ZAGREB, April 14, 2018 – The Croatian Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs on Friday strongly condemned threats which Serbian convicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj had made against Tomislav Žigmanov, president of the Democratic Alliance of Croats in Vojvodina and a member of the Serbian parliament, and Nenad Čanak, president of the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina, urging Serbia to take legal action against such outbursts of hatred and threats.
The ministry noted in a statement that Šešelj had repeated threats against the leaders of the Croatian community in Vojvodina only 24 hours after the appeals chamber of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, the successor to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment for crimes against humanity, including his inflammatory speech in the predominantly Croat village of Hrtkovci on 6 May 1992, which resulted in the deportation, persecution, forced resettlement and other inhumane acts against Croats in Vojvodina.
“I am making intensive preparations to repeat my war crimes and I am going to start with Tomislav Žigmanov and Nenad Čanak,” Šešelj told the Blic newspaper on Thursday. He repeated the statement he had made on Wednesday that he was proud of the war crimes attributed to him and was planning on repeating them.
The Croatian ministry voiced serious concern that the Serbian authorities had remained silent on Šešelj ‘s repeated threats, saying it “demands and expects an appropriate legal reaction from the relevant authorities of Serbia to these repeated outbursts of hatred and direct threats targeting the members of the same minority community in Vojvodina that was the object of brutal ethnically-motivated violence in the 1990s and whose wounds are still fresh.”
The ministry also called on Serbia to “prevent any form of physical and verbal violence and intolerance against members of the Croatian minority in Serbia.”
