Croatian Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic-Radman said on Wednesday that his Serbian counterpart Nikola Selakovic's response to a Croatian protest note over threats against Croats in Vojvodina was "unprecedented in diplomacy" and that it was "neither European nor good-neighbourly."

This Zagreb-Belgrade dispute began on 4 March when the Subotica City Council adopted a decision to change the city statute and initiated the introduction of the Bunjevci language as official in this city in the northern province of Vojvodina, despite objections from the Democratic Alliance of Croats in Vojvodina, the Croatian National Council and the Institute for the Croatian Language.

The ethnic Croat community in Serbia considers the Bunjevci idiom just a dialect spoken by ethnic Croats in northern Backa region of Serbia, and not a language in its own right.

Croats in Serbia’s northern province of Vojvodina asked Serbian authorities to apply the same logic used by the Subotica City Council – the percentage of the population represented – and introduce Croatian as a co-official language throughout Vojvodina.

The ethnic Croat community then started receiving threats, which prompted Croatia’s protest note.

“We waited for several days for the Serbian authorities. They did not respond nor condemn those personal threats directly sent to Croat community web portals and e-mails,” Grlic-Radman said on Wednesday for Croatia’s state radio HR.

“The Croat community was not supported by the Serbian authorities so it asked for Croatia’s support,” he added.

On Saturday, Selakovic called Croatia’s protest note “one of the most stupid and most pointless notes I have received to date” because, he said, Croatia was complaining about ugly outbursts on social media, while at the same time Croatian media made “the most monstrous and most brutal insults” against Serbia’s top politicians, notably President Aleksandar Vucic.

Grlic-Radman said on Wednesday that the note was not just about random comments made on social media, but addressed direct threats made, and that Selakovic’s response “is unprecedented in diplomatic practice.”

“The fact that the Subotica authorities later arrested one or two citizens shows that our note had made sense. It was also welcomed by Croats in Vojvodina,” he said, adding that Selakovic’s statement “isn’t conducive to the advancement of our relations” and that it was “not only not European, but not good-neighbourly either.”

“If Serbia wants to join the European Union, it certainly can’t continue with this narrative,” Grlic-Radman said, adding that building good-neighbourly relations calls for solving unresolved bilateral issues, such as the issue of missing persons from the 1991-95 war and the status of the ethnic Croat minority in Serbia, which does not have equal rights as the ethnic Serb minority in Croatia has.