Vote to Scrap Cyrillic in Vukovar Angers Serbia

Serbia has protested after Vukovar town council on Monday said that signs in Cyrillic, the script of the Serbian minority in Croatia, will no longer be displayed on town institutions, squares and streets.

The receipt of any official note in Cyrillic in Vukovar will also now require a special request and payment of a fee of three euros.

The changes were adopted on the initiative of the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, the leading party in Vukovar. Serbian political representatives and the councillors of the Social Democratic Party, the strongest party in the national government, opposed the decision.

Serbia's government on Monday said the changes violated equal rights on language and script and thereby the fundamental human and minority rights of Serbs.

"Serbia is warning Croatia of its duty to honour its international obligations. We demand an urgent response of the Croatian state bodies to the decision of the Vukovar authorities, whose top officials, in the year celebrating 70 years of the victory over fascism, have become known to a wider public by singing Ustasa [fascist] songs," the Serbian Foreign Ministry stated on Monday.

Some Croatian media outlets last week published a video showing two senior Vukovar officials, Marijan Pavlicek and Igor Gavric, singing World War 2 Fascist songs at a wedding.

Pavlicek was a known opponent of the bilingual signs in Vukovar who has blamed Serbian representatives in Vukovar for the lack of coexistence in the town, adding that Serbian politicians in Croatia act on orders from Belgrade.

Vukovar Mayor Ivan Penava, from the HDZ, rejected the allegations of human rights violations.

He said the amendments to the town's statute "provided maximum rights to the members of the Serbian...