Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina

The detainees were tied together with wire and made to stand in a line, and then their captors started to execute them with shots in the back.

Bosnia's main Bosniak and Croat parties have finally struck a breakthrough deal on how to rule the ethnically-divided southwestern city of Mostar, paving the way for the first local elections to be held there since 2008. 

Fadil Novalic, the caretaker Prime Minister of Bosnia's Federation entity, was detained Thursday overnight by the state law enforcement agency SIPA together with the head of the Civil Protection and the owner of a private company as part of an investigation into the purchase of allegedly overpriced Chinese respirators. 

Ivo Tomasevic, secretary-general of the Bishops' Conference, the permanent assembly of Catholic bishops in Bosnia and Herzegovina, told BIRN on Friday that a mass to commemorate the killings of Croatian Nazi-allied troops and civilians by the Yugoslav Partisans at the end of World War II will not be cancelled despite condemnation from politicians, anti-fascist activists and many public figures.

'Defenders of the homeland'

He recalled how the unknown soldier then told his father: "Turn around and look at your house one last time."

Alija Konjhodzic never saw his father again.

After the arrest, he went to the military police station to try to find out why his father had been taken.

But Croats are reluctant to do this backbreaking work and local farmers usually employ pickers from neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially from its southern Herzegovina region - mostly Bosnian Croats with dual citizenship.

Amid a row in Bosnia over whether aid was being sent to the country on a selective basis, Hungary on Thursday sent a plane load of 200,000 masks and 10,000 protective suits.

Their real goal is maintenance of the political status quo, which allows them to stay in power, manage their patronage networks and avoid prosecution.

While most of the Croat population in Bosnia and Herzegovina would support the creation of a separate Croat entity, or even secession, the elites would lose too much to genuinely support such a policy.

Croatian media reported that Split county court found former Croatian Defence Council fighters Marinko Maric and Zeljko Rodin guilty of war crimes against Bosniak civilians and prisoners of war held at detention camps in the Western Herzegovina area from July to September 1993.