"He showed that the suppressed and dark past could be spoken about fairly and objectively, by stating data and facts, and not lies and historical myths," Mesic said, adding it was good that there was such a book given that many in Croatia had felt the horrors of Mussolini's regime and his concentration camps.
Mesic said he would be equally pleased to attend the promotion of a book that would deal in the same way "with our falsified history or suppressed past".
"On our territory the need to face the truth about the past stems on the one hand from the evident tendency of historical revisionism of World War Two, and on the other from the persistent attempt to either suppress the dark episodes from our recent past or, let me put it this way, cover them in pink," said Mesic.
He said there was no state in the world that did not have a historical event or person to be ashamed of, that should be rejected or condemned.
Mesic said the Italians, by a combination of historical circumstances, but also the political will of those in power in postwar Italy, had chosen to forget those events and persons so that for the majority of Italians today the story about Mussolini's camps was something new and unknown.
He said that some in Croatia "thought that democracy and a multiparty system legitimised a general reckoning with everything that had gone on before, and the reckoning with communism was understood and practiced also as a reckoning with antifascism".
Mesic said that reckoning had been turned into a shroud under which to, if not reaffirm, then certainly tolerate fascism and its Croatian version -- the Ustasha ideology.
Present-day Croatia should not and must not tolerate either the Ustasha or the neo-Ustasha, he said. "There is no argument which could justify lying about the past, either the recent or the distant past, either one's own or someone else's."
Wondering why young people wanted insignia which had sent millions of people to their deaths, Mesic said that Croatian schools were failing. The situation will be calmer on stadiums and in society when false information is thrown out of textbooks, he added.
"Croatia must face the past not only because of its European integration, not only so as to provide conditions for full normalisation on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, but also so as to have undisturbed bilateral relations with its neighbours, Italy included."
Speaking of Croatia-Italy relations, Mesic said they had been settled once and for all with the Osimo agreements, which Croatia inherited as a successor to the former Yugoslavia. "Those agreements must be adhered to," he said.
Mesic supported an initiative for an Italian-Slovene-Croatian gesture of reconciliation, saying it should also include independent Montenegro, "in order to relax relations".