Locals in Mostar, as well as a number of people from Croatia, participated in a peaceful protest at the Partisan Memorial Cemetery on Thursday where 700 monuments were destroyed by unknown perpetrators two days ago.

“This is our common heritage. The red line has been crossed,” said the head of SABNOR, the umbrella association of anti-fascists and WWII veterans in Bosnia, Sead Djulic, adding that the destruction of the cemetery, officially a National Monument of BIH, represents an attack against the state itself.

He argued that there is a reason why it happened in this particular moment.

“All this should be viewed in the context of changing the law on the Ministry of the Interior in our canton, the results of the Brussels meeting and the continuous policy of Dragan Covic,” he said, accusing the leader of the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ BiH) party of propagating “ideas of neo-fascism and neo-Nazism in BiH.”

Djulic said that the generations that inherited anti-fascist ideas of peace, freedom and equality of all, must continue to promote them.

Among those protesting were 17 Croatian citizens, anti-fascists and veterans of the Homeland War, who said that what happened affects not just one country, but of the entire region, Europe and the world.