Josip Boljkovac
Photo: Ronald Gorsic/Cropix
The 94 year old, Josip Boljkovac, was acquitted by the Zagreb County Court on Thursday 22 May of war crimes against civilians in the aftermath of WWII.
The 94-year old Boljkovac was accused that in the early May of 1945, as head of the Karlovac branch of the then Department of National Security (OZNA), which was the Tito-led Partisans’ security service, he had ordered the arrest and execution of 21 civilians from Duga Resa.
Judge Tomislav Jurisa handed down the Judgment, acquitting Boljkovac of the war crime while, in the same breath saying that “there is no doubt that the crime was committed but that there was no written order for the execution of the crime … not a single document leads to Boljkovac … it was simply a matter of crime committed by the system …which crimes have compromised the historically-affirmative antifascist battle…” reported Croatian HRT TV News 22 May 2014. The judge emphasised that Boljkovac was probably the last member of the WWII Partisan movement who has been processed for war crimes. “The court had a difficult task and we had to make sure that the whole burden of war crimes committed by members of the Partisan movement does not fall upon Josip Boljkovac, because that would be unjustified and impermissible in a democratic and civilised country such as Croatia …”.
The judge added that while “a certain degree of doubt about whether Boljkovac ordered the killing still exists, it is not enough to pronounce someone guilty”.
Anto Nobilo
Photo: Miro Soldic
Boljkovac’s attorney, Anto Nobilo, was happy with the judgment – why wouldn’t he be, he is and was a communist, and said that “this would have never have happened (prosecution of Boljkovac) had a former minister of internal affairs (meaning current leader of the leading opposition party HDZ, Tomislav Karamarko) not set his sights on becoming the leaders of the right-winged opposition and then organised masked special policemen, with a media entourage, to arrest a 92 year old man …that minister had abused his powers for political goals…”
Tomislav Karamarko
Photo: Anadolija
Tomislav Karamarko made a brief comment on Nobilo’s statement: “It would be flippant of me to comment on what Nobilo said, the good thing about this judgment is that in fact a system has been convicted.”
The State Attorney will appeal this decision to the Supreme Court.
“Thus this is a legal scandal because the [victorious] Partisans were the liberators …” Nobilo was also found to comment.
So, as far as Anto Nobilo and the communists/antifascists are concerned one does not prosecute old people, especially if they came from “liberating” forces that Partisans refer to themselves as being!
Oh my goodness, the Nazi hunters, including Simon Wiesenthal Centre, are bound to die in shame for having kept friendly company with Anto Nobilo – a lawyer who evidently promotes the type of justice where old people should not face the courts and answer for their crimes; many old people have been hunted down and prosecuted for crimes relating to the Holocaust.
Andrija Artukovic 1986 extradition
to communist Yugoslavia
If we turn the clock back a few decades we realise that the same Ante Nobilo, a communist Yugoslavia deputy public prosecutor in Croatia, was at the helm of the prosecution for Holocaust crimes against Andrija Artukovic in 1986, who was at the time in the ripe old age of 89, suffering dementia and brought to Croatia from the USA under extradition orders. Artukovic was sentenced to death and died in prison in 1988 and his burial place, if there is one, is not to this day known as a matter of communist order of the time.
So this pathetic excuse for a lawyer, Anto Nobilo, who had made it his business in 1980’s to prosecute old people with dementia for war crimes associated with the WWII Independent State of Croatia, without any regard to their inability to defend themselves, would now like us to take pity upon his 94 year old client, Josip Boljkovac, a communist Yugoslavia operative, because he is old and ill – but does not suffer from Dementia!
To make things worse it was the same Anto Nobilo who firmly stated in November 2011 that he knows who committed the murders his client Boljkovac was charged with and he now has the gall to be happy with the court’s finding that the “communist system” murdered them! What happened to the evidence about the murderer he said he had?
A grave injustice has been served in Zagreb on Thursday to the victims of communist crimes, if not for Nobilo’s comments regarding Boljkovac’s age then surely because the testimonies of living people who testified seeing Boljkovac “in the vicinity of the 1945 murderous action and arrests of innocent people” seem to have not weighed as much in the court as “no documents presented” seem to have! It would have been just and reasonable to find that the communists have most likely destroyed any documents relevant to the orders for the execution of the murders in 1945.
The communist system was found guilty of committing the murders of innocent people and system simply does not and did not exist without people! Let’s pray that the Croatian Supreme Court will have the courage of seeing that truth and deliver a verdict, which takes into account the clandestine operations of destroying evidence that were a second skin to the communist system made up of people. Josip Boljkovac may not be found as guilty of the murders on appeal but he should, I believe, at least be found guilty of having the knowledge of the murders and, hence, being an accessory after the fact! Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)