The regional committee for assistance to refugees in Vojvodina was quoted on Friday by the Novi Sad-based Radio 021 as accusing the Serbian government of "letting again war profiteers and individuals, accused in Croatia of war crimes, to mark the anniversary of the exodus of Serbs from Croatia".
The committee chairman, Radenko Popic, said that further normalisation of relations between Serbia and Croatia should be made conditional on the restitution of property, i.e. on giving back socially-owned flats to its prewar tenants or ensuring appropriate compensation and the reconstruction of or compensation for houses which refugees, now settled in Serbia, had in Croatia.
Contrary to a wide-spread opinion in Serbia that the August 1995 offensive of the Croatian forces was the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Vojvodina's parliament chairman, Bojan Kostres, pinned the responsibility for the exodus of 200,000 Croatians Serbs to the then Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.
"The regime of Slobodan Milosevic was directly responsible for the exodus of 200,000 Croatian citizens as it stood behind that event in collusion with the then Croatian authorities in Zagreb," Kostres wrote in a press release.
He called on the incumbent government in Belgrade not to allow war profiteers and individuals accountable for war crimes to abuse the suffering of their compatriots today again.
He urges Belgrade not to pretend that it did not see the establishment of some phantom organisations such as the self-proclaimed government in exile of the so-called Republic of the Serb Krajina (RSK) which was formed in Novi Sad "with the support of local authorities and the Serbian Radical Party".
"The democratic Croatia, on the other hand, should in no way celebrate over the graves of hundreds of civilians who were killed in Operation Storm, but it should clearly discontinue the policy of ethnic cleansing. Otherwise, it will not find the right path towards Europe," Kostres said.
The Foreign Minister of Serbia-Montenegro (SCG), Vuk Draskovic, issued a press release on the occasion of the Storm anniversary reiterating his position that the operation was ethnic cleansing.
"The celebration of the tenth anniversary of Storm in Croatia and commitment to admission to the European Union cannot go together," Draskovic said.