The crimes in Jadovno were the start "of all later crimes in the second half of the 20th century in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina," said Milorad Pupovac, a Croatian Serb MP and president of the Serb People's Council.
He said such places showed that the only function of the 1941-45 Independent State of Croatia (NDH) had been the extermination of Jews and Serbs, voicing confidence that those singing Ustasha songs today did not know what a criminal regime that had been.
"They should know it already, the authorities should enable them to, write textbooks on that, and it's on us to continue to insist on the truth. It's the only way for those who glorified the Ustasha regime to finally be ashamed as well as those who demolish monuments to those horrible crimes," said Pupovac.
The coordinator of Jewish communities in Croatia, Ognjen Kraus, requested that a memorial plaque that was put up in Slano Bay on the island of Pag in 2010 and taken down the next day be put up again.
"The truth about the horrible camps on Mount Velebit and on Pag must reach the Croatian public, because it's the only way for young people to know what the (NDH) was and what it had been founded on," he said.
Speaking on behalf of the Alliance of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists of Croatia, Juraj Hrzenjak said Jadovno had been a killing factory regardless of the number of the victims one took as reliable.
Hrzenjak said those people were neither prisoners of war nor guerillas nor citizens who openly expressed an ideology opposite to the Ustasha regime, "only Serbs and Jews who did not resist arrest, sure of their innocence."
Historian Slavko Goldstein said there were to many mass graves in Croatia to commemorate, but that Jadovno was one that should be, because it had been the first concentration camp set up by the NDH for the purpose of genocide.
Proof that this camp was not a response to Partisan operations or crimes but that it was intended for extermination lays in the fact that Jadovno was set up two months before the Partisan movement was formed, said Goldstein.
Also in attendance were many descendants of the victims. Serbian Ambassador Stanimir Vukicevic and Bosnian Serb entity official Stanislav Cado laid a wreath at the monument.
At Saranova Jama pit, Serb Orthodox Bishop Gerasim held a service, while the head rabbi in Croatia, Luciano Mose Prelevic, said the Kaddish prayer.