SERBIAN President Aleksandar Vucic said that he wanted good relations with Croatia and a reconciliation not be based on humiliation, adding that Serbs in Croatia should have made the decision on participation in the Operation Storm commemoration with Serbia, but that Serbia could not be drawn into celebrating Storm.
I am sorry if there have been attacks on (Croatian Serb representative Boris) Milosevic, they were not organised by me, but if he expects support for his act, he will not get any. Dragging Serbia into the celebration of Operation Storm - we will not take any part in it, Vucic told a press conference.
Vucic says Operation Storm is the biggest ethnic cleansing in Europe after World War II.
Vucic said that Milosevic's attendance at the anniversary of Operation Storm was much too important, reiterating his view that the operation was "the biggest ethnic cleansing in Europe after World War II."
He assessed that Milosevic going to the commemoration in Knin had led to Serbs no longer seeming united in their view of Operation Storm, in which over 200,000 Serbs had been expelled and over 2,000 had disappeared or been killed.
Vucic said that Milosevic's decision to go to Knin would not change the attitude of Serbia and Republika Srpska towards Serbs in Croatia.
Asked about the statement by Croatia's ambassador to Belgrade, Hidajet Biscevic, that Serbs in Croatia had more rights than Croats in Serbia, Vucic said it was logical that the ambassador thought so, but that his statements deviated from facts.
Vucic underscored that of the 26 demands for the improvement of the status of minorities, Serbia had fulfilled 25, and Croatia none, saying that the Serbian government had done everything that the Croat community had asked for regarding the house where Croatian Ban Josip Jelacic had been born, that it had resolved property issues, that it had provided money and everything else that had been requested.
Underscoring that the number of Serbs in Croatia and Croats in Serbia could not be compared, he said that everything that Serbia did was influenced by what it wanted to achieve and not by the number of people.
Serbia, he said, was now looking for a model of restitution of the Croat community centre in Sremska Mitrovica and was offering a 50-year lease at a price of one dinar per month.
He underscored the construction of a community centre in Tavankut and the establishment of an educational centre in Subotica, which was underway.
Vucic said that compared with the number of attacks in Croatia on cars with Serbian licence plates, there had been ten times fewer incidents and attacks on property and people in Serbia.
He also said that there was an additional request for unveiling the bust of a Catholic priest, who is said to have been connected with the Ustasha regime, which would be looked into.
In our country, there are no streets that carry the name of someone with a reputation similar to that of (Ustasha official) Mile Budak, of someone who talked about Croats in the way Budak spoke of Serbs, calling for them to be hanged on willow trees. There are no such streets in Serbia, but there are in 17 cities in Croatia. I am sure that now after the Operation Storm celebration, all those street names will be abolished, together with the monument to (Miro) Baresic, who was convicted in Sweden for the murder of a Yugoslav ambassador, Vucic underscored.
He said that that "will surely be one of the results" of the commemoration of Operation Storm, rather than just laying flowers in a place where Serbs had been killed.