SABA said that efforts to exaggerate the suffering of Croats who were members of Ustasha and Home Guard units, as well as civilians supporting them, were aimed at defaming the anti-fascist struggle and negating the horrific crimes committed by Ustasha, Chetnik and other occupying forces.
"We are not against remembering victims, but we are against inflammatory speech," SABA said in the statement, wondering if Adlesic had forgotten how and with whose help Ante Pavelic and some 300 Ustasha had come to power in Croatia in 1941 and handed over parts of Croatian territory to Italy under the Rome accords.
It also recalled the victims of 38 Ustasha-run concentration camps, where thousands of people were killed only because they were Serbs, Jews or Roma or because they opposed fascism, as well as other victims of the Ustasha regime, from whom, according to Adlesic, history should be learned.
Such claims have been opposed by anti-fascists whose monuments in Bjelovar, where Adlesic is mayor, have been mostly destroyed. "Today you glorify the same cut-throats and their supporters who are parading across Bleiburg in black uniforms," the association said in the letter to Adlesic, wondering
if the Croatian Constitution was based on the ideology of crime which she defended at Bleiburg or on the anti-fascist struggle.