After an exchange of letters with Ivo Banac, Ranko Helebrant tendered his resignation on 1 July from the post of deputy executive director The Croatian Helsinki Committee (Hrvatski helsinski odbor, HHO) has for months now been gripped by the greatest single crisis since its inception, starting with the departure last year of its long-time president Zarko Puhovski, and which culminated with the release of an open letter by former employee Ranko Helebrant, who accused the current president Ivo Banac of leading the HHO to the brink of bankruptcy, that its further existence is in question as a result of that, especially because many prominent HHO members have left the HHO over the past few months, or have frozen their membership in the organisation.

"After almost 11 years of working at the Croatian Helsinki Committee For Human Rights I have been brought to a situation in which I must leave it. The underlying reason for this decision is the truly insufferable situation and atmosphere present in this non-governmental organisation that should concern itself with the violations of the human rights of other citizens in Croatia. The arrival of the current president in November of 2007, however, marked the beginning of the downward spiral of the HHO, which, I fear, shall be hard to stop without a radical intervention. (...) This situation has existed for several years now and the employees were often in a position in which they received their wages late. These shortcomings were overcome by a knack for finding projects, so that in the end all of the wages were paid out. The situation changed significantly at the beginning of this year following the president's decision to suspend the existing projects, much less to apply for new ones, whereby we might arrive at the funds necessary to continue the work of the Office of the HHO.

He has thereby not only endangered the livelihood of all of the employees, but has also brought us to a situation in which we will likely have to reimburse funds taken for obligations undertaken, but not fulfilled", reads the opening of the letter sent by Ranko Helebrant. Banac responded to the contents of this letter, in which Helebrant tried, in good faith, to warn of the necessity of resolving the numerous problems facing the HHO, only before the members of the HHO executive committee, not to the author of the letter, and after Helebrant again sent a letter which Banac again failed to respond to, he decided to come out in public with the issues. Besides the catastrophic financial situation at the HHO, which, according to the Helebrant, had 350 thousand kuna of unpaid debts as of 1 July, and employees' wages for April were paid out as late as on 15 July, Helebrant has also accused Banac of exceedingly authoritarian behaviour, of creating an atmosphere of mistrust among the employees, of being self-willed in adopting key decisions that concern the HHO, and of privatising the HHO official vehicle.

Ivo Banac, HHO president since November of 2007, has, with his leadership, brought the HHO to its most dire straits ever "The president tried to keep all the strings in his own hands, and continues to do so now, behaving like a private owner, and not like one chosen among equals." Banac has told Nacional that "he did not wish to comment this 'topic'". He also declined to go on the record for Radio 101, and his statement was carried only by the H-Alter.org portal: "This is not the first time that Mr. Ranko Helebrant has written a letter to the members of the HHO, and he has received the same answer to each and every one of his letters: that his accusations are not true, and that is the end of that as far as I am concerned!" In that same commentary it reads that Banac refused to respond because he "did not wish to drop to Mr. Helebrant's level", and added: "I know that I am sure in my position." It is indicative that besides the Internet portal H-Alter.org, which on 16 July first ran Ranko Helebrant's letter, the net.hr portal which carried the news, and Zagreb's Radio 101, which covered the story in its leading news program Aktualni 101 this Sunday, no one else in the press considered the story of any value to the Croatian public.

Zarko Puhovski, HHO president from 2000 to 2007, also withdrew from HHO membership in May Zarko Puhovski, former HO president, who served at the post from December of 2000 to May of 2007, confirmed, however, the validity of Ranko Helebrant's claims: "Everything that Mr. Helebrant has said, unfortunately, is true. I am in a difficult position insofar as I, as the president of many years, also share responsibility for the poor financial situation that started about three years ago. Secondly, I also share the responsibility for the promoting the inactivity of a majority of the membership of the Helsinki Committee, because I took too many of the obligations on my own shoulders and everyone else felt good while I worked, because they did not have to. Things are now, however, much worse in many aspects. The new leadership has proclaimed a renewal of the Helsinki Committee that is nowhere to be seen. But, since I no longer participate I the work of the Committee, I cannot speak of details. What I can say is that in the six and a half years that I was at the helm of the HHO we did not have a single squabble in the Committee, and the relations between the employees were undoubtedly better than they are now. Things have gone so far that the office, which previously employed seven people, will as of 1 September have practically one or two employees in Zagreb."

Veljko Miljevic tendered his resignation to the post of vice-president the day Ivo Banac was elected HHO president

Nacional has received confirmation of the fact that at least two more employees intend to leave the HHO from several sources, which only confirms the seriousness of the situation. What is more, we have received confidential information that one employee on Monday 21 July was handed a warning prior to dismissal paper. Asked how many people had left the HHO during his mandate, Puhovski said that only three people had left in those six and a half years, none of them as a result of a dispute or squabble. That, however, cannot be said of the situation during the mandate of Ivo Banac. Over the past few months resignations have been tendered to posts within the HHO by Tin Gazivoda, Zdravko Bazdan and Veljko Miljevic, who froze his membership, while the, until recently, executive director Srdan Dvornik has left the HHO office, as did the author of the letters Ranko Helebrant, who previously also served at the post of acting HHO executive director.

