EBRD To Finance Croatian Agriculture, Tourism

Zagreb, August 18, 2004 - The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) said it would lend 71.4 million euro ($88 million) to Croatia's agribusiness jointly with local commercial bank Zagrebacka Banka (ZABA).

Under a separate loan deal, the EBRD would provide a further 10 million euro credit line to Croatian banking group Nova Banka, which is to be on-lent to small and medium companies operating in the tourism sector and related industries.

"A joint risk-sharing facility worth up to 71.4 million euro - of which the EBRD portion is 25 million euro - will make loans available for the 2004/2005 crop season," the EBRD said in a statement.

Croatia's farming sector was badly hit by draught last year and fresh lending is much needed, according to the EBRD.

The facility, now in its third year, is based on the concept of warehouse-receipt financing. The EBRD is working with the Government of Croatia on a warehouse receipt law, which will simplify the procedures for owners of farm commodities to use them as collateral for loans, and thus gain access to working capital.

The EBRD and ZABA, the biggest Croatian bank in terms of assets, which is owned by the Italian bank UniCredito Italiano and the German insurance company Allianz, have been working together since 1995.

The 10 million euro tourism loan will be extended for a period of eight years. The project aims to support development of the tourism industry in the country by improving access to long-term lending for small and medium companies in the tourist industry.
Source: SeeNews

http://www.southeasteurope.org/subpage.php?sub_site=2&id=12518&head=hl

Croatia confident on genocide case

ZAGREB -- Monday – International law expert, Ivo Josipolic, said that Croatia would not have filed charges of genocide against Serbia-Montenegro if they did not feel that they had a valid and strong case.

Radoslav Stojanovic, who is in charge of coordinating Serbia-Montenegro’s defense case, recently said that the charges would not hold up in court.

Croatian Justice Minister ,Vesna Skare Ozbolt, would not comment on Stojanovic’s claims, but said that dropping the charges is currently not an option.

http://www.b92.net/english/news/index.php?&nav_category=&nav_id=29506&order=priority&style=headlines

Gerald Warner commentary in The Scotsman

To: Letterr_ts@scotsman.com
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004
Subject: Gerald Warner commentary

My letter to the e-mail address I had for The Scotsman came back
undeliverable, so I went directly to their web site and wrote the whole
thing over in their "letters to Editor" message. Keep this in mind in
case anyone else wants to write to them.
Hilda

The Scotsman
Dear Editor:

One would have to be hard pressed to find a better, more historically
correct commentary than the one by Gerald Warner in the Scotsman on
Sunday 8 Aug.

The response from a Serb, Mr. Dorich of Los Angeles, had the typical
exaggerations regarding the numbers of Serb victims in various wars.
Worse, Mr. Dorich could not even keep his dates straight, by writing that
Serbia's king was killed three years prior to the killing in 1914 of
Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Serb, precipitating
WWI. Fact is, the Serb (Yugoslav) king Alexander was assassinated in
Marseilles in 1934, a full twenty years later, and not by, as he states,
a Croatian, but by Vlada Gheorghieff , a Macedonian revolutionary. He
mentions that the Congress of Berlin (1876) gave Austria the right to
keep Bosnia as a protectorate for 44 years and "when it became time to
return Bosnia to the Serbs, Austria and the Archduke refused". Simple
arithmetic shows that it would have been 1920 not 1914 for Austria to
give up the protectorate of Bosnia - which by the way was not part of
Serbia previous to the Ottoman Turk conquest.

Furthermore, Mr. Dorich omits mentioning that king Alexander abolished
the constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes shortly
after the assassination in 1928 of the six Croat leaders in the Belgrade
Parliament and he then renamed the country "Yugoslavia" in 1929,
establishing a royal dictatorship. Serbia's heavy, oppressive hand was
felt not only by Croats but by all the other south Slav nations cobbled
together into this Yugoslavia after WWI.

