Serbs of Croatia

The Croatian president’s special adviser on missing persons met his Serbian counterpart for the first time and vowed joint action to find the remaining Serbs and Croats who disappeared during the 1990s war.

Croatia's Serbian National Council, SNV, and the Serbian cultural association "Prosvjeta" - joint organisers of the Ojkaca Singing Festival in the town of Petrinja, due on August 25, have written on Wednesday to UNESCO's Cultural Heritage Protection Committee, accusing Croatian veteran organisations of trying to prevent the event.

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has extended the provisional release in Serbia for Jovica Stanisic – charged with committing crimes against non-Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia – until January 2019.

Domagoj Zovak, whose satirical TV show News Bar Prime Time airs on regional cable N1 TV, received death threat after the latest episode, about the 23rd anniversary of Croatian military operation 'Storm'.

"You too will also get [a bullet] in the back of the head," said a message sent to Zovak on Facebook.

The operation resulted in more than 200,000 Krajina (ethnic) Serbs expelled from their homes in Croatia.

More than 2,000 people were killed or went missing, and the memory of a dozen kilometers long column of refugees who arrived in Serbia through Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) testifies to one of the most massive exoduses ever in this region.

A total of 25 bodies of people suspected to have died in World War II or the post-war period were exhumed in the Croatian capital in July, officials said.

Investigative website Insajder is reporting, citing other media, that Kurak had been living and working for years in Tanzania.

The Interior Ministry (MUP) told Insajder that they sent a request to locate and arrest Kurak to the General Secretariat of Interpol, as well as their offices in Tanzania and Ethiopia.

The head of the Serbian NGO Veritas, Savo Strbac, Strbac said that Croatia has stepped up arrests of Serbs wanted for alleged war crimes, so war veterans should be careful when crossing the country's borders

"We record an average of up to 10 arrests per summer season, depending on the year," Strbac told BIRN.

The Serbian National Council, which represents the Serb minority in Croatia, recorded a rise last year in the number of threats, hate speech and violence directed against Serbs in the country.

Croatian prosecutors announced that they have charged 22 ethnic Serbs with war crimes committed during the conflict in the 1990s.

The Zagreb Prosecutor-General's Office said in a statement on March 10 that the 22 Croatian Serbs were accused of killing 20 civilians and two policemen being held prisoner in three areas in the east of the country in 1991.