Croatia will finance a newly established Croat-language TV Channel in Bosnia, named after the wartime Croat unrecognised statelet of Herzeg-Bosnia (HB), with 450,000 Kuna, ‘Jutarnji List’ wrote on Monday.

The paper wrote that Croatia’s Government on Thursday decided to give 25,8 million Kuna to Bosnian Croats by adopting the “Decision on the division of resources for financing cultural, educational, scientific, healthcare and other programmes and projects of interest to the Croat people in Bosnia and Herzegovina for 2019.”

The money is to be distributed for culture, education and science, healthcare and “other purposes.” It is to finance, among other things, hospitals and medical equipment, kindergartens and playgrounds.  

A third of the funds are, the paper said, designated to Bosnia’s Catholic Church.  

But among the recipients is also the Croat Radio-television of Herzeg Bosnia, with its headquarters in Mostar.  

In what the UN Court deemed to be a joint criminal enterprise, aided by the wartime leadership in neighbouring Croatia, six top officials of Herzeg-Bosna were at the helm of a massive ethnic cleansing operation in the south of the country with the goal of annexing HB to Croatia. The operation included prison camps, mass killings, rape and other grave crimes.  

Radio-Television HB aired its radio programme during the war in 1993. After it ceased to exist, it began airing again on June 1 this year.

The program is designed to cover areas across the country where ethnic Croats make up the majority and to provide news focused on Croat interests.  

Bosnia’s public broadcasting system is composed of three channels – the state-level Radio Television of Bosnia and Herzegovina (RTV BiH) and two channels for each of the two semi-autonomous entities. The Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS) has the Radio-Television of Republika Srpska (RTRS), while the Federation (FBiH), mostly shared between Bosniaks and Croats, has the Radio-Television of the Federation (FTV) which airs in Croatian and Bosnian.  

However, Bosnian Croat right-wing politicians, especially from the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ), have been pushing for the establishment of an only ‘Croat-language channel’ that would cover more Croat issues.