FM Dacic hits back after Croat president's Storm statements

FM Dacic hits back after Croat president's Storm statements

Dacic said that her statement about the "ethically clean victory that unburdened Serbs of the shackles of the Greater Serbia project" was an indication that Croatia considers it ethically clean to murder several thousand Serbs and drive out more than 220,000 people.

Grabar-Kitarovic statement about "the unburdening" was described by the Serbian minister in a written statement as "genuine insolence."

"How? By taking their lives, by leaving them without their houses and apartments, fields and woods, without pensions, expelled from the land of their fathers, their ancestral property? And from whom did they (Croatia) liberate those cities and villages, when the absolute majority (of the population) there was Serb?," Dacic asked.

The minister pointed out that Operation Storm represented the biggest ethnic cleansing in Europe after the Second World War, and noted that the 1931 population census in Croatia showed 18.45 percent of its population being Serbs, while in 2011 this figure was 4.36 percent.

"There were 581,663 Serbs in Croatia according to the 1991 census, while 20 years later, in 2011, after Storm and other ethically clean campaigns, as the Croatian president has said, there were only 186,633. Where did the 400,000 Serbs disappear to, in 20 years?," asked Dacic.

According to him, instead of showing a sense of guilt and compassion, Croatia takes pride in this, something that is evident in the speeches given in Knin and the Ustasha salutes - in a town where Serbs made up 80 percent of the population in 1991.

"The final solution to the Serb question - to expel one third, murder one third, and convert one third to Catholicism - which was the idea of Mile Budak, the Ustasha minister in the Nazi NDH (Independent State of Croatia) - will never be accepted by Serbia, no matter how much Croatia chooses to hide behind the EU and NATO," Dacic concluded.