The Documentation and Information Center “Veritas” informs the public and the families of the victims that during September and October of this year, without any public announcement and far from the media eye, the competent authorities of the Republic of Croatia carried out exhumations of human remains at two known burial sites containing Serb victims from the 1990s war – at the New Cemetery in Knin and at the cemetery in Daruvar.
On October 28 of this year, “Veritas” was contacted directly from the Knin cemetery by the son of one of the Serb fighters killed on June 21, 1992, on the Miljevci Plateau, whose remains have still not been identified. For years, several times a year, he visited the mass grave where 12 unidentified (John Doe) victims from the Miljevci Plateau were buried following their exhumation from a pit in Drinovci in August 1992, lighting candles and laying flowers for all twelve of them. After doing so again in August of this year, during his visit on October 28 he found a completely altered site – the burial mounds were gone, replaced only by freshly dug and leveled earth, which he documented with photographs taken in both August and October.
Through verification from two credible sources, “Veritas” has received confirmation that the Directorate for Detained and Missing Persons of the Croatian Ministry of Veterans’ Affairs recently did indeed exhume this site in Knin, and that the remains were transferred to Zagreb for bone sampling and DNA identification. Given that all families of the victims from the Miljevci Plateau (except one) provided reference blood samples long ago and have waited for years for this known site to be exhumed, we hope for a swift and successful identification.
The same sources confirmed that in September of this year, a known location at the cemetery in Daruvar was also quietly exhumed, for which the Serbian side had likewise submitted a request for exhumation long ago under the well-founded suspicion that Serb victims killed in the 1990s war were buried there.
Not a single word was published on the official website of the Croatian Ministry of Veterans’ Affairs regarding either the exhumation in Knin or the one in Daruvar. Such silence becomes particularly striking when compared to yesterday's visit to the Petrovačka Dola landfill near Vukovar, where Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and Minister Tomo Medved, amidst heavy media coverage, stated that finding the missing remains a focus of the Government and repeated accusations against Serbia for allegedly hiding information on grave locations.
While exhumations of Croat victims are used to send political messages in the presence of top state officials and the media, exhumations of known burial sites containing Serb victims are carried out in complete silence – evidently to avoid provoking a backlash from a segment of the domestic public that knows full well whose victims are being unearthed.
Croatian officials take every opportunity to emphasize that their official list currently contains 1,725 missing persons from the “Homeland War,” yet they routinely omit the fact that more than half of that number are precisely Serb victims. At the same time, according to the records of DIC “Veritas,” there are currently around 1,460 missing Serbs from the territory of Croatia and the former RSK on its list, of whom nearly one-third are not even included on the official list used by the Republic of Croatia.
“Veritas” calls upon the competent institutions in Zagreb to cease selective public reporting, to complete the DNA identification process of the remains from Knin and Daruvar in the shortest possible time, and to transparently inform the families of the victims and the public about all stages of this process.
Belgrade/Banja Luka, November 7, 2026.
Information Service of DIC “Veritas”
