ZAGREB, 30 August, 2022 - War Veterans Minister Tomo Medved said in Vukovar on Tuesday, at a commemoration marking the national day of remembrance for people gone missing in the country's 1991-95 Homeland War and the International Day of the Disappeared, that there was no cooperation on Serbia's part in the search for the missing.
Medved said that Serbia was not submitting information on the fate of persons gone missing in the Homeland War although it was completely clear that data on the whereabouts of the missing persons' remains could be found in Serbian archives.
"I therefore again call on Serbia to face the fact that it carried out military aggression against Croatia and committed horrible crimes, and to open its archives and provide information on the whereabouts of the missing persons' remains so that we can speed up the process," Medved said.
Asked by a reporter if the Croatian government was prepared to block Serbia's EU accession talks if its non-cooperation continued, the minister said that at the time when talks on policy chapters 23 and 24 were opened in Serbia's EU entry talks, Croatia made its conditions clear and that those conditions were still the same.
"Those are cooperation in the search for missing persons, payment of compensation to former inmates of Serb-run concentration camps, and the withdrawal of the law on the so-called regional or universal jurisdiction... Those are not only Croatia's conditions but the EU's conditions as well," said Medved.
He recalled that Croatia was still looking for 1,832 persons gone missing in the 1990s war.
In the past six and a half years Croatia has made significant progress in that process, having established the fate of 221 missing persons, with exploratory exhumations being carried out on a daily basis, he said.
