A commemoration for the thousands of Jews, Roma, Serbs and Croats killed in the Gospic-Jadovno-Pag concentration camps from April to August 1941 by the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) regime was held in Jadovno near Croatia's town of Gospic on Sunday.

Organisers unveiled a new memorial plaque with a chronology of the three camps. The commemoration, attended by about 300 people, was organised by the Serb National Council (SNV), the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Communities in Croatia, and the Alliance of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists (SABH).

As in the past nine years, organisers called for “undivided dedication of state and society to telling the whole truth about the causes, extent and consequences of the crimes which took place from Velebit to Pag.”

Speaking on behalf of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Communities in Croatia, Ognjen Kraus said that only a few days after it was established, NDH formed camps for the persecution, plunder, terrorising, political violence against, deportations and organised killing of children, women and elderly persons on racial, religious, ethnic and political grounds.

The response to the criminal NDH is that the incumbent president, parliament speaker and prime minister commemorate the Bleiburg victims, but not those at Macelj, Tezno and the Battle of Sutjeska, Kraus said.

He asked whether it was necessary to repeat that the Ustasha regime was “legalised genocide, which makes it essentially different to the crimes committed during communism.”

Today’s freedom obliges us to remember all those who were killed, said Veljko Kajtazi, a representative o Roma and MP of 12 ethnic minorities.

Only with full freedom, full peace and full truth can the new generations be freed from the shadows of those killings, and the fight for full freedom and peace entails fighting for a society in which all citizens enjoy equal opportunities as well as equal economic and legal security, said Kajtazi.

SABH president Franjo Habulin recalled that from April to August 1941 tens of thousands of people were deported to camps from Gospic to the island of Pag, where they were executed without a trial, under racial laws modelled on Nazism and fascism, and that the Partisan movement was the response to those NDH crimes.

“Today the revisionists of historical truths call Tito and his Partisans criminals, they say the Yugoslav Federation was a dungeon of peoples, yet it was they who washed off the stain left on the Croatian people by NDH’s Ustasha regime,” Habulin said.

He said a current referendum petition “to reduce ethnic minority rights” might be the first step to new expulsions, persecutions, concentration camps, “perhaps to the formation of a new NDH, which must not happen.”

Habulin urged state leaders to clearly and unambiguously distance themselves from “NDH, to stop the rehabilitation of Ustasha crimes, to remove Ustasha insignia and salutes from the public sphere” and to “unambiguously position Croatia as a modern state founded on the tenets of antifascism – freedom, equality, peace-building, social justice, protection of human rights.”

“As long as we live, we have the obligation to come here,” SNV president Milorad Pupovac said, asking why Ustasha insignia was not condemned and why it was not being said that there was no place for them today.

He asked why “this place isn’t a place of conscience for people in politics and the Church, for society as a whole?”

Citing a school near Sibenik, Pupovac said “children are being taught Ustasha values (because) in the school system there is no clear social awareness that the Ustasha regime was a criminal regime which organised a genocide against Jews, Roma and Serbs.” He said that awareness “doesn’t exist to the necessary extent in the rest of the public sphere either.”

He said tens of thousands of women, children and men were thrown into unmarked pits on Mount Velebit and the Adriatic Sea, and that the total number of those killed would never be known. He said historians’ estimates of the number of Jadovno victims ranged from 10,000 to 42,000.

At the Jadovno monument, wreaths were laid and candles lit by the organisers, a delegation of parliament and the government, and the Serbian Embassy to Croatia.