Croatia's reaction to Šešelj "hypocritical"

Croatia's reaction to Šešelj "hypocritical"

"This is a classic fallacy and an attempt of Croatia to pull Serbia into something that has nothing to do with us," the foreign minister and first deputy prime minister said.

Dačić noted that the behavior of the Croatian authorities, who are requesting that the Serbian government distances itself from the statements of the leader of the Radicals (SRS), was a case of "classic hypocrisy and a fallacy."

"When Croatia is able to, without deploying major police forces, keep safe ten signs written in Cyrillic, then it can lecture Serbia," Dačić said, noting that he was speaking "in good faith because Serbia wants to look forward."

Croatia, he added, should have a lot more courage to address issues from the past - the search for the missing, and the exercise of rights of Serbs who once lived there. There was, he said, also the question of the border line.

Therefore, Dačić said, "internal political reasons must yield to the interests of the state."

Serbia, he added, did just that when it made "a series of difficult decisions, but also significant steps - it conducted internal reforms, the dialogue with Priština, signed the Brussels agreement."

He stressed that some Albanian, Croat and Muslim Hague indictees were greeted as heroes when they returned home and were later "sending various messages."

"Serbia did not greet Šešelj as a national hero and we were not in any way involved in the process of his release," Dačić said and reiterated that Šešelj had no strength in the political scene of Serbia, and that Serbia "has no responsibility for what Šešelj will say."