"The devil finds work for idle hands," President Zoran Milanovic said on Monday in a comment on Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic's proposal for ethnic Serbs in Serbia and abroad to display Serbian state flags for Serbian Unity Day, 15 September. 

“I really can’t believe that people in Serbia do not have more important things to care about, such as economic development, in which Serbia has been lagging behind and Croatia has not been making adequate progress,” Milanovic said while visiting Pazin when asked by reporters to comment on Vucic’s call for the people of Serbia and Serbs around the world to display Serbian state flags on Serbian Unity, Freedom and National Flag Day.

Milanovic believes that one should not react to that act of provocation.

“I guess we are all now expected to respond in a similar way, and then we will have something Vucic has been surviving on for the last 20-30 years,” said Milanovic, describing Vucic’s initiative as “nonsense.”

As for Serbs in Croatia, Milanovic said they should decide for themselves what the true motives of Vucic’s proposal were.

“That’s not the way to build a strong and influential country,” he said.

Asked if he considered today’s visit by the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Porfirije, to Jasenovac an act of provocation, Milanovic said that he was not sure what to say about it, adding that he had a good relationship with Porfirije at the time when he was the Serbian Orthodox Metropolitan of Zagreb and Ljubljana.

“My predecessor Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic put a reproduction of an icon he gave her on a wall in her office,” he said.

“It is still there, I have not moved it,” Milanovic said, adding that he hoped he would not have to.