Following harsh reactions to his column titled "F*ck Vukovar", published by N1 earlier this week, journalist Boris Dezulovic said on Wednesday that if there were Vukovar victims who felt offended, they were not offended by his article, but instead by those who trade in their suffering, and that his text was about trade in the horrible sacrifice of Vukovar.

“If anyone is offended, if some innocent people, victims, their families are offended, it was not me who has offended them, they have been offended by those who trade in their suffering, that is what my article is about,” Dezulovic said on Wednesday morning in an interview with the N1 broadcaster, which published his column on its website.

The journalist also commented on reactions to his column by the right-wing DP party and the Ministry of War Veterans, which claimed that with his article Dezulovic “is trying to degrade all victims of Vukovar and the 1991-95 war.”

Dezulovic said that he did not intend to apologise over his column and that its point, which he said many did not get, was to speak up about the “cheap, thieving trade in the sacrifice of Vukovar.”

Dezulovic’s column was prompted by a decision by the organisers of an actors’ festival in the town of Vinkovci to cancel a concert by actor and musician Rade Serbedzija, which was to have taken place on November 15 at the end of the festival. The concert was cancelled following a request by Mayor Ivan Bosancic of the HDZ party that the concert not be held “in the week when we remember the biggest tragedy of the Croatian people in the more recent history, and when we pay tribute to the victims of Vukovar in peace and with respect.”

“I wrote about that trade in the horrible sacrifice of Vukovar. I know about that sacrifice much better than many who today are outraged, because I was there. They don’t need to tell me what Vukovar is and how it used to be. I know it, I saw it,” he said.

Dezulovic said that the swear words he used throughout the text were used in defence of the town, and considered it his right because he was in Vukovar when the city had fallen in November 1991 and because he knew what it had been and what it was today.

He also commented on the main point of his column, namely an estimate by the national statistical office that 5,500 Vukovar residents left the city in the past ten years.

“And the government has invested billions of kuna in the city. What has it invested in? In what kind of city?” Dezulovic said, adding that those investments were made in creating a tomb, a city for the dead, because “Vukovar is not a city for the living nor was it planned to be a city for the living.”

“It was planned to be a city serving as an eternal warning, a measure of patriotism for the rest of us. It is not a city for its residents and those who can admit it, and the 5,500 who have left, are aware of that. You should ask them why they have left, they surely have not done it because several billion kuna was invested well in Vukovar, to make their life better,” he added.

Dezulovic’s article was strongly condemned by Vukovar Mayor Ivan Penava, the HDZ party branch in Vukovar-Srijem County, and the HVIDRA association of disabled war veterans, which asked the competent institutions to determine if there were elements of criminal liability in Dezulovic’s articles.

MP Bojan Glavasevic of the Green-Left Coalition sided with Dezulovic on Wednesday, saying he, too, has been warning for years that Vukovar has been sacralised instead of being a town for the living because some politicians are feeding off it.

Glavasevic is the son of a Croatian journalist Sinisa Glavasevic, who became famous for reporting from the town in November 1991 as the town was under siege, and who was killed by Serbian paramilitaries shortly after Vukovar fell on November 18, 1991.