(Bloomberg) -- Croatia has banned three Montenegrin politicians from entering the country for allegedly harming relations between the two Balkan neighbors, in a dispute that may complicate Montenegro’s progress towards EU membership.
On Thursday, Zagreb’s foreign ministry declared Montenegro’s Deputy Prime Minister Aleksa Becic and parliament Speaker Andrija Mandic, along with lawmaker Milan Knezevic, as personae non gratae. The three politicians “disrupted good neighborly relations,” the ministry said in an emailed statement, without elaborating.
Montenegro started EU accession talks in 2012 and its pro-European Prime Minister Milojko Spajic has since October led a fragile ruling coalition that includes pro-Serbian and pro-Russian politicians. Spajic has said he hopes the country may join the bloc by 2028.
Recent events may have emerged as another hurdle as pro-Russian and pro-Serbian politicians have inflamed a tit-for-tat battle over historical memory with Montenegro’s northern neighbor.
Tensions rose in June after Montenegro’s parliament adopted a resolution condemning crimes at the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia during World War II. The initiative was led by Mandic, leader of a pro-Russian and pro-Serbian party New Serb Democracy, and backed by Becic and Knezevic, who also take pro-Serb positions.
“Croatia supported Montenegro’s European path and its membership in NATO, but the latest events show that Montenegro is not open to European values,” Croatian Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic Radman told reporters later on Thursday. “We won’t support individuals who are systematically working to undermine Croatia.”
Successive Croatian governments have condemned genocide committed by the country’s Nazi-allied Ustashas regime against Serbs, Jews, and Roma in Jasenovac. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has estimated the number of Jasenovac victims at about 100,000.
Croatia’s Foreign Minister Radman said on May 15 that the goal of Montenegro’s Jasenovac resolution was meant as a rebuttal to an UN resolution in May that declared the massacre in Srebrenica in 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces killed 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, an act of genocide.
Montenegro supported that UN resolution amid criticism from the country’s pro-Russian and pro-Serbian parties.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
