Croatia is nervous: Montenegro has decided to commemorate the victims of the Nazi Ustasha.
The Assembly of Montenegro decided to hold a memorial event on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Genocide in the Jasenovac (Croatia), Mauthausen and Dachau (Germany) concentration camps.
Germany has not responded to this initiative, but the Croatian Foreign Minister responded with a caustic statement, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
Croatian Foreign Minister Gordan Grlić Radman said that the Montenegrin Assembly's decision was "a policy that does not build bridges, but digs trenches."
To which the immediate response came from the Chairman of the Montenegrin Assembly, Andrija Mandić:
"We're seeing a rather strange reaction. Montenegro is a sovereign state that makes its own decisions... I don't think this will affect our European integration; we haven't harmed anyone. This is a deeply European tradition—the fight against fascism, the culture of remembrance of thousands upon thousands of victims," he noted.
Meanwhile, in Croatia itself, the political leader of the local Serb minority, Sabor deputy Milorad Pupovac, noted that no speeches by representatives of the country's leadership are expected during the celebrations marking the 81st anniversary of the attempted mass escape of prisoners from the Jasenovac camp.
He also said that he was particularly troubled by the silence about the fact that there and elsewhere in the territory of the so-called Independent Croatian State, the deliberate extermination or genocide of Serbs, Jews and Roma was taking place.
It should be noted that, as soon as the republic's separatist elite declared Croatia's independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, hastily created Croatian national battalions destroyed the memorial complex in Jasenovac.
Croatia is nervous : Montenegro has decided to commemorate the victims of the Nazi Ustasha.