Leader of ethnic Serbs in Croatia, MP Milorad Pupovac, said on Friday that despite an indictment which Serbia is preparing against Croatian pilots for a 1995 attack on a refugee column in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there was still room for restoring relations and cooperation between Croatia and Serbia.

“As regards the indictments… one should use this situation to hold talks because since 2019 there has been no cooperation whatsoever, either on judicial or on political matters. Judicial officials should meet and address this issue that can only complicate relations between the two governments. Without that, a good solution is not likely,” Pupovac told reporters in the Parliament.

Asked if the war crimes indictment against Croatian pilots would jeopardize the survival of the ruling coalition, Pupovac said that he had part of coalition governments for 12 years in order to help find solutions to problems between Croatia and Serbia rather than making problems bigger.

There is room for Croatia and Serbia to start restoring relations and looking for mechanisms of cooperation, he said.

“Croatia should not be flexing muscles with statements that it will reject such indictments because war crimes prosecution is an obligation it assumed under the Act on Cooperation with the ICTY and its EU accession treaty, having pledged under Article 7 that it would continue with the prosecution of war crimes. This case is one of the not so few cases of involvement in war crimes in which Croatia has not responded to requests from the prosecutorial authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2009, having also failed to do anything in that regard on its own,” he said.

One should stop politicising issue of missing persons

Asked if this was a topic that could cause the ruling coalition to break up, considering that his SDSS party’s position is different from that of the HDZ, Pupovac said that the ruling coalition discussed the matter at a meeting on Thursday.

“The most important thing at the moment is to stop politicizing the issue of persons gone missing in the war, regardless of who is doing it, and to encourage the justice system as well as institutions in charge of missing persons and war crimes prosecution, to do their job,” he said.

Pupovac noted that of the people gone missing in the war who were still unaccounted for, 50% were people of Serb ethnic background and 50% were Croats.

“This is a matter of shared responsibility, information is on both sides and everyone has their own share of responsibility, which is what I have been saying for years. That (Croatian) officials are acting as if there was no shared responsibility does not correspond with the facts,” he said.

He added that Croatian, Serbian and Bosnia and Herzegovina authorities had been aware of the attack on the refugee convoy since 1995 and that Croatia’s non-cooperation had played a critical role in the failure to prosecute it, followed by inaction from the other countries.

Pupovac said it was important to him to make it known that the case was a crime in which nine civilians were killed 30 kilometres deep into Bosnia and Herzegovina’s territory and from the Croatian border.

Four of the victims were children and 50 people were wounded in the attack carried out by planes for which it is known where they had arrived from and what their theater of operations was, he said.

Pupovac called on reporters to stop using the term “alleged crime” and look for facts, photographs and documents on the case and help inform the public in Croatia.

“Just as the air attack on Slavonski Brod in which (ethnic) Croat children were killed is a serious problem, so is this,” he said.