The SABA alliance sent letters to Croatian President Ivo Josipovic, the parliament, the government and former President Stjepan Mesic, labelling the law as "petty politicking and gross manipulation with the dead, only to cause divisions among the living".
The alliance said that every deceased human being had the right to rest in peace, but that "declaring every unearthed skeleton" to be a victim of the Communist regime, without establishing their identity, is gross manipulation and petty politicking.
In mid-February, Interior Minister Tomislav Karamarko said that Croatia was strewn with pits containing people killed in the aftermath of World War II, but that the political elites had not been sensitive to that issue in the last 20 years.
"Those pits have not been investigated, the perpetrators have not been identified and it is not known why those people were killed," Karamarko said in an interview with Croatian Radio on 13 February. He said that antifascism was a globally recognised achievement of civilisation and that "only madmen are not against fascism." He said that "a lot of evil" had been done by Communist and Bolshevik regimes, and that the Croatian people was the victim of both.
His comments triggered off strong criticism among SABA members.