Commemoration for Victims of Operation Storm Held in Donji Zirovac Village, Croatia

Commemoration for Victims of Operation Storm, Donji Zirovac Dvor na Uni (BETAPHOTO/ZLF/Sinisa Obrenic)

The plight of Serbs in a refugee procession from Glina to Dvor in the last years of the war remain outside institutional memory and with no open investigations even 30 years later, officials at a commemoration of the Serb National Council for those slain and expelled in Croatia's Operation Storm in 1995 said on Aug. 3.

Milorad Pupovac, the president of the Independent Democratic Serb Party and a member of the Croatian parliament, delivered an address at the commemoration in the village of Donji Zirovac. He said no proceedings to establish accountability for the operation had ever even been initiated, and that the events of August 1995 did not exist for Croatian state institutions -- "either when it comes to records of the victims or commemoration." Pupovac said the attacks on the Serbs happened "after the fighting ended, when the articles of surrender were already signed," the HINA news agency reported.

"In the Gornji Zirovac and Donji Zirovac area alone, and the Obljaj forest, 78 persons were killed -- 48 civilians, 17 soldiers and 13 who have not yet been identified as civilians or soldiers," he said. Vesna Terselic, an activist and director of the Documenta Center for Dealing with the Past, called for the further collection of information about persons killed in Operation Storm and those unaccounted for after that military and police action. According to data recently made public by Documenta, 2,654 people died during Operation Storn and in its wake -- 1,747 Serbs and 416 Croats.

Present at the commemoration, along with the victims' families, were representatives of the Serb community in Croatia, a delegation from the Serbian embassy in Zagreb, several members of the Croatian parliament, Serb National Council head Boris Milosevic, representatives of the Serbian the Green-Left Front and Free Citizens Movement parties and civil sector organizations.