Sincerely,

Hilda M. Foley
National Federation of Croatian Americans
13272 Orange Knoll
Santa Ana, CA 92705, USA
714 832-0289

Men : CROATIA 34-ICELAND 30

14 Aug. 2004

ATHENS, 14 August - World champions Croatia defeated Iceland in their opening game in the Olympic tournament 34-30 (halftime 16-12).
Croatia was superior to Iceland throughout the greater part of the match but for the first 20 minutes of the game both teams were very close.
Croatia started to widen the gap using their strong defence, good offensive combinations and taking advantage of any mistakes that Iceland would make.Igor VORI (CRO) played an exceptional game today, offering critical help to his team by scoring 6 goals and playing hard defence.
Croatian line player Ivano BALIC organized the offence and made the play for his team.
Iceland showed that it has a strong team, pushing Croatia all the way. The best player of the match, Olaf STEFANSSON, caused many problems to the Croatian defence, forcing the Croatian coach to change his zone defence and to play him man-to-man.
At the 34 minute mark HALLGRIMSSON Asgeir Om was expelled from the game due to hard play.

ATHENS, 14 August - Comments from the coaches, Lino CERVAR (CRO) and Gudmundur GUDMUNDSSON (ISL).

Lino CERVAR (CRO) – Coach

On the match:
"My team played well and at certain times I think we played exciting handball. On the other hand there were some points where we faced difficulties with our offence."
On his team's defence:
"I believe we executed the 3-2-1 defence really well. By using this kind of defence we found our rhythm and we won a game against a tough team, who I want to congratulate."
Gudmundur GUDMUNDSSON (ISL) – Coach
On the game against Croatia:
"We played against one of the best teams in the whole world. I’m satisfied with the way we played. Our defence stood up to their strong offence. Eventually we made a lot of critical mistakes and we could not take our chances."
On the problem concerning the two minute suspensions:
"In this game we had to play a lot times with 4 against 6 or 5 against 6. This was the point where we could not keep up our offence and as a result the Croatians scored too many goals on fast breaks. They had 14 fast breaks and this is a number that we cannot overcome."

http://www.athens2004.com/en/resultsHandball/results?oid=fd19b3de0ee5ef00VgnVCM4000002b130c0aRCRD&dcpnews=1&rsc=HB0000000

A Croatian boy is silhouetted as he jumps in the sea in Split, Croatia, August 13, 2004. The Croatian part of the Adriatic Sea is a popular holiday destination for European tourists. REUTERS/Matko Biljak

Irish Mum fights flying fear for Olympian Gearóid

13/08/2004 - 2:54:26 PM

One Irish mother has conquered her greatest fear today so she could see her son battle it out for an Olympic gold medal in Athens.

Carmel Towey, from Kilworth, Co Cork, mother of rower Gearóid, is terrified of flying but was determined not to miss out on seeing her son take part in his third Olympic Games.

She overcame her flying phobia today when she jetted out to the ancient city, along with her husband Jerry, her son David and his wife, Niamh, her sister-in-law Annette OConnor and members of Fermoy Rowing Club.

Her other son, Martin, and daughter Janette will stay at home.

This is the first time she will be there to watch her son compete in the Olympics.

Gearóids father Jerry was in Sydney in 2000 when he flew the flag for Ireland in the rowing event.

Carmel chose to stay at home, due to her fear of flying, and had to settle for watching her son compete on TV. This time around she wanted to be closer to the action.

This has always been his big dream. My husband was there with him in Sydney but I watched on TV. I hate flying. But it will be nice to be there this time. He can only do his best and please God they will do well.

The reunion will be a special one as the family have not seen Gearóid in a while.

I last saw him in early June. He has been training in Sweden and then Croatia. We are in constant contact though, texting is great. We got a message from him today wishing us a safe trip.

Gearóid and his rowing partner Sam Lynch from Limerick will take to the waters against a team from the US on Sunday morning at 7.30am.

Locals in Fermoy have pasted posters of good luck for the Cork athlete all over Kilworth and Fermoy.

Over the next 16 days, Gearóid, will be among more than 10,500 athletes from more than 200 countries who will be battling it out for gold medals in 28 different sports at 35 venues across Athens.

The sporting event was due to get underway today, amid the highest security level ever for an Olympic Games.

A 70,000 strong security force, including soldiers carrying machine guns and armed police with dogs, were on stand by.

