On the other hand, based on allegedly completely different languages and scripts, the political leaders of the Serb ethnic community got separate schools in which nationalists transfer their world view to children, the result being that young people leave school with a horrible national charge which often turns into extremism, said Iljkic.
He described that as abuse of the Serbian language and script, saying that "a language used for such purposes is called an apartheid language."
Iljkic said eastern Croatia's Vukovar was a multiethnic and multilingual town. "Go to the cafes, to the farmers market, and you will hear Serbian, Croatian, Hungarian and German. Among the common people, Vukovar is bilingual, even a multilingual town."
Nobody bans court proceedings or the issue of ID cards or driver's licences in both Croatian and Serbian, but because of the not so distant war events, placing signs as symbols is simply frustrating for many people who still cannot make the democratic step towards bilingualism in a symbolic sense, said Iljkic.
The host said one could not talk about good coexistence because of the current protesters' positions, to which Iljkic replied that what was going on in Vukovar was a political issue.
"The issue is indeed political. We live here ones with the others, no longer ones near the others. There are the beginnings of genuine forgiveness which are now being endangered like this. Coexistence is possible, but the political leaders must understand that they can't measure everything by their political goals. Here the people must be more important than that."
He said this especially referred to the government and that he was deeply disappointed by Croatian Serb leader Milorad Pupovac. He said that as a convinced democrat, in order to become the political leader of Croatian Serbs, Pupovac "adapted his democratic positions, even accepting some rigid positions from people from once occupied areas, notably positions on education."
Iljkic said there were many places in Croatia where minority communities, including the Serbian, had successfully integrated into Croatian society without assimilation, yet in Vukovar this was not happening or was, albeit very, very slowly.
He said the main obstacle to that was not the Serb ethnic community, but its political leaders in Croatia.