State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Nemanja Stevanovic summoned for talks to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia the Charge d’Affaires of the Croatian Embassy to lodge a strong protest over the comments by Croatia’s Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and its public statement following the erection of a monument to Milan Tepic, a JNA officer hero, in Belgrade.
State Secretary Stevanovic said that it was shameful that Croatian officials, glorifying the ideology of Ustashe and their crimes committed in WWII and whipping up an anti-Serb hysteria and grossly violating human rights in the 21st century, protested against hero Tepic, an embodiment of honour and morals.
To use the unveiling of the monument to Major Tepic to accuse the Republic of Serbia again of “armed aggression” was not only totally unfounded and baseless from the legal and historical point of view, but also highly hypocritical.
In the talks concerned was raised in particular because of the fact that Croatia had not made any serious progress on distancing itself from the growing trend of revival of Nazism and historical revisionism. This also included, among other things, erection of a monument to Ustasha terrorist Miro Barisic, convicted of killing the Yugoslav Ambassador to Sweden, and mounting of a plaque with a Nazi salutation “For Home Ready” in Jasenovac, the most notorious place of execution of more than half a million Serbs, Jews and Roma.
More concern of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Serbia is caused by the fact that the attacks and offences coming from the Republic of Croatia at the expense of Serbia and the Serbia people as a whole were getting worse at a time when Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic publicly stated the country’s commitment to a comprehensive development of good-neighbourly relations with Croatia.