Milanović Publicly Praised Croatia's Serbs: A Sentence Zagreb Won't Forgive Him

At first glance, a statement not heard often in Croatia. Croatian President Zoran Milanović, at the marking of Anti-Fascist Struggle Day in Brezovica, openly stressed the key role of Croatia's Serbs in turning the 1941 uprising into a broad national liberation movement.

"Without the Serbs of Banija, Kordun and somewhat fewer from Lika, this whole story would have stayed untold - that has to be said and repeated a thousand times, because without that synthesis the whole story is just an ordinary unspoken one," Milanović said. He invoked the formation of the First Sisak Partisan Detachment on June 22, 1941 - the same day Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union - when around seventy Sisak communists launched an uprising that grew into a mass movement.

Milanović went further still - he rejected the thesis that relations between Croats and Serbs rest on "centuries-old hatred," recalling the political cooperation between Croatian and Serbian representatives before the Second World War, before the cataclysm came.

In the Balkans, where history is regularly rewritten to suit daily political needs, a head of state who publicly acknowledges that a neighbouring people had merit in a shared past is a rarity worth noting. The question is whether this is sincere historical honesty or a calculated gesture by a politician who knows exactly what he is saying and to whom. But even if it's the latter - rarely in these lands does politics choose to bring closer rather than divide. And that sentence is one many in Zagreb won't easily forgive him.