Word: croatia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...More than 300 people, including several government figures, attended Pukanic's funeral on Monday, after which he was buried to the tune of the Dire Straits song "Brothers in Arms." The owner and editor in chief of Nacional, a high-circulation weekly that often probed into Croatia's corruption-ridden political life, Pukanic was a controversial figure, widely seen as closely involved with mobsters and politicians alike. Croatian President Stjepan Mesic had been his close friend, as had Hrvoje Petrac, a businessman currently on trial for extortion...
...sentenced to six years in prison. (Petrac continues to deny the kidnapping charge.) Zagorec is also facing trial, accused of embezzling millions of dollars worth of jewels from the Ministry of Defense in the early '90s. The jewels had been intended for the purchase of weapons in Croatia's war with Serbia during the breakup of Yugoslavia. (The official story was that the jewelry had been donated by unnamed patriots to help Croatia's war effort, but some alleged it had originally been looted from Croatian Jews during World War II by the Nazi-aligned nationalist Ustasha militias...
...Mesic government is now under fire from various quarters for allowing organized crime - which flourished under the reign of autocratic President Franjo Tudjman, who led Croatia's independence struggle - to grow even more rampantly after the country's transition to democracy. "The authorities are obviously incompetent to stand up to organized crime," said opposition MP Vladimir Sisljagic at a press conference on Monday. "This situation is a result of 18 years of turning a blind eye to war profiteering and gangsterism...
...Even Croatia's top policeman joined the angry chorus. "At least half of the force is incompetent or corrupted," admitted police director Vladimir Faber in a television interview on Sunday. "So many people only got jobs in police because they had political connections, completely regardless of their qualifications." But critics of Faber point out that he, too, gained his position by virtue of his allegiance to Croatia's Prime Minister, Ivo Sanader...
...Sanader has vowed that the government will do "whatever it takes" to uproot organized crime, and on Tuesday, Ivan Simonovic, Croatia's newly appointed Justice Minister, announced a series of measures aimed at curbing organized crime. These include new legislation to allow criminals' property to be confiscated, as well as the establishment of a new police agency, modeled on America's Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the new measures still need to be approved by the parliament, and it will be months before they take effect...