ZAGREB, May 4, 2018 – The Serbian Radical Party (SRS) headed by war crimes convict Vojisla Šešelj hasn’t given up on its idea to hold a rally in Hrtkovci on May 6 despite the Interior Ministry’s ban of the rally in that village in Vojvodina, Serbia, from which Croats were expelled during the 1990s.
The police once again handed Šešelj’s party a notice banning the rally on May 6 after the Administrative Court in Novi Sad ruled that the party had made a procedural error in reporting the rally.
However, the radicals seem determined to hold the rally on the very day marking the 26th anniversary of a rally Šešelj conducted in 1992 when he publicly read names of ethnic Croats who were ordered to leave the village.
An Appeals Chamber of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals recently sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment which found that, with his speech in Hrtkovci, Serbia, on 6 May 1992, in which he called for the persecution of Croats, Šešelj committed a crime against humanity by inciting and substantially contributing to the persecution and deportation of Croats that followed.
SRS said that it would once again appeal to the Administrative Court and if the court should once again ban the rally they would nevertheless conduct a parade through Hrtkovci and “find a way to relay their message.”
Serbia’s Interior Minister Nebojša Stefanović last week explicitly and categorically said that he guaranteed that no rally would be held in Hrtkovci.
