The discussion was attended by the Croatian Assistant Minister of Family Affairs, War Veterans and Intergenerational Solidarity, Ivan Grujic, and representatives of the commissions on missing persons from Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Sarajevo-based International Committee on Missing Persons, and the Federation of the Associations of Families of Imprisoned or Missing Croatian Soldiers.
Speaking at a press conference afterwards, Grujic said that Croatia was still looking for 1,131 persons listed as prisoners or missing from the 1991-1995 Homeland War. He recalled that in 1991 that list contained more than 18,000 names.
Grujic said that Croatia was also searching for 909 persons who had disappeared in 1995 and that they need not necessarily be ethnic Serbs.
The Croatian representative said that a successful search for missing persons required a political will, which he stressed definitely existed in Croatia.
The names of all missing persons from Croatia will be made public in a book that will soon be published by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as this organisation has already done in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The data to be published in that book fully match those gathered by Croatia, Grujic said.
The head of the Serbian Commission on Missing Persons, Gvozden Gagic, said that Serbia was still looking for 400 of its citizens who had disappeared during the war and about 900 Croatian citizens of Serb ethnic background.
"There are about 800 persons more who are not on any list and details of their disappearance are being verified," he said.
Gagic and Milan Ivancevic of the Office for Prisoners of War and Missing Persons of Republika Srpska, the Serb entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina, said they were not satisfied with the speed of tracing missing persons.
Ivancevic said that only 50 per cent of the cases of missing persons from the former Yugoslavia had been resolved to date.
He specified that about 30,000 persons were listed as missing in Bosnia-Herzegovina and that 16,000 people had been exhumed there so far, of whom 12,000 had been identified, while 4,000 remained unidentified.
The Sarajevo-based International Commission on Missing Persons is not happy with the results in tracing missing persons, its representative Jeffrey Buenger said, adding that the commission would continue exerting political pressure on all those involved to speed up the tracing process.
The head of the Federation of the Associations of Families of Imprisoned or Missing Croatian Soldiers, Ivan Psenica, said that the problem of missing persons was primarily "a family problem from which politics should be totally excluded."
"It is an illusion to expect a family that has been waiting for 15 years to find out about the fate of their loved ones, to be satisfied. We are extremely unhappy with the process of tracing missing people," Psenica said.