"Serbia does not cooperate in the search for the wartime missing people," Croatia's Minister for War Veterans, Tomo Medved, said in Vukovar on Tuesday, at a commemoration marking the national day of remembrance for people gone missing in the country's 1991-95 independence war and the International Day of the Disappeared.

Medved said that Serbia was not giving up any information on the fate of Croatians who went missing in the war, “although it was completely clear that data on the whereabouts of the missing persons’ remains could be found in Serbian archives.”

“I therefore again call on Serbia to face the fact that it carried out military aggression against Croatia and committed horrible crimes, and to open its archives and provide information on the whereabouts of the missing persons’ remains so that we can speed up the process,” Medved said.

Asked by a reporter if the Croatian government was prepared to block Serbia’s EU accession talks if this non-cooperation continued, Medved said that at the time when talks on policy chapters 23 and 24 were opened in Serbia’s EU entry talks, Croatia made its conditions clear and that those conditions remained still the same.

“These include cooperating in the search for missing persons, paying out compensation to former inmates of Serbian-run concentration camps, and the withdrawal of Serbia’s law proclaiming regional or universal jurisdiction…. These are not only Croatia’s conditions, but the EU’s conditions as well,” said Medved.

He recalled that Croatia was still looking for 1,832 persons gone missing in the war. “Over the past six and a half years, Croatia has made significant progress in that process, having determined what happened to 221 missing persons, with exploratory exhumations being carried out on a daily basis,” he said.