Croatian Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic Radman said on Thursday Montenegro admitted that Yugoslav People's Army members from Montenegro had participated in the aggression on the Dubrovnik area in the early 1990s and that this was a sign that one could expect it to return the Jadran training ship.

We received a note which says that Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) members from Montenegro participated in war operations in the Dubrovnik area, he said in Split at the opening of an exhibition on the Jadran.

That means they admit they carried out the aggression and stole the ship, he said, adding that this is a good sign and that Croatia can expect Montenegro to return the Jadran.

The note arrived at the Croatian Foreign Ministry this morning, informing Croatia that equipment, stolen when Montenegrin JNA soldiers took part in war operations in the Dubrovnik area with the support of Montenegro’s then governments, was found in Montenegro, said Grlic Radman.

Montenegrin Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic said on Tuesday that during an inventory of the assets of the country’s airports, they found equipment suspected to have been stolen from Dubrovnik airport when the JNA shelled the city in 1991 and 1992, and that Croatia would soon be notified.

Grlic Radman said today “it is a fact that he (Abazovic) said that was a shameful episode for Serbia and Montenegro.”

The 60-metre-long sailing ship was built in 1933 and was entered in the fleet registers of Croatian ports until 1991, when it departed from its home port of Split for Montenegro for an overhaul and never returned. It remains a bilateral dispute between Zagreb and Podgorica.

“Croatia will never give up on its property… if the ship had not departed for an overhaul, nobody would be asking where it is. It would be where it belongs, in Split,” Grlic Radman said at the opening of the exhibition.

In late July this year Montenegro marked the 90th anniversary of the ship, which prompted Croatia to lodge a protest note with Podgorica for “appropriating its property”.

Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said at a regional gathering in late August that he wanted the ship to be returned to Croatia because of its symbolic importance for “many Croatian seamen who trained and worked on it.”

Abazovic said at the event that his country is “also presumably entitled to something from the dissolution of Yugoslavia,” emphasising that he is not one of the politicians that use “rows in the region to score cheap political points.”

“On the contrary, I support full reconciliation. I also want people to find the common ground on much more complicated issues,” Abazovic said.

Montenegrin President Jakov Milatovic said during a visit to Zagreb in early September that the ship was owned by Montenegro but that Podgorica was open to dialogue on the matter, while Croatian President Zoran Milanovic called for a financially sustainable solution to the problem, noting also that there were more important topics than that.

Grlic Radman said today in Split that the return of the ship required the good will of the neighbour to discuss the issue.

“And we can see that that has not happened in the past 30 years… there was much stalling, there was talk of commissions, etc. That never yielded any results,” Grlic Radman said, adding that there were other, “legal and political mechanisms” and “arbitration”, to resolve the dispute.