Croatia–Serbia Relations

Independent Croatia and Serbia established diplomatic relations on 9 September 1996, following the end of the Croatian War of Independence (March 1991—November 1995). From 1918 to 1991, both countries were part of Yugoslavia (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and later Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). They now share 241 kilometers of common border. According to the 2011 Croatian census, there were 186,633 Serbs living in Croatia. According to the 2011 Serbian census, there were 57,900 Croats living in Serbia. Smaller lasting disputes include border disputes over the Island of Šarengrad and the Island of Vukovar. Serbian and Croatian are mutually intelligible standardized varieties of the Serbo-Croatian language and are official in Serbia and Croatia respectively.

Croatia has an embassy in Belgrade and a general consulate in Subotica. Serbia has an embassy in Zagreb and two general consulates, one in Rijeka and one in Vukovar.

Background

With the nation-building process in the mid-19th century, the first Croatian–Serbian tensions appeared. Serbia's minister Ilija Garašanin's ''Načertanije'' (1844) claimed lands that were inhabited by Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Hungarians and Croats as part of Greater Serbia. Garašanin's plan also envisioned methods of spreading Serbian influence in the claimed lands. He proposed ways to influence Croats, who Garašanin regarded as "Serbs of Catholic faith". Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić considered Croatians, who spoke Shtokavian dialect, "Catholic Serbs". Croatia was at the time a kingdom in the Habsburg monarchy, with Dalmatia and Istria being separate Habsburg Crown lands. Croatian thinker and politician Ante Starčević, an advocate of Croatian unity and independence, who was both anti-Habsburg and anti-Serbian in outlook, envisioned the creation of Greater Croatia that would include territories inhabited by Bosniaks, Serbs, and Slovenes, considering Bosniaks and Serbs to be Croats who had been converted to Islam and Orthodox Christianity, while considering the Slovenes to be "mountain Croats". Starčević, who in 1861 co-founded a nationalist and irredentist Party of Rights, argued that the significant Serb presence in territories claimed by Greater Croatia was the result of recent settlement, encouraged by Habsburg rulers, and the influx of groups like Vlachs who converted to Orthodox Christianity and came to identify themselves as Serbs. Starčević admired Bosniaks because in his view they were Croats who had adopted Islam in order to preserve the economic and political autonomy of Bosnia and Ottoman Croatia. After Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 and Serbia gained its independence from Ottoman Empire, Croatian and Serbian relations deteriorated as both sides had pretensions on Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1902, major anti-Serb riots in the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia were provoked by a re-publication by the Zagreb-based Serb Independent Party of an article authored by a Serb Nikola Stojanović that was titled ''Srbi i Hrvati'' ("Serbs and Croats"), also known as ''Do istrage vaše ili naše'' ("Till the Annihilation, Yours or Ours"). Stojanović denied the existence of the Croatian nation and forecast the result of the "inevitable" Serbian–Croatian conflict:

In World War I, ethnic Croats fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army against the Kingdom of Serbia, while Croatian general Ivan Salis-Seewis was a military governor of occupied Serbia. Some Croat POWs volunteered to fight in Thessaloniki battlefront with Serbian Army. On 29 October 1918, the Croatian Parliament (Sabor) declared independence from Austria-Hungary and decided to join the newly formed State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs which on 1 December 1918 entered a union with the Kingdom of Serbia and formed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Initial Croatian zeal for the new state faded away as the republican view of a new state was ignored, especially since the concept of Greater Serbia was put in practice during the early 1920s, under the Yugoslav premiership of Nikola Pašić. Using tactics of police intimidation and vote rigging, he diminished the role of the oppositions (mainly those loyal to his Croatian rival, Stjepan Radić) to his government in parliament, creating an environment for centralization of power in the hands of the Serbs in general and Serbian politicians in particular. Police violence further alienated Croats, who began to ask for their own state. On 20 June 1928, Stjepan Radić and five other Croat politicians (supported by a vast majority of Croats) were shot in the National Assembly in Belgrade by a Serb deputy Puniša Račić, enraged by continuous Croatian claims that they were "exploited by Serbia and that Serbia is treating them like a colony." This led to the royal dictatorship of King Alexander in January 1929. The dictatorship formally ended in 1931 when the king imposed a more unitarian constitution and changed the name of the country to ''Yugoslavia''. The Croatian Peasant Party, now led by Vladko Maček who succeeded Radić, continued to advocate federalization of Yugoslavia, resulting in the Cvetković–Maček Agreement of August 1939 and the autonomous Banovina of Croatia.

