The President of Croatia, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, during a joint press conference with her Serbian counterpart Alexandar Vucic, on his visit to Zagreb, said that relations between the two countries are still “burdened by history” and they “can not be called friendly.”
In her speech, she highlighted the main painful issues that the Serbian and Croatian authorities will have to discuss: people who have disappeared in the war years, national minorities (Croatian in Serbia and Serbian in Croatia) and justice in international matters, such as, for example, the post-war borders of post-Yugoslav states.
Serbian President Alexandar Vucic brought to Croatia huge piles of documents of the dead and missing in the years of the break-up of Yugoslavia.
The visit of the Serbian president is taking place under the protests of the “right” radicals in Zagreb, the police are holding back the demonstrators from a breakthrough to the route by which Alexandar Vucic should go to meet with the Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic. Croatian nationalists are against the visit of the Serbian leader, who is called the “Chetnik.”
Today’s visit is held at a very strained Serbian-Croatian relations. A recent occasion for a verbal conflict between the leaders of the two countries was the holding of an exhibition at the UN headquarters in New York dedicated to the Croatian concentration camp “Yasenovac” during the Second World War. And in Croatia last December, a law was passed, according to which Serbia in the Yugoslav wars was called an “aggressor”, which was expected to provoke sharp reactions from Belgrade.