Serb National Council (SNV) president Milorad Pupovac said on Saturday, in a comment on the commemoration of the Bleiburg tragedy, that every victim deserved to be commemorated and remembered but that criminal ideologies and their executors deserved condemnation and social and moral contempt.

“Each victim deserves their suffering to be commemorated and remembered. Ideologies that are criminal deserve condemnation and contempt. Perpetrators of crimes deserve social and moral contempt. Those who do not want to make this kind of distinction are not guided by the highest of moral principles,” Pupovac said at Petrova Gora, where the SNV, the Association of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists (SABA) and local officials marked the 80th anniversary of a Partisan attack launched to break from enemy encirclement on that mountain in Karlovac County.

The operation helped establish a free territory and save 10,000 refugees and is considered the first organised case of resistance to fascism in Europe.

Reporters asked Pupovac how he interpreted today’s commemorative events for the Bleiburg victims, to which he said that the preamble to the Croatian Constitution spoke of the Partisan movement and decisions by the State Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Croatia (ZAVNOH), of which the Partisan field hospital at Petrova Gora was part.

“The preamble to the Croatian Constitution and the part of the Mirogoj cemetery dedicated to the Ustasha and Home Guards do not communicate what our policies today communicate,” he said.

The SNV said that at Petrova Gora today it remembered May 1942, when 730 Partisan fighters launched an attack on Ustasha and Italian fascists whose forces were ten times bigger, broke out of the encirclement and established a free territory, saving 10,000 people who had fled their villages.

“This is a very important place in the modern history of Croatia and in the struggle of the peoples of Croatia and Yugoslavia for freedom, against Nazi, fascist and local (collaborationist) forces,” the SNV president said.

He called for restoring the Partisan hospital complex at Petrova Gora so that the place is given the treatment it deserves “in line with the freedom-loving traditions of Croatia and Europe.”