The Montenegrin parliament on Saturday dismissed Defence and Foreign Ministers, Rasko Konjevic and Ranko Krivokapic, initiators of setting up the memorial plaque to Croatian POWs at the site of wartime camp at Morinj.

The initiative for their dismissal was tabled by the caretaker Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic, whose cabinet received a no-confidence motion in mid-August.

The dismissal of the two ministers was supported by the pro-Serb Democratic Front, as well as a coalition led by a former parliament speaker Aleksa Becic, and Abazovic’s coalition.

Abazovic said that the installation of the Morinj plaque had been conducted without the consultations with the government and in contravention of the law on memorials

During the vote that took place in early hours of Saturday, lawmakers of President Milo Djukanovic’s DPS party and the parties of the two ministers, as well as the parliamentary parties representing the ethnic Bosniaks and Albanians were not present in the parliament hall.

Since the inauguration of the Abazovic cabinet, the ministers Konjevic and Krivokapic criticised Abazovic’s decisions, especially his move to sign a basic agreement with the Serb Orthodox Church. That agreement eventually led to the ouster of his government on 20 August.

Montenegro’s Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs installed the memorial plaque commemorating Croatian POWs held in an army barracks in Morinj near the coastal city of Kotor during the war in the early 1990s in accordance with regulations governing military and defence affairs, Ministers Konjevic and Krivokapic said this past Thursday.

The two ministers unveiled the memorial plaque last week. The plaque says that Montenegro regrets the existence of the POW camp in Morinj and the suffering of Croatian POWs held there. The unveiling ceremony was attended by Croatia’s Minister of Veterans’ Affairs Tomo Medved and Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic-Radman.

By installing the memorial plaque on the site of the Morinj camp, which existed at the time of attacks on Dubrovnik and which is now a military facility used by the Montenegrin Ministry of Defence, our country shows that it feels regret and that it fosters a culture of remembrance for crimes that occurred on its territory and tainted the name and spirit of Montenegro, the two ministers said.

They said that the installation of the memorial plaque was an important act in promoting good neighbourly relations between the two former members of the Yugoslav federation while meeting fundamental obligations from the EU integration process and the NATO alliance.

They noted that the memorial plaque was not installed in a public space but in a fenced space run by the Ministry of Defence, which is why no approval from the local government was necessary.