BRANKO MIHALJEVIC has been at the helm of the Central Military Archives since 2004Croatia will not be able to fully comply with the requests of the Hague tribunal prosecution pertaining to artillery documentation, because a part of this documentation has disappeared. The archive material the Hague prosecution is interested in was not kept in safes from 1996 to 2004, and at a dozen locations, mostly at Zvonimirova Street in Zagreb, but also scattered around the various Croatian Army corps from Karlovac, Osijek and Rijeka to Split, that is to say it was accessible to all, Nacional has learned from a source close to the Croatian justice department. Still, the course of the drafting of the requested documentation has to a large extent been reconstructed, some have already been submitted to the Hague tribunal's prosecution, but it is not known were the remainder of the requested documentation wound up.

After the Homeland War the military archives have never been kept at a single location, they were not well guarded, nor were they systematised. It was accessible to any agent of the Security and Information Service (SIS) who could easily have manipulated it depending on who might seek such a favour of them, and by all accounts these were the attorneys of the defence counsels who were close with the military secret services. The former Chief of General Staff, Petar Stipetic, also noticed the difficulty in collecting wartime documentation when he was a suspect before the Hague tribunal. Preparing himself for questioning by the Hague tribunal's investigators, he was hard put to locate documentation that was to be of use to him during the questioning, as much of the documentation was missing or scattered across many locations.

The missing artillery documentation produced by Croatian Army units and the military districts ahead of Operation Storm was supposed to be kept at the central military archive, while the other part of the documentation pertaining to commands and analysis of the Croatian Army Supreme Command was kept at its Directorate for Operational Affairs, Nacional has learned from justice department sources. The only people with access to the documentation needed for Croatia to comply with the request from the Hague tribunal, in both of these organisational units, where the members of the defence ministry's former Security and Information Service (SIS) which is now a part of the Military Intelligence Security Agency (VSOA).

Agents of the service would come to the Directorate for Operational Affairs, located at the military complex on Zagreb's Petar Kresimir IV Square, where they would pick up copies of the documents, while the original had to remain at the Directorate. Then the agents would declassify the documents and send them to Government's office responsible for cooperation with the Hague tribunal. The original copy of each document from the Directorate for Operational Affairs had, therefore, to remain in the archives. The situation with the central military archives is much more complex and problematic. As of 2004, the documentation of 300 military units, comprising 7,000 metres of archive material, has been kept at the new home of the Central Military Archives, a 1,800 square metre facility at the Croatian Military Academy. As of 2004, a part of the most valuable and politically most sensitive archive material has been kept in special safes.

And it has been established that several hundred original documents are in the private archives of officers and soldiers, or were simply destroyed, not because their content might have been compromising, but simply because they felt that it was "old paper" that only cluttered their homes. There is no doubt that Croatia is doing all it can to comply with the requests of the Hague prosecution, which, as we have learned, understands the problems related to locating the documentation, as it has been notified in great detail of the fact that the archival material was never systematically kept at one location. It is, however, very much an open question whether the Hague prosecution will award a passing grade to Croatia's cooperation if it is not established who in the chain of military command was the last link where precisely determined documentation went missing.