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Complaint Filed About Croat Family’s Wartime Murder in Serbia

October 17, 201812:12
Serbia's Humanitarian Law Centre has filed a criminal complaint against unknown perpetrators for the unsolved murder of a Croat family in Vojvodina in 1992.

This post is also available in this language: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp

Belgrde Higher Court. Photo: BIRN

The Humanitarian Law Centre, HLC, said on Wednesday that it had filed a criminal complaint to the Serbian war crime prosecutor’s office for the murder of three members of the ethnic Croat Matijevic family in 1992.

According to the HLC, in the evening on April 20, 1992, unknown perpetrators took Ana and Jozo Matijevic along with their underage son, Franjo, from their family home in the Serbian village of Kukujevci.

“Several years later, their remains were exhumed from the cemetary in Mohovo, Croatia. To this day nobody was held accountable for this crime before Serbian courts,” the HLC said in a press release.

The Centre said that this was not the only killing of Croats in Kukujevci. In July 1993 two Serbian volunteers in the Croatian Serb rebel army killed Nikola and Agica Oksomic and 87-year-old Marija Tomic, Agica’s mother.

The HLC said that the county court in Sremska Mitrovica in 1996 jailed Goran Vukovic, Pavle Draskovic and Milan Nikolic for 15, 10 and three-and-a-half years, respectively.

It called the murders of the Matijevic and Oksomic families part of a series of ethnically motivated crimes against Croats in Serbia’s northern province of Vojvodina between 1991 and 1993.

“During this period there were documented murders, beatings, abuses, threats, planting of bombs and fires – committed in order to pressure the Croats of Vojvodina to move to Croatia,” the HLC said.

On April 11, 2018, the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals sentenced the Serbian nationalist politician Vojislav Seselj in absentia to ten years in prison for inciting crimes with nationalist speeches in the Vojvodina during the war in 1992.

The HLC urged the Serbian war crimes prosecutor’s office to investigate allegations of other crimes committed against Croats in Vojvodina during the 1990s.

Read more:

The Croats and Serbs Who Swapped Homes

No Love for Seselj at Scene of His Crime

This post is also available in this language: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp


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