Anti-Serbian sentiment

Novosti started 20 years ago solely as a weekly newspaper for Croatia's Serb ethnic minority, but as its profile and impact have grown, so have the pressures that its staff have had to face.

Croatian Serb leaders condemned on Thursday two attacks by masked assailants on local Serbs watching a televised football match near the town of Knin.

The Serbs in the villages of Uzdolje and Djevrske were watching a game involving Red Star from the Serbian capital Belgrade when the attackers burst into the bars, media reports said. Five, including a minor, were lightly injured.

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.

Milorad Pupovac, the leader of the Independent Democratic Serb Party, SDSS, one of the parties representing Croatia's Serb minority, said on Friday that the defacement of some of the party's European Parliament election campaign billboards should not deter Croatian Serbs from turning out to vote.

N1's executive producer Igor Bozic told BIRN that the station's office in Serbia has received the latest in a series of threats targeting its journalists, and argued that Serbian politicians' anti-media statements were responsible.

A new documentary film claiming that Croats have been subjected to a ‘century of Serbian terror’, made by controversial Croatian director Jakov Sedlar, will be premiered next month.

Australian company Valley Eyewear removed footage of the memorial at the World War II concentration camp at Jasenovac in Croatia from a sunglasses advertisement after a public outcry.

"I better not respond. I think everyone knows the correct answer to that question, regardless of what they are saying," the president of Serbia told reporters on Friday.

As he added, the issue of Kosovo is the most difficult and the most responsible one, which reflects "all of our, but also his concerns."

The director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center also told Vienna-based daily Der Standard that Austria's handling of perpetrators was "absolutely idiotic."

He particularly criticized the events taking place in Bleiburg each year, which the newspaper described as "annual meeting of right-wing extremist held in mid-May in Carinthia."

Serbs and anti-fascists will commemorate victims of the Croatian World War II concentration camp at Jasenovac on Saturday, boycotting the official state commemoration for the third year in a row.