During this weekend, both Croatia and Serbia will remember the August 4 Zagreb offensive “Storm” to liberate the territories held by the rebel Serbs for four years: Croats will celebrate, Serbs will mourn for the 22nd time, N1 reported on Tuesday.

The Humanitarian Law Centre (FHP) in Serbia has organised a seminar on the occasion of the anniversary, focused on the different ways of remembering the event.

Nemanja Stjepanovic, from the FHP, has said that while the Croats celebrate the victory, they don’t mention innocent civilian casualties. On the other hand, in Serbia, politicians remember the victims but do nothing to legalise their status in the country in a proper way.

“Politicians ( in Serbia) keep talking about the victims, but when it comes to what their rights are today, the situation is different,” he said.

“The ‘Storm’ civilian victims who now live in Serbia are, unfortunately, not recognised as such according to the 1996 law that is still in power. They have no rights here,” Stjepanovic said.

He also said that no one in Serbia talked about why and what happened before and related to the “Storm.”

Croatia’s Army launched an offensive on early morning on August 4, 1995, to liberate parts of the country held by the Serb rebels who were a majority in some of those areas before the armed conflict started in 1991.

Supported by the then Belgrade regime, the rebels took control of some 25 percent of Croatia’s pre-war territory, wanting to secede and join Serbia after Zagreb declared independence from former Yugoslavia in June 1991.

After four years, some 200,000 local Serbs fled Croatia following the start of the ‘Storm’ while 1,839 were either killed or missing, according to the Documentation and Information Centre Veritas.

Stjepanovic said that the Hague War Crimes Tribunal Appeal Chamber’s acquittal of two Croatian generals accused of war crimes during and after the ‘Storm’ and sentenced to long-term imprisonment in the first instance, was unreasonable.

Alos, he added and that Croatia’s President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic decision to decorate them this August was “an insult to the victims and will not contribute to establishing peace in the region.”