After the Croatian national anthem was played and a minute's silence was observed for all victims of the camp, the ceremony was addressed by the Director of the Jasenovac Memorial Park, Natasa Jovicic, who said that Jasenovac was not just a symbol of human suffering, but also a warning that something like that should never happen again, and that each camp victim should be given dignity and identity.
"In the name of the modern Croatian state and the values on which we are building our present and our future, I wish to express my deepest respect to all the victims on this tragic site," Prime Minister Ivo Sanader said, adding that "the truth should not be concealed, the truth should not be forgotten, the truth cannot be used as a bargaining chip."
"Not to forget the truth about our past and to draw a lesson from it is the only guarantor of our peace of mind and our peaceful future," the prime minister said. "Hatred impoverishes us, while others enrich us, and it is this value (...) that reaffirms our readiness to get out of the circle of intolerance that was imposed on us and turn to the modern European society where all citizens of Croatia will share the ideals of peace, democracy and dialogue."
The Jasenovac Memorial Park project, thanks to which Croatia was accepted into an international task force on Holocaust education, shows that Croatia respects European standards regarding commemoration of victims and is an important part of the Croatian and European heritage.
"We need the truth about Jasenovac and its victims because we should not forget that justification for the Serbian aggression against Croatia was partly sought in the untruth about Jasenovac and an exaggerated number of its victims," Sanader said.
Speaking of the role of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum and the Education Centre, President Stjepan Mesic said that young and future generations in Croatia should learn why Jasenovac had become synonymous with atrocities and why the Ustasha-run Independent State of Croatia (NDH) had been a criminal creation.
"Jasenovac leaves no room for doubt about how present-day Croatia sees events from the Second World War. Here there is no room for downplaying or diminishing the atrocities, genocide and Holocaust that were committed in the Croatian name," Mesic said, stressing that the purpose of the Jasenovac Memorial Park should be "to inform those uninformed, enlighten those misled and confront those wishing to rewrite history."
Following a tour of the Memorial Museum and the Education Centre, Mesic, Sanader and Parliament Speaker Vladimir Seks laid flowers and lit candles at the Jasenovac Flower, the monument made by sculptor Bogdan Bogdanovic.
A list of the names of camp victims, compiled by the custodians of the Memorial Park, takes the central place in the permanent exhibition of the Memorial Museum.
The list names 69,842 people -- 39,580 Serbs, 14,599 Roma, 10,700 Jews, 3,462 Croats and victims of other nationalities -- who perished in Jasenovac and the nearby Stara Gradiska camp during WWII. Of the total number of the victims, 32,577 were men, 18,453 were women and 18,812 were children under the age of 18.
The Memorial Museum and Education Centre project was carried out in cooperation with European and American experts.