Croatia to compensate ‘wartime victims’

ZAGREB: The Croatian government on Thursday backed a bill on compensating the victims of sexual violence committed during the country’s independence war, which ended almost two decades ago.
“More than 20 years since the sexual violence was committed ... its victims, both men and women, will finally get the right to be treated with respect and the right for their suffering to be recognised,” deputy minister for veterans Vesna Nad told a government session.
Victims would be entitled to a one-time compensation payment of up to 20,000 euros ($21,800), depending on the severity of the crime, under the bill.
They would also be entitled to monthly allowances of some 320 euros, health care, rehabilitation, psychological counselling and free legal aid.
Nad called the compensatory measures an “answer to the failure of both the state and society” to protect and enable the victims’ rights over he past two decades.
The bill has still to be approved by parliament, which is expected to do so next month.
The number of sexual violence victims during the former Yugoslav republic’s 1991-1995 war of independence is estimated at some 2,500.
Most of them were women but some men, mostly those held in detention camps, also suffered sexual violence in the conflict which claimed some 20,000 lives.
Unlike other victims of the wars that tore the former Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s, in particularly members of the military, the victims of sexual violence have long been neglected and not only in Croatia.
Their overall number is estimated at between 20,000 and 50,000, mostly of them being Bosnian Muslim women who were raped during the 1992-1995 war there.
In Bosnia, they have since 2006, 11 years after the end of that country’s bloody war, to a pension of some 290 euros.
In Kosovo, the former Serbian province, they have the status of war victims, but due to budgetary restrains they receive no financial compensation.