ZAGREB, 7 Dec, 2021 - The Serb National Council (SNV) said on Tuesday that Zagreb Mayor Tomislav Tomašević would pay his respects to Aleksandra Zec and her family as the first representative of the City of Zagreb to do so in the past 30 years.

The commemoration is being organised by the Antifascist League of Croatia and the SNV on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the murder of members of an ethnic Serb minority family, Aleksandra, Marija and Mihajlo Zec. 

Deputy Prime Minister Boris Milošević, and SNV president Milorad Pupovac will also attend the commemoration.

"This crime is one of the most shameful chapters in recent Croatian history. The perpetrators were all members of special police forces who were acquitted due to procedural errors. Croatian institutions protected them and sent an intimidating message to Croatian citizens and shamed Croatia and the City of Zagreb," a press release said.

Two surviving family members Dušan and Gordana Zec were paid one-off compensation in 2004 and that is the only support they received from the state.

Members of a special police unit under Tomislav Merčep came to the home of the Zec family in Zagreb's Tresnjevka district shortly after 11 pm on 7 December 1991 and shot dead 38-year-old Mihajlo Zec as he tried to escape. Marija and Aleksandra (12), who witnessed the murder, were then taken in a van to the Adolfovac mountain lodge on Mount Medvednica, overlooking Zagreb, where they were killed and the mountain lodge was burned down. The perpetrators were Munib Suljić, Siniša Rimac, Igor Mikola, Nebojša Hodak and Snježana Živanović, according to the press release.

One of the murderers, Siniša Rimac, later become the then Defence Minister Gojko Šušak's bodyguard and was even decorated by President Franjo Tuđman.

Aleksandra, Marija i Mihajlo Zec are buried in Gornja Dragotinja (near Prijedor, northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina), Mihajlo's native town.

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ZAGREB, 20 Aug, 2021 - The head of the Democratic Alliance of Vojvodina Croats (DSHV), Tomislav Žigmanov, on Friday condemned the opening in Subotica of an office of the Captain Dragan Foundation, run by convicted war criminal Dragan Vasiljković alias Captain Dragan.

The office has been set up in the centre of Subotica, a year after that foundation established its branch in that city in the north of the province of Vojvodina, and the purpose of the foundation is to "assist the Serbs unfairly convicted and imprisoned in the countries of the region," that is in Serbia's neoghbourhood.

In September 2017, Split County Court sentenced Vasiljković to 13.5 years for crimes committed against prisoners of war in the Croatian towns of Knin and Glina during the 1991-95 Homeland War. Born in Belgrade and holding the citizenship of both Serbia and Australia, Vasiljkovic was arrested in 2006 in Australia where he lived under a false name and worked as a golf coach.

He was extradited to Croatia in July 2015 and denied the charges from the very start of the trial. Given that the eight years and nine months he had spent in extradition prison in Australia were credited to his sentence, Vasiljković's sentence expired in March 2020 when he was released from prison in Lepoglava and transferred to the Bajakovo crossing on the border with Serbia and banned from entering the European Economic Area for a period of 20 years.

Addressing the press on the topic of captain Dragan's foundation's office in Subotica, Žigmanov said that he was worried but not surprised.

"We are registering more and more activities by convicted war criminals and the downplaying of their verdicts, their rehabilitation in the public and their influence on public opinion creation," Žigmanov said.

He recalled that ICTY convict Vojislav Šešelj purchased a house to open the office of his Serb Radical Party in the town of Hrtkovci, a byword for the persecution of Vojvodina Croats in the 1990s.

Upon his transfer from Croatia to Serbia, Vasiljković engaged in political activities and ran in parliamentary elections.

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