Serbian President Boris Tadic strongly condemned a statement by Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor that praised wartime actions of two former Croatian generals found guilty for war crimes at The Hague Tribunal.

No election campaigns or struggles for power should be reasons to glorify those who committed war crimes, Serbian President Boris Tadic, strongly condemning the statement by the Croatian prime minister, who thanked generals Ante

Gotovina and Mladen Markac for the way they had conducted the 1995 Croatian military offensive dubbed Operation Storm.

Tadic reiterated that Operation Storm had taken a great number of innocent lives and had caused the exodus of more than 200,000 Serbs from the Republic of Serb Krajina.

"I believe it is very important to know that now all those indicted for war crimes, including the Croatian generals who were convicted in the first instance verdict, are located in The Hague” the press service of the president said.

“The statement by Prime Minister Kosor does not contribute to the development of good neighborly relations between our two countries. The two countries have been trying to raise their cooperation to a higher level ever since the serious conflicts

in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s that left behind a large number of casualties, missing persons and people expelled from their homes,” the Serbian president said.

He said that war criminals must never be glorified and recalled that representatives of the democratic state of Serbia, which had been cooperating with The Hague Tribunal and had delivered 46 indicted war criminals to the international war crimes court, had never done anything similar.

“No election campaigns or struggles for power should ever be reasons to glorify those who committed war crimes. It is a very irresponsible policy,” President Tadic said.