The purpose of the meeting, held under the slogan "Where are our dearest ones?", was to warn about the fundamental right to know the truth about one's dearest ones.
Delegations of state, county and town officials and representatives of Homeland War associations lay wreaths and lit candles in memory of missing soldiers and civilians at the local cemetery, after which a religious service was held in a local church.
The president of the federation of associations gathering the families of imprisoned and missing soldiers, Ivan Psenica, spoke about problems encountered by those families, expressing dissatisfaction with the pace at which the problem of missing and imprisoned persons is being solved.
The Minister of Family and War Veterans' Affairs and Inter-generational Solidarity, Jadranka Kosor, who also attended the event, called on all people with any information on possible locations of mass or individual graves to report it using an anonymous phone line opened for that purpose.
She said that ahead of the International Day of the Disappeared the government had established a special commission to step up efforts to solve this problem.
The commission consists of officials from the ministries of defence, internal and foreign affairs and intelligence services.
Kosor said that in the first six months of this year 66 test exhumations were carried out on Croatia's territory and that 47 yielded no results.
A total of 1,149 persons are still registered with the Office for Missing and Imprisoned Persons, and 510 of them are from Vukovar County. So far, 141 mass graves and around 1,000 individual graves have been discovered on Croatia's territory, she said.
Kosor's assistant Ivan Grujic confirmed that test exhumations in the area of Vukovar County would start after September 5. They will include the Ovcara farm outside Vukovar, where four suspicious locations will be investigated.