Serbs in Croatia held an autonomy referendum on 17 August 1990 which the Croatian government did not recognise. After that, the date was observed in the then occupied parts of Croatia as the day of the Serb people's uprising.
"Today we are observing the date when war events in the former Yugoslavia began in 1990. Those events marked the 1990s and brought many victims which today we are paying our respects to. We remember all those who laid their lives defending the homeland with the desire that those events and those times never happen anywhere again," said Zoran Alimpic, deputy president of the Belgrade City Assembly.
The monument in Savski Trg square was unveiled in late March prompting some Serbian historians to criticise the insufficient clarity of its name. They said it remained unclear who were "the defenders of the homeland" and what homeland meant in that context, the former Yugoslavia or present-day Serbia.