Human Rights – 2005
2005
The newspaper, The Independent, interviewed a Serb refugee trying to return to the family home in the Knin area. Dragoslav Dupor had taken his wife, three children and grandchild and fled by car into Serbia when the government of Croatia attacked the area where he lived. Ten years later, in 2005, they had not yet been able to get their house back. The house had been sold to a Croat family by the Government of Croatia. Through the “Agency for Mediation in Real Estate” (APN) the Dupor family home had been sold using forged power of attorney paperwork years earlier.
Formed in 1997, the APN spent EUR200m buying over 8,000 Serb homes in Krajina and Slavonia. Those in charge of APN admitted that organized crime members and corrupt government officials bought and sold homes that didnÕt belong to them for an extended period. Much of the money went into private pockets, as families moved into their new homes purchased with fraudulent documents.
Goatti, the newest leader of APN, told investigators that as many as half of the 8,380 Serb homes sold to APN were fraud. Pupovac, another investigator says that the number is closer to 90 percent fraud. In all, thousands of houses of Serb refugees were bought by the Government of Croatia and sold to new Croatian families using fraudulent paperwork – only one arrest was made at the APN.1
A senior Croatian diplomat tells The Independent that “there are reasonable grounds for believing” that the swindle of Serbian homes in Croatia was deliberate and part of a “refined method of ethnic cleansing.” Out of the 600,000 Serbs that lived in Croatia before the war, in 2005 only 200,000 remained.2