Croatian President Zoran Milanovic said Milorad Dodik, the newly elected President of Bosnia's Republika Srpska entity, is the “Serb I want for a neighbour in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” adding that the Serb leader is not “remote-controlled” by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic but is “wildly independent.”

Addressing media in the Croatian town of Gospic on Friday, Milanovic said it was “awful” that Dodik was “almost robbed” in the recently held elections in Bosnia.

“I won’t say whose recipe it was. We have seen this in the world many times and there was always a chaos following in Libya, in Mexico, Syria, Egypt,” said Milanovic, calling Dodik a “Serb patriot” and his opponent in the Republika Srpska President race, Jelena Trivic, being “ten times worse than Dodik.”

As for Dodik’s relations with Belgrade, Milanovic said he was neither controlled by Vucic nor was he against him.

“It is not easy to get along with such people, but it is possible,” he underlined.

Croatian President also commented on his earlier statements on the Srebrenica genocide, noting that “only one court” ruled the crime committed in the eastern Bosnian town was an act of genocide. In fact, the crime committed in Srebrenica was ruled to be an act of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia and later upheld by the International Court of Justice.

“The fact that a group of judges assessed at one moment under certain circumstances that an event from July 1995 was an act of genocide – I am acknowledging that. But that is not Quran (Muslims’ holy book). So, we cannot act towards that as religious dogmatizers. This is something that needs to be talked about. And finally, what does Dodik, and especially me, have to do with Srebrenica? Nothing,” stressed Milanovic.

According to Croatian state-owned Hina news agency, Milanovic said it was not true that he had denied Srebrenica genocide.

“That’s not true. I never said that,” Milanovic told reporters, dismissing media reports that he had denied the Srebrenica genocide during a lunch with Dodik.

A court has ruled that the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, committed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995, was an act of genocide, but this is a very delicate matter, he said.

“There are much bigger crimes in history in terms of their duration and magnitude, and by insisting that everything is genocide we are doing an injustice, for instance, to the Holocaust of Jews,” Hina carried him as saying.