PRIKUPLJANJE, OBRADA I KORIŠTENJE ARHIVSKOGA GRADIVA 9. (KNINSKOG) KORPUSA JUGOSLAVENSKE NARODNE ARMIJE U HRVATSKOM MEMORIJALNO-DOKUMENTACIJSKOM CENTRU DOMOVINSKOG RATA U ZAGREBU.

The Croatian Memorial Documentation Center of Homeland War in Zagreb stores archival fonds of the 9th (Knin's) Corps of the Yugoslav People's Army, the total of fifty eight boxes (5,8 linear meters) of archives, confiscated by the Croatian forces after the Storm operation in August 1995 in the liberated territory of the Republic of Croatia. Originally the fonds was not an organic whole, but was created by the exclusion of the corps' archives from various and unarranged documentation wholes which from December 2005 to March 2018 were handed over to the Center as deposit by the Croatian State Archives, Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Croatia, State Archives in Zadar, Military Security and Intelligence Agency, Lika-Senj Police Administration and several private holders. To a significant extent, that slowed down and made its arrangement harder, while causing numerous difficulties for the Center's employees during the fonds' archival processing. Because of that, fonds was arranged in three phases during several years and it was finished in June 2018. A finding aid was created for the fonds (summary inventory) kept at the Division for Conventional Records of the Center. The fonds' records, dating from 1972 to 1992, are divided into sixteen series with associated sub-series. They are written in Serbian (or so called Serbo-Croatian), in Latin or Cyrillic script. The fonds mostly contains original documents, written on paper, cardboard or transparency. It also contains smaller amount of photographs and negatives. The records are authentic, wellkept and credible, representing the large part but not the entire documentation created by the activity of its creator. The fonds has significant informational value and is an extremely important historical source for research of the Homeland War, especially in the area of north Dalmatia and southern Lika during 1991- 1992, research of the outbreak of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in spring 1992, as well as for understanding the role of the Yugoslav People's Army in the way the Yugoslav crisis was resolved. Due to its historical importance and in order to bring it closer and present it to the both professional and general public, the Center published four volumes comprising of 525 documents of the Corps' Command and units within it, as well as headquarters and units of the territorial defence of the rebelled Serbs in northern Dalmatia, created from mid-February 1991 to the end of May 1992.The judiciary bodies of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina also used it to a large extent in their investigations of criminal offences and war crimes committed during the conflict in northern Dalmatia and southern Lika, as well as western and south-western Bosnia until mid-1992. Fonds' records were also greatly used to create The Memorial for suing Yugoslavia due to violation of Genocide Convention's provisions, submitted by the Republic of Croatia to the International Court of Justice in Hague on 2 June 1999. Fonds' records are public archives available to all users on equal terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]