Addressing the event, the head of the association of former inmates of Serb-run concentration camps, Danijel Rehak, said that some 30,000 people had passed through those camps, including 3,000 women and 500 children.
Women detained in those camps were subjected to torture, rape, harassment and many other forms of abuse, he said, adding that their testimonies should be looked into by human rights organisations.
Croatian President Ivo Josipovic's adviser on war veterans, Predrag Fred Matic, who was detained in camps in Serbia for nine months after the fall of the eastern Croatian city of Vukovar into the rebels' hands, warned that rapes in those camps were a war crime which should be particularly addressed. He warned that Serbia kept refusing to recognise the existence of war camps on its territory in the early 1990s.
According to UN figures, during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, there were some 300 camps in Serbia and in the areas of Croatia and Bosnia under Serb control. Thousands of people were tortured in those camps, said Mladen Loncar, an official at the Croatian Ministry for War Veterans' Affairs.
He said that sexual harassment of both male and female inmates was a conspicuous feature of those camps.
Loncar reiterated that so far no one had been called to account for those crimes.
He called on tortured women to give their testimonies to the prosecutorial authorities that are now conducting a large-scale investigation into Serb concentration camps.
Several women from eastern Croatia spoke at today's conference about what happened to them when they were detained in those camps.