KOSTOVIC MEETS FAMILIES OF MISSING, DETAINED SOLDIERS

ZAGREB, Sept 8 (Hina) - The Croatian President's Chief-of-Staff Ivica Kostovic on Wednesday met a delegation of the Association of the Families of Missing and Detained Croatian Soldiers. The families said they wished to inform the President of the Republic and all state bodies about their request for discovering the truth about the missing and detained. "As far as the state is concerned, search actions, identification, exhumation, and the care about the families (of the missing and detained) is one of the priorities", Kostovic said. The families, he said, are dissatisfied that the Hague Tribunal and the international community have completely neglected the processing of killings and torture committed against Croatian POWs, which is a war crime under all war conventions. The state shares their view because the ample evidence on the events of 1991 has met no response, nor has any attention been paid to those crimes, Kostovic said. Asked to assess cooperation between Croatia and Yugoslavia in solving the problem of missing and imprisoned Croatian soldiers, the president of the Government Commission for the Missing and Detained, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Grujic, said the official contacts were suspended at the moment, although there was a protocol on cooperation between the two countries' commissions. We have made steps through the international commission for missing persons for those contacts to be re-established, Grujic said. The two commissions severed contacts at a conference on missing and detained persons in Amsterdam, on the day the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia started. Croatia is interested in gathering data and documents on the missing and in taking over the remains of Croatian citizens who were buried on the Yugoslav territory. According to our estimates, there are at least 300 such persons, and they all went missing or were detained in 1991, Grujic said, adding Croatia was still searching for 1,687 missing and detained citizens. (hina) jn rml