Vojislav Seselj, a Serb nationalist and convicted war criminal, said on Tuesday he would go the northern village of Hrtkovci on May 6 despite a police ban, but would not hold a rally if police were present.

He told a news conference he would certainly go there, but if the rally was really banned he said he and the members of his Serbian Radical party (SRS) would walk around the village.

Serbia’s police banned the SRS gathering which Seselj wanted to hold on the very date he delivered an inflammatory speech in 1992 that resulted in local ethnic Croats leaving the village where they were a majority before the war in the 1990s.

Seselj said on Tuesday he did not get a written ban, and thus had only a verbal one by the Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic.

 “We have never caused any fight with police. If police prevent us, we will walk through Hrtkovci. If police attack us we will sit on the ground. That is our tactics… police do not beat you in that case,” Seselj told reporters.

The United Nations Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, which replaced The Hague Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, convicted Seselj for instigating the expulsion of local Croats from Hrtkovci and sentenced him to 10 years in jail, the time he had already spent in custody.

Serb democratic opposition said they would hold a counter meeting, but the police banned both gathering due to security reasons.

A Democratic Paty’s MP Balsa Bozovic said his colleagues would also be in Hrtvkovci on May 6, “to defend the dignity of people” there.

“We will prevent Seselj to come back to the crime scene if neither the state nor minister Stefanovic will,” Bozovic said.

He added that by saying police would ban both gatherings Stefanovic made no difference between citizens and a war criminal. “We will not hold a rally, we will be with citizens.”

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