Well, if this case wasn't weird enough for you, it just got weirder.
In the last two days many efforts have been made to get the diplomatic community to help the Krupas. Someone promised to try to help but then later got back to us and said he couldn't help. One of the reasons for this was that he had learned that the Krupas were "untouchables" because, paraphrasing, "It's all over the internet that Mr. Krupa is a pedophile."
What this person is referring to is a webpage, written in the Croatian language, that states, as if it were fact, that Alfred Krupa is a "convicted pedophile" who was removed from his teaching position for molesting students. It also states that he is 47 years old, that he has three children, and that he married one of his former students.
In fact, Mr. Krupa has never been convicted or even charged with any inappropriate sexual behavior towards anyone. He is only 38 years old, only has two children, and has only been married once, since 1992, to someone who was never his student. The smear piece was intentionally placed on the internet, and the rumors circulated, by two individuals known to Mr. Krupa. In fact, Mr. Krupa successfully sued because of this slander and won a settlement. He also got one of the perpetrators, the former principle of his school, removed from office because of this. Mr. Krupa is still teaching two of the young ladies whose names were dragged into this mess. Neither girl ever actually made any such accusations against their art teacher. The whole thing is completely made up out of whole cloth.
All of this is, as you might expect, tied in to the campaign of persecution that has been waged against the Krupas by certain people in positions of power. Of course, none of this has anything to do with the fraudulent debt that was levied against the Krupas, the attempts to steal their home, or the plans to violently arrest them and throw all twelve of these innocent men, women and children out in the streets. It only serves to illustrate the kind of evil we are dealing with here. They are getting desperate because their corrupt criminal activities are being exposed internationally. They have to do whatever they can to try to degrade the public image of the Krupas and prevent the public from empathizing with their plight.
(Above: The "untouchable" Krupa kids, soon to be homeless, with bulldog Spike, whom the courts have ordered to be killed for no reason whatsoever.)
“It’s a Kafka type situation,” says Alfred Krupa Jr., describing the bizarre set of circumstances that has led to the possibility of eviction and homelessness that faces his family in less than a week, on February 23, 2010.
As Mr. Krupa describes it, after decades of owning outright their family home in Karlovac, Croatia, and passing it from generation to generation, a debt was invented out of nowhere by a bank, and a lien placed against the property by the local Chamber of Commerce. Then, as the Krupas attempted to rectify the matter in court, their home was sold to a third party in Zagreb without their permission. Now the Chamber of Commerce is hastily rushing to throw them out into the streets in the middle of winter.
At every stage of the game since 2003, when this whole nightmare started for the Krupa family, they have faced a wall of resistance from the justice system in Karlovac. Always forced to deal with the same two judges, one at the Municipal Court and one at the Constitutional Court of Appeals, the Krupas have not been permitted to view the evidence against them or to present evidence in their own defense. They have not even been given an exact amount for the original debt that has been charged to them erroneously by Zagreb Bank.
But this is not a mere bureaucratic mix-up. This has been done deliberately, and this is personal. The actors at play here -- Zlatko Kuzman, President of the Karlovac Chamber of Commerce, Nadan Vidosevic of the national Croatian Chamber of Commerce, and Tomislav Maras, Presiding Judge for the Karlovac Municipal Court -- are actively plotting to steal the Krupas’ property, and to deny them due process of law. The Chamber of Commerce even provided the purchaser of the Krupa property the money to buy the house, and sold it to her for a pittance. The buyer appears to have been merely a puppet acting to facilitate this theft.
The motivation for this theft is pure greed. However, anti-Semitism is believed to be a factor here as well. For while the Krupas are baptized Catholics, there is still a great deal resentment among certain elements of Croatian society towards people of Jewish racial extraction, especially those who own businesses and property.
Alfred’s grandfather, Alfred Krupa the First, was a Polish Jew, captured as a prisoner of Croatian partisans after escaping a Nazi death camp in WWII. He was then recruited into the Croatian army, which he loyally served, even assisting in the rescue of Winston Churchill’s son.In 1943, he moved to Karlovac and married a Croatian girl. Because of his heroism during the war, Krupa was awarded apartments at the historic Karlovac Palace, where he raised a family and became known as one of the greatest water color artists in all of Yugoslavia (a tradition continued by Alfred Jr.) His son Mladen and grandson Alfred Jr. also served the Croatian army loyally during the Balkan conflict in the 1990s. The family started an automobile dealership out of the garage that grew into a company which was at one time worth over 3 million euros.
