Croatian Police Arrest Two After Attack on Serbs

Police arrested two people on Sunday on suspicion that they participated in an attack earlier that day on a group of five younger people in Supetar, a small town on the Croatian island of Brac.

The young people who were attacked were Croatian citizens doing seasonal work on Brac, among them two Croatian Serbs. They sustained minor injuries as a result of the incident.

One of the victims said that the attackers made anti-Serb comments.

"These two guys who were with us were from [the town of] Vukovar, but Serbs, and probably the attackers heard them talking. And then they… shouted: 'Who is the Serb among you?' and 'Kill the Serb'," the victim, who was not identified by name, told media.

He said that the attackers punched them for ten minutes before a taxi driver came and saved them.

The attack happened after the Torcida Cup, a football tournament that brings together local fans of FC Hajduk Split, which took place in Supetar on Saturday.

On Monday, the mayor of Supetar, Ivana Markovic, condemned the ethnically-based attack and said she had decided not to give any financial aid to the Torcida Cup.

"Since the attackers were participants or visitors to the Torcida Cup, I decided to withdraw the donation decision because the town of Supetar cannot encourage sports events in which participants or visitors are expressing hate," Markovic told local media.

In a report last year, the Serbian National Council, which represents the Serb minority in Croatia, registered 393 incidents of ethnic intolerance, historical revisionism, denial of historical facts, offences, threats, physical attacks and hate speech targeting Croatian Serbs in 2017.

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