During their march, they peacefully passed by the police station which yesterday became the fifth institution with the dual-script signs in Vukovar. At the very start of today's protest, one of the leaders of an initiative against dual-alphabet signs in Vukovar praised the police for their conduct while apprehending a few protesters on Monday and Tuesday. Tomislav Josic, however, pleaded to the police to stop arresting teenage protesters, after a mother said that her 19-year-old son and his friends had been arrested last night.

Josic said that the protesters would continue walking around the public office buildings with Cyrillic signs.

During today's march, the protesters also stopped at the Vukovar Water Tower, a landmark of that city badly damaged in the war, to display a 10-metre-long Croatian flag and banner with the message "Milanovic, these are the chauvinists!" alluding to Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic's insulting remarks about the protesters being chauvinists.

The leadership of this initiative also announced new protests and a news conference for Thursday.

Groups of war veterans in the capital of Zagreb and the southern town of Sinj also joined in the condemnation of the government's insistence on Cyrillic signs in Vukovar, which was a byword for the suffering which non-Serbs endured during the Serb rebellion in Croatia.

Croatia's Homeland War victims with direct experience of suffering see the placing of bilingual signs in Vukovar as very frustrating and premature, the head of the legal department of the Initiative for the Defence of Croatian Vukovar, Vladimir Iljkic, said on Tuesday.

Nobody bans court proceedings or the issue of ID cards or driver's licences in both Croatian and Serbian, but because of the not so distant war events, placing signs as symbols is simply frustrating for many people who still cannot make the democratic step towards bilingualism in a symbolic sense, said Iljkic.

According to the 2011 census, local Serbs account for slightly over one-third of the population in Vukovar, which enables them to exercise certain rights such as signs written in the alphabet this minority uses.

Opponents of dual-alphabet signs warn that signs in Cyrillic also appeared in Vukovar in the summer of 1991 just before the outbreak of the war. They recall that in 1991, Vukovar was completely destroyed during a months-long siege by the Serb rebels and the then JNA and the subsequent occupation, and that 5,500 people, most of whom were Croats, lost their lives. Furthermore, non-Serbs were expelled after the occupying forces raided the city in mid-November 1991, all of which has contributed to the current make-up of the population.

Bilingual signs have not met resistance in a dozen other areas in Croatia populated by ethnic Serbs.

The protests began in Vukovar on Monday morning, after dual-alphabet signs appeared on a few public institutions. On the first day, protesters smashed those signs and later they were re-erected.