Speaking in parliament on Wednesday, MP Milorad Pupovac of the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS) hailed the recent proposal by the Education Minister Blazenka Divjak who said that elementary schools should introduce mandatory group visits to the Jasenovac concentration camp memorial site.
“In 2017, only nine schools had visited that awful World War II execution site, and last year there were more visitors there from Italy than from other parts of Croatia,” Pupovac said. He is one of three MPs elected to represent ethnic minority Serbs in Croatia’s 151-seat parliament.
Around 80,000 ethnic Serbs, Jews, Roma, and anti-fascist Croats had been killed in the Jasenovac camp set up by the Croatian fascist Ustasha regime some 90 kilometres south-east of Zagreb during World War II.
“Today, children don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore, or whether the Ustasha salute and the glorification of that regime are allowed or not,” Pupovac added.
A number of institutions slammed the recent rise of right-wing historical revisionism in Croatia, whose proponents try to downplay the crimes committed at Jasenovac or the nature of the wartime camp.
In January, the Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre called for the government to ban publication of revisionist books about Jasenovac equating their ideas to Holocaust denial, and in November Ombudswoman Lora Vidovic issued a report warning of dangers of downplaying Ustasha crimes in public discourse and said that such attempt are in violation of the country’s Constitution.
After the war, the Jasenovac memorial centre was built by communist authorities on the site of the camp, and opened for visitors in 1968. It’s permanent exhibition area was updated twice, in 1988, and again in 2006.
Last year the centre recorded only 16,000 visitors, with merely 40 percent of them Croatians and the remaining 60 percent mostly arriving as part of group tours from Slovenia, Italy, United States, and Serbia.
Meanwhile, around 40,000 elementary school pupils in Croatia go every year on two-day trips to Vukovar as part of their curriculum to learn about the 1991-95 war, the siege of that eastern Croatian town, and the Ovcara massacre that happened right after it fell to Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitary forces in November 1991.
The trips are funded by the War Veterans Ministry, which last year announced plans to introduce similar school trips to the town of Knin, formerly a stronghold of rebel Serbs and their self-proclaimed territory, which was overran in the Croatian army’s 1995 Operation Storm.
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