REMAINS OF SERB VICTIMS SECRETLY EXHUMED IN KNIN AND DARUVAR

BELGRADE, NOVEMBER 7 /SRNA/ - Croatian authorities secretly exhumed the remains of murdered Serbs from graves in Knin and Daruvar during September and October, away from public scrutiny, the Veritas Documentation and Information Centre said.

Veritas revealed that on October 28, the son of a Serb fighter killed on June 21, 1992, on the Miljevci Plateau, whose remains have yet to be identified, contacted the organisation from the Knin cemetery.

As they explain, the man in question had visited the mass grave several times a year. The grave contains the remains of 12 unidentified victims from the Miljevci Plateau, who were buried there after being exhumed from a pit in Drinovci in August 1992. He would light candles and lay flowers at the site.

"After doing so in August this year, he returned on October 28 and found that everything had changed completely – the burial mounds were gone, and all that remained was freshly dug-up and levelled ground. He documented this with photographs taken in August and October," Veritas said.

They then verified his claims with two relevant sources and received confirmation that the Directorate for Detained and Missing Persons of the Croatian Ministry of Veterans' Affairs had indeed recently exhumed the site in Knin and that the remains had been transferred to Zagreb for bone sampling and DNA identification.

"Given that all the families of those killed on the Miljevci Plateau, with the exception of one, provided reference blood samples long ago and have been waiting for the exhumation of this well-known site for years, we hope that the identification process will be swift and successful," Veritas said.

They added that the same sources had confirmed that the remains of Serb victims from the wars of the 1990s had also been exhumed discreetly in September at a well-known site in the cemetery in Daruvar.

"Not a single word about either the exhumation in Knin or the one in Daruvar has been published on the official website of the Croatian Ministry of Veterans' Affairs," Veritas pointed out.

They said that this silence becomes particularly striking when compared with yesterday's visit to the Petrovačka Dola waste disposal site near Vukovar.

At that site, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and Minister Tomo Medved, in the presence of extensive media coverage, said that the search for missing persons would remain a priority for the Government and repeated accusations against Serbia over its alleged concealment of information about the locations of mass graves, Veritas said.

"While the exhumations of Croatian victims are used to send political messages in the presence of the country's highest-ranking officials and the media, the exhumations of known burial sites containing Serb victims are carried out in complete silence," Veritas said.

In their view, this is clearly being done to avoid provoking an outcry among the Croatian public, which is well aware of whose victims are being exhumed.

Veritas points out that Croatian officials regularly emphasise that their official list currently includes 1,725 missing persons from what they refer to as the Homeland War, but consistently fail to mention that more than half of that number are Serb victims.

They stressed that, according to their records, the list of missing Serbs from Croatia and the former Republic of Serbian Krajina currently contains around 1,460 people, nearly a third of whom are not even included on the official list maintained by Croatia.

Veritas called on the relevant institutions in Zagreb to stop selectively informing the public, complete the DNA identification of the remains from Knin and Daruvar as soon as possible, and keep the families of the victims and the public informed transparently at every stage of the process.