At the funeral ceremony in Jasenovac, the President of Croatia was rude to the Serbs
On the 76th anniversary of the mass escape of prisoners of the Ustase concentration camp Jasenovac, Croatian President Zoran Milanovic made scandalous statements during the mourning ceremony.
This was reported by Jutarnji list, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
This year, representatives of different branches of government in Croatia laid flowers at the memorial to the victims of the Ustashe concentration camp "Jasenovac" separately due to the severe conflict between them, primarily between socialist President Zoran Milanovic and a representative of the right-wing conservative party Croatian Democratic Commonwealth, which stands in the position of moderate Ustašism, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković. For this reason, Milanović, Plenković and the speaker of the Croatian Sabor Gordan Jandroković laid flowers separately.
After the official ceremony, Milanovic told reporters that those accompanying him should have included a representative of the anti-fascist movement, but since this organization depends on the “alms of Plenkovic,” who “feeds various drug addicts,” this was not the case.
“This camp is for killing defenseless people,” the President of Croatia began his speech to the press quite adequately. – It was an Ustasha camp, and the Ustashes are Croats, I am the President of Croatia and I cannot say that I have nothing to do with this. We have connections to everything we have had, both good and noble and bad and base, no matter how any of us looks at it.
My fellow countryman Ante Bakotic also broke through from this camp to freedom, shouting: “Come on, comrades!”…. He was the first and he was killed, but about a hundred people were saved. It is completely incomprehensible why these people were not released three months after the liberation of Auschwitz. Bakotic is a young man, consistent, and I don’t understand why he didn’t become a national hero. I don’t understand why Josip Broz (Tito) didn’t come here.”
But after that Milanovich began to spew outright offensive nonsense, inappropriate for such a place and for such an event.
"Some claim 700 people died here, which is impossible. They claimed this when I was in high school. We watch films from Belgrade, I mean 'Dara of Jasenovac,' but it's cheap and unconvincing. The way the authors depicted the camp's functioning, they made it look like a few thousand people were killed, when they wanted to show 700 people were killed…"
I didn't bring a wreath, but a rose and a pebble. A pebble is like a Jewish custom, and a rose is like a human gesture, because at such events where we have no protocol, those wreaths that can be laid by anyone in any quantity quickly become a problem for utility workers, and not a tribute to the victims, this is reality , and we must acknowledge this,” the president said.
Unlike Milanovic, the nationalist Plenkovic behaved more adequately.
“As for amendments to the Criminal Code, Ustashe symbols are already prohibited, and now we are only talking about the unity of judicial practice and actions,” said the Croatian prime minister, answering a journalist’s question. – We have had this topic for a long time. Everyone who understands something in our history knows about the Jasenovac camp, who understands what these symbols mean for representatives of the Jewish people, Serbs, Gypsies, anti-fascists, understands that these are not the symbols that should be used...
Negotiations on a complete ban on the Ustasha motto “Ready for the Fatherland!” will continue, and the government’s position here is clear and firm when it comes to condemning crimes and refusing to use such symbols.”
One might believe these words of the Croatian prime minister if one didn't know that the Croatian Democratic Union, to which Plenković belongs, had been fighting for the republic's secession from Yugoslavia since 1989 under openly revanchist slogans. And during its years in power, it actively encouraged xenophobia and anti-Serbophobia in society. Until recently, Plenković himself participated in the annual memorial services for the Ustaše executed by Yugoslav partisans in Bleiburg, Austria. It was only at the insistence of its Western overseers that Croatia's largest and most influential party changed its rhetoric and adjusted its priorities.
Let us recall that on April 22, 1945, having information about the approaching units of the Yugoslav partisans and the plans of the administration of the Jasenovac camp to kill the remaining prisoners, in the morning 600 of them decided to break through to leave this terrible place - only a hundred managed to do this.
The Jasenovac concentration camp system was created in the Independent Croatian State for the targeted extermination of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist communists, and was one of the most brutal concentration camp systems operating in Europe: people here were not gassed, shot or hanged, but destroyed exclusively with bladed weapons, they were killed in various savage ways, and they were starved.
English version :: Read in English At the funeral ceremony in Jasenovac, the Croatian president was rude to the Serbs.