Today is the last day for thousands of Croatian Serbs to register in the first census in Croatia since the war nearly ten years ago.

The international community is urging them to do so.

A BBC correspondent in the region says that unless sufficient numbers of them register the Croatian Serbs could see themselves erased from their country's future, as well as its past.

The war left around two-hundred-thousand Croatian Serb refugees in neighbouring countries, following what our correspondent describes as one of the biggest single acts of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia -- the recapture by the Croatian army of the breakaway Krajina-Serb republic. .

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service