CROATIAN Serb leader Milorad Pupovac said on Tuesday, at a commemoration for Serb civilians killed during and in the aftermath of the 1995 operation "Storm", that after 20 years a step had been made forward by Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and President Zoran Milanovic in commemorating victims.

"From August 6 to early September 1995 at least 24 residents of Plavno and its hamlets, mostly elderly people, were killed. They were killed while tending to their cattle, working in the field or lying in their beds. They were killed with their arms raised up in the air. They were not armed, they were not soldiers, they could not have hurt anyone or defended themselves against those who came with the intent to kill them. They were killed by members of the Croatian Army and special police forces," Pupovac, leader of the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS), said in Grubori, a village in the area of Knin.

He stressed that no one had been held accountable

The murders were documented by the UN and by the Croatian judiciary and they established beyond doubt that a war crime against the civilian population had been committed here, said Pupovac.

He went on to say that nobody had been held to account for the Grubori killings or most of the killings committed in Sector South as well as that "courts did their job but in such a way to fail to determine who had committed the crimes."

"Unfortunately, participating in that were also those who should not have done so had they followed judicial ethics and a sense of morality," he said.

Pupovac stressed that it had taken 25 years for a memorial for the victims to be erected at Grubori, underlining the political progress made in that regard by the Andrej Plenkovic government and President Zoran Milanovic.

"The fallen will live in our memory"

"If not for that move forward, which is aimed at creating new commemorative policies and practices where there will be room for all victims regardless of their ethnicity and where the voice of condemnation of every crime, regardless of the perpetrator, will be heard, these two crosses would probably not have been put up here even after 25 years," he said.

He recalled that the village of Plavno in the Knin area today was inhabited by around 30 of the 1,720 villagers who lived there before 1995.

We hope that some of them will return here and rebuild their homes and we have the duty to help them in creating conditions for a dignified life, he said.

"The fallen will live in our memory, the failed will die in oblivion. Let us remember all and may we eternally remember innocent victims and do all we can so that those who have not been punished at least feel shame for what they did," said Pupovac.