Serbian President apologises for the victims of war
"I am here to pay respect to the victims and to all those who have been killed. Bowing before the victims, I come here to once again give words of apology and express my sincere regrets with a view to creating conditions for Croats and Serbs to turn a new page in our history." It is with these words, which the Croats had waited to hear for 19 years, that Serbian president Boris Tadić offered, in the martyred city of Vukovar, the official apology of Serbia for crimes committed during the 1991–1995 war. After the normalisation of bilateral diplomatic relations in 1996, followed by the extradition by Belgrade in 2001 of Slobodan Milošević who was tried in The Hague for crimes against humanity, this constituted a strong new gesture and an important step in the reconciliation of the two countries. Croatia, an EU member state today, supports Serbia's efforts to join the European Union.
