"We want to draw public attention to the fact that after the 1991-1995 Homeland War in Croatia 1,131 persons are still listed as missing," the head of the alliance, Ivan Psenica, has told Hina in a recent interview.
"We want to tell the public that the problem of missing persons, two-thirds of whom are civilians, has still not been settled and to tell the politicians to become more actively involved in tracing them," he added.
Psenica said about 1,000 of alliance members and about 200 guests from Bosnia-Herzegovina were expected to attend the gathering, as well as residents of Zagreb and representatives of Croatian war veterans' organisations. He added that Serb organisations declined the invitation to attend.
"We have also invited representatives of similar associations from neighbouring countries which are interested in dealing with this problem on the regional level in order to discourage any politicisation and to prove that this is a purely humanitarian issue," Psenica said.
As part of its campaign to bring the problem of missing persons to public attention, the alliance has made a one-minute video that will soon be broadcast by Croatian television stations. The video will be shown at the rally.
The International Day of the Disappeared is observed on August 30 following a recommendation from the United Nations working group on missing persons and on the initiative of the South American non-governmental organisation FEDEFAM which gathers families of persons who were held captive or disappeared in Latin America. Croatia started to observe the International Day of the Disappeared in 2002.