BRUSSELS — A controversial vote in the Montenegrin parliament condemning crimes committed by Croatian fascists during World War II has cast a shadow over the country’s hopes of joining the EU.
“It’s damaging us, it’s definitely not helping us,” Montenegro’s Prime Minister Milojko Spajić told POLITICO in an interview in Brussels before his parliament voted on the nonbinding resolution Friday, which was swiftly condemned by Croatia.
The resolution focuses on a World War II death camp in Jasenovac, Croatia, which was run by the fascist regime in the country that collaborated with Nazi Germany. Tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma and other minorities were murdered at the camp.
The vote overshadowed a positive week for Spajić’s pro-EU centrist government. The PM described his administration as having been “really optimistic and pumped up” after overcoming a major hurdle in its EU accession talks at an intergovernmental conference in Luxembourg on June 26. Spajić wants to get his country into the EU by 2028 and says he intends to close “quite a few chapters” by the end of the year, while Hungary is chairing meetings of the Council of the EU.
Following the vote on the resolution, however, European Council President Charles Michel canceled a trip to the Montenegrin capital Podgorica during which he was to meet Spajić, instead inviting President Jakov Milatović to Brussels on Tuesday.
Montenegro, a country of some 600,000 people where available data suggests some 30 percent are ethnic Serbs, is pitching itself as low-hanging fruit as the EU seeks to expand. Spajić, 36, came to power in late 2023 after a period of deep political instability and now runs a minority government supported by a pro-Serbian party.
Spajić said a May resolution passed by the U.N. General Assembly condemning the Srebrenica genocide committed against Bosniaks by Serbia in 1995 had led to “hyperinflation” in resolutions. He added that he supports all such resolutions as long as they focus on victims rather than on perpetrators or history.
Montenegrin MPs expanded their resolution at the last minute to include other historical crimes such as the Nazi concentration camps at Dachau and Mauthausen.
“There was, frankly, the Pandora’s box of resolutions opened [by the U.N.’s Srebrenica resolution],” Spajić said. “This is not our main policy, this is digression.”
Croatia’s government condemned the Montenegrin parliament’s resolution as “unacceptable, inappropriate and unnecessary” in a post on X on Saturday, saying it had been “passed in order to devalue and relativize the U.N. resolution on the genocide in Srebrenica” and that it risked derailing Montenegro’s EU membership bid.
Croatian PM Andrej Plenković said Saturday that the Podgorica resolution evinces “a deliberate, conscious policy of division within Montenegro” and sends “an even worse message regarding mutual respect and the desire for good neighborly relations.”
Following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the country’s constituent republics fought a series of interethnic wars pitting Serbs, Croatians, Bosniaks and Montenegrins against each other and reanimating older grievances from World War II and earlier.
Speaking to POLITICO on Friday, Spajić said he “completely” agreed with Croatia’s desire not to drag the region “back in history.”
“We don’t want to make the history prettier. We just want to make [the] future prettier,” he said. “We want absolutely best possible relations with Croatia.”
Spajić also appeared to link the timing of the resolution to Russian efforts to destabilize the Western Balkans and compromise his government.
“There is a Russian narrative in Montenegro, that [the] European Union and [the] Western world is supporting Nazi or fascist history,” he said, suggesting that if his government had voted against the resolution it would have been used against him.
Serbia’s pro-Russian President Aleksandar Vučić congratulated Montenegro on Sunday for passing the resolution and announced he would visit the country this month. He earlier denied having had anything to do with the measure, but in May hinted that Serbia might make a similar proposal at the U.N.
Ana Brnabić, speaker of the Serbian parliament and the country’s former and longest-serving prime minister, hit out at Croatia on Monday for opposing the resolution, calling the criticism of Croatian officials “extremely sad.”
Council chief Michel postponed his visit to Podgorica “to a later date to ensure successful discussions with key interlocutors in the country, which should not be overshadowed by most recent developments,” an EU official told POLITICO.
“Good neighbourly relations also remain [an] essential element of the accession process,” the official said, adding that Michel is in contact with Spajić.
A Montenegrin government official said they were displeased with Michel’s decision to postpone and worried it would send the wrong message.
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