ZAGREB, Aug 30 (Hina) - Croatia is still looking for 1,262 persons gone missing in the 1990s war, the head of the government's office for detained and missing persons, Col. Ivan Grujic, told national television late on Friday on the
eve of International Missing Persons Day -- August 30.
ZAGREB, Aug 30 (Hina) - Croatia is still looking for 1,262 persons
gone missing in the 1990s war, the head of the government's office
for detained and missing persons, Col. Ivan Grujic, told national
television late on Friday on the eve of International Missing
Persons Day -- August 30. #L#
Eighteen thousand people were listed as detained or missing in
1991, the start of the Serbian aggression on Croatia, Grujic said,
adding that long-standing experience and continuity in the work of
his office had resulted in the creation of the Croatian model of
tracing the missing.
This model encompasses keeping a data base, a search methodology,
tracing mass graves, a negotiation methodology, mass grave
exhumations, and identification, Grujic said, recalling the model
had been acknowledged abroad as well.
Speaking of negotiations between the government's office for the
detained and the missing and Belgrade in connection with the
relocation of bodies from mass graves and the covering up of Serbian
crimes in Croatia, Col. Grujic said several significant things had
been done over the years.
He said that based on evidence from his office, the relocation of
mass graves in formerly Serb-occupied Croatian areas, done with the
assistance of the former Yugoslav army (JNA), was entered into
official negotiation documents for the first time this year. Also,
representatives of Serbia and Montenegro made the commitment to
take every step to provide answers as to the whereabouts of the
bodies, he added.
Asked if representatives of the international community who were
deployed in occupied Croatian territories at the time had known
about the relocation of bodies and had done anything about it,
Grujic said his office had reliable information about the
relocation of bodies from mass graves in eastern Croatia's Danube
river region over 1994 and 1995, when U.N. troops were deployed
there.
Grujic said his office had undertaken a series of measures to
investigate the issue, including sending a report to the United
Nations, the Hague war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
and all relevant bodies tracing missing persons.
Asked about the victims buried in mass graves, Grujic said 136 such
graves had been found in formerly occupied parts of Croatia and that
victims included wounded soldiers from Vukovar's general hospital
and elderly persons, a fact, he added, which pointed to planned
ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Grujic also said the government had set aside sufficient funds for
his office, which he added included internationally recognised
exhumation experts and three state-of-the-art DNA labs.
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