In its "Human Rights Watch World Report 2006" on the state of human rights in the world in 2005, the HRW said that between three hundred thousand and 350,000 Croatian Serbs left their homes during the 1991-95 war, mostly for Serbia and Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. As of September 2005, the government had registered 122,000 Serb returnees, the report says. Croatian Serb associations and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) mission to Croatia assessed the actual number of returnees as significantly lower -between 60 and 65 percent of the registered figure- because many Croatian Serbs had left again for Serbia and Montenegro or Bosnia and Herzegovina after only a short stay in Croatia, the report said.
The report also notes that violent acts against ethnic Serbs suddenly increased during 2005. The May 18 killing of eighty-one-year-old Dusan Vidic in his house in Karin, near Benkovac, was particularly shocking, the report said, adding that the May 18 killing of eighty-one-year-old Dusan Vidic in his house in Karin, near Benkovac, was particularly shocking.
In Pakostani, Benkovac and Zagreb, attackers damaged vehicles with Serbian registration plates, the report said, adding that in all but a few cases the police failed to apprehend the perpetrators.
The report said there were some worrying trends in 2005 threatening to reverse the course. In the key multi-ethnic towns of Knin and Vukovar, local boards of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) formed municipal governments in coalition with ultra-nationalist Croat parties following the May 15 local elections, while sidelining the centrist Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS), the report read.
The number of war crimes trials against ethnic Serbs (eleven) greatly outnumbered trials of ethnic Croat indictees (six). Trials of ethnic Serbs also tended to involve more defendants, making the contrast between the numbers of individuals standing trial from each ethnic group even starker, according to the report.
The absence, for the second consecutive year, of any new indictment against accused Croats raises serious concerns about the sincerity of the Croatian government"s accountability efforts, the report said.