CROATIA: Croatia's state prosecutors and the Catholic Church are under scrutiny over allegations that child abuse has long gone unchecked in the country's orphanages.
The staunchly Catholic nation has been stunned by the arrest of several staff at a home for mentally handicapped children near the capital, Zagreb, and the sacking of at least one prosecutor on suspicion of a cover-up.
Two nuns and a woman counsellor at the Brezovica orphanage, which is run by the Catholic charity Caritas, were charged with neglect and abuse this week, while a former caretaker is awaiting trial for allegedly raping a nine-year-old boy at the home.
Police are also now investigating a former cook and a French volunteer who worked at Brezovica, despite the latter being convicted of paedophilia in France.
Testimony from former residents and staff at the orphanage prompted a police investigation in 2002 but, despite their recommendation that a case be pursued, the matter was quietly dropped.
Amid fierce media criticism of state investigators and the Catholic Church for conspiring to "bury" the scandal, Croatia's prosecutor general has fired at least one of his deputies who worked on the case. Caritas and others involved deny all wrongdoing, but that has failed to quell an outcry in a country of 4.4 million people, where almost 90 per cent are Catholics.
After weeks of silence Cardinal Josip Bozanic, the Archbishop of Zagreb, announced last week that "current circumstances and difficulties linked with the Caritas charity force us to urgently launch a thorough inquiry".
At a televised Mass on June 25th, he said that "with anguish in our hearts, we condemn the crime which is being talked about - if it was committed". But, before a congregation that included Croatia's president and prime minister, the Cardinal also insisted that "all good things which Caritas ... has done and is doing for people of all ages ... must not be forgotten".
However, the Brezovica scandal now appears to be a far from isolated case of abuse compounded by official silence. The government ordered an inspection of state orphanages this month after two girls in a home in the coastal town of Pula said a cook tried to rape them.
In the highest-profile case so far, a couple dubbed the "monsters of Sunja" allegedly invited friends to join them in repeatedly raping their two young sons. But it took police in the Sunja region nine months to arrest four adults and charge them with sexually abusing the children "in a particularly cruel and humiliating way".
Analysts say Croatia is only now confronting social ills that were obscured by its people's conservative Catholicism and Yugoslavia's unreflective state communism.