A memorial ceremony was held in the central town of Glina on Saturday to commemorate several hundred Serbs killed by the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime 82 years ago in what was then the Orthodox Church of the Birth of Our Lady.

The ceremony, co-organised by the Antifascist League and the Serb National Council (SNV), was held on the site where the church had stood and in front of a building that previously housed the Memorial Centre and is now called the Croatian Hall.

Speaking on behalf of the Antifascist League, Vesna Terselic said that part of the historical material of the Memorial Centre had been relocated and part of it was safeguarded by a local history researcher. She said that a small exhibition of pieces from the Memorial Centre could be organised if the Croatian Hall were renamed and put to its previous use. “That is important,” she said.

“We are here not only to remember the victims of the Holocaust, mass murder and genocide, but also those who did all they could to help the victims. We are also here to prevent the distortion of the facts about the Holocaust and the genocide of Serbs and Roma. There has been some progress, but I would not call it a trend,” Terselic said.

She recalled that they had put in a request for renaming the building ten years ago, but that the local authorities were not showing any political will to grant their request and there was no support from the central government either. She highlighted the need to stop historical revisionism.

The SNV’s Boris Milosevic said that people had been invited to the church to be converted to Roman Catholicism and thus escape death from the Ustasha regime but were instead “shamelessly and brutally” murdered.

He said that remembrance was necessary “for the sake of the victims to whom we owe our respect and for the sake of society as a whole to avoid repetition and prevent a spiral of hatred so that supporters of the ideas of those who committed this crime would not succeed in having this crime forgotten or finding justification for it.”

Milosevic said that the crime committed here in 1941 could not be justified and that it was important that this building should again become the Memorial Centre.

“It is important that Glina finds the strength to restore the name of this building because what happened in Glina through history is a clear warning of the consequences of intolerance, hatred and divisions. It is crucial that we acknowledge our past together, learn from it and dedicate ourselves to building a future in which every person will be appreciated and respected regardless of their ethnic, religious or social background,” Milosevic said, adding that peace-building does not mean forgetting or ignoring the past but accepting it with sincerity and sympathy.

SNV president Milorad Pupovac laid a red rose at the monument to the victims of the Ustasha terror but did not address the ceremony.