Srdan Dvornik, who had worked at the HHO since early 2005, had told Banac he would resign back in mid January of this year, but remained on in full capacity right up to the end of March. He says that the financial crisis at the HHO has been going on from prior to his arrival in January of 2005: "When I came to the HHO, I did not find a single more permanent source of financing, i.e. a donator who would finance the HHO as an organisation that provides direct assistance to the victims of human rights violations. That is why I understood my engagement at the post of HHO executive director as a kind of crisis management and was involved during those three years in looking for sources of funding for the functioning of the HHO. When Banac came into the post of president and when the recovery committee was set up, which was initially made up of him, Danijel Zderic, Puhovski, Vlatko Silobrcic and Dragomir Vojnic, I grasped that no one was asking me anything, nor were they consulting with me as executive director over the past three years, so that I might indicate where the problems were. I have the impression that they came to some conclusions after observing the matter from the outside, without having checked on the situation from the inside. The employees were entirely shut out of these meetings, instead of conducting a joint analysis and debate on what we had done, what we had not done and what we could do for the survival of the HHO." Dvornik also explained the rule that exists in the HHO whereby employees, who are paid for their work, cannot also be HHO members, and that those who are members of the HHO or the HHO executive committee cannot be remunerated for their work. Puhovski, for example, has never received a single kuna for his many years of prominent engagement at the HHO, just like Zdravko Bazdan, until recently the vice-president and head of the HHO branch in Dubrovnik.

Srdan Dvornik announced that he would resign from the post of executive director in January of 2008, and stayed on until the end of March

Zdravko Bazdan was unwilling to discuss the reasons for his resignation or to comment the latest situation in the HHO: "These kinds of shocks do us no credit, but I would decline to comment. I have been with the HHO since December of 1993 and tendered my resignation to the post of deputy president precisely because of what has been going on as of late. I announced my resignation at a session of the executive committee that preceded the plenum and tendered the resignation to the post of vice-president in writing prior to the plenum. I have remained a member as the HHO is a part of me, and of all those who bear democracy and human rights in their hearts. Since the inception of the HHO in April of 1993, besides Ivan Zvonimir Cicak, the first president and co-founder of the HHO, Zarko Puhovski has, of all the members and the former HHO presidents, done the most for democracy and the promotion and protection of human rights in Croatia. At the last plenum of the HHO, at which I was not present, the members of the Committee behaved unfairly towards Puhovski, who had been at the helm of the organisation for six and a half years and who gave his resignation in the middle of the plenum and left the session."

Tin Gazivoda tendered his resignation to the post of HHO executive committee member in May

Attorney Veljko Miljevic, who was a prominent member of the HHO and who served from 2003 to 2007 at the post of vice-president, said that he recently left the organisation precisely because of his disagreement with president Banac: "Professor Banac has objections towards me because of my engagement in the Glavas case. Even thought the executive committee said that I was in the right, because it was my duty, constitutionally, as an attorney to undertake the defence, and I froze my membership precisely so that it would no longer be held at issue because of my legal representation of Branimir Glavas. Besides, I find nothing that motivates me to being in an organisation headed by Ivo Banac. Some people have spoken to me privately and in secrecy to state their dissatisfaction with the situation in the HHO. We have not had this kind of situation since 1998." Miljevic underlines the personal engagement of former executive directors Tin Gazivoda and Srdan Dvornik, who succeeded in finding sources of funding for the functioning of the HHO office by taking part in various projects and who managed to function without intervention on the part of the Government.

Zdravko Bazdan resigned from the post of HHO vice-president on 18 May

"We did not want to accept money from the Government, regardlkess of the fact that even Deputy Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor once offered help, because we would then have brought into question the independence of our work as a non-governmental organisation. Instead we rather two years ago decided to accept small donations from companies with clean operations. Professor Banac has an entirely different position in that regard. One the one had he has stated that there is funding and that he has seen to that, and on the other had the situation in the office has never been worse. This kind of situation and the behaviour of Ivo Banac has led over the past six months to the departures of five or six of the most prominent figures, who led the HHO over the past 10 years, which, in my opinion, will inevitably lead to the shutting down of the Committee, at the least under this kind of leadership", Miljevic added.

The underlying objection in Helebrant's letter to Banac also concerns doing away with or inactivity on projects that were the chief source of funding for the work of the HHO over recent years. By way of various projects, such as the most recent once like "Croatian Prison System Monitoring", "Human Rights School for Secondary School Pupils", various summer schools and seminars on human rights protection, the HHO was able to continue its work and in the direct protection of human rights, i.e. activism, especially since the interest of donators for the direct protection of human rights had dropped to a minimum as of late. The need for that kind of activism still exists and that is why a greater degree of resourcefulness is required to secure funding targeted to that.

The HHO, for example, in early 2006 concluded a contract with the National Foundation for the Development of Civil Society that it would receive 350 thousand kuna of institutional support a year over the next three years, but that only covered 7-8 percent of their needs, and that contract expires this year. The fundamental objection Helebrant has towards Banac is the lack of a strategy to find funding for the work of the HHO. The issue of a financial crisis at the HHO had already emerged by the spring of this year. Funding then came suddenly from an unknown source. Banac himself at the Committee's plenum announced that the HHO had received 160 thousand kuna, but did not expand on where the funds had come from, even thought the operations of the HHO should be transparent. That is why there were doubts and speculation as to who had donated the money. The list of donators can be seen on the HO official web site, but it does not show when the last donations were given or in what amount and if the donators continue to finance the HHO.