The statement was prompted by the release of a video recording on the Croatian Internet portal Index.hr on Saturday, in which Mesic apparently spoke favourably of the Nazi-style Ustasha regime that ruled Croatia during the Second World War. The speech was reportedly made in the early 1990s in Austria or Australia.
The SAB said that Mesic had been connected with the Antifascist National Liberation Movement since his youth and that members of his family had also been involved in the movement. "All those are reasons why we are not demanding a public apology from him, believing that his political work is contrary to the views imputed to him, the views untypical of him."
"In the time we live in, no one in Croatia has done so much in debunking the myth of the so-called NDH (the Ustasha-ruled Independent State of Croatia) and in denouncing the Ustasha movement and its criminal nature as President Stjepan Mesic has," the statement said.
Speaking in a televised address on Sunday evening, Mesic said he could not remember making that speech, but did not rule out the possibility that he had made it. He, however, stressed that what he had allegedly said then was a wrong and failed concession in flirting with Ustasha ideology.
Mesic repeated his antifascist views and once again denounced Ustasha ideology, describing the publication of the 30-second video footage as a perfidious attack on him as an architect and protagonist of key elements of Croatian politics.