Serbia has called on the European Union to take action after a Croatian town with a bloody history of ethnic conflict decided to scrap street signs in Serbian, as rising nationalism stokes tension between the ex-Yugoslav neighbours.
Vukovar in eastern Croatia faces Serbia across the Danube river, and still bears scars from a three-month siege in 1991 during which ethnic-Serb rebels and Belgrade-controlled Yugoslav forces rained relentless artillery fire onto the town.
The Serb attackers murdered several hundred Croats – including patients and people taking shelter in Vukovar’s hospital – when they finally overran the town’s vastly outnumbered and outgunned defenders in November 1991.
The formerly bustling river port is now poor and economically stagnant, and with growing frequency political disputes fuel unease between its Croat majority and Serbs who make up about 35 per cent of its 27,000 population.
Cyrillic script
On Monday, Vukovar’s council voted to remove Serbian-language signs on streets and public buildings, which were introduced – despite strong opposition from Croatia’s influential war veterans – as the country joined the EU in 2013.
Veterans regularly protest in Vukovar against the signs in Cyrillic script, which were often torn down or vandalised and became a bone of contention between Croatia’s ruling Social Democrats and the right-wing HDZ opposition party.
Social Democrats and Serbs in Vukovar opposed the removal of the signs, but the measure was pushed through by councillors loyal to the HDZ and its allies – two of whom were this week shown on a wedding video singing a song associated with the Ustase fascist regime, which ran Croatia as a Nazi puppet state from 1941-45.
“Serbia is warning Croatia of its duty to honour its international obligations,” Serbia’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
“We demand an urgent response from Croatian state bodies to the decision of the Vukovar authorities, whose top officials . . . have become known to a wider public by singing Ustase songs.”
Serbia's minister for labour, Aleksandar Vulin, said Brussels must respond. "If the EU can allow a member country to ban the use of a nation's alphabet, to ban the memory of the Serbs who no longer exist in Croatia, or are very few, if it can allow such things, the question is, what are EU's values? Are we ready . . . for the EU, if the EU cannot react to a clear example of racism?"
Controversial
The controversy comes just weeks after Croatia celebrated, and Serbia mourned, the 20th anniversary of Operation Storm, in which Croat troops crushed Serb separatists and reunited most of the country; in the process, however, some 200,000 Serbs fled their homes in Croatia, and most have not returned. At a commemoration event in Knin, tens of thousands of Croats attended a concert by a controversial nationalist singer and some shouted Ustase slogans and chanted “Kill a Serb”.