The opening event was due to get underway at 6.30pm and run until 10pm. It will be televised on Network 2.

More than 77,000 spectators will be in the stadium to witness the event first-hand, having paid up to 1,500 for the privilege. A further four billion TV viewers are also expected to tune in.

RTÉs Bill OHerlihy will present live coverage of the Opening Ceremony from Athens on Network 2 from 6.30pm.

The ceremony will be of particular interest to Ireland, as Cork man Dr Martin Barrett has played a huge role in the preparations for the event.

He is the Envisaging Director of the Olympic Games, which means he is responsible for creating the vision behind the opening and closing ceremonies.

As Sam and Gearóid take to the waters, Monkstown man Billy Twomey will be taking to the sky.

Billy, who will act as a reserve for the Irish Equestrian Team, flies out to the Games on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Munster athletes Robert Heffernan from Togher who will take part in the 20km walk and Cobh woman Sonia OSullivan who will participate in the 5,000m race, will come under the spotlight next Friday, August 20.

On the same day, Corks Mark Mansfield will take to his boat to show his sailing skills.

The other Munster athletes, including Derval ORourke, Gillian OSullivan, Mark Carroll, Olive Loughnane and Maria Coleman, will all participate during the second week of the Games.

http://www.eecho.ie/news/bstory.asp?j=93728580&p=937z9y6x&n=93729189

Catholics and voting in 2004 USA Elections

SOURCE: Gallup Poll News Service
CONTACT INFORMATION: Media Relations 1-202-715-3030
Subscriber Relations 1-888-274-5447
World Headquarters
901 F Street
Washington, DC 20004

August 10, 2004
Catholic Vote Split Based on Level of Religious Commitment
Practicing Catholics more likely to support Bush

by Jeffrey M. Jones

GALLUP NEWS SERVICE
PRINCETON, NJ -- Historically a solid Democratic voting group, in the past three decades Catholics have become a key swing voting group in American presidential elections. Catholics broke with their historical voting pattern to support victorious Republican candidates in 1972, 1980, and 1984, according to Gallup final pre-election poll estimates. Aside from the 1988 election, Catholics have supported the candidate who won the popular vote in every election since 1972.
Catholics, who comprise a substantial amount (about 25%) of the population, are of special interest this year since Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is the first Catholic major-party nominee since 1960. Recent polling has shown Catholics with a slight preference for Kerry over President George W. Bush. However, among practicing Catholics -- those who attend church on a weekly basis -- Bush leads Kerry. Catholics who attend church infrequently support Kerry by a wide margin.
The Overall Catholic Vote
The last five Gallup surveys have shown Kerry with at least a slight lead over Bush among Catholic registered voters. In the most recent poll, Catholic registered voters favored Kerry by a 51% to 45% margin. Before mid-May, Bush had at least a slight lead among Catholics in every poll.

It is unclear why the shift occurred in mid-May; especially when the national vote among registered voters has remained fairly stable since it became clear Kerry would be the Democratic nominee. One possibility is that as voters learned more about Kerry, they became aware of his Catholic faith. Kerry's faith has been an election-year issue, as well. Some Catholic bishops have argued that Catholic politicians, like Kerry, whose policy positions on matters such as abortion rights are not consistent with church teachings, should be denied Communion when attending church.
The Catholic Divide
While the overall Catholic vote would still appear to be very much up-for-grabs, but presently leaning toward Kerry, a closer look at the data reveal that Catholics themselves are divided in their support, according to their frequency of attending church.
Combined data from Gallup's two most recent polls, conducted July 19-21 and July 30-Aug. 1, show that Catholic registered voters who attend church weekly support Bush over Kerry by a 52% to 42% margin. This group represents about one-third of all Catholic registered voters. Among Catholic registered voters who attend church on a semi-regular basis -- that is, nearly every week or monthly -- Kerry leads Bush by 50% to 45%. This group represents slightly more than one-quarter of all Catholic registered voters, 27%. Among Catholic registered voters who attend church on an infrequent basis -- that is, "seldom" or "never" -- Kerry has a large 57% to 39% lead. This is the largest group of Catholics, representing just under 40% of all U.S. Catholic registered voters (38%).

