"An old speech by Croatian President Stipe Mesic published on a website, in which he apparently glorifies Croatia's World War II pro-Nazi state, shocked many across the country on Sunday. Still, the affair was not likely to seriously endanger Mesic's position.," the Associated Press reported on Sunday.
"Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, whose party controls parliament and who is often seen as Mesic's only serious rival, stood in his defense," the AP said.
"I'm waiting for a time when we will stop burdening ourselves with the things from the past," Sanader was quoted by the AP as saying.
Sanader went on to say that Mesic has shown "with his acts and in his public speeches" that he condemns the World War II regime.
The AP recalls that Mesic went to Israel on one of his first trips after becoming the president in 2000 to apologize to Jews for the crimes committed against them in Croatia.
"He also regularly goes to Jasenovac, the site of Croatia's World War II infamous concentration camp, to commemorate the victims."
The Agence France Presse (AFP) says that at the start of the 1990s Croatian President Mesic reportedly minimised the gravity of crimes committed by the Nazi regime, according to video footage released on the Index.hr website.
The AFP carries an excerpt from a statement the office of President Stjepan Mesic issued in response to the website's video. The Office said that the video footage was a malevolent attempt to draw a few sentences from the context in which they were said.
The AFP quotes the Croatian Human Committee's head, Zarko Puhovski as saying that the current head of state should apologise if the authenticity of the video be proved.
"This is about a man who has been to the largest extent engaged in our society for ten years in promoting anti-Fascist ides," Puhovski said, referring to Mesic.
The Austrian APA news agency said the speech in the questionable video contains "statements that can be interpreted as a positive assessment of the so-called Independent State of Croatia".
APA says it is possible that the speech was given in Austria.
It says that the most prominent Croatian Serb representative, Milorad Pupovac, has stood in Mesic's defence.
Pupovac said that this was a sort of speech typical for early 1990s, but "I must admit that since then Mesic has done a lot to move the country far from that".