Serbian Orthodox Church in Croatia

Croatian political leaders, wartime generals and war veterans gathered on Friday in the town of Knin to mark the anniversary of the country's victorious military offensive, Operation Storm, which effectively ended the independence war in the country in 1995.

"I was in the hospital for six days, after that I wore a leg brace for a month," he added.

Some two-and-a-half years later Drca, together with many other Croatian Serbs, was forced to flee the country and come to Serbia.

Media reported on Tuesday that the mayor of the Borovo municipality in eastern Croatia, Zoran Bacanovic, is under police investigation over his recent Facebook post about Operation Storm.

The legal amendments address the problems of around 5,000 people whose parents were Croatian Serbs but were living in Serbia when they were born, when both Serbia and Croatia were part of Yugoslavia.

The Serbian National Council, SNV presented its annual report on Tuesday, registering 214 incidents of ethnic intolerance, historical revisionism, denial of historical facts, offences, threats, physical attacks and hate speech targeting Croatian Serbs last year.

The European Court of Human Rights, ECHR in Strasbourg ruled on Thursday that Croatia violated the rights of a Croatian Serb war refugee whose property was taken over and damaged by another family while he was out of the country, and ordered the state to pay him compensation.

Vucic added that "few world statesmen" called Serbia and Serbs "a handful of misery", as the newly elected Croatian President Zoran Milanovic once did.
Asked what he expects in relations between Serbia and Croatia, Vucic said that Serbia would be delighted to welcome any improvement in relations towards the Serbs in Croatia.

Hate crimes and hate speech towards Croatia's Serb minority have blighted the year in the country, and although there are no statistics available on the number of incidents, several very serious ones have been reported during 2019.

A day after Zagreb State Attorney's Office dismissed criminal complaints filed by war veterans against Milorad Pupovac, which claimed that the Croatian Serb leader had damaged the country's reputation, the leader of a disabled war veterans' association said on Tuesday that they will now try to make Chief State Attorney Drazen Jelenic step down from his position.

For her book, entitled 'Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War', she interviewed 131 members of these communities from parts of Croatia that were directly or indirectly influenced by the conflict.