ZAGREB, April 17, 2018 – The president of the Democratic Alliance of Croats in Vojvodina (DSHV) and member of the Serbian parliament Tomislav Žigmanov will not be part of the Serbian parliamentary delegation during the visit of Croatian Parliament Speaker Gordan Jandroković to Belgrade, scheduled for April 18 and 19, as a sign of protest against threats made by war criminal Vojislav Šeselj, Hina learnt from sources close to the Democratic Party parliamentary group of which Žigmanov is a member.
Žigmanov asked last week that Serbian officials and the judiciary voice their opinion about threats which Šešelj made after the tribunal in The Hague found him guilty and sentenced him to 10 years in prison for the persecution of Vojvodina Croats. Šešelj said he was prepared to repeat the crimes against Žigmanov and another member of parliament, Nenad Čanak of the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina.
Given that there were no official reactions, Žigmanov decided not to be a member of the Serbian parliament delegation which will greet Jandroković.
The Appeals Chamber of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), the successor to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), said in a final verdict last Wednesday that Serbian Radical Party leader Šešelj is responsible for the persecution and deportation of Vojvodina Croats by giving a hate-mongering speech in Hrtkovci on 6 May 1992.
The MICT Appeals Chamber sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment and counted the time he had spent in the ICTY’s detention against the sentence.
