The plaque was installed at the initiative of the New York-based Jasenovac Research Institute (JRI), which was granted permission by the city authorities to erect the monument after it filed an application more than three years ago. The Institute, consisting of members of the Jewish and Serbian communities, was established in 1998.
The plaque, unveiled by JRI National Coordinator Branislav Lucic, says: From August 1941 to April 1945, hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Romas, as well as antifascists of many nationalities, were killed in the Jasenovac death camp run by Croatian Ustashas.
The monument marked the 60th anniversary of the break-out of prisoners from the Jasenovac camp. Lucic said that the purpose of the monument was to ensure that the victims of Jasenovac were never forgotten and that such a thing never happened again.
The unveiling ceremony was attended by a two dozen people, including camp survivors and a priest from the Serbian Orthodox Church from New York. Croatian diplomats and members of the Croatian community did not attend because, as the Croatian Embassy in Washington told Hina, they had not been invited.
The JRI requested that the inscription on the monument should read that between 350,000 and 750,000 people had been killed in Jasenovac, but the New York Holocaust Advisory Committee rejected the request, allowing the sentence to state that hundreds of thousands victims had been killed.
Earlier this month, the Croatian American organisation, the National Federation of Croatian Americans (NFCA), sent a protest letter to the New York City authorities for permitting the erection of a monument that exaggerated the number of Jasenovac camp victims.
NFCA official John Kraljic said in the letter that not a single respectable scholar had ever claimed that the number of Jasenovac camp victims exceeded 100,000, stressing that the US Holocaust Museum put the figure at between 56,000 and 97,000.
Kraljic said that the number of victims was overblown in the interests of followers of a Greater Serbia in order to vilify the Croats as a genocidal nation, to cover up the collaboration that had existed between the Serbian Chetnik Movement and Nazi Germany, to deny the participation of hundreds of thousands of Croats in WWII on the allied side and to deny Croatia the right to independence.
The JRI says on its Web site that it was founded "on the belief that the failure to learn the lessons of the genocide committed against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies during the Second World War rests at the very core of recent events in the Balkans."
The failure to recognize the crimes at Jasenovac, "the greatest crimes of genocide ever committed in the Balkans," has resulted in "a revival of fascism in the Balkans (and) a deadly, racist demonization of the Serbian people," the JRI says.