Croatia will not stop search for missing persons

Croatia will not stop the search for the disappeared, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said at an event marking the International Day of the Disappeared and Remembrance Day for people who went missing in the Homeland War, adding that it would insist on cooperation with Serbia.

Cooperation is needed to ensure information from Serbia’s archives would not only be recycled knowledge, but fresh information to ease the issue of the disappeared, the PM added.

“There’s no faltering, we won’t stop searching for the 1,858 disappeared and killed persons,” the prime minister said.

Serb National Council (SNV) leader Milorad Pupovac said that over the past few years the search for people who had gone missing in the war had seriously slowed down and that Croatia and Serbia had to work on cooperating on the matter. According to him, 9,969 missing persons are still being searched for in the former Yugoslavia since the wars in the 1990s. 

“That cooperation has stalled in both defining the protocol on cooperation and in the necessary meetings at the appropriate political level. Because of that, the humanitarian side of the search for the disappeared and political relations between Croatia and Serbia suffer,” the SNV president stressed. 

The chief of the UN mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), Zahir Tanin, on Monday urged, in turn, urged Pristina and Belgrade to also redouble their efforts to shed light on the fates of those unaccounted for since the Homeland War, a press release published on the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances noted. Read more.

In a press release, Tanin also expressed UNMIK’s commitment to fully supporting the process, as well as the families’ right to the truth.

“While […] Tanin welcomes the progress achieved earlier this year with the exhumation and identification of several missing persons under the auspices of the Working Group on Missing Persons, he expresses concern that the process appears to have stalled in the past few months due to a political impasse. In this regard, he calls on Prishtina and Belgrade to refrain from politicising this critical humanitarian and human rights issue,” the press release noted.