ZAGREB, Jan 17 (Hina) - The 10th Zagreb Corps of the National Liberation Army of Croatia, which played an important role in the liberation of northwestern Croatia in the Second World War, celebrated its 60th anniversary in Zagreb on
Saturday under the auspices of President Stjepan Mesic.
ZAGREB, Jan 17 (Hina) - The 10th Zagreb Corps of the National
Liberation Army of Croatia, which played an important role in the
liberation of northwestern Croatia in the Second World War, celebrated
its 60th anniversary in Zagreb on Saturday under the auspices of
President Stjepan Mesic.#L#
On the day of its foundation, 19 January 1941, the 10th Corps had
7,500 soldiers and by the end of the war their number grew to 17,000
members, mainly from Zagreb and its surroundings. About 7,000 members
of the Corps were killed in operations to liberate areas between the
Sava and Drava rivers as far as the border with Slovenia.
Mesic said that at the time of its foundation the Corps had more
soldiers than the entire occupied Europe, adding that the Croatian
state lay on the foundations of the anti-fascist struggle for national
freedom and equality.
"Pursuing the policy of anti-fascism, Croatian Partisans helped
Croatia join the anti-fascist coalition and enabled the survival of
Croats as a nation and Croatia's statehood within Yugoslavia, while
your sons created and defended the independence of present-day Croatia
in the Homeland War," Mesic said.
Speaking on behalf of Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, the Minister of
Environmental Protection, Zoning and Construction, Marina Matulovic
Dropulic, said that today's anniversary was celebrated in free and
democratic Croatia founded on the achievements of the anti-fascist
struggle.
The chairman of the 10th Corps Committee, General Josip Skupnjak, said
that the Corps had been the largest combat unit in Croatia at the time
and that it had been joined by some 20,000 soldiers in all, including
1,000 women.
Speaking of the history of the unit, Ivo Padovan, a member of the
Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences, said the Corps was the only
military unit to be named after a city, Zagreb, in which every fifth
citizen took an active part in the anti-fascist struggle.
Ivan Fumic, the head of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist War Veterans,
said that the anti-fascist struggle was now being belittled in
Croatia, particularly in "school textbooks, television programmes
about the Home Guard and songs about Jasenovac and Gradiska Stara
(concentration camps)," adding that those were "the last spasms of
clerical fascism and Nazism" because Croatia pursued the path of
democracy.
(Hina) vm