"Croatia is a country in which every city and town is such that Croatians, Serbs, Hungarians, Italians and all our citizens can live there as equals and under equal conditions," Croatian President Ivo Josipovic said on Friday when asked to comment on Serbian President-elect Tomislav Nikolic's statement that the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar was "a Serb town".
Josipovic said that if such a statement meant a return to some ideas from the 1990s, he, in his capacity as the Croatian president, could say that such ideas would not pass and could not be implemented.
Addressing reporters after meeting families whose members were victims of traffic accidents, Josipovic said that just as it had managed to defend its sovereignty in the 1990s, Croatia would know how to defend itself today, too.
Croatia will continue pursuing the policy of the national equality of all its citizens in the country and an active peace-loving policy towards its neighbours, he said.
"We expect our neighbours to do the same," Josipovic said, adding that Nikolic's statement definitely was not in that vein.
Asked by reporters whether there would be official reactions, the president said that his answer was sufficient as a response and that it was clear.
In an interview with the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung before a presidential runoff, Nikolic said that a project of a greater Serbia was his unrealised dream. As for the German reporter's statement that currently there were more Serbs in Vukovar than ten years before, Nikolic said "that's because Vukovar was a Serb town" and "Croatians have no reason to come back there".
Croatia's President Josipovic said today that it would depend on Nikolic's future policy whether there would be cooperation between the two countries and that he also hoped that Nikolic would revise his views and that he must find the right way "to assure us that he is no longer an advocate of his policy from the 1990s".
