Operation Flash - Civilian Casualties and Exile

Civilian Casualties and Exile

The Serb civilian population of the RSK-controlled areas of western Slavonia was gravely impacted by Operation Flash, and they mostly fled the region as a result of the operation. Sources differ regarding the number of Serb refugees after Flash: Veritas documentation-information center, a Serb non-profit organization based in Knin and later in Belgrade, supporting the RSK, reports around 15,000 inhabitants of the region, while the Serbian news agency Beta press estimates 30,000. While there have been returnees since the end of the war, to all parts of Croatia, the number of returnees is small in comparison to the pre-war population.

The reports of war crimes during and after Flash were relatively scarce. The U.N. Secretary General's Personal Representative, Yasushi Akashi said that "massive" human right abuses have taken place during the offensive, though a subsequent and in-depth Human Rights Watch investigation concluded that the operation was " professionally conducted" and that there were only isolated incidents, and criticized the Secretary General for his "unfortunate and premature" statement.

Reprisals against POWs or Serb civilians did, however, happen. The Croatian Government's Commission on missing and captured persons composed a list of 168 fatalities together with places of burial, of which 79 bodies were identified. A Croatian Helsinki Committee report from 2003 noted a total of 83 civilians murdered by the Croatian forces, of which 30 in the attacks on refugee columns and 53 in their homes.

The Serbian Veritas NGO reported that "283 people were either killed or went missing, 57 of them women and nine children. The Croats buried 168 Serbs, mostly listing them as "unidentified", and those bodies have to date not been exhumed and identified".

The Association of Refugee Organizations of Serbs from Croatia is based in Belgrade, headed by one Milojko Budimir, and they yearly commemorate the event and attend church services for the victims of Operation Flash. Their stance is that no one has been held accountable for the crimes committed against the Serbs, "neither in front of the Hague Tribunal, nor in front of the domestic courts".