Ex-Bosnian army chief acquitted (Muslim killings of Bosnian Croats)

Former Bosnian Army commander Sefer Halilovic has been cleared of claims he was responsible for the killings of Croat civilians in 1993.

The UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague said prosecutors had failed to prove that he was in charge of troops who carried out the killings.

Mr Halilovic was the highest-ranking Muslim army officer to be tried for war crimes relating to the conflict.

The charges related to killing of at least 62 civilians in the villages of Grabovica and Uzdol. They were occupied during an operation by Muslim forces to retake areas held by Bosnian Croats in a bid to end the blockade of Mostar.

The indictment alleged that Mr Halilovic had ordered the deployment of two army units from Sarajevo with "notorious reputations for being criminal and uncontrolled in behaviour".

Judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ordered the release of Mr Halilovic, who had denied the charges.

In March, the man who succeeded Mr Halilovic as Bosnian Army Commander in 1993 pleaded not guilty to war crimes charges at the tribunal.

Rasim Delic, 56, has been indicted over crimes said to have been carried out by foreign fighters, or mujahideen, he commanded during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia.

The alleged crimes include the murder and torture of Bosnian Serbs and Croats and the rape of female prisoners.

Since you seem rather uneducated about the Balkans wars, I am calling your attention to this thread.

There was an intense Croat-Muslim war within the Bosnian war which ran for almost 1 ½ years. They ethnically cleansed each other by the 100s of thousands. Croats were claiming, by October 1993 already that 200,000 Croats had been ethnically cleansed by the Muslims from central Bosnia.

The same Croats go along with the mainstream media propaganda against Serbs - that the Muslims had no weapons and army until the very end of the war - yet at their own sites they claim attacks by the Muslims with HEAVY WEAPONRY and by the Muslim army already in October 1992 in certain parts of Bosnia - and also horrific murders by Mujahadeen, which were welcomed by the Bosniaks and given free reign.

Are you British? Did you know that English, Scottish, and Irish mercenaries were big supporters of the Croats and Muslims? Croats have a page dedicated to them (the "martyrs" - those who died there) and their exploits.

Did you ever read the book by John MacPhee called "The Silent Cry" - he details crimes of the Muslims and also kills he participated in against Serbs and Muslims. He did kill civilians, including several women and girls (Serbian and Muslim), if they were in the way when he attacked, and he also killed a few by accident/mistaken identity. There was a bit of talk by the UN after his book came out, about putting him on trial for war crimes, but nothing materialized.

The foreign mercenaries who came from scores of different countries - from the Middle East, all of Europe, Africa, Canada - participated in much bloodshed, yet they have gotten off scot-free.

Doesn't genocide imply that a peoples percentage of population would be reduced relative to those they accuse of genocide? If so, then it looks more like the Serbs were genocide for the so-called "genocide victims" make up an equal or greater percentage of Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo than before the war. Explain that. How about you list the percentages of Croats and Serbs in Croatia in 1991 and 2002?

How about you look up the percentages of Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia in 1991 versus today, or Kosovo?

What do you call the Serb population in Croatia being over 12.2% in 1991 but only 4.5% in the 2002 census?

I ask you, where the Jewish population rose in Europe, where they claimed being the victims of genocide - NOWHERE. So, how can you say "genocide" when the census results show the so-called people genocided have kept up or increased over those claimed to have committed genocide? It demonstrates to me that those whining genocide gave equal or greater (to losses of others) than what they took (victim wise).

Ethnic divisions: Croat 78%, Serb 12%, Muslim 0.9%, Hungarian 0.5%, Slovenian 0.5%, others 8.1% (1991)

Croat 89.6%, Serb 4.5%, other 5.9% (including Bosniak, Hungarian, Slovene, Czech, and Roma) (2001 census)

Croatia 1991-2001:

Croats 78% => 89%

Serbs 12% => 4.5%

So, an increase of a populations' percentage, to you, is “genocide”, but a marked decrease means the people were those who committed genocide. Are you poor at math?

Croatia’s and the international community’s screaming about “genocide” was only to mask to TRUE genocide of Serbs and making Croatia into a more ethnically pure state.

It was Tudjman's policy to bring them to Croatia or Hercegovina before the war to strenghten Croat's numbers in those parts. Rather than be in 3rd place to Serbs and Muslims, the Croat government thought they'd serve better in Croat strongholds or where the the population of Croats was competitive and could be made majority with a few percentage points of additional population. Here is a fellow Bosnian Croat complaining about the pressure on Croats, PARTICULARLY in the RS, to leave for Croatia, starting in 1990.

http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0503&L=justwatch-l&D=1&O=D&F=&S=&P=33610

Is this cardinal amnesia that cardinal Puljic suffers from - a contagious thing? Has it been forgotten that this exodus of the Bosnian Croats began even before the war did in Bosnia-Herzegovina? All those 'apartment & houses swapping', silent ethnic rearrangement operations with the blessing of Tudjman and the Catholic Church? When cardinal Puljic is crunching his exodus numbers today, is he including all those Bosnian Croats who left Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1990 and 1991, especially from what is today known as Republika Srpska, lured by the mighty 'One Nation - One Country' call from across the border? Anybody using 'ancestral homes' expressions back then was, in fact, considered anti-Croat, and 'constituent nation' expression was used almost exclusively to justify the creation of Herceg-Bosna and its aspirations to join greater Croatia. So when cardinal Puljic is using these expressions today to cry over the plight of the Bosnian Croats, without taking out the splinter from his eye first, it is in the most hypocritical manner. Today's plight of the Bosnian Croats does indeed have a lot to do with the policies of the Croatian government next door, past and present, as it is very easy to compare some other numbers, the numbers of zeros in sums of money Croatian government invests in Croatian communities, those in Herzegovina and those outside it. Mr. Barisic, please, take a look at those numbers, and see if you can find any related to a Croatian program of return or reconstruction in Republika Srpska: http://www.vlada.hr/Download/2003/07/30/057-10_b.pdf. These official documents of the Croatian government can be found at this address, under a link that clearly reads 'financial support for Croatian minorities': http://www.vlada.hr/Default.asp?ru=265&sid=&jezik=1. This year, Croatian programs and institutions in Mostar alone will receive Croatian government's support of close to a hundred million kunas, http://www.fena.ba/rubrika.html?fena_id=FMO74253&rubrika=BH, a huge part of it going to the Mostar (Croatian) University, whereas I don't see any numbers dedicated to, for example, grants and stipends to Croatian students in Banja Luka or Sarajevo, something that would encourage them to study or plan a future closer to their ancestral homes.
With respect,
Maja Lovrenovic, Bosnian Croat now living in Amsterdam

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