War Veterans' Affairs Minister, Tomo Medved, laid wreaths and lit candles at Zagreb's central Mirogoj cemetary on Monday, marking Black Ribbon Day, Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

On Black Ribbon Day, Europe remembers victims of specifically Stalinist, communist, Nazi, and fascist regime.

“After this, I am travelling to Gospic where we are burying the remains of 102 WWII and post WWII victims, exhumed in the wider Lika area,” Medved said at Mirogoj.

Asked why nobody from the government will go to Jasenovac this year, Medved said government members were visiting Mirogoj, Macelj, and Goli Otok today, and that visiting Jasenovac would be left for some other occasion.

On this year’s Black Ribbon Day, Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic will attend commemorations in Macelj and Transport Minister Oleg Butkovic on the island of Goli Otok.

Macelj was a site for mass executions committed by the Tito-led Partizans in the wake of the Second World War.

The Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur prison camps operated first as hard-labour detention camps for people accused by the Communist authorities of supporting Soviet leader Joseph Stalin after Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Broz Tito severed ties with the Soviet Union in 1948 or who for whatever reason were declared enemies of the state.

They were later transformed into regular prisons and closed down in 1988. According to historian Martin Previsic, 13,000 prisoners were held in Goli Otok between 1949 and 1956, when it was transformed into an ordinary prison, and over 400 of them died there.