Orders, decorations, and medals of Croatia

The Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was a WW2 Nazi allied entity whose Ustasha regime established and operated death camps for Serbs, Jews, and Roma.

The 19th anniversary of the death of Croatia's first President, Franjo Tudjman, was marked on Monday by the unveiling of a more than four-metre-high monument in Zagreb, near the National University Library and the Vatroslav Lisinski concert hall.

Several events are being held in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina on Thursday and Friday to commemorate the death of former Bosnian Croat general Slobodan Praljak, a year after he swallowed poison in the courtroom while the verdict finding him guilty of war crimes was being read out.

A Zagreb court reduced former Croatian Defence Council officer Marko Radic’s sentence for crimes against humanity because the Croatian legal system does not recognise the concept of a ‘joint criminal enterprise’.

In an interview with Croatia's public broadcaster HRT, Zeljko Komsic said, a day after he was elected, that"Croatia had "twice broken a convention on the law of the sea."

The case involves Croatian military planes bombing Serbian refugees on August 9, 1995 near Banacki Petrovac in Bosnia and Herzegovina, when nine people - four children and six adults - were killed and 50 were injured or badly wounded.

Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandic said that a big monument to Croatia's first President, Franjo Tudjman, will be finished by the 19th anniversary of his death in December.

Croatia's Serbian National Council, SNV, and the Serbian cultural association "Prosvjeta" - joint organisers of the Ojkaca Singing Festival in the town of Petrinja, due on August 25, have written on Wednesday to UNESCO's Cultural Heritage Protection Committee, accusing Croatian veteran organisations of trying to prevent the event.

This Croatian military-police offensive took place in early August 1995, and also resulted in more than 200,000 Serbs being expelled from Croatia.

Of the victims, more than 60 percent were civilians, of which about three quarters over 60 years of age, Veritas said.

The report describes Croatia as a country fostering a climate of hatred and intimidation, and one "increasingly moving to the right" - while ruled by "a radical political discourse where the keywords are 'enemy, homeland, nation, and, treason'."