As such, Kerry tends to appeal to non-practicing Catholics, while Bush appeals more to practicing Catholics. Bush's policy stands on abortion, stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage appear to be more consistent with Catholic teachings than Kerry's. In general, Gallup Poll data show that practicing Catholics are much more likely to share the stances on policies espoused by the church than are non-practicing Catholics. Last week, Bush, who is a Methodist, made a direct appeal to Catholic voters in a speech at a large Catholic gathering in Dallas.
Hispanic Catholics
Part of Kerry's appeal to Catholics could be because he appeals to Hispanic voters, who are overwhelmingly Catholic (62%, according to Gallup's June Minority Relations poll). But recent Gallup data suggest that Hispanic Catholics are only slightly more likely to support Kerry than are white Catholics, although there is not as strong a relationship between Hispanic Catholics' church attendance and support for Bush as there is among Catholics overall.
Among Hispanic Catholic registered voters, Kerry led 58% to 36% in the June Minority Relations poll, and his lead among white Catholic registered voters in that poll was similar, at 55% to 43%. Kerry led Bush 54% to 41% among all Catholic registered voters in that poll.
Though the sample sizes are too limited to draw firm conclusions, the data suggest that Hispanic registered voters who attend church weekly give less support to Kerry than Hispanics who attend church on a less frequent basis. Still, it appears Kerry would maintain a lead over Bush in both groups.
Survey Methods
These results are based on telephone interviews with a randomly selected national sample of 545 Catholic registered voters, aged 18 and older, from polls conducted July 19-21 and July 30-Aug. 1. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum error attributable to sampling and other random effects is ą5 percentage points.
Data for Hispanics are based on interviews with 503 Hispanics, aged 18 and older, conducted June 9-30, 2004. The sample of 166 Hispanic Catholic registered voters has a margin of sampling error of ą14 percentage points.
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Larry Cirignano
Larryvote@aol.com
www.CatholicVote.org
120 Riverwood Ave.
PO Box 118
Far Hills, NJ 07931
609-781-0090
908-234-1978 fax

Larry Cirignano
617-755-7668

Otto von Habsburg champions Croatia as a typical European country
Saturday, August 14, 2004
Austro-Hungarian dynasty heir sees a broader Europe

By Katinka Mezei, Agence France-Presse

VIENNAOtto von Habsburg, heir to the illustrious imperial Austro-Hungarian dynasty, is at 92 a tireless champion of an EU enlargement he hopes will soon reach out to southeast Europe too.

Oldest son of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, whose dynasty once ruled much of southern and eastern Europe, the veteran conservative envisages a bloc stretching from Ukraine via Albania to Iceland.

On a recent visit to Vienna, he hailed the May 1 entry of 10 mostly eastern European countries into the European Union as the culmination of a gigantic process . . . that was blocked first by fascism and then communism.

Habsburg was in the Austrian capital ahead of the commemoration of the 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of his ancestor, Archduke Franz-Ferdinandan event that triggered World War I and, ultimately, the demise of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The enlargement was even more satisfying for me in that several of the new members are more European than the old ones, he said.

He rejoiced particularly about the reuniting of Hungary and Austria under one roof.

Tall and elegantly dressed, bespectacled and sporting a moustache, Habsburg now lives in Germany. He gave up his claim to the throne in 1961 and makes no claims for the restitution of family property.

Although he was forced into exile at the age of six when his father Karl I abdicated at the end of World War I, he has been a tireless advocate for the countries the Habsburg family once ruled.

An outspoken opponent of Austrias incorporation into Nazi Germany in 1938, he was forced to flee to the United States when the Nazi regime accused him of treason.

After exile in Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, France and the United States, he settled in Germany after World War II, where he was elected to the European Parliament in 1979 for the conservative Christian Socialist Union.

He served in the parliament until 1999 where for a while he was head of the conservative bloc.

But while he favors EU enlargement, it is on the basis of a shared set of Christian values.

We shouldnt waste time because there are still very important countries which should become part of a united Europe, notably Croatia which is a typical European country, he said.

