In a statement issued ahead of the 15th anniversary of what it called the first big crime against humanity on the territory of the ex-Yugoslavia, the Committee said it wanted to remind the public that 15 years had passed since the ex-Yugoslav People's Army, with the wholehearted assistance of territorial defence units, "liberated" the eastern Croatian town by systematically destroying, plundering and ethnically cleansing it, killing civilians hiding in basements and setting up infamous camps like Ovcara.
The statement said there were no indications that the institutions of the system in Serbia would soon re-examine the ideological background and essence of the conquering march on a territory which the statement said should have been defended only from an external enemy.
Without taking a clear distance from the project which resulted in the Vukovar crimes and other grave crimes committed in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and without taking an equally clear distance from the ideas the project's architects and participants are still spreading, Serbia will constantly encounter obstacles in the full normalisation of relations with Croatia and other countries in the region, read the statement.
It added that those obstacles would also hamper Serbia in its democratisation and transformation into a modern European state.