Addressing the gathered at the Jasenovac Memorial Centre, Croatian President Stjepan Mesic said that meetings at places such as the former concentration camp in Jasenovac did not allow horrendous crimes to be forgotten.
"We meet here to pay tribute to the innocent victims of the Jasenovac slaughter house and to recall who were the executioners and who were the victims. We also meet here to send an unequivocal message not only to those who survived the (Second) World War which saw genocide and the Holocaust, but also to the generation of today," Mesic said.
Jasenovac was one of the worst execution sites of Fascism in the then occupied Europe. I intentionally say in the occupied Europe as during the Second World War there was neither freedom nor a Croatian state here. The victims of this place were people who were different on the basis of their ethnicity, race, religion or view of life and included Serbs, Roma, Jews and members of other ethnic groups and Croat communists and anti-fascists. This was a site of crimes and the regime that organised those crimes was a criminal regime, the Croatian president said.
Condemning the devastation of monuments to fascism victims and anti-fascists in the last two decades, Mesic ascribed this to concessions made to historical revisionism and to the consequences of dangerous flirting with the Ustasha ideology.
He stressed that it was necessary to always speak to young people about what had happened in the Second World War.
It is true that crimes were committed also by anti-fascists during and in the wake of the war, but fascism and the Ustasha movement were criminal in nature and in practice, while the idea of anti-fascism was pure and crimes committed by anti-fascists cast a shadow on that bright side of the struggle for freedom, the president said.
The Croatian people is not guilty. It is individuals who are guilty and it is organised groups who are guilty. There is no collective guilt. To individualise guilt is an important component of the struggle for the truth and of the struggle for the truth about Jasenovac, Mesic said, among other things.