The Initiative was launched in 2006 by Serbia’s Humanitarian Law Fund, the Investigation and Documentation Centre of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Croatian Documenta centre, with the aim of helping prosecutors’ offices and courts in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo prosecute war crimes more efficiently, providing assistance to victims and promoting tolerance and understanding.

At least 120,000 people were killed and 17,158 went missing in the armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995 and between 1998 and 2000, said Vesna Terselic of the Documenta centre.

Terselic said that pre-investigative activities had been completed in only less than a half of the total of 703 war crimes reported to the Chief State Prosecutor’s Office in Croatia since 1991.

If that is the situation in Croatia, other countries in the region face even more challenges, notably Bosnia, where most crimes were committed, Terselic said.

Natasa Kandic of the Serbian Humanitarian Law Fund said that at the existing pace, regional courts would be able to prosecute a maximum 1,200 perpetrators of war crimes by 2020, which she said would not provide a complete overview of the gravest war crimes nor restore the dignity of the victims and their families.

The president of the Association of Families of Detained and Missing Croatian Homeland War Soldiers, Ivan Psenica, said that the list of people who were detained or went missing in the Homeland War contained the names of 1,066 people.

We paid a visit to Belgrade and we have information that there are protocols on a certain number of people who are on the list of persons who were detained or went missing in the Homeland War, which have not been given to Croatia, Psenica said.

The meeting in Vukovar was also attended by representatives of other associations of war victims and war veterans and non-governmental organisations operating in Vukovar.

The next meeting of the Initiative to establish RECOM will be held in Pristina next week, when RECOM is expected to be established so that it could organise a campaign to collect one million signatures and send them to all governments in the region with a request that they adopt a decision on the acceptance of the initiative.