FAMILIES OF MISSING CROATIAN CITIZENS STAGE PROTEST IN ZAGREB

ZAGREB, March 21 (Hina) - The centre for the protection of human rights of imprisoned and missing Croatian citizens and their families, "Apel", staged a peaceful protest in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Zagreb on Friday. The protest coincided with a closed-door session of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in the hotel. Families of missing and imprisoned persons from the UN-administered Danube region of eastern Croatia held a banner with photographs of their loved ones, saying "We Appeal for Humanity and Human Rights." They said they were protesting because there were people on the commission who had passively watched the Vukovar tragedy and mass executions of Croatian citizens, and because representatives of missing persons' families had been given only four minutes to present their problems, just like representatives from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Yugoslavia. "Neither former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, nor the European Union, nor the United Nations nor the International Committee of the Red Cross prevented the Serb destruction of Vukovar and a horrible genocide and the worst barbarism in the history of mankind at the end of the 20th century" Apel director Zdenka Farkas said. Farkas said that the ICMP meeting should have been held in Belgrade because "the truth about the fate of all registered missing and detained persons can be found there." "Our people cannot disappear, they may be held in prisons or condemned to forced labour in camps, but unfortunately, many of them are in mass graves like Ovcara," she said. "It would be much better to exhume mass graves and identify all people because every family has the right to find out the truth about the fate of their loved ones and we will make this clear in our address to Mr Vance." Farkas announced that she would invite all the participants in the meeting to observe a minute of silence in honour of the victims exhumed from the Ovcara mass graves, who are being reburied these days throughout Croatia. She recalled a statement by President Tudjman during talks with Vance on Thursday that all parties should present data about the survivors and that the truth about the victims should be revealed so that their families would not be kept in suspense. She added that for it remained for Vance to ask a statement in Belgrade from Milosevic who had started the war. Asked whether the "Apel" would talk with families of the missing persons from Yugoslavia (Serbia/Montenegro), Farkas said that they made a mistake if they wanted to talk about the problem in Zagreb, since the truth about their loved ones as well as about most of missing and detained Croatian citizens, was in the hands of Milosevic and the military leadership of the Yugoslav army. (hina) jn vm mš 212046 MET mar 97