Unfortunately, the Croatian Republic has not served the Krupa family as loyally as they have served it. Corruption runs rife in that country, and now a cadre of corrupt judges, bankers, and bureaucrats have colluded to steal the Krupa family home. The Croatian Helsinki Commission on Human Rights has investigated the matter and has written to the Croatian President’s office (during the previous administration) informing him that the Krupas’ civil rights are being violated. The letter recommended that the case be reviewed for signs of influence from corrupt government officials, and the eviction halted during this review. But the President did not respond to the letter, and nothing was done.
All of this is to be expected, perhaps, in a country as notoriously corrupt as Croatia. As journalist Goran Flauder recently quipped to the BBC, “We like to say that where Italy is a state with a mafia, Croatia is a mafia with a state.” This same BBC article by Matt Prodger notes that Croatia is trying to clean up its image on this particular index because of its desire to join the European Union, having joined NATO in April 2009. But cleaning up the image and cleaning up the reality of the situation are quite different matters, for, as Prodger writes, “The Index of Economic Freedom recently ranked Croatia below several African states in one of its corruption measurements.”
So perhaps this is why, despite gaining a small amount of local media coverage in Karlovac, the Krupa saga has not made any headlines in national newspapers in Croatia. In fact, one journalist who did dare to publish a story about the Krupas was personally threatened by the President of the Karlovac Chamber of Commerce, who insinuated that the young man’s career would not progress if he continued to cover this story.
Some of the Krupa family friends who have positions in government have attempted to help them, only to come up against the same impenetrable wall of resistance. Some of these people have told Alfred outright that racial and cultural prejudices have something to do with what’s happening to them. These same people pointed to the influence of a certain group on Croatian politics: Opus Dei.
Krupa himself is Catholic, and holds no quarrel with Opus Dei. There is no good reason why they should have anything against him or his family. However, friends of his on the inside in Karlovac, and even in the present Croatian Presidential administration, have warned Alfred that Opus Dei has a vendetta against the Krupas. One only has to read the bestseller Their Kingdom Come by Robert Hutchison to learn about the influence of Opus Dei on Croatian history, including the arming, funding and training of the Bosnian Croat militia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The newly-elected Croatian President, Ivo Josipovic, is rumored by the local papers to be a member. As it turns out, Tomislav Maras, Presiding Judge for the Karlovac Municipal Court, is a known member as well.Interestingly, Zagreb Bank was recently purchased by the Vatican Bank.
Does that have anything to do with why the Krupas are about to have their property stolen from them. Or why 12 innocent people, the youngest age 10, are soon to be sleeping in the snow under a bridge in Karlovac, along with their faithful bulldog (whom the courts have ordered to be destroyed)? Lord only knows. All the Krupas know is that they are about to lose everything they have worked so hard for, and they have nowhere to go. The Chamber of Commerce in Karlovac already attempted an eviction in January 2010, with a giant SWAT team of militarized police, and only stopped when the Chief of Police called it off to stop Mladen Krupa from committing suicide in protest. On their next attempt, scheduled for February 23rd 2010, they are planning on arresting the Krupas the day before to get them out of the way.
They need your help.
We need to put pressure on the government in Croatia to stop this, and simultaneously pressure media both within and without the country to help. Please join the Facebook group "Stop the Eviction of the Krupa Family" and write letters to the following contacts demanding that they do something to put a stop to this. Also please forward this information to media outlets everywhere. With your help we can shine a spotlight on not only this case, but all of the corruption, abuse, and racism in Croatia. Thank you!
Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia: email: Ustavni_sud@usud.hr Zagreb 10 000, Varšavska 3
Office of the President of the Constitutional Court Ksenija Podgornik, Head of the Office Tel.: +385 1 6400 100 Fax: +385 1 6400 000 e-mail:Ksenija_Podgornik@usud.hr
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