Croatia will send a note of protest to Serbia over the unveiling in Novi Sad of a memorial plaque to Mladen Bratic, major general and commander of the Novosad Corps of the Yugoslav People's Army, who commanded the operation to preserve territorial integrity against Croatian separatists in Vukovar in 1991.
This was stated by Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The fact that a monument to the general who killed 2200 people was unveiled in Novi Sad will be the subject of an official protest against Serbia. I have already stated this to Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic,” Plenkovic said, Beta reports.
Vucic himself, commenting on the installation of the memorial plaque, recalled that in Croatia some streets are named after Milet Budak, a Croatian war criminal and organizer of genocide against Serbs, Gypsies and Jews during World War II, the main ideologist of the Ustasha movement.
He is credited with saying that the Ustasha are obliged to “kill a third of the Serbs, expel a third, and convert the rest to Catholicism.”
Perhaps the scandal with the plaque is intended to prevent Vučić from coming to Zagreb for the Congress of the European People's Party (EPP), of which the Serbian President's Progressive Party is a collective member. Vucic himself believes that hysteria has gripped that part of the Croatian public that does not want good ties to be established between Serbia and Croatia.
In 1991, Croatian police carried out ethnic cleansing in Vukovar and blocked the Yugoslav People's Army garrison stationed there. On September 3, the Yugoslav People's Army began an operation to liberate the blocked garrisons, which developed into a siege of the city and protracted fighting. Although the city was surrendered, the Croatian side called it their Stalingrad. Casualty figures for Serbs and Croats vary significantly.