Dayton Accord Compliance

Re “Lack of Arrests Undercuts Tribunal,” March 2: The Times reports that NATO troops encountered Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic but made no effort to detain him. On Dec. 28, 1995, Dario Kordic, a Bosnian Croat political leader, indicted as a mass murderer, had breakfast 12 feet away from a table of European police officers in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The officers were sent to Bosnia to help reestablish a justice system.

Ignored at the Rome summit meeting in February was a violation of a clause in the Dayton accord which calls for a commission to preserve national monuments. The commission is authorized to act upon petitions to designate as national monuments property of great importance to a group of people with common cultural, historic, religious or ethnic heritage. When property is designated as a national monument, the entities will make every effort to take appropriate legal, technical, financial and other measures to protect and conserve the national monument and refrain from taking deliberate actions which might damage it. The government of Croatia has razed all traces of sites calling attention to atrocities committed by the Germans and the “Independent State of Croatia,” an ally of Hitler’s Germany during World War II.

It was at Jasenovac, the largest of 22 death camps in Yugoslavia, that over 600,000 Croats, Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and others were massacred. Now Croatian President Franjo Tudjman is trying to obscure their Nazi past by renaming the Jasenovac site as a “memorial to all Croat war victims.” Zagreb publicist Slavko Goldstain has lodged a protest with Tudjman. Goldstain has warned Tudjman that court proceedings would be instituted against him for desecrating a memorial to the victims of the Croatian Nazi-fascist regime.

Why have the Western media (this side of the Atlantic) ignored this ploy by Tudjman?

VAL RODRIGUEZ

Signal Hill