Wars of independence

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.

The International Day of the Disappeared was marked in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo on Friday with a series of events intended to highlight how thousands of people who disappeared during the 1990s wars have not yet been found.

Controversy erupted after a decommissioned T-55 tank was installed near the north stand of Red Star Belgrade's football stadium on Monday, with critics in Croatia accusing the club of celebrating Serbian "aggression" during the wars that broke out as Yugoslavia collapsed in the 1990s.

Belgrade Appeals Court has reduced the sentence handed down to Ranka Tomic, a former captain of the Bosnian Serb Army's Petrovac Women's Front, from five to three years in prison.

Tomic was convicted in November 2018 of participation in the assault and killing of the captured Bosnian Army nurse, Karmena Kamencic.

The group of 12 mostly Croatian citizens arrived on Tuesday in Olovo, a small town some 50 kilometres north-east of Sarajevo, on their 520-kilometre walk from Dubrovnik to Srebrenica's Potocari memorial centre to mark the anniversary of the 1995 massacres.

The appeals chamber of the Bosnian state court on Friday raised former Croatian Defence Council brigade commander Mensur Djakic's sentence from two to eight years in prison.

The Serbian court sentenced a female Serb ex-soldier to five years in prison for her involvement in the torture and murder of a Bosnian Army nurse during the 1992-95 conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Serbian authorities said that the bodies of nine Serb victims killed in 1995 during the Croatian war have been exhumed from four localities in Croatia.

The search for the remaining missing persons from the wars in the former Yugoslavia is still being hindered by politics, a BIRN conference on regional cooperation and post-conflict justice was told.

Medical experts told a Belgrade court that one of ten former Serbian fighters accused of the killing of 70 Croatian civilians in the village of Lovas in 1991 has become permanently unfit to stand trial.