Mesic said the aggressor had paid a high price in Vukovar and dared not go further west, although the plan was to continue to Zagreb. He added that Croatian victims in the 1990s war of independence had been numerous and part of the creation of independent and sovereign Croatia.
The president reiterated that guilt for war crimes must be individualised. "Present-day Serbia must help so that all those who committed the crimes answer for them."
Mesic said that although a trial was under way in Belgrade for the crime committed at Ovcara, a farm near Vukovar, he doubted that only 16 or 18 people had taken part in those atrocities. "I don't think that's the proper job that needs to be done."
Asked to comment on a Serbia and Montenegro military ship which entered Croatian waters on the Danube earlier today, Mesic said state bodies had already reacted to this violation of the border.
"That was allegedly an accident," he said, adding the most important thing was for the Serbian army to withdraw from the border so that the two countries could establish a border in keeping with European standards.
Asked if he felt ignored because the assistant defence minister had signed a memorandum on cooperation between the Croatian army and the United States, Mesic said that as the supreme commander of the Armed Forces he must be informed of everything pertaining to them.
"Negotiations were held but I knew nothing about them," he said, adding that his advisors were analysing the document "to see if the command line was overstepped".
"I don't think the custom introduced by the new defence minister is good. He doesn't inform his supreme commander, who is his superior. I don't know why this is done," the president concluded.
Also today, an Orthodox memorial service was held at the Serb military cemetery in Vukovar in memory of the war's Serb victims. Delegations of the Independent Democratic Serb Party, the Joint Council of eastern Croatia's predominantly Serb municipalities, and Serb victims' associations laid wreaths.
As in previous years, representatives of the Serb minority in Vukovar did not attend the marking of Vukovar's remembrance day.
According to data of the Veritas documentation centre from Belgrade, about 2,600 Croatian Serbs went missing in 1991 and during the liberation operations of 1995.
The Serbia and Montenegro Council of Ministers' commission for the missing is tracing 1,200 persons gone missing during the war in Croatia.
According to the Croatian War Veterans Ministry's office for the detained and the missing, about 1,000 Serbs are estimated to have gone missing during the war in Croatia.