Grlic-Radman said Croatia was appalled and did not understand this act.

“He was an instrument of the Greater Serbia policy who carried out the Milosevic regime. Numerous crimes were committed in Croatia,” he said, adding that Seselj “never denied his involvement in the crimes. He even bragged about them.”

Grlic-Radman said the decoration of a convicted war criminal “should concern all of us here.”

He called on Serbia to “actively and strongly commit to and stand for the EU’s common security and foreign policy if it wants to be on the European path. And to deal with the past, to reject all Greater Serbia policies, to dedicate itself to the democratisation of its society, to stop politicising war crimes, to solve the issue of the disappeared, of reparations to camp inmates.”

Krivokapic said “this is worse that what has been seen, this is evident support for committed crimes, legitimising the policy of crimes, and when that happens, preparations are being made for new active evil, not passive political evil, active evil which threatens Montenegro first and foremost.”

He said the concept once called Greater Serbia was nowadays called Serbian World.

“The motive is the same, the intentions are the same, and what makes it even more dangerous is that the participants in the whole play are the same,” Krivokapic said, adding that “the Europeanisation and stabilisation of the Balkans is not over.”

Seselj was sentenced to ten years in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague in 2018 for inciting the persecution, deportation and forced displacement and relocation of Croats in the Vojvodina village of Hrtkovci in 1992.