bosnian security agency, quoted by the paper. The document said the operation has been masterminded by Bosnian Muslims Vladimir Popilovski,...

What Serbia's election says about the European Union's enlargement A BRITISH tabloid set a high standard for bombast when it once took credit for the re-election of a Tory government with the headline: “It's The Sun Wot Won It”. This week European Union leaders were taking credit for another election upset: the unexpected success of the pro-European coalition led by the Serbian president, Boris Tadic, in the general election on May 11th. The Serbs had “clearly chosen Europe,” said the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner. Jan Marinus Wiersma, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, declared that the election was...

BELGRADE, Serbia-Fourteen former Serb fighters went on trial Thursday on charges that they killed 70 Croat civilians in 1991 after forcing some of them to walk through a minefield. The group includes former Yugoslav army soldiers and paramilitary fighters suspected of "torture, inhuman treatment and killing" of the Croats in a border town in Croatia during the war there. Croatian investigations have discovered dozens of bodies in mass graves in the village of Lovas, the remains of people apparently killed in October and November 1991 when Serbs controlled the area. The Serbian prosecutors charged the Serb fighters with killing 22...

Prior to the presentation of defense, the last piece of evidence was examined at the trial of generals Rahim Ademi and Mirko Norac. It was the statement given to the ICTY by a Croatian soldier. As protected witness he gave an account of how he was covering up the crimes committed during the Medak Pocket Operation. He was burying the mutilated bodies of the Serb civilians and prisoners of war. In his statement he said he thought the first accused Rahim Ademi was responsible, as the latter was in command of the Gospic Military District at the relevant time. The...

17 April 2008 | 12:05 | Source: Tanjug ZAGREB -- Stjepan Mesic has criticized the Croatian parliament’s decision to spend more money on the commemoration for Bleiburg victims than Jasenovac victims. “The fact is, not one Jasenovac victim was to blame for the Bleiburg victims, but a lot of Bleiburg victims were guilty for a lot of victims at Jasenovac,” said the Croatian president, stressing that the excuse that Jasenovac had received money earlier and Bleiburg had not, did not wash. A commemoration for Second World War war crimes in Yugoslavia should be held in Jasenovac because it was the...

Melbourne's Katarina Zrinski restaurant held a celebration this past weekend to honor World War II Croatian leader Ante Pavelic, whose genocidal policies led to the deaths of 400,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. The restaurant is attached to the local Croatian club. The event honoring the head of the Croatian fascist Ustasha movement and the leader of Nazi-allied Croatia was an "outrageous affront" both to his victims and to any persons of morality and conscience who oppose racism and genocide, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi-hunter and Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff said on Wednesday. According to local press reports, a...

The soldier of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan, led by Mladen Kruljac, were surprised by the fact that Bush shook hands will all 50 of them.ZAGREB, CROATIA - As a symbolic sign of support and gratitude, American President George Bush, wanted to spend last part of his visit in Croatia by taking photographs with the Croatian soldiers who are taking part in the ISAF peace mission in Afghanistan. Before taking pictures in front of the American presidential airplane Air Force One, President Bush shook hands with all 50 soldiers who, all together with the Croatian diplomatic delegation, came to Zagreb’s...

Thousands filled St. Mark’s Square in Zagreb, Croatia today to hear President Bush and their own Prime Minister Sanader speak on the second day of the president’s visit to their country. (Transcript) President Bush: Laura, who has joined me today, and I are proud to stand on the soil of an independent Croatia. (Applause.) Our countries are separated by thousands of miles, but we're united by a deep belief in God and the blessings of liberty He gave us. And today, on the edge of the great Adriatic, we stand together as one free people. (Applause.) After meeting with...

For Immediate ReleaseOffice of the Press SecretaryApril 5, 2008 President's Radio Address   President's Radio Address  Audio  En Español       In Focus: NATOTHE PRESIDENT: Good morning. I'm speaking to you from Europe, where I attended the NATO summit and witnessed the hopeful progress of the continent's youngest democracies. The summit was held in Romania, one of the 10 liberated nations that have joined the ranks of NATO since the end of the Cold War. After decades of tyranny and oppression, today Romania is an important member of an international alliance dedicated to liberty, and it is setting a bold example for other...