Ivan Djakic, the 22-year-old son of MP Josip Djakic from the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), was taken in for questioning on Tuesday afternoon over his hateful Facebook post which quickly made headlines and resulted in a public outcry.

On Monday, which was the Serb Orthodox Christmas, Djakic junior had posted what appeared to be a World War II photo to his Facebook profile showing an member of the Croatian wartime fascists Ustasha posing with a severed head of a member of the Serbian nationalist wartime organisation Chetnik, with a message reading “Merry Christmas to all my Serb ‘friends’.”

The Ustashas and Chetniks were both Croatian and Serbian allies of Nazi Germany in World War II.

The posting, which soon made it to headlines on web portals around the country, immediately prompted widespread condemnations, not least because the offender in question is one of the sons of MP Josip Djakic, a prominent member of the ruling HDZ party, and also the national head of the disabled war veterans’ association Hvidra.

On Tuesday evening, HDZ strongly condemned the post, describing it as “hate speech and incitement to social intolerance,” announcing that they would take disciplinary action against Ivan Djakic, who is also a member of the party.

Djakic junior was contacted by the Index.hr news portal, and reportedly told them that he had erased the post “within a minute,” even though the screenshots shared online showed that the post was online for at least ten minutes.

“I shared the photograph from a friend of mine and erased it within a minute. It doesn’t reflect my opinion. I apologise to anyone I may have offended and wish them a merry Christmas,” Djakic told the Index.

On Tuesday, MP Milorad Pupovac (SDSS) who represents Serb ethnic minority and controls three MPs allied with Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, held a news conference to warn about the rise of hate speech in the country, mentioning and condemning the incident.

He said that the incident amounted to glorifying the World War II Ustasha regime, and that it resulted in insulting the victims of their 1941-45 Nazi-allied regime, which by Croatian law can be punished with a sentence of up to three years in prison.

However, Pupovac said that the inertia in the Croatian judiciary does not instill any optimism about the outcome of the prosecution of that incident.

“There is too much tolerance for such things,” he said, adding that things like these are going on in spite of regular messagess of tolerance sent by the state leadership and the attendance of top government officials at the traditional Orthodox Christmas this week.

Later on Tuesday, Ivan Djakic resigned from party membership, with his father saying that this signalled his realisation that the Facebook post was a “grave mistake”.

“I see his resignation from the party today as an act of confession of this grave mistake, and a realisation of the gravity of this regrettable act,” said his father, Josip Djakic, who also serves as the chairman of the HDZ’s Virovitica-Podravina County committee.

Also on Tuesday, Djakic junior was taken in for questioning by local police in his hometown of Virovitica, some 150 kilometres northeast of Zagreb.

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