Serbia - 51, Croatia - 1,396

Serbia - 51, Croatia - 1,396

The lists, according to the Belgrade daily, do not specify the ethnicity of the accused or the convicted, but it is doubtless that there are Croats among them, such as Mirko Norac and Branimir Glavas.

However, the newspaper indicates, it cannot be said precisely how many Serbs and how many Croats are on the list, because some identical names and last names can be found in both nations.

Unlike the list of Croatian judicial authorities, Politik" notes, the list given by the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor of the Republic of Serbia to the State Attorney's Office of the Republic of Croatia is far shorter - it has only 51 names.

According to the report, there are as many as 50 accused or convicted, of Croat nationality on that list.

The president of the Documentation and Information Center Veritas, Savo Strbac, told Politika that among the 1,396 names in the Croatian list, 99 percent are Serbs from Croatia accused or convicted of war crimes convicts.

He believes that the authorities in the neighboring country are most concerned about the agreement on the processing of war crimes perpetrators because, as he states, they expect it to be specified that Serbia cannot use regional jurisdiction for the war crimes trial, which now exists in the laws that regulate this area.

"This is what hurts the Croats the most and why they have been creating many problems to Serbia in its EU membership bid so far.

"One of their priorities is that our country should not try to put Croatian citizens on trial. The fact Serbia can prosecute 'defenders' from Croatia is regarded there as a very brazen stance of our country," Strbac said.

Serbian and Croatian justice ministers, Nela Kuburovic and Drzen Bosnjakovic, agreed at their meeting last week that the lists should be updated completely "in order to eliminate discrepancies", Politika recalls.

They said that they discussed the work of a mixed commission tasked with drafting an agreement on the processing of war crimes perpetrators.

Kuburovic and Bosnjakovic agreed that "concrete progress has been made" and announced a new meeting of the said commission "to intensify activities to finalize all remaining aspects of the basis of a future agreement."

It is not known what "discrepancies" exist between Serbian and Croatian lists, just as it is not known what and how will regulate an agreement on the processing of war crimes perpetrators, as announced by the justice ministers of Serbia and Croatia, writes Politika.