Croatia was granted candidate status in June and is due to open accession talks next year.

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2004/aug/14/yehey/opinion/20040814opi8.html

Dubrovnik International Film Festival in LA Times Article

Scenes of life after wartime; A festival is part of the social
reconstruction in a still-haunted land.
Kenneth Turan
Times Staff Writer
8 August 2004
Los Angeles Times

Dubrovnik, Croatia

As sites for film festival press conferences go, it would be hard to
improve on the East West Beach Club. Beautifully situated on the shockingly
blue Adriatic Sea, it has a postcard view of this city's 15th and 16th
century walls. Likely the best preserved vintage fortification system in
the world, these battlements look very much like something Jack Warner
might have ordered up for an action-adventure epic.

The Dubrovnik International Film Festival used the club for the opening
press conference of its second year. The Croatian media, both local and
national, had shown up in force.

The festival itself had gotten considerable coverage in Croatia for its
2003 debut, with press headlines like the irrepressible "Cannes is Dead,
Long Live Dubrovnik!" The second year under founder and festival director
Ziggy Mrkich was shaping up to be just as potent, including the local
premier of Croatian director Vinko Bresan's riveting, controversial
"Witnesses," perhaps the best film to deal with the war in what everyone
now calls simply "ex-Yugoslavia."

But at its midpoint press conference something had gone wrong. The
techno-pop was on the speaker system, the bottles of mineral water were
close at hand, and the guest of honor, top Croatian director Krsto Papic,
was there. Only one thing was unnervingly absent: the press itself. And
Papic thought he knew why.

He has been making films for nearly 40 years, even directing Orson Welles
as J.P. Morgan in 1980's "The Secret of Nikola Tesla." Papic's latest film,
"Infections," was having its national premier at Dubrovnik and showing as
well was his classic 1970 work "Lisice" (Handcuffs), considered as good a
film as any made inside the former Soviet bloc.

A thoughtful, articulate man who spent a year at USC on a Fulbright
fellowship, Papic said the lack of press had to do with the kind of
materialistic society he feared Croatia, a new country admitted to the U.N.
in 1992, was becoming. His press conference was without press, the director
explained, because of the lure of a rival media event, complete with
entertainment and a lavish buffet, being held just 20 minutes outside of
town.

"The president of Croatia is coming today to open a new luxury hotel,"
Papic explained, as much in resignation as in despair. "The film festival
is not the event, the whole spirit of the town is in that opening. This is
our society, this is a real picture of us.

"I call my generation 'Lost in Transition,' " Papic went on, with a
conscious nod to the Sofia Coppola film. "During communism, we were
dreaming of democracy. Then it came, but it is a false democracy in my
opinion.

"Everything that is bad in Western society came. We don't have a middle
class, we have a small group of very rich, and 90% of the people are hardly
surviving. What kind of society, what kind of democracy is this?"

The director gestures again to the uncrowded room. "This is your chance to
picture the essence of a country in transition. The reality is going on in
front of you." A pause, followed by a wry "We are lost."

Behind the scenes

I had come to Dubrovnik to get a look at a young film festival, to find out
how one of these events goes about getting started, and I did. But I also
found out something more.

The Dubrovnik event turned out to be an unexpected opportunity to examine a
film culture and a society still coming to terms with a devastating
catastrophe a decade-plus after the fact. It was a way to observe the
political and human aftershocks of war in a place that never expected to be
under fire, and to see how those tremors affected both the kinds of films
being made and how they are received.

To look up at the delightful green hills gently dotted with cypress trees
that ring the city is to feel as Dubrovnik's residents did in 1991: that it
would be unimaginable for the war that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia to
touch down in this nonstrategic location, beautiful enough to be the image
of choice for guidebook covers and one of only three cities in Europe to be
designated World Heritage Sites by the U.N.

Yet the war did arrive here, and with a force that stunned the inhabitants.
The Serb-Montenegrin-dominated Yugoslav army bombarded the city with more
than 2,000 shells from October 1991 through the following summer. More than
two-thirds of the old town's distinctive red-tiled roofs were hit, and
total damage, including the destruction of a 25,000-book library, has been
estimated at $10 million. According to Robin Harris' authoritative
"Dubrovnik: A History," 221 people died and the city's tourist industry was
"destroyed."

