Was Vučić’s ”friendly visit” all cloaks and daggers after all?
When the Serbian President visited Croatia recently, there were naturally a lot of very loud, very angry voices. While some welcomed the move and saw it as a much needed step forward from the past, many others accused the Serbian President, who has held his position since the end of May last year, of holding a knife behind his back as he smiled and shook hands, with others simply seeing the move as a way for Serbia to try to pull the wool over the EU’s eyes, following Jean Claude-Juncker’s frosty statement that no would-be EU member Balkan countries with ongoing border issues could gain accession to the political and economic bloc.
Vučić, who is a highly controversial character with a more than questionable, colourful past himself, appears to be able to take on numerous different personalities depending on the situation he finds himself in. It would seem that his Croatian counterpart, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, trusted in the personality he had decided to take on during his official visit to Croatia, stating that she had met the ”European Vučić” – whatever that means.
In spite of Grabar-Kitarović’s view of the ”European Vučić” she met during his time spent visiting in Croatia, it seems that during what appeared to be a progressive mutual move in discussing Croatia’s missing persons data from the 1990’s, there was something quite different than a mutual desire for civility at play. It has been alleged that Vučić handed over outdated information to Croatia on the identities of people who had already been found.
On the 26th of February, 2018, Balkan Insight reported that ”a prominent Croatian missing persons association claimed on Monday that Serbian institutions do not have the will to cooperate over finding the remaining missing persons from the 1990s war, after information handed over by Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić this month turned out to be outdated.”
A ”European Vučić”? – not a likely story.
Read more here.
