Cyrillic signs on government buildings in Vukovar are again in the focus of attention.
President of the Serbian National Council in Croatia Milorad Pupovac said that he was worried due to recent statements made by Interior Minister Vlaho Orepić, who discussed the issue of alleged manipulations with illegal residence registration by the Serbian minority in Vukovar, saying that, after the imaginary inhabitants of Vukovar were erased, there would be no legal basis for the use of Cyrillic script, reports Jutarnji List on August 14, 2016.
“Minister, you have repeatedly accused an entire national minority for manipulation with the residence registration. Such accusations are not only worrying, but also frightening”, wrote Pupovac in an open letter sent to Orepić as a reaction to his statements.
Responding to the accusations from right-wing circles that the Ministry of Interior was erasing fictitious voters from voter registers in Imotski and Vrgorac regions, which are areas with a lot of right-wing voters, Minister Orepić reacted on Saturday. “No one wants to tell the truth, but I think that already at this point, if we were to erase all imaginary residents, the Serbian minority in Vukovar would fall below the 30 percent threshold. If that is the sole basis for the use of Cyrillic script in Vukovar, after this initiative that basis will no longer exist. The Serbian minority has manipulated with illegal residence registration.”
Commenting on the statement that the Serbian minority was manipulating with illegal residence registration, Pupovac said that there was every reason to pose a question – do even the minimum conditions for the exercise of minority rights exist, given that Minister Orepić does not know or deliberately overlooks the difference between the Law on Residence Registration, the Law on Voter Registers and the Law on Census.
The president of the Serbian National Council noted that the right to official use of minority languages and scripts was not based on voter registers, but on results of the latest census. “Therefore, you should not deceive the public that this will solve the problem of the Cyrillic script”, concluded Pupovac.
