Jadranka Cigelj

From Diana Johnstone's Fool's Crusade, Pluto Press 2002, p 80:


 * [Jadranka] Cigelj herself, added Gutman, "has become a leading activist in a growing effort to document alleged war crimes in Bosnia". This was something of an understatement.  Cigelj was a vice president of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman's ruling nationalist party, the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) and was in charge of the Zagreb office of the Croatia Information Center (CIC), a wartime propaganda agency funded by the same right-wing Croatian émigré groups that backed Tudjman.  The primary source for reports which sent "piles of testimony to Western women and to the press." The CIC benefited from a close connection with the "International Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte" (International Association for Human Rights, IGfM), a far right propaganda institute set up in 1981 as a continuation of the Association of Russian Solidarists, an expatriate group which worked for the Nazis and the Croatian fascist Ustashe regime during World War II.  &hellip; The CIC ran all the wartime "foreign press centers" in Croatia, primarily in Zagreb and Split, and also had branches in Canada and the United States.  Thanks to the strong American connection, the large staff spoke fluent English and provided visiting Western journalists with information and interviews.  CIC director Ante Beljo had formed branches of Tudjman's HDZ in Canada and the United States prior to Croatian independence. Cigelj was featured as victim and witness in numerous IGfM publications, as Jadranka Cigelj, but also as Jadranka C., Jadranka Cigev, Jadranka Cigay, or simply Mrs Jadranka.  Whereas she told Gutman she had been raped by camp commander Mejakic and three other men, in the IGfM brochure, "God's Forgotten Children", she told of being repeatedly raped by only one man, named Grabovac, and in a long interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 5 April 1993, Cigelj denied that Mejakic had raped her.

On tour with Amnesty International
Amnesty International organized a 25-US-city tour where Cigelj, Nusreta Sivac, and some other "rape victims" discussed their ordeals; the film Calling The Ghosts was screened at these events. The defining aspect of these performances is that they became increasingly hysterical as they went along, and Amnesty was questioned about the increasing inconsistencies as the tour went on. Instead of cancelling the tour, Amnesty International, pushed the tour. It is only after the fact that it was revealed that Cigelj was a paid Croatian propagandist.

Further References

 * Thomas Deichmann, War Stories, Roy Gutman and Western perceptions of the Balkans War, Balkan Repository Project, Sept 1994.
 * Diana Johnstone's Fool's Crusade, Pluto Press 2002.