Ten years and more down the line, those roofs have been replaced, the
damaged architectural treasures rebuilt. Croatia is running ads on European
TV touting itself as "the Mediterranean as it once was," and the tourists,
though not at pre-war levels, are returning to experience the city's
dazzling interplay of limestone and pure light and understand why George
Bernard Shaw said "those who seek Paradise on Earth should come to
Dubrovnik."

But as much as people understandably want to put the war and its aftermath
behind them, they can't completely. Good and pleasant as life is now, with
hotels crowded, traces of the past are visible if you know where to look.
And if you care enough to ask, you can find memories of discord just below
the surface of people's minds, still roiling the placid waters of current
prosperity.

So, sharing window space with dolls in native costumes and souvenir
ashtrays in a shop just off the Stradum, the city's main street, is a book
called "Dubrovnik In War," with a surreal photo of the city in smoke and
flames on its cover. A video, "War In Dubrovnik," is available around the
corner. And a few streets away, upstairs in what used to be the old town's
hardware store, sits War Photo Limited, a gallery, possibly the first in
the world to be devoted to the photography of war.

Newly opened under the direction of Wade Goddard, himself a former war
photographer, the gallery's first exhibitions are devoted to searing images
of the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Showing in the gallery's small video theater,
doing double duty as an auxiliary film festival screening site, is a brief
documentary about the extremely hostile reaction these photographs got when
the show was on tour in Serbia. The reaction in Dubrovnik, while much
quieter, has also been intense.

"Most of the local people are happy to have something different, educators
especially are very grateful," says Goddard, a New Zealand native. But, he
adds, "there is always the odd comment about 'Why aren't there photos of
Croatian soldiers looking more heroic?' "

Then, Goddard says, there's the reaction of "the woman who runs the cafe
next door. She didn't want to look at any photos. Finally, she came, and
within five minutes she was crying. Some local people don't come because
it's too hard for them. The memories are too strong."

A festival takes shape

When 38-year-old festival founder Mrkich came to Dubrovnik four years ago
as part of a visit to nearby parents, she was taken by the spirit of the
city and the country's rebuilding process. "I was at that phase in my life
where I needed to take things into my own hands, to be in control," she
says. "I thought, 'This is so beautiful, the war's over, it's going to take
off. How could I do something here?' I came up with the idea of a film
festival."

While neighboring Serbia has 14 film festivals of various kinds, and
Bosnia's well-regarded Sarajevo Film Festival just celebrated its 10th
anniversary, Croatia has only four, including one in Pula, once
ex-Yugoslavia's biggest festival and a favorite of Marshal Tito, the
country's ruler and something of a movie buff.

Tito would stay on a nearby island and have features shuttled out to him
every night. "When the boat returned with the films," one director
remembers, "the projectionist would tell us 'he laughed' or 'he stopped the
projection.' Very often the films he loved became favorites at the
festival."

Though it didn't have a film event, what Dubrovnik did have is one of
Europe's foremost summer theater and music festivals, over half a century
old and so big it uses 30 venues for performances. "That made it a little
harder," Mrkich admits. "People would say, 'We already have a festival.'
And there are only so many local sponsors to go around." That made the
support of Dubrovnik's mayor, Dubravka Suica, essential, and she turned out
to have big-picture reasons of her own to be enthusiastic.

"This city lives exclusively on tourism, and the modern tourist wants
cultural events," Suica said. "We are strongly connected to culture,
culture is everything to us, we give 50% of our budget to theater, the
symphony orchestra, museums, galleries.

"We want to have festivals all year round. Americans were a big percentage
of tourists before the war. We want to attract them again."

Still, the mayor says Mrkich's role as catalyst was essential. "Nothing
would have happened here without Ziggy Mrkich," she says.

