Strong pressure and an expansion of right-wing forces in Croatia are affecting relations between Serbia and Croatia, Serbia’s Foreign Minister said on Sunday, commenting a protest that took place a day before in the Croatian town of Vukovar over unprocessed war crimes.
Dacic made the statement ahead of a gathering of the main board of his Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) and in response to demands heard at the protest for Croatia to condition Serbia’s EU membership with the processing of those responsible for war crimes.
After Croatia declared in 1991 independence from Yugoslavia, the Serb minority rebelled against the decision. The conflict erupted into a war in which the Serb-led Yugoslav army destroyed the eastern Croatian city of Vukovar while committing war crimes that were processed by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague as well as by Serbian courts.
But for the Croatians, the prosecutions and the trials are too slow and Saturday’s protest in the city was meant to put pressure on the Croatian government to do something about that.
“I don’t know who they are complaining about,” Dacic said.
“Serbia has sanctioned and will sanction anyone who committed a war crime. But they should focus on their own war crimes,” he told reporters in Belgrade.
Unrelated to the war crimes issue, Dacic addressed Serbia’s burning issue of its relations with Kosovo.
He said that he noticed that the United States had stopped communicating with Kosovo’s security minister Adem Ceku and interpreted it as a change of US attitude toward Pristina.
“There is a clear change of the position of American administration which has stopped viewing Kosovo as its own child but is now trying to be objective, which I think is good,” Dacic said.
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