Croatian leader tries to ease tensions over war crimes law

There is no question that Serbia wasthe aggressor in the Balkans wars, the aims for a greater Serbia are well documented! Now they would be the victims too? I ask anybody to explain to me how Serbs who were 12%of Croatia's population in 1990 took by force over 30% of Croatian territory and still call that anything but agression! No, a spade is a spade. The guilty mist pay for their crimes and agressor states are doomed to be pariah states until they come to terms with their crimes.

Maybe we should ask the Khymer Rouge to sue their victims or Al-Queda could always take the families of the 9/11 victims to court over the death of Bin Laden. Better still, if there are any old Nazis left, maybe they could take Israel to court over their own 'pain and suffering'?
There are too many fools running Europe- both politically and also in the media and the claim that Europe is 'civilised' is a joke. The Serbs were the aggressors in the Balkan, and not for the first time mind you, and any attempt to rewrite this hard historical fact is nothing short of revisionism and pro-genocidal propaganda.

Its amazing how some Serbs think they had the 'right' to succeed from HR. If you want to talk about 'getting your facts straight', under the Constitution of SFRJ, each Republic had the 'right' to succeed if it wanted to-- politically it may have been another story but under pure legal terms it was well within its rights. No such legal rights were applied to minorities in those Republics.
And if we take Serb thinking to its logical end, then Croats in Vojvodina and BiH have the right to succeed as well.

It's amazing that Serbia is still up to it's dirty tricks again. The greater serbia dream is completely gone and so is it's attempt to occupy the coastal/sea which is a tourist money making haven. Serbia has no sea which is what the always wanted. Oh well, as the saying goes "Nemate More".

Serbia throughout the 90's was a pariah state, isolated and under sanctions, the intelligentsia left in droves. The only support came from other black sheep states- China, Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, Russia etc.. With friends like these we hardly needed enemies, bit we had those too! First the Slovenes and Croats, followed by the western Europeans, then South American states, Canada, and the USA. Now it's easy to say what makes the US and EU the moral compass and Russia the black sheep, but there is a history of democracy and freedom those countries have that lends them credibility; case in point how many Serbs moved to Germany compared to Bulgaria! No we have a dark legacy but we have heavy pride. Most Serbs did not believe the stories on the western news, Srebrenica was Turkish propaganda until recently. The transition to becoming a progressive democracy means taking ownership of our past. We did not all support Milosevic but we did not stop him. The dream of greater Serbia was hypnotic and we believed so many lies that only now our media admits to. We will recover but the sooner we accept our role as the aggressors the better. Crimes were admitted by all sides, but we must acknowledge our own

The secret Serb genocide roll call- almost 800,000 Serb Muslims 'disappear' into thin air between 1868-1914, 200,000 Albanians killed by Serbs in the Second Balkan War of 1913, 150,000 Bosnian Muslims 'disappear' between 1918-1924, Croatia's population 'shrinks' by 8.5% between 1918-1941, During WWII according to Yugo figures, the number of Croats 'shrinks' by 14.5%; 1942, Serbia declared 'Jew Free by Germans, 1945-1948- 420,000 ethnic Germans 'disappear' from Serbia, 1944-1946, 180,000 Albanians killed by Serbs, during the same period, 110,000 Hungarians, 20,000 Bulgarians, 12,000 Rumanians, 10,000 Montenegrins, 8000 Macedonians and about 5000 Ukrainians and many others killed by Serb forces.
1991, Serbia attacks Slovenia & Croatia, 33,000 dead all up, 1992, Serbs attack Bosnia, 120,000 dead in total, 1999, Serbia attacks Kosovo-Metohija, 50,000 dead all up.
If I were a Serb, I would not be talking about other people being 'nazis'.

"To say that Serbs committed all the war crimes in Balkans wars is not accurate and frankly ridiculous"...that statement would be true except for three important facts.
1. There is not a country, race, ethnic group, religious minority or ethno-religious sub-group in the Balkans that in the past 150 years has not at the very least had some quarrel with the Serbs...I wonder what the mathematical probability is that everyone else in the Balkans is evil yet one group, in this case, the Serbs are always somehow supposedly innocent?
2. When you start a war there are always consequences -- this is known as 'cause and effect'-- and in the minds of most rational human beings, those that start wars are always more guilty than those who react and try and exact some form of revenge for being attacked/oppressed or wiped out.
3. Not one of those peoples that the Serbs have attacked, oppressed or brutalised have ever launched or even dreamt of launching an attack on Serbia itself.

I will agree with your comments, Serbia was lead astray by Milosevic but the majority of Serbs did not see him as a leader but rather a dictator. I served JNA, I saw limited action on the Croatian front and I can say for certain that crimes were committed by everyone. The difference my Croat co-workers point at is that those crimes occurred in Croatia and as a result of some pretty brutal military action on the part of the JNA. We used to say, "don't send a soldier to do what a shell can do" and if you talk to people that were in Vukovar this was the mindset in the early days. We shelled Vulovar until it was rubble and told the world it was to preserve Yugoslavia. Then 6 days after we took the town, I saw the Croat flag torn down and replaced by a Serbian flag. Now a handful of Macedonians, Montenegrins, and even Albanians were part of our brigada and demanded the true Jugo flag be raised but that never happened. I can tell you this because I saw it. I always felt like a Yugoslav, that's how I was raised but those weeks we spent patrolling I never felt like it was anything but an occupation. I can also tell you that we found tanks with dead men inside. The Croats waited for our tanks and lured them into tight quarters then dropped grenades from roof tops where our guns couldn't get at. Once disabled, they would drop a lit Molotov into the tank and let the men burn to death. True brutality I thought. Now I think, wow, we sent tanks into neighborhoods of a town where we knew the locals.

In the past 1400 years, every single country or ethnic group that has attacked and/or occupied Croatia today either no longer exists or is festering in some historical sludge pit- the Avars, the Franks, Byzantium, Venice, Hungary, the Mongols, Turkey, Austria, Yugoslavia and of course Serbia.
Some would say this is a coincidence, I however think it is closer to karma.

In 584 AD we came to our present-day homeland as part of the marauding and nomadic Avaric Confederation, and we saw what no one else saw, we understood what no else one understood and we felt what no-one else felt the moment we set foot on Lijepa Nasa - and no-one, least of all those that we consider to be beneath us, will ever tell us how we will live on our land.