ZAGREB - Croatia's president said on Wednesday he would not attend the inauguration of his new Serbian counterpart next week in the first sign of regional fallout from the election of nationalist Tomislav Nikolic.
Last month's surprise election of Nikolic, long depicted in the West as the ideological heir to late Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic, sent a chill through a region still coming to terms with the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia, in which over 125,000 people died.The European Union, which Nikolic says he wants Serbia to join, made clear he was on probation. Brussels hopes a coalition government currently being negotiated - with liberal leader Boris Tadic possibly in the more powerful post of prime minister - will be able to keep Nikolic in check.
Nikolic immediately stirred controversy by denying that the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica was genocide and by saying the Croatian border town of Vukovar "was a Serb town."
