Milanovic: Referendum on Cyrillic a disgrace

BRUSSELS/ZAGREB - Croatia's Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said on Friday that the Croatian parliament (Sabor) should make a decision on the initiative to call a referendum on the use of the Serbian Cyrillic script in this country.

"I think that this referendum is a disgrace. The same opinion was voiced here in the European Union, that is, in the European Parliament, when the initiative by Biljana Borzan (a Croatian member of the European Parliament) was even supported by several prominent representatives of the National Democratic Party of Germany", said Milanovic.

“This was a clear message to their friends in Croatia about the European values and about barbaric behavior,” Milanovic stressed in a statement reported by the Zagreb-based daily Vecernji list.

Members of the European Parliament wrote a letter to the Croatian public last month, warning that the campaign against the use of the Cyrillic alphabet in Croatia is "absurd and, above all, dangerous for Croatia and the EU."

"We want to send a strong message to the Croatian public, organizers and supporters of this unjust and dangerous initiative," said the signatories of the letter - 74 MEPs from 19 countries.

The anti-Cyrillic campaign has been led in Croatia since September last year, with the opponents of the official use of the Cyrillic script damaging bilingual signs on public institution buildings in cities where the Serbs make up more than one-third of the population.

Spearheading the campaign are the war veterans in Vukovar who launched an initiative to call a referendum on the use of the Serbian language and script, which was supported by 700,000 people across Croatia.

They demand a change to the Constitutional Law, which...