Veritas: Still No Punishment for Exodus of over 220,000 Krajina Serbs

Veritas

The Veritas Documentation and Information Center said on July 31, ahead of the 31st anniversary of Croatia's Operation Storm, that the exodus of more than 220,000 Serbs from the former Republic of Serb Krajina remains unpunished, even though most of those killed in the offensive were civilians and people over the age of 60.

The Center recalled in a press release that on Aug. 4, 1995, Croatian forces attacked Serb areas under U.N. protection in northern Dalmatia, Lika, Kordun and Banija, even though representatives of the Republic of Serb Krajina accepted the international community's proposal for a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Geneva a day earlier. "Against 30,000 Krajina troops, the aggressor deployed forces that exceeded the entire population of the Krajina district, crushing resistance in a highly unequal battle within just a few days," Veritas explained in the statement.

The Center went on to say that its records contained the names of 1,904 Serbs killed or missing during and after the operation, most of them elderly or people too infirm to leave leave their homes, as well as people traveling in refugee columns inside Republika Srpska. "As many as 1,250 of the victims were civilians, or 66 percent, three-quarters of whom were over the age of 60. Ten children and as many as 566 women, or 30 percent, were killed in the operation, a particularly grim record of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. To this day, 612 people, or 32 percent, are still missing, 76 percent of them civilians and 238 of them women, whose fate is still unknown after three decades," Veritas said.

The organization placed special emphasis on what it described as the absence of international justice and the selective conduct of the Croatian judiciary. "Even though the International Court of Justice in 2015 unambiguously qualified Operation Storm as an act of ethnic cleansing aimed at removing the Serb majority from the area, the judicial system completely failed... Croatian courts have handed down only two final convictions for war crimes against Serbs, while surviving Krajina soldiers were at the same time convicted en masse and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, and thousands of defenseless civilians were interned in camps," the statement said.