Prime Minister of the Republic of Srpska Savo Minić together with highest officials of the Republic of  Srpska and the Republic of Serbia, attended tonight in Mrkonjić Grad the central ceremony marking the Day of Remembrance for all Serbs who died or had been expelled during the Croatian-Muslim offensive against the Serbs in the Republic of Serbian Krajina and the Republic of Srpska in 1995.

The organizers of this event are the Committees for Cherishing the Tradition of Liberation Wars of the Government of the Republic of Srpska and of the Government of the Republic of Serbia.

The criminal military operation "Storm" began on August 4, 1995, with an offensive of the Croatian army and police and the HVO units in the area of ​​Banija, Lika, Kordun and northern Dalmatia, during which more than 220,000 Krajina Serbs were expelled from their ancient  homelands.

According to the records of the "Veritas" Documentation Centre, 1,904 Serbs died or disappeared during and after this offensive including 1,250 civilians, out of whom three-quarters were above 60.

Among the victims were ten children under the age of 14 and 566 women and, four-fifths of them were above the age of 60, which represents a special "black record" of the civil war of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, the "Veritas" Documentation Center stated.

In its February 2015 ruling, the International Court of Justice characterized Operation ‘Storm’ as ethnic cleansing, but not as genocide, although numerous international law experts and researchers believe that the operation had all the main characteristics of the genocide.