Petition to Limit Serbs' Rights in Croatia Aims for Referendum
A petition that would curb rights for ethnic Serbs in Croatia has enough support -- 650,000 signatures -- to go to a referendum, a Croatian veterans' group said Friday.
But while the group says the petition has the requisite backing of 10 percent of the electorate to automatically become a plebiscite, the center-left government is intent on blocking it.
"As long as I am a premier this referendum will not pass," Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said recently.
The petition's demand runs counter to Croatia's vow to respect minority rights that underpinned its accession to the European Union, which became effective in July.
It was circulated by an association of veterans and victims from the 1990s war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, in which ethnic Serbs and Croatians battled each other.
It aims to stop signs in the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet being erected and narrow the use of minority languages in the country of 4.2 million people. Serbs make up the biggest minority, accounting for around four percent of the population.
Veterans in recent months have smashed Cyrillic signs and clashed with police in the eastern town of Vukovar, which was seized by Serbs after a bloody siege at the start of the war.
A spokesman for the veterans' association, Dragutin Glasnovic, told Agence France Presse the petition would be given to parliament on Wednesday.
"People have the right to decide their own destiny," he said.
The Balkan country held its first petition-triggered referendum last Sunday, in which voters decided that gay marriage would not be permitted.
Source: Agence France Presse
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