In April 1941, Yugoslavia was occupied by Germany and Italy who created a puppet-state called the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) which was governed by the pro-Axis Ustasha organization. The Ustashas sought to create ethnically pure Greater Croatia by cleansing Serbs as well as Jews and Roma from its territory. The Ustashas regime systematically murdered around 300,000–350,000 Serbs, as a part of a genocide campaign. Approximately 100,000 people, primarily Serbs, Roma and Jews and others were murdered in Jasenovac concentration camp alone. The predominantly Serb Chetniks, a Yugoslav royalist and Serbian nationalist movement and guerrilla force, engaged in war crimes and ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats in order to establish Greater Serbia, while also supporting the reinstatement of a Serbian monarchy. Some historians view these crimes as constituting genocide. The most recent estimates on the number of Muslims and Croats deaths caused by the Chetniks in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina range from 47,000 to 65,000. Following the victory of Yugoslav Partisans, who were led by Croatian communist Josip Broz Tito, the Ustashas and the Chetniks were defeated. Yugoslav communists abolished the monarchy and established one-party socialist republic and a federation governed by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Newly formed socialist Yugoslav state under Tito's benevolent dictatorship
"...All Yugoslavs had educational opportunities, jobs, food, and housing regardless of nationality. Tito, seen by most as a benevolent dictator, brought peaceful co-existence to the Balkan region, a region historically synonymous with factionalism." was made up of six socialist republics including SR Serbia and SR Croatia.

Yugoslav wars and establishment of diplomatic relations

The period of 1991 to 1995 is marked as the Croatian War of Independence. Serbs living in Croatia stimulated by Serbian leadership established Republic of Serbian Krajina, which captured a third of the whole territory of Croatia, occupied by the remnants of the Serbian-controlled Yugoslav People's Army (from FR Yugoslavia) from 1991 to 1992 and supported by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia through military support. The reason for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to support the Republic of Serbian Krajina against Croatian forces were common interests in upholding the status quo of keeping ethnic Serbs of former Yugoslav territories united, either within the extant Yugoslav state or as satellite states serving as proxies to Belgrade. The war killed some 20,000 people from both sides. An estimated 170,000 to 250,000 Croats and other non-Serbs were expelled from parts of Croatia overrun by Serb forces and hundreds of Croatian and other non-Serbian civilians were killed. During the Croatian military's Operation Storm in August 1995, around 250,000 Serbs fled from their homes and hundreds of Serb civilians were killed.

Following the war in Croatia, the two countries established diplomatic relations on 9 September 1996. Croatia filed a genocide lawsuit against Serbia at the International Court of Justice in 1999, and after Zagreb declined requests to withdraw it, Belgrade filed a countersuit in 2010. Both lawsuits were dismissed on 3 February 2015, as International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found no evidence to support either claim. The court ruled that both sides undoubtedly committed crimes, but they were not committed with genocidal intent so they are not considered genocide according to the Court's definition of genocide.

In 2005, Croatia ratified a bilateral agreement with Serbia and Montenegro on the protection of the Serbian and Montenegrin minority in Croatia and the Croatian national minority in Serbia and Montenegro.

Relations since 2010

In May 2014, floodwaters in southeastern Europe caused greatest damages to Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Croatia suffered to a lesser extent. Croatia provided military transport, a number of rescuers and 65 tons of drinking water to affected areas in Serbia. The Croatian Red Cross donated €71,386.90 to Bosnia and Herzegovina and €57,168.47 to Serbia for victims of the floods.

In April 2018, Serbian minister Aleksandar Vulin was proclaimed persona non grata in Croatia for making a statement that: "only the Supreme Commander of the Serbian Army – Aleksandar Vučić – can decide about me entering in Croatia, not Croatian ministers." Throughout the years, Vulin has made a reputation of a man often insulting Croatian officials and Croatian state by calling them fascists, ustašas, criminals in his public statements. As a response to that, Serbian authorities banned Damir Krstičević, then defense minister of Croatia, from entering Serbia.

In the same month, as Croatian delegation was visiting the National Assembly of Serbia, ultranationalist Serb politician Vojislav Šešelj accompanied by members of his Serbian Radical Party trampled the Croatian flag in front of Croatian delegation. In response, Croatian delegation led by Goran Jandroković canceled their visit. Šešelj also bragged of cursing the Croats .

In 2020, the birth home of Ban of Croatia Josip Jelačić, built in the 18th century and located in Petrovaradin, was bought by the Republic of Serbia from private owners. It was later reconstructed and given as a gift to the Croatian community.

During Serbian Protests in July 2020, Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić blamed Croatia for the protests and, saying that "their rivalry is to destroy Serbia and destroy Vučić".

On 29 December 2020, a violent earthquake hit central Croatia with an epicenter in Petrinja. President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić announced that Serbia is ready to help Croatia both financially and technically. The next day, Government of Serbia decided to donate €1,000,000 to Croatia for repairing damages from the earthquake. Serbian Chamber of Commerce donated additional €50,000. Miloš Stojković, a member of Serb delegation which was supposed to bring the humanitarian aid to areas hit by the earthquake, came unannounced to Croatian city of Knin (once capital of self-proclaimed Krajina). From there he livestreamed on Facebook, saying that: "Knin is the occupied Serb town", and announced the "return of Republic of Serbian Krajina" and removal of Croatian flag from Knin fortress". His video went viral and caused a diplomatic incident. Croatian embassy in Belgrade issued a protest note to Serbian ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to Croatian ambasador Hidajet Bišćević; Serb ministry of Foreign Affairs distanced themself orally from Stojković's statements, however, Croatians also announced that they are expecting a written response from Serbian government. Stojković later called Croatian protest note "shameful".

In July 2021, Croatia announced that an image of Nikola Tesla