Mrkich was born in Australia of Croatian parents who moved back to the
country when she was 13. In 1995, Mrkich moved to Hollywood to get involved
in the film business. "It's a tough place for females, for Australians, to
work your way up the ladder," she says. "If you don't fit into the
cookie-cutter development executive thing, they don't want you." Then came
the film festival idea and an unexpected opportunity to be creative.

"As soon as it hatched in my brain it possessed me," Mrkich says. "It's
kept me going for the last four years, coming home after work and
researching, thinking, planning, reading. It's all I think about, all I
do."

Everything about starting and running a festival, however, turned out to be
"harder than I anticipated," Mrkich says. Local would-be volunteers
"refused to understand the concept of volunteering" and demanded to be
paid. And getting sponsorships and raising money was especially difficult
because "American companies don't even know Croatia exists. Next year I'm
going to try Britain; Croatia is the No. 1 location where the British buy
European real estate."

Coming from a culture where "people like to sit in cafes," audiences
weren't always eager to get up and find seats in the festival's wonderfully
eclectic group of theaters, which include a stunningly-sited outdoor venue
with a 1950s-style rhomboid screen and baby blue trim, and the Marin Drzic,
an exquisite three-tiered theatrical house dating from 1864. Still, 2003's
first festival got good marks from the citizenry.

For the 2003 event, Mrkich had lined up the national premier of Woody
Allen's "Anything Else" for opening night, but the focus this year turned
out to be the Croatian connection, including the presentation of the 15th
annual Hartley-Merrill International Screenwriting Prize to a Croatian
writer, Iva Kapetanovic, another person who couldn't get the war out of her
mind and set her script in the once-besieged city of Vukovar.

Brenda Brkusic, a 23-year-old recent Chapman University graduate, came with
a personal documentary about her politically active father, "Freedom From
Despair." On a much lighter note was Zoran Budak's irresistible half-hour
doc, "Cooking for Hollywood," about how Croatian immigrant Toni Kalem
founded Tony's Food Service of Chatsworth, one of the movie business'
premier location caterers, and became the chef of choice for Clint Eastwood
("He adores Croatian food") and John Travolta.

The chance to see the veteran Papic's new film was one of the festival's
coups. The director himself, though, was more excited to have a big-screen
showing of his 1970 "Handcuffs," a Kafkaesque parable about paranoia and
power. Morally complex and psychologically acute, set in a remote area in
1948 on the day of a lively village wedding, it deals with the nature of
totalitarianism and its ability to cause poisonous breakdowns in society.
And it turns out to have a history as dramatic as what is on the screen.

Though "Handcuffs" was invited to be in Cannes' official competition in
1970, Yugoslavia's official film committee, taking it as an attack against
the current regime, refused to allow it to represent the country there.
"Handcuffs" was shown instead to great success at the Directors Fortnight,
and Papic, who considered his career in his homeland to be over, was
thinking about emigrating to France with his family when he got a call from
his producer.

To the director's astonishment, this outcast film had won several prizes at
Pula, the key Yugoslavian festival, including the coveted Grand Prix. How
to explain this? Papic smiles: "Tito saw the film and he liked it." The
director shakes his head, still not quite believing it. "Tito, the only
free man in Yugoslavia."

If Papic represents, in his own words, a group in transition, 40-year-old
Vinko Bresan, once Papic's assistant, is part of what the younger director
calls "the new kids." An energetic man with an expressive face, Bresan is
perhaps the most accomplished filmmaker of his generation. But no one was
prepared for what he achieved in his latest film, the devastating
"Witnesses."

That was because Bresan, who wrote his first two films in collaboration
with his writer-father Ivo ("He can't say no or my mother will be angry"),
has been known exclusively as the creator of comedies. Sharp, satiric and
very funny comedies, but comedies nevertheless.

Evolution in style

Bresan's first film, the wonderfully titled "How the War Started on My
Island," became, except for James Cameron's "Titanic," Croatia's
top-grossing film of the last 20 years. He followed that with 1999's droll
and pointed "Marshal Tito's Spirit."

"I didn't want to make comedy for itself, I used humor as a way to tell the
story," the director explains. "When (former Croatian president Franjo)
Tudman was alive, what dominated cultural politics was a celebration of
everything. My resistance to this took the form of a carnivalization of
life. But those cultural politics disappeared after Tudman died. Now we
have a different social situation."

