On the occasion of the 24th anniversary of the 1995 Croatian military and police operation Storm, the Serb National Council (SNV) on Saturday issued a remembrance statement calling for a minute's silence and expressing sympathy with all who remember their family members, neighbours and friends killed in that operation.

“We express sympathy over the lost and abandoned homes. Even though we are not part of the collective memory established by the state, it is up to us to say the victims’ names and the names of their villages and towns without fear and with dignity, and to remember them freely,” reads the statement, signed by SNV president Boris Milosevic.

The SNV leader noted that the war in Croatia did not end with Operation Storm, or with the murder of the last old man or the departure of the last tractor, and that it also did not end with Croatia’s accession to the EU.

“The war has never been more alive and the news of its end travels slowly,” the SNV says, adding that the news of the war’s end has still not reached Croatian courts, members of parliament, schools and those who do not know what to do with themselves in peacetime.

“The war is not over and Serb children who have to bear the stigma of criminals in their schools and feel the guilt for its destructive consequences are the ones who know it best,” the SNV says.

It warns that in such circumstances it is not only Serbs, killed and expelled during the Storm and Flash operations and tortured and abducted during the war, who are being forgotten, also forgotten are Croat civilians killed in the war. Their suffering becomes equally invisible and unreal in a society in which the war and war myths become values in themselves while ethnic and religious backgrounds are treated as life achievements, reads the statement.

The SNV has fought and will continue fighting for a remembrance policy in which there will be room for all victims and all those who today suffer injustice due to their ethnic and religious affiliation, the statement says.

“We will eventually have to look at ourselves in the mirror as a society regardless of how much we fear our own reflection,” the SNV says, adding that the sooner this is done, the better it will be for the freedom and equality of all people in Croatia.

“The necessity of that act is reflected in the fact that violence was sown in society long ago and is evident in schools, in political speeches, in the media and in the street. History will repeat itself to all those who do not see the connection between the glorification of the war and an almost complete absence of solidarity and empathy,” the SNV said.