A Croatian court convicted an opposition lawmaker of war crimes on Friday, but he vowed in a video statement to avoid imprisonment.
Branimir Glavas is Croatia’s first senior politician to be held responsible for atrocities committed during the 1991 Serbo-Croat war. As a legislator, however, he has parliamentary immunity, and was not required to attend court proceedings.
The Zagrab court sentenced him on Friday to 10 years and asked parliament to lift his immunity so he could be arrested to serve his time in prison. The earliest the chamber might vote on the issue would be next week. Glavas’ lawyer Drazen Matijevic said he would appeal the ruling.
Glavas released a video statement saying he “won’t give them the satisfaction” of arresting him — amid media speculation that he has fled the country. He had been detained when the trial opened several years ago, but was released in 2007 when he was elected to parliament.
During the 1991 war, Glavas was a member of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union and formed a paramilitary unit in eastern Croatian town of Osijek, where he was seen as a warlord.
Judge Zeljko Horvatovic said Glavas ordered the detention, torture and killing of six Serb civilians, whose bodies were dumped in a river.
Glavas also failed to prevent the killings of two other Serbs, one of whom had been forced to drink battery acid before being sprayed with bullets, the judge said.
Five members of the Osijek paramilitary unit were also convicted and sentenced to prison terms of five to eight years.
Glavas has denied committing crimes, saying he only defended his town during the six-month war that started when Croatian Serbs took up arms to rebel against the country’s independence from Yugoslavia.
Thousands of Croats were killed by Serb rebels, but Croats also committed crimes against Serbs.
Croatia had long refused to try its own for war crimes, insisting Serbs were the sole perpetrators of atrocities. But as the country moves to adopt Western standards in hopes of joining the EU by 2011, it has started prosecuting Croatians along with Serbs.
BEYOND WASHINGTON: Although historically the US has been the partner of choice for military exercises, Jakarta has been trying to diversify its partners, an analyst said Indonesia’s first joint military drills with Russia this week signal that new Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto would seek a bigger role for Jakarta on the world stage as part of a significant foreign policy shift, analysts said. Indonesia has long maintained a neutral foreign policy and refuses to take sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict or US-China rivalry, but Prabowo has called for stronger ties with Moscow despite Western pressure on Jakarta. “It is part of a broader agenda to elevate ties with whomever it may be, regardless of their geopolitical bloc, as long as there is a benefit for Indonesia,” said Pieter
US ELECTION: Polls show that the result is likely to be historically tight. However, a recent Iowa poll showed Harris winning the state that Trump won in 2016 and 2020 US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris courted voters angered by the Gaza war while former US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump doubled down on violent rhetoric with a comment about journalists being shot as the tense US election campaign entered its final hours. The Democratic vice president and the Republican former president frantically blitzed several swing states as they tried to win over the last holdouts with less than 36 hours left until polls open on election day today. Trump predicted a “landslide,” while Harris told a raucous rally in must-win Michigan that “we have momentum — it’s
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
TIGHT CAMPAIGN: Although Harris got a boost from an Iowa poll, neither candidate had a margin greater than three points in any of the US’ seven battleground states US Vice President Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live (SNL) in the final days before the election, as she and former US president and Republican presidential nominees make a frantic last push to win over voters in a historically close campaign. The first lines Harris spoke as she sat across from Maya Rudolph, their outfits identical, was drowned out by cheers from the audience. “It is nice to see you Kamala,” Harris told Rudolph with a broad grin she kept throughout the sketch. “And I’m just here to remind you, you got this.” In sync, the two said supporters
RSS