Milorad Pupovac at the press conference on Friday. Photo: Sandro Lendler/SNV.
Milorad Pupovac, president of the Independent Democratic Serb Party, SDSS, and MP, on Friday said that slogans and chants heard on the streets of Knin on August 5, the day marking the 31st anniversary of Operation Storm, represented a “serious attack on constitutional values and democracy”.
Pupovac, leader of the main party representing Serbs in Croatia, argued that “hatred and incitement to crime are incompatible with true patriotism”.
At a press conference, he showed a compilation of recordings from Knin, the town that was the headquarters of a rebel Serbian statelet crushed by the Croatian Army’s Operation Storm in 1995.
They included sports fans and army veterans singing songs glorifying the Ustasha – the army of the Independent State of Croatia, NDH, a World War II fascist puppet state operating under the patronage of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
The recordings also showed people chanting: “We Croats do not drink wine, only the blood of Chetniks [Serbian nationalists] from Knin”; “The battle is fought, it is fought, the Ustasha flag is flying”, as well as insults directed at St Sava, the patron saint of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
“Those who have been trying to pass this off as an act of patriotism for years are actually seriously violating the true values of patriotism. In peacetime, the greatest patriotic virtue is constitutional patriotism,” Pupovac said.
He added that such behaviour was a “vicious attack on democracy”.
The SNV cited articles of the Croatian Constitution that it believes were violated by the shouting of the Ustasha salute “For the Homeland, Ready” and other glorifications of the NDH. The violations came after, not during, the official anniversary celebrations, it said.
Every year, Knin hosts a commemoration of Operation Storm, which liberated about 18 per cent of Croatia’s territory from rebel Serb forces and was followed by the flight of around 200,000 Serbs from Croatia. Some of them later returned.
SDSS leader Pupovac also criticised the Croatian judicial authorities, questioning why the State Attorney’s Office often does not react to hate speech and incitement to violence, appealing for an end to what he called a policy of appeasement.
He warned that failure to condemn such phenomena represents a direct threat to the Serb community in Croatia, and to all citizens who advocate for a state governed by the rule of law.