VUČEVIĆ: SERBS SEEK JUSTICE FOR EVERY LIFE LOST IN CRIMINAL OPERATION STORM

BELGRADE, AUGUST 4 /SRNA/ - Serbian President's Adviser Miloš Vučević said that Serbs are seeking justice for every life lost and every child's tear in the Croatian criminal operation Storm and will not apologise to anyone because the Serbian people were tortured and abused.

"After several decades, we have begun to show self-respect, to speak about our own victims, and not to apologise to anyone because our people were tortured and abused, but instead to seek justice for them. To seek justice for every life lost in that sad convoy, for every child's tear, for lost childhoods and lost ancestral homes," Vučević said.

He said that he grew up angry over the years "wasted" by those who turned a blind eye to the tragedy of their own people, and over all those who remained silent or failed to acknowledge that Operation Storm was a crime against humanity and the largest ethnic cleansing in Europe.

"These August days will always be a reminder of sorrow. But no pogrom can ever again erase the success of our Serbia. Together, we are building a future stronger than all storms, in convoys that do not lead to escape, but to new victories, for all our children and for the future of Serbia," Vučević wrote on X.

The Day of Remembrance for all Serbs who were killed or expelled during the 1995 Croatian-Muslim pogrom against Serbs from the Republic of Serbian Krajina and Republika Srpska will be commemorated on Tuesday evening in Banjaluka and Mrkonjić Grad. The commemoration is being organised by the committees for the preservation of the tradition of the liberation wars of the governments of Republika Srpska and Serbia.

The criminal Operation Storm began on August 4, 1995, with an offensive launched by the Croatian Army and police, along with units of the Croatian Defense Council /HVO/, in the regions of Banija, Lika, Kordun and northern Dalmatia, during which more than 220,000 Krajina Serbs were expelled from their ancestral homes.

According to the updated records of the Veritas Documentation and Information Centre, 1,904 Serbs were killed or went missing during and after the operation, including 1,250 civilians, about three-quarters of whom were over the age of 60.

The victims also include 10 children under the age of 14 and 566 women, about four-fifths of whom were over 60 years old, representing a particularly grim record of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, according to Veritas.

In its February 2015 ruling, the International Court of Justice classified Operation Storm as an act of ethnic cleansing, but not genocide, although global experts in the field maintain that the operation exhibited all the characteristics of genocide.