The director of the Center for Regionalism from Novi Sad, Aleksandar Popov, and the political analyst from Zagreb, Davor Gjenero, were guests of Radio Free Europe's "Most" show, where they talked about issues Serbo-Croatian relationship. First of all, why these relationships Can't they improve at all?
When asked what are the main disputes between Serbia and Croatia, Aleksandar Popov says that the key problem is dealing with the past.
"Neither of those two countries is ready to face what happened in the 1990s." HDZ is in power in Croatia, which was also in power in the 1990s, and in Serbia today people like Aleksandar Vučić and Ivica Dačić are in power, who participated in what happened in the 1990s. That is why problems such as the issue of the missing, the border on the Danube, and the succession dispute, to name only the most important, cannot be resolved. "We are constantly spinning in the nineties and we cannot get out of that vicious circle," Popov points out.
Davor Gjenero believes that the problem in relations between Croatia and Serbia is not in open questions.
"The problem is that Serbia has a government that is cynical about European integration. Croatia is a member of the European Union, aligns its policy with common European policy and insists that Serbia fulfills the criteria required of it in the process of European integration, while the regime in Belgrade systematically uses antagonism against Croatia in order to achieve domestic political goals.
Arrests
In the relations between Belgrade and Zagreb, incidents are breaking out every hour, due to which tensions are growing. In August, the Croatian police arrested Serbian lawyer Nemanja Berić and sentenced him to 15 days in prison for singing the nationalist songs of Baja Mali Knindža, and then it was announced that a Croatian spy whose name has not been released was caught in Belgrade.
"It's not just those two arrests. We also had an actor arrested Sergej Trifunović during his entry into Croatia and the arrest of a popular singer Severine Vuckovic on the border with Serbia. "All these arrests, I'm talking about Serbia, are for the purpose of smearing the eyes of the domestic public in order to push other, big problems under the carpet," says Popov.
He explains that the idea of Belgrade Mayor Aleksandar Šapić to return Tito's bones to Croatia and to erect a monument to Draža Mihajlović in the center of Belgrade also belongs to this type of throwing fog in the eyes of the public.
Genero points out that arrest of Nemanja Berić it is not an isolated case in Croatia.
"In the areas that were affected by the war, where we had severe war conflicts between the population of Croatian and Serbian nationality, there have been no incidents between the two communities for years. People are aware that they are not to blame for such a situation, and that is a great civilizational step forward. And then over the summer, people come who have no intention of living in Croatia and cause tensions and excesses in the area that used to be called the Krajina," explains the Croatian analyst.
He adds that "that's why the practice of punishing people who come from outside and commit excesses began." It is considered that it is simpler to keep a couple of red-hot heads for a week in a misdemeanor prison, than to allow them to bring unrest among the population that normally lives in good relations with each other".
Poisoning with songs
When asked by the journalist if it is a matter of double standards - because in Serbia they say that a lawyer from Serbia was punished in Croatia for singing nationalist songs, and they do not punish Thompson, who also sings nationalist songs at concerts, Gjenero says that, from the Croatian perspective, these are different things.
"Baje Mali Knindža's songs speak in the name of the ideology of a kind of parastate that existed on the territory of the Republic of Croatia." What Thompson is doing is disgusting to me on every level. And musically, because I find the entire Balkan pastoral rock from Goran Bregović to this day disgusting, and I also hate that rhetoric. However, it is not something that would undermine the state order, so the reactions to it are also different. I don't like it when Thompson's songs mention a part of neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina in a context that can be interpreted as if it is part of the Croatian state. This is something that should be sanctioned," says Gjenero.
He, on the other hand, believes that the similarity ends there. As he says, quasi-Krajic folklore was part of the official policy of the parastate on the territory of the Republic of Croatia, while Thompson was never a political mainstream in Croatia.
Aleksandar Popov has a different opinion - he believes that what Thompson and Baja Mali Knindza are doing poisons the social atmosphere.
"The fact that the Ustasha greeting Za dom spremni is de facto legalized is particularly unpleasant for the Serbs who remained living in Croatia," says Popov.
Jasenovac and Storm
In Serbia and Croatia, there are diametrically opposite views on Jasenovac and Oluj. Every anniversary of Jasenovac and Oluja is an occasion for a new tightening of relations.
Davor Gjenero believes that Croatia has no qualms about the fact that Jasenovac was a genocide, and that the Serbian national community in Croatia was decimated during the NDH.
"Otherwise, the difference between the Srebrenica genocide and the genocide in Jasenovac is that in Croatia no one who belongs to the mainstream of politics denies the genocide in Jasenovac, and the mainstream of politics in Serbia and in the satellite states and parastates tries to deny the unambiguous internationally judged genocide in Srebrenica," says Gjenero .
He adds that as far as the Storm is concerned, "it's a completely clear matter."
"The storm was a legitimate operation." During the Storm, and especially after that military operation, there were war crimes. It is a great sin of the regime in Croatia that these war crimes were not immediately sanctioned. Everything else is playing with nationalist sentiments, especially what Mr. Vučić has been systematically doing for the last few years".
Aleksandar Popov believes that there would be no problem with the interpretation of Jasenovac and Oluja if what he mentioned earlier had been done - dealing with the past.
"For Croatia, the Storm is a liberation action, for Serbia it is ethnic cleansing and war crimes against civilians." So we look at these things diametrically opposite. It is a fact that Croatia regained sovereignty over a part of its territory with the Storm operation, but it is also a fact that there was ethnic cleansing and a large number of victims," says the interviewee of RSE.
He explains that the past should be approached by both nations starting with themselves and their war criminals.
"We saw in the 1990s how negative emotions were ignited like gunpowder with a match." "War criminals cannot be treated as national heroes and honored instead of being ostracized from society," concludes Popov.
Source: RSE
