Demands for Croatia to punish crimes against Serbs in Storm

BELGRADE/ZAGREB- The Coalition of Refugee Associations in Serbia appealed to the United States, the EU and the OSCE to request Croatia to stop celebrating Operation Storm, an offensive of war crimes and ethnic cleansing of Serbs, and to punish those responsible.

Speaking about Operation Storm, which Croatia is celebrating as Victory Day on Tuesday, August 5, the Coalition said that Croatia still showed no willingness to have the crimes committed against the Serb people during the 1991/95 war prosecuted.

Storm was not a liberation offensive but rather a joint criminal enterprise whose main goal was the expulsion of Serbs from the territory they lived in for centuries. The operation was followed by a mass murder of Serb civilians, looting and burning of Serb property, preventing the return of Serbs and settling Croats there instead. The perpetrators of the war crimes have not been found, let alone punished, and those killed were not recognized as victims of war and there is no remembrance of them, the statement said.

The Coordination of Serb associations of families of missing, murdered and killed persons from the territory of the former Yugoslavia recalls that the Croatian armed forces’ Operation Storm killed more than 1,200 Serb civilians, more than 60 percent of whom were older than 60 years old. According to the NGO Veritas, the civilian casualties included 534 women and 19 minors, nine of them children under 14 years old.

“Over the past nineteen years, Croatia has convicted only one single person, which clearly shows that it has not and does not intend to conduct any serious trials for this and other war crimes committed against Serbs,” the statement said.

The Coordination is asking for the Serbian...