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War veterans smashing bilingual signs in Vukovar in September. Photo: Beta

The campaign group pushing for a referendum, the Committee for the Defence of Croatian Vukovar, announced on Friday that it had already gathered over 650,000 signatures – 200,000 more than needed to trigger a vote on the minority rights issue.

The Committee, led by war veterans angered by the installation of new bilingual signs in Croatian Latin and Serbian Cyrillic in the symbolic wartime flashpoint town of Vukovar, launched its petition for a referendum two weeks ago and still has another three weeks to gather signatures.

Croatian law states that if 10 per cent of registered voters sign such a petition, they have the right to a referendum.

The Committee is proposing that minority language rights should be granted only in places where at least half of population is from an ethnic minority, instead of a third, as under the current minority rights legislation.

More than a third of Vukovar residents are Serbs, which led the authorities to start installing the controversial bilingual signs in September – although many of them were immediately torn down by angry veterans who fought to defend the town that was besieged by Serb forces in 1991.

The centre-left government has condemned the anti-Cyrillic initiative.

Croatian foreign minister Vesna Pusic warned this week that by signing its accession contract with the EU, “Croatia obliged itself to implement the existing laws on ethnic minority rights”.

But Vlado Illjkic, a member of the Committee, demanded that Pusic show exactly how the accession contract forbids the referendum, and threatened to take the issue to the constitutional court.

“If the Croatian parliament accepts the changes in the constitution that will forbid the realisation of this referendum, perhaps the constitutional court will have a different opinion, which could lead to a constitutional crisis,” said Iljkic.

The Committee said that a few thousand signatures still remain uncounted, so the final petition tally could be higher than 650,000.

Meanwhile Serbia’s foreign ministry said on Thursday that it had warned foreign governments that Croatia’s Serb minority was under threat over the proposed referendum and other allegedly anti-Serb incidents over the past month.

It said it sent a document to all the countries in which Serbia has an embassy listing incidents which it said were “endangering the rights of Serbs”, including the removal of the bilingual signs in Vukovar and other Croatian towns, an attack on the Serbian consulate in the town of Rijeka and a Croatian football player leading a chant associated with the wartime fascist Ustashe movement.