Presidents of Croatia and Macedonia Appoint Personal Envoys to RECOM
Croatian President Ivo Josipović and Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov have appointed their personal envoys to RECOM. The envoys will take part in the work of the Regional Expert Group tasked with considering the Draft Statute put forward by the Coalition for RECOM and examining the constitutional and legal grounds for establishing RECOM. The meeting of the Presidents' Envoys, to be attended by representatives of the Coalition for RECOM, will take place under the auspices of a president in the Region. Media will be excluded from the meeting.
President Josipović appointed Zlata Đurđević, a professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Zagreb; President Ivanov appointed Luben Arnaudoski, Deputy Secretary- General in charge of legal and organizational affairs at the Office of the President of Macedonia.
In December 2012, the Coalition for RECOM called on the State Presidents in the region to adopt a decision on the establishment of RECOM. The initiative is sponsored by the Regional Coalition and supported by 543,000 signatures collected in all the post-Yugoslav countries.
In its letter to the State Presidents, the Coalition for RECOM points out the significant results achieved by human rights NGOs in documenting the victims of the Wars of the 1990s. It adds that the results would help RECOM to carry out more speedily and efficiently its primary task of personalizing the people who lost their lives or went missing during the 1991-2001 wars and making sure that they are publicly recognized.
Several independent sources estimate the human losses suffered in or related to the wars in the territories of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Kosovo and Macedonia at some 130,000.
