The Serb National Council (SNV) on Tuesday held a commemoration for six Serb civilians killed in Donji Skrad in Barilovic municipality, Karlovac County, during and in the aftermath of Operation Storm, which ended a Serb armed insurgency in Croatia in 1995.

After the commemoration, Deputy Prime Minister for Social Affairs and Human Rights Boris Milosevic said it was his wish for Victory Day, 5 August, to become more a day of reconciliation and for mutual respect to grow stronger every year.

“We are taking one step at a time, trust has not been lost, we are continuing the policy of inclusiveness and understanding and are building trust, as we said we would last year,” Milosevic said, adding that his non-attendance at this year’s Victory Day commemoration in Knin did not mean giving up on that policy or a loss of trust.

During their visit to Donji Skrad, Milosevic, SNV president Milorad Pupovac and Documenta NGO head Vesna Teršelič also paid tribute to three Croatian soldiers killed on 5 August 1995 at the memorial in Donji Skrad.

This was preceded by a Serb Orthodox religious rite and the reading of the SNV’s 14th Statement of Remembrance, in which the SNV says that 30 years after the start of the 1991-95 war and 26 years after its end “there has been a war of commemorative policies in Croatia, with everyone holding their own commemorations and using war suffering for political ends” while “we rarely remember the suffering of others.”

Pupovac said nobody had been called to account for the murder of the six Serb civilians killed in Donji Skrad as no investigation had been launched.

“The messages we send from commemorations cannot receive support right away because that is not realistic. We cannot tell when that will happen because state policy makers are the ones who decide about it, but we will continue with commemorations, including those for Croat victims,” Pupovac said when asked how come “no one from the Croat side” attended today’s commemoration.

Asked why there was a war of commemorative policies, Pupovac said that commemorative policies had turned into a continuation of real warfare, without an awareness that a true peace can be achieved by changing those policies.

He called for following post-WWII practices between France and Germany, Poland and Germany or Yugoslavia and Italy, and Yugoslavia and Germany, which 26 years after WWII were building Europe together and creating preconditions for friendship.

Contrary to that, “the peoples of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia have been digging in with their commemorative policies.”

Asked if it would not be good, in terms of reconciliation, for Deputy PM Milosevic also to attend this year’s commemoration in Knin, as he did last year, Pupovac said that he did not see any problem with that and that “that is not a mere gesture in an annual ritual.”

Moreover, he said, “with its messages, today’s commemoration at Donji Skrad is no less important than the one Mr Milosevic attended last year.”

“One should stay away from war-mongering policies, through commemorative policies and respect for victims we should get rid, in parallel, of the burden of the violent break-up of our common state in the 1990s and the burden from World War II,” he said, noting that the Ustasha salute “For the homeland ready” should be banned from public life.

Pupovac also called for recognising Croatian Serb refugees who fled to Serbia or Bosnia and Herzegovina as war victims and for creating room to enable that recognition.

He added that he had not yet decided if he would travel to Belgrade on Wednesday to attend an annual commemoration of the exodus of Croatian Serbs, noting that this would depend on his assessment of whether by doing so he could contribute to changing current commemorative policies.