Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic's intention to come on an unannounced, private visit to Jasenovac is an act of violating protocols, because a head of state is a protected person, and visits by presidents require official preparations, Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic-Radman said on Sunday.

The Croatian Foreign and European Affairs Ministry sent a protest note to Belgrade on Friday over this case, the minister told the press outside the ministry’s building today.

The protocol has been violated, said Grlic-Radman elaborating that visits by presidents and office-holders must be announced to the host country and require planning for weeks and months.

Following Croatia’s demarche, Serbia’s authorities tried to hand their protest note to the chargé d’affaires in Croatia’s embassy in Belgrade, however, she refused to receive it, the Croatian minister said.

He said that Croatia had invested a lot of efforts in the improvement of the dialogue with Belgrade, however, there has been no sincere response from the other side.

Croatia’s refusal to allow Vucic to pay a private and impromptu visit in such way to Jasenovac caused uproar among Serbian officials, who are close aides to Vucic.

Grlic-Radman believes that the issue of Vucic’s possible visit to Jasenovac, a WW2 concentration camp, had been made topical in Belgrade for the sake of the ongoing talks on forming the new Serbian government.

He also sees this as Belgrade’s attempt to blur unresolved issues stemming from the Homeland War and Croatia’s insistence on answers from Serbia about what happened with 1,800 unaccounted-for people who went missing in that war.

The Jutarnji List daily reported that Vucic had contacted Croatian Serb leader Milorad Pupovac to tell him that he would arrive in Jasenovac from Bosnia and Herzegovina where he planned to visit the Serb entity.

According to the Zagreb-based daily newspaper, Pupovac conveyed that information to Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, and the government found Vucic’s plan to dodge the appropriate protocols outrageous.

Grlic-Radman today declined to confirm or refuse the claims about Vucic’s attempt to implicate the SDSS party leader Pupovac in this affair.