Milanović: Croats and Serbs were united by cooperation, not hatred

Croats and Serbs were united by cooperation, not hatred - Croatian President Zoran Milanović said today at the celebration of the Day of Anti-Fascist Struggle in the Brezovica Memorial Park, near Sisak.

"Croats and Serbs were not united by age-old hatred, but by cooperation. We constantly hide behind the thesis that it is age-old hatred that could never be saved and could not have ended differently, and the truth is much different," Milanović said at the ceremony on the occasion of the Anti-Fascist Day fight, which is a non-working day in Croatia.

In Croatia, the Day of Anti-Fascist Struggle is June 22, the day when the first partisan detachment and the first anti-fascist unit in this part of Europe was founded 83 years ago in the forest of Brezovca near Sisak.

Milanović reminded that last year he was not in Brezovica, but went to Sutjeska, and pointed out that Croats and Serbs fought together against fascism.

"This is an opportunity, on the Day of the Anti-Fascist Struggle, to ask ourselves what the partisans mean to us today, what do Sutjeska, Neretva and the thousands of young people who died a terrible death mean to us? What does this mean for the relations between Croats and Serbs in our country, which I can't rearrange the last hundred years?" asked Milanović.

He assessed that for some the story about 1941 and the gathering of brave people in Brezovica boils down to the fact that they were all Croats, saying that it was wrong, because the partisans did not see themselves that way.

"They were freedom fighters and they were communists. And that is their very important characteristic, a strain of people that we cannot understand today. And all these Croatian champions and greats whose names were mentioned here for a reason, including Tuđmanovo, they were first of all communists, internationalists, and then Croats, and that matured in them," the Croatian president said in a speech, his press service reported in a statement.

He also referred to the battles on Sutjeska and Neretva, saying that "the bones were left by thousands of Dalmatians, but also by Dalmatian Serbs".

Milanović said that in 1991, several thousand Serbs from Banja "tried to preserve something that the imperial and conquering logic of the Belgrade clique did not allow with the brotherhood of arms."

"And in the end, in 1991, it was only possible to take up arms and defend Croatia," Milanović said.

The celebration of the Day of Anti-Fascist Struggle was attended by Croatian Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Gordan Grlić Radman, Mayor of Zagreb Tomislav Tomašević, former President of Croatia Stjepan Mesić and President of the Association of Anti-Fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists of the Republic of Croatia Franjo Habulin.

Prime Minister Andrej Plenković congratulated the Day of Anti-Fascist Struggle. He wrote today on the X network that on this day, Croatian anti-fascists are honored who bravely stood up against the Nazi and fascist regimes in Europe, and made Croatia one of the victorious countries in the Second World War.