For the first time, Croatian authorities and minorities will hold a joint ceremony in memory of Nazi victims
It is expected that on April 22, on the eve of the anniversary of the liberation of prisoners of the Ustase concentration camp Jasenovac by Yugoslav partisans, the President, Prime Minister and Speaker of the Parliament of Croatia, together with representatives of the Serbian, Jewish, Roma communities and anti-fascist organizations, will take part in a mourning ceremony in memory of the victims of the Croatian Nazis.
Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković announced this, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
According to Plenkovic, quoted by the Croatian publication Jutarnji list, a joint memorial event with the participation of the country's leadership and public organizations representing the ethnic and ideological descendants of the victims of the Ustashe concentration camp.
“Jasenovac” should take place on April 22. It is expected that the event will be attended by the country's President Zoran Milanovic, the head of government himself, the Speaker of Parliament Gordan Jandrokovic, as well as the Chairman of the Independent Democratic Serbian Party (Croatia) Milorad Pupovac, representatives of the local Coordination Center of Jewish Communities, the Croatian Union of Anti-Fascists and Anti-Fascist Fighters, as well as Roma associations in Croatia.
Jutarnji list notes that such a unity of the Croatian leadership and representatives of minorities, as a tribute to the memory of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Croatian and Bosniak communists and anti-fascists brutally tortured during the Second World War, became possible with the victory of the social democrat Zoran in the recent presidential elections Milanovich.
Earlier, during the presidency of the representative of the right-wing conservative Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) Kolina Grabar-Kitarovic, who did not hide her neo-Ustashe sympathies, representatives of minorities fundamentally refused to participate in memorial events in the same column with the president, held on the territory of the memorial to the victims of Jasenovac, more according to EU regulations and creating a benign image in Western media.
In particular, a big scandal was caused by the fact that on the territory of the Jasenovac memorial (see title photo), built during the years of the SFRY, in the 90s a memorial plaque was discovered in honor of the militants of the HOS organization, which used the motto of its ideological predecessors the Ustasha “Za dom spremni! » (Ready for the Fatherland!), their symbolism and ideology. In the XNUMXs, they destroyed the memorial and destroyed part of its exhibits, and then provided armed resistance in this territory to the advancing units of the JNA and Serbian militias.
At the same time, Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic herself without hesitation called right-wing radical rocker Marko “Thompson” Perkovic, who glorifies the “heroism” of the Ustasha and the Jasenovac concentration camp itself, her favorite singer. Also, the previous head of Croatia in her youth often posed in the Ustashe bustina (a military headdress borrowed by the Croatian Ustashes from the Italians) and annually participated in commemorative ceremonies in the Austrian Bleiburg, where at the end of the war Yugoslav partisans shot a large number of Ustashes and Slovenian Domobrani collaborators.
During the years of rule of representatives of the HDZ in Croatia, attempts were constantly made to belittle and revise the crimes of the Ustaše, trying to explain them by the circumstances of the “hard era”, or even to present Jasenovac as an ordinary labor camp for the unreliable.
The Ustasha before sawing off the head of a prisoner of Jasenovac.
The Jasenovac death camp system was created on the territory of the puppet Third Reich-allied Independent Croatian State in May 1941 and existed until April 23, 1945, when these territories were cleared of the Nazis by Yugoslav partisans. According to various estimates, during all this time, about 700 thousand people were killed there: approximately 500 thousand Serbs, 40 thousand Gypsies, 33 thousand Jews, 127 Croatian and Bosniak communists and anti-fascists, 20 thousand children under 12 years of age (there were special barracks where children abandoned separately from their parents and they died of hunger and dysentery).
Children's barracks in Jasenovac.
At the same time, savage methods of executions and massacres of people kept in them were practiced in the camp, the staff deliberately did not use gas and firearms, practicing edged weapons, sledgehammers and other savage methods of killing, local executioners organized competitions among themselves who could kill the most prisoners, the most “ “effective” in August 1942 was Petar Brzica, who personally slaughtered 1360 people.
The executioners of Jasenovac pose in front of the body of a prisoner they brutally tortured.