Serbs of Croatia

Zagreb County Court on Tuesday convicted Milan Martic, the former president of an unrecognised wartime Serb rebel statelet called the Republic of Serbian Krajina, and his military chief-of-staff, Milan Celeketic, of staging rocket attacks on Croatian cities in 1995.

Under the first-instance verdict, Martic was sentenced to seven years in prison and Celeketic to 20 years.

Zagreb county court on Monday acquitted Dragan Cavic, a former paramilitary from the Republic of Serbian Krajina, an unrecognised wartime Croatian Serb-led statelet, of committing war crimes against civilians in the Petrinja area in July 1993.

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.

Vracaric died in 2008 in a nursing home for the elderly and disabled not far from Vukovar, while Cibaric currently lives in Varazdinske Toplice, a small town in north-western Croatia.

The Croatian War Veterans Ministry said on Thursday that the remains of two people who it believes were victims of the 1990s war have been discovered in Negoslavci, a village in eastern Croatia.

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.

Novosti started 20 years ago solely as a weekly newspaper for Croatia's Serb ethnic minority, but as its profile and impact have grown, so have the pressures that its staff have had to face.

The identification of the remains of the 13 Serbs, which was organised by the Croatian War Veterans Ministry, was completed on Monday at the forensic department of the Zagreb University School of Medicine.