Selaković: Lectures from Croatia are an absolute projection

17. Jul 2022.
Today Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia Nikola Selaković stated that Croatian Minister of Foreign Affairs Gordan Grlić Radman told a series of untruths explaining the reasons why the Croatian authorities forbade the President of Serbia to visit Jasenovac in order to pay homage to the victims of that death camp.

Speaking with media, Selaković stated that the Croatian Ministry seemed to have a type of instrument that measured truthfulness, because we had the opportunity to listen to a lecture about how President Aleksandar Vučić's intention to go to Jasenovac was not honest.

He noted that the doubts of the Croatian political elite about the reasons of President Vučić, who is a descendant of the Jasenovac victim, are “absolute projection”, and that what the Croatian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was doing was equal to asking someone for an official announcement to go to the cemetery.

Selaković pointed out that the descendants of the victims did not want to attend the events in Jasenovac supported by the Croatian government because they saw no sincerity in it.

Referring to Grlić Radman's comment that Serbia has not faced its past, Selaković noted that that was being said by a representative of a country where black shirts marched in the central city squares, where the Ustasha cry “За дом спремни!” (For homeland - ready!) was domesticated, where dozens of streets and squares were named after Ustasha ideologists and criminals.

“This coming from someone who erects monuments to people convicted of terrorism, like a monument to Miro Barišić who killed Ambassador Vladimir Rolović,” said Selaković.

Commenting on the fact that Grlić Radman referred to the unresolved issue of people listed as missing, Selaković asked about the percentage of the missing who were members of the Serbian nation.

Is someone shifting the responsibility to us and saying that we did not want or do not want to discover the fate of the missing, we, who demonstrate that we are committed to it?” asked Selaković.

According to him, if the Serbs in Croatia could enjoy a fifth of the rights that members of the Croatian national minority in Serbia enjoy, we would be very happy.

Are these sermons about the rights of minorities being preached to us by those who cannot keep a sign written in Cyrillic with the name of an institution even a few hours,” Selaković asked.

He pointed out that no one in Serbia has ever measured the honesty of the reasons for visits of Croatian officials who came to Serbia unannounced.

“Are we to learn from them how to face the past?” No, we are not. We are the ones who bow down to every victim, who are able to sanction the members of our people who committed crimes, because we are not someone who will attribute collective responsibility. Whoever expects us to sit and be silent, listening to nonsense, untruths and fabrications, he is seriously mistaken,” stated Selaković.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs once again quoted the sentence from the Croatian note sent to the Serbian Ministry that the visit of a high representative of a foreign country to Jasenovac cannot be of a private nature, and explained it meant that the descendants of the Jasenovac victims cannot go there privately.

“We haven't had a single president of Serbia who went there for at least 30 years. Here we have the President of the Republic who wants to go there privately, consequently he is forbidden to go to Jasenovac. Where does it say that a visit to the largest Serbian execution grounds in the world cannot be of a private nature? If the President of Serbia is prohibited from doing so, what can others hope for,” Selaković said.