After visiting the private farm, the minister said that the horses were in good shape. However, the Serbian news agency Beta quoted people living near the farm as saying that what the minister had seen today at the farm, owned by Todor Bukinac, was not the real state of affairs.
The minister, who pledged to send Bukinac food for the horses, said that he would organise a meeting with his Croatian counterpart Petar Cobankovic to try find a solution to the issue of Lippizaners that were taken from a Croatian stud farm in 1991 to Serbia.
Croatian Agriculture Minister Petar Cobankovic on Wednesday asked his Serbian counterpart to take necessary steps to alleviate the serious condition of Lippizaner horses. Cobankovic's request came after recent media reports about some 80 Lippizaner horses starving to death at the farm in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina.
The Croatian ministry recalled that the problem of transferring those horses back to their farm in Croatia has not yet been solved.
In 1991, Mihajlo Komasovic, who worked at the stud farm in Lipik, transferred horses from Lipik via Bosnia to Serbia. He insisted that he had wanted to save the thoroughbred animals from the war.
In 2004, officials of the Croatian and Serbian agriculture ministries reached agreement to transfer the Lippizaner horses back to Lipik.
However, Bukinac, the owner of the Novo Naselje farm, did not accept the terms of the agreement as he had insisted on being reimbursed for keeping the horses on his farm.
Minister Cobankovic yesterday wrote to Minister Milosavljevic to warn him about the inappropriate treatment of the horses at the farm in Vojvodina.
We believe that it is your duty to carry out an inspection to establish the real state of affairs regarding the treatment of those horses and in case of negligence to take appropriate measures to ensure good conditions for keeping and feeding those animals, Cobankovic wrote in the letter.