Serbia's Minister for Human and Minority Rights, Tomislav Zigmanov, said on Friday that the recent meeting of Croatian and Serbian government officials in Zagreb gave hope that the two countries would address their issues soon, noting that this required good will and good faith.

He called for government officials of the two countries to meet again soon.

Speaking in an interview with the Politika daily of Friday, Zigmanov said that specific steps could be taken “relatively soon”, starting from the most delicate issues concerning the legacy of the 1990s war and “the history of mutual warfare in the 20th century in general.”

“Missing persons, POWs, commemorative practices, interpretations of the wars, the border issue and the status of the ethnic minorities,” Žigmanov said, adding that these issues were already listed in the Subotica declaration of 2016, signed by Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic and Croatia’s Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic.

He said the forthcoming reciprocal visit by Croatian Serb leader Milorad Pupovac to the institutions of the Croatian community in Serbia should be coupled with a new meeting of representatives of the two governments.

Late last year, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said that President Aleksandar Vucic had called for thawing of relations between Serbia and Croatia in contacts with leaders of the minority communities in the two countries.

In Zagreb, Pupovac, the leader of the Independent Democratic Serb Party, and Zigmanov, the head of the Democratic Alliance of Croats in Vojvodina, signed a declaration of cooperation on 5 January this year, and the next day, Orthodox Christmas Eve, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, Croatian Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic-Radman, Serbian Foreign Minister, Ivica Dacic, and Serbian Patriarch Porfirije broke Christmas bread.

Zigmanov said that the bilateral talks in Zagreb should be followed by “an institutional form of communication” involving lower-level government officials to examine the overall situation and prepare next steps.

He said that regardless of the further course of relations between the two countries, relations between the Serb minority in Croatia and the Croat minority in Serbia should be “intensified and enriched.”