31 years passed since Croatian Defence Forces (HOS) general Blaz Kraljevic was killed in the town of Varda near Krusevo along with eight of his soldiers. No one was ever held accountable for his murder.
Blaz Kraljevic was one of the founders of HOS in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), he was actively involved in the defense against aggression at the very beginning. But very quickly he found himself in conflict with the then Croatian political leaders from the ranks of HDZ BiH.
The fight for a united BiH
Kraljevic was against the division of BiH, and after the meeting of Mate Boban and Radovan Karadzic was held in Graz and their agreement on the truce of the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) and the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), and the territorial demarcation of the Croatian Community Herceg-Bosna and the RS, he issued a proclamation in to which he called on Croats and Bosniaks not to accept the betrayal of BiH.
Conflict with Boban
After the HOS members made great progress by liberating parts of the municipality of Trebinje, Mate Boban invited BlazKraljevic to a meeting in Mostar on August 9th, 1992, in order to agree on future military operations against Serbian forces.
Vinko Martinovic “Stela”, one of the HOS commanders in Mostar, accompanied General Kraljevic to the meeting place. Bruno Stojic, Minister of Defense of Croatian CommunityHerceg-Bosna, also participated in the meeting. During that meeting, Mate Boban asked Kraljevic to take care of the disarmament of the Bosniaks within the HOS.
Kraljevic refused, and on his way back from the meeting, Kraljevic and eight HOS members (Gordan Culjak, Sahdo Delic, Ivan Granic, Rasim Krasniqi, Osman Maksic, Mario Medic, Vinko Primorac and Marko Stjepanovic) fell into a prearranged ambush of the Convicts’ Battalion, a special unit of the HVO.
A crime without punishment
After the skirmish and liquidations, the bodies were transferred to Siroki Brijeg, and later to Croatia, where they were discovered by the Croatian police. The reason why the bodies were transported to Dalmatia is not known, but the assumption was that they tried to hide them by throwing them into the sea.
Kraljevic was buried in his birthplace on August 13th, 1992. After that, the HOS in BiH collapsed, and soon a conflict broke out between BiH‘s Croats and Bosniaks, which lasted until February 1994. Some of the people associated with the murder of Kraljevic were arrested, but they were never tried for that crime, Klix.ba reports.
E.Dz.