And, successful and savvy as these films were, Bresan says, "I didn't want
to do just childish comedies all my life." Enter "Witnesses."

"I felt obligated as a director to say something about the moral problems
of my society, and if I do that I have no right to use humor as a
disguise," Bresan says, explaining "Witnesses' " serious tone. "No one here
wants to think of the past, but unfortunately we are living in the past. We
are deeply in the past."

Adapted from a novel by Jurica Pavicic, this assured, confidently cinematic
and daring film is set in 1992 in an unnamed city near the front lines. A
trio of disgruntled Croatian soldiers decide to blow up the house of a
local Serb, a wealthy war profiteer they think is out of town. He isn't,
and ineptitude leads to the man's death and his daughter's kidnapping.

As both a detective and a journalist go against local sentiment and pursue
separate investigations into the incident, "Witnesses" ("Svjedoci" in
Croatian) looks into areas most societies would prefer to avoid examining.
What does armed conflict do to social order and individual responsibility?
How does the wartime emphasis on clannishness, compromise and a malleable
"what nobody saw never really happened" code of ethics impact national
morality? Is it possible, finally, to have a moral dilemma in an immoral
world?

As if the subject matter weren't enough to make "Witnesses" stand out,
Bresan's decision about structure makes it even more compelling. His first
cut followed the conventional pattern of linear storytelling, but he and
co-screenwriter Pavicic found that "all the emotional levels we wanted to
show didn't happen."

So Bresan restructured the film by fragmenting it, by having the story told
and retold from the overlapping points of view of different central
characters, with each retelling adding key details and texture and the
whole truth only apparent at the close.

"Witnesses" won six awards at Pula, including best director for Bresan, and
was extremely well received at its international debut at the Berlin Film
Festival.

But as far as the reaction at home went, Bresan says, "Berlin made it
worse. Every good reaction overseas is bad for me here." Finally, he says,
"two months ago, the Croatian party of the right, a powerful party, accused
me of being an enemy of the state, a traitor."

Don't misunderstand, Bresan says. "I am happy I can make this film here,
there are a lot of people who like it, nobody is beating me on the street,
I am not a lonely revolutionary."

For Bresan, the present looks promising. He has an agent at United Talent
who regularly sends him scripts, he is doing a short film for the Croatian
pavilion at EXPO 2005 in Japan, and "Witnesses" is in the hands of a top
European distributor.

But just under the surface of success for the director, as it is for many
Croatians, are concerns about that past, about the difference the war made
in their lives.

"From books, films, everyone thinks they know something about war," Bresan
explains, quiet but forceful. "But the one thing nobody prepared me for,
the worst change, was in the minds of people. It is how society treats the
value of humanity in a war situation. That's the reason why I made this
film.

"In peace, if you are a good person, you are very valuable for society. In
a war situation, if you hate you are valuable. If you hate more, you are
more valuable. I lost a lot of friends during the war -- they hate too
much, I cannot have conversations with them. The state encourages that in
people's souls. After that, everything is possible.

"Holes in roofs are easy to fix," Vinko Bresan says, the carefully repaired
skyline of the old city glistening behind him. "People's souls are very
heavy to fix. Those kinds of shadows are still standing. The job for
intellectuals, for artists, is to fix that kind of thinking."

PHOTO: FOUNDER: Dubrovnik Film Fest's Ziggy Mrkich.;PHOTOGRAPHER: Patricia
Williams For The Times;PHOTO: 'This is your chance to picture the essence
of a country in transition.... We are lost.' -- Krsto Papic,
director;PHOTOGRAPHER: Patricia Williams For The Times;PHOTO: 'Holes in
roofs are easy to fix. People's souls are very heavy to fix.' -- Vinko
Bresan, director;PHOTOGRAPHER: Patricia Williams For The Times;PHOTO:
PICTURE PERFECT: The old-world charm of Dubrovnik's port serves as a scenic
backdrop for the city's film festival.;PHOTOGRAPHER: Patricia Williams For
The Times