Mesić accused the state leadership of tolerating the relativization of the NDH in Jasenovac

Former Croatian President Stjepan Mesić stated today in Jasenovac that the state leadership tolerates the relativization of the NDH and the crimes from World War II.

"It's enough for you that the prime minister goes to pay homage to an NDH nostalgic. That's shameful, but what can we do," Mesić said after the commemoration marking the 81st anniversary of the breakout of prisoners from the Ustasha concentration camp in Jasenovac, Hina reports.

Last year, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković attended a rehearsal of controversial singer Marko Perković Thompson with his minor son ahead of a concert in Zagreb, but he was not at the concert itself, which attracted around half a million people from Croatia and abroad.

Mesić said today that a big problem in education is where "relativization is happening" and added that young people are not learning about what happened in World War II.

"The Jasenovac concentration camp was an execution site, one of the most famous in Europe, where people came to be killed because they were of a different religion or nationality," Mesić emphasized.

He pointed out that the NDH was a criminal creation that was created to kill.

"If we know what it was, then all these discussions that put a question mark on what the NDH was are superfluous. I am surprised when I see young people, not because of them, but who teaches them, who are the professors who educate them. They now put the NDH symbols on their equipment, 'ready for the homeland', and if they came here and saw what was happening, we would not have a problem with these nostalgic people for the NDH," said Mesić, who served two terms as president of Croatia.

He said that there are those who are uninformed, but also those "bad people who know very well what the NDH was, that it was a crime in idea and execution, and that there is no middle ground."

A commemoration "Memory for the Future" was held in Jasenovac today to mark the 81st anniversary of the breakout of the Jasenovac concentration camp inmates.

The commemoration was attended by Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, the envoy of the President of Croatia Orsat Miljenić, the Speaker of the Parliament Gordan Jandroković, the Mayor of Zagreb Tomislav Tomašević, several ministers, representatives of the peoples of the victims, anti-fascist associations and survivors of concentration camps.

The patron of the commemoration is the Croatian Parliament, and the commemorative program was held in front of the Flower monument.