The leader of the Croatian Association of Returnees (ZPH), Josip Kompanovic, said on Monday that if the process of adoption of a law on war reparations was not launched soon, the ZPH would be forced to sue the Croatian state for damage suffered by people displaced during the 1991-95 Homeland War.

Addressing a session of the Osijek-Baranja County ZPH branch in Osijek, Kompanovic said that the ZPH had been insisting for years on the adoption of a law on war reparations, envisaged by an agreement on the normalisation of relations signed in September 1996 by the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Croatia.

He said that the compensation for housing and other units destroyed in the war did not reflect the actual damage suffered by displaced persons because there were many cases where a displaced person who originally owned a 150 or 200 square-metre housing unit was given a rebuilt housing unit measuring 60-70 square metres in area.

“The war damage determined by the state commission amounts to HRK 236 billion. This includes roads, factories, public facilities, infrastructure as well as the war damage suffered by individual citizens. According to our analysis, that damage amounts to about HRK 200,000 per household. Around 70,000 families were displaced, which makes the total damage amount to HRK 14 billion,” Kompanovic said, adding that if the process of adoption of a war reparations law was not launched in the next six months, the ZPH would sue the Croatian state.