Serbia, Croatia mark 10th anniversary of Krajina Serb expulsion

Belgrade, August 5 (RIA Novosti, Nikolai Paskhin) - Events marking the 10th anniversary of the expulsion of Serbs from Krajina were held Friday in Knin, the breakaway region's capital from 1991 to 1995.

More than 2,500 Serbs were killed or went missing in August of 1995 as Croatian troops launched an offensive to return the city to Croatian control. About 250,000 others fled their homes to find refuge in Serbia and areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina with a predominantly Serb population.

President Stjepan Mesic, Prime Minister Ivo Sanader and Parliament Speaker Vladimir Seks have arrived in Krajina to attend Friday's commemorative events. The anniversary of the Knin offensive, which became known as Operation Storm, is being marked in Croatia as Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day.

Operation Storm veterans had been planning to stage an opposition rally in Knin Friday, but held off because of what they see as the republican authorities' collaboration with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in hunting down three Croatian generals under whose command the offensive was carried out. The most wanted of these, Ante Gotovina, indicted by the ICT for crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war, has been in hiding for a decade now.

Ceremonies to commemorate the mass expulsion of Serbs from what they see as their ancestral lands in Krajina also took place in the Serbian capital of Belgrade today, bringing together Serbian government officials and hundreds of refugees from Croatia.

In Serbia, Operation Storm is considered to be the worst case of ethnic cleansing since World War II.