ZAGREB, September 24, 2019 - Presidential candidate Miroslav Škoro, who visited Vukovar on Monday, was asked by reporters to say if he supported a possible new protest in Vukovar over the failure of state institutions to prosecute war crimes, to which he said that he supported everything Vukovar residents supported.
Škoro was in Vukovar for a screening of a documentary by Jakov Sedlar on suicide among Croatian war veterans.
He noted that high suicide rates among war veterans were to a great extent due to failed policies over the past 20 years.
Reporters also wanted to know what he thought of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić's statement that presidential candidates should speak about the future rather than about the past, given after Škoro's statement about Serbia's role in the 1991-95 Homeland War in Croatia, to which Škoro said that people whose conscience was not clear often called for the future and hurried into it.
"There is no future without a clear past regardless of what Mr Vučić says. When he is ready for such a future, I will be there waiting for him with the same request," Škoro said.
Croatian Parliament Speaker Gordan Jandroković said on Monday, when asked if a protest would be held in Vukovar, that it was difficult for him to say what would be happening in the coming period, but he noted that "there is no alternative to the work of state institutions and respect for the law."
"It is difficult for me to say what will happen in the coming period. It is evident that a certain number of people are deeply unhappy because they have not found the justice they deserve, because some of the people who were involved in war activities and possibly committed crimes have not been prosecuted. Those injustices remain," Jandroković said in an interview with Croatian Radio, noting that Vukovar was a particularly sensitive area.
He noted, however, that there is no alternative to the work of state institutions and respect for the law.
"We must ask the relevant institutions to be just, to find the perpetrators of criminal acts and to punish them, but there is no alternative to the work of state institutions and respect for the law. Street justice would lead to a different kind of chaos and is not good," he stressed.
Jandroković said that the Ministry of the Interior did achieve certain results in locating people who had committed crimes and that they should now be prosecuted, which would be the best remedy for the still present war wounds.
"I would not put this in a narrow political context, this is about a trauma that has remained for 20 or more years," he said when asked how much a protest rally in Vukovar over the failure to prosecute war crimes could harm the ruling Croatian Democratic Union party now that the campaign for presidential elections was about to begin.
More news about Miroslav Škoro can be found in the Politics section.
