CROATIA, SERBIA-MONTENEGRO TO STEP UP COOPERATION REGARDING MISSING PERSONS

BELGRADE, May 6 (Hina) - Croatia and Serbia-Montenegro will step up cooperation in connection with missing persons, the two countries' officials told a joint news conference in Belgrade on Thursday, adding that the exhumation of 67 unidentified persons from Belgrade's Lesce cemetery and the Obrenovac city cemetery would begin on May 17.#L# Expert teams of the Croatian Administration for Detained and Missing Persons and the Serbia-Montenegro Commission for Missing Persons met in Belgrade over the last two days, thus resuming cooperation which had been discontinued for nearly a year due to the constitution of Serbia-Montenegro. It was agreed that both sides would have experts monitoring exhumations in both countries. The head of the Croatian Administration for Detained and Missing Persons, Ivan Grujic, told reporters it was good that cooperation had resumed and that exhumations would start in Belgrade and Obrenovac, but that some open issues remained. He said Croatia still demanded the return of documents seized from Vukovar's hospital in 1991, the list of people killed at the Ovcara farm, and data on possible new mass graves in Croatia. The chief of the Serbia-Montenegro Commission for Missing Persons, Gvozden Gagic, said his country was looking for about 520 of its citizens as well as some 2,000 missing Croatian Serbs. Grujic said Croatia was searching for 1,214 persons of different nationalities, but mostly Croats, gone missing between 1991 and 1994. He added that the list of people gone missing during the 1995 operations Storm and Flash were not complete but already contained 813 names. Asked about damages the families of the missing might claim from Serbia-Montenegro, Grujic said this possibility was open for associations and individuals. (Hina) ha