Brnabic: "EU is still silent about the fact Ustasha crimes are celebrated and relativized in Croatia"

Photo: Tanjug/Marko Djokovic

President of the Serbian National Assembly Ana Brnabic noted today that the European Union continues to be silent about the fact that in Croatia, a member of the EU, 80 years after the end of the Second World War Nazi and Ustasha crimes are relativized, justified and celebrated.

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Brnabic also stressed that Serbia will continue to oppose such tendencies and fight so that the crimes committed against the Serbs in the NDH (Independent State of Croatia, a WW2 Nazi state) are not forgotten.

Brnabic said that EU institutions keep silent about the fact that half a million people attended Marko Perkovic Thompson's concert in Zagreb that celebrated Ustasha crimes and the NDH, including the crowd shouting WW2-era salute "Za dom spremni" ("For home ready") under which Serbs, Jews and Romani were murdered in the Jasenovac death camp.

"In that NDH, under that slogan - that is now shouted so enthusiastically both in the Croatian Assembly, and by the half a million people in the middle of Zagreb, 100 kilometers from the place where the Jasenovac concentration camp was - they made soap out of (the bodies) of Serb children. And the EU is silent, silent all week. We will not allow things to just pass like that and we will not allow that silence," Brnabic told TV Pink.

She pointed out that EU institutions did not react even when some Croatian Assembly deputies were uttering the said Ustasha salute, as well as when member of the European Parliament Stiven Nikola Bartulica posted a photo from Thompson's concert on social networks with the caption, "Croatia is awakening".

"Croatia is awakening once again, with the cry, 'For home ready' - the equivalent of the (German) Nazi 'Sieg Heil' - that was said as they slaughtered Serbs, came up with the most brutal and monstrous ways to kill Serbs, including Serb children, Jews and Romani, but mostly Serbs, in order to completely ethnically cleanse the Ustasha NDH of the Serbs. And 80 years later, here's the same thing," said Brnabic.

Brnabic said that Israeli officials with whom she spoke this week during her official visit to that country were shocked by what is happening 80 years after the end of the Second World War in a country that is a member of the EU, and that they expressed gratitude to Serbia for opposing attempts to make relative, and revitalize fascist and Nazi tendencies on the European continent, or anywhere in the world.

"But it is up to us to fight more and harder and I have already talked to President Vucic, that we will work even harder to establish a memorial center in Jajinci and Donja Gradina because we have to fight so that such things are not forgotten," said Brnabic.

She added that during her visit to the Yad Vashem memorial center, dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust, she reminded Israeli officials that exactly three years ago, the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a note of protest to Croatia, because they banned President Aleksandar Vucic from visiting Jasenovac.

Brnabic explained that the Croatian authorities did not allow Vucic to visit Jasenovac as a private person and a descendant of a victim of the Ustasha regime, nor to pay respects to the victims of that concentration camp, which was a torture center where the most monstrous ways of killing Serbs were invented, including a separate concentration camp just for children.

"Three years ago, the Government of Serbia asked the Croatian authorities to give us a date, time, and opportunity for a visit. They have not replied in three years. It's equivalent to Israeli President Isaac Herzog getting banned from visiting Auschwitz," said Brnabic.

(Telegraf.rs/Tanjug)