Eurasia Press & News
A Serbian association of the families of missing has appealed to the Croatian government to speed up the process of exhumation and identification of those gone missing during Croatia’s 1995 military operations.”Croatia stands at the threshhold of the EU, a community of democratic nations and societies. Now is the time for it to show its democratic spirit by completing these humane tasks,” Cedomir Maric, head of the association, told a news conference on Thursday.Maric stressed that even 17 years after the operations ‘Flesh’ and ‘Storm’, the fate of 1,950 Serbs from Krajina, the breakaway Serb region in Croatia in the early 1990s, is still unknown.
The remains of 1,018 people have been exhumed, with 350 of them still located at an institute in Zagreb, awaiting identification.
The families of the missing are not happy with the pace of the process related to finding out what happened to the missing and point out that there is still a large number of registered burial sites where exhumation has not started.
Veljko Odalovic, Head of the Serbian government committee for missing persons, said the committee had started an initiative to organise a meeting between the presidents of the countries in the region, where a joint declaration would define the obligations by the authorities aimed at uncovering the truth about the missing persons.
Serbia cannot decide when and where exhumation will be carried out inside another country, but it does participate in coordinating that business based on a protocol signed with Croatia.
