The issue of the war missing should be depoliticised, the president of the ruling coalition's Independent Democratic Serb Party, Milorad Pupovac, said on Saturday in a comment on Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković's visit to Subotica, Serbia yesterday.

Plenković and his Serbian counterpart Ana Brnabić opened Croatian House, the new headquarters of the Croatian minority in Serbia, which was financed by the Croatian government. He arrived in Subotica at the invitation of the Croatian National Council and the Democratic Alliance of Croats in Vojvodina, so it was neither an official nor a working visit to Serbia.

“There are no negative comments, at least in the media, and the reactions in Subotica, notably within Croatian community institutions, are more than excellent,” Pupovac told Croatian Radio, adding that the Croats in Serbia needed that visit.

Asked about the scarce coverage of the visit in Serbian media, Pupovac said the most important thing was that there were no negative comments and that the reports were objective about the main messages sent by Brnabić, Plenković and Croatian representatives in Serbia. “That’s a lot.”

He said the visit and the open talks the two prime ministers had showed that the relations, frozen for years and sometimes marked by a harsh rhetoric, actually progressed through the cooperation of the Croatian community in Serbia and the Serbian community in Croatia.

The visit in itself is “a big deal” and “more than enough in these circumstances,” so that the two minorities don’t bear the brunt of Croatia-Serbia relations, he added.
Pupovac said the days ahead were full of big issues faced by Serbia, the region and the international community. In that sense, progress between Croatia and Serbia would considerably help the international community stakeholders trying to deescalate the situation between Serbia and Kosovo as well as in Kosovo, he added.

War missing should be depoliticised and treated as humanitarian issue

After a long absence of any cooperation between Croatia and Serbia, it is very important to first depoliticise the issue of those gone missing in the 1990s Homeland War and treat it as a primarily humanitarian issue, he said.

It is equally important to deal with the real dimension of what is being sought and for Croats and Serbs to have common interests in that matter, he added.
Everyone has their own task in that sense and if this approach is taken, it will be much simpler to establish the fate of those still unaccounted-for much sooner, Pupovac said, adding that if one keeps politicising and claiming that is only one side’s obligation, there will be no progress.

Post-earthquake reconstruction

Commenting on post-earthquake reconstruction, he said that having participated in the donation of ten houses in the last year, he saw how difficult it was to deal with a lack of coordination between government bodies, an inefficient administration, insufficient commitment from people who should participate, and a shortage of contractors.

Still, he said, he sees progress in nearly all communities thanks to the new construction minister, Branko Bačić, “who brought a new way of working, a new approach, a new energy and a new freshness.”