Croatia and Serbia must do all they can to make progress in dealing with the issue of missing persons from the 1991-95 war in Croatia, which will be the basis for building good relations between the two nations, the Croatian President's commissioner for missing persons and Mayor of the eastern city of Osijek, Ivan Vrkic, said on Tuesday.

Speaking to the press after meeting with the Serbian President’s special representative for missing persons, Veran Matic, in Osijek, Vrkic said that he and Matic had been given the mandate to continue implementing the agreement between Croatia’s President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic and Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic on bilateral efforts aimed at finding the remains of missing persons disappeared during the war, largely believed to have been killed and buried in unmarked graves.

“We have agreed that the pain on both sides is the same, and that both sides have the obligation to create a climate in which progress will be made, so that the war can finally end. And to try to find all the missing persons, or at least most of them, so that their families can give them a proper burial,” Vrkic said.

Vrkic said that he and Matic “do not have a political mission, but a humanitarian role” to find solutions to this long-standing problem. The two countries’ commissions on missing persons will continue their work, as they are responsible for making progress in this process, in order to improve relations between the two nations.

Matic said that the fate of missing persons “is the last remaining issue to be resolved, so that conditions can be created for normalising (bilateral) relations and reconciliation.” He said that the Croatian and Serbian commissions on missing persons had been affected by turbulent political relations between the two countries in recent times. “Our task is to de-politicise this work, to ensure that this humanitarian effort does not stop even at times of chilled relations,” Matic said.

Vrkic told reporters that Croatia was still looking for 1,945 missing persons, while Matic said that Serbia was looking for about 1,500 people, including some 650 ethnic Serbs from Croatia.

There are 76 grave sites in Croatia believed to contain some of the people listed as missing. Asked if there were any such sites in Serbia, Matic said that, according to records from the two commissions, there was no such information. He added that some grave sites had been found in the area stretching along the Danube river, from the Croatian border to the Serbian city of Smederevo, but he said there was no information whether any of the bodies exhumed and identified were persons originally from Croatia.

“The Croatian commission has asked that the entire course of the Danube, as far as the cliffs of Djerdap, be examined, and that work is under way. The commissions are also working on issues regarding missing Croatian persons who were held at detention camps in Serbia, or in health institutions there, but I do not have any exact information as to which documents the Croatian commission had requested from Serbia,” Matic said.

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