The parliamentary committee for war veterans' affairs on Wednesday endorsed by a majority vote the proposed conclusion on arranging a military graveyard within Zagreb's Mirogoj for soldiers of the 1941-1945 Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia (NDH).

The committee said that every human being was entitled to a decent and dignified burial and to a marked grave.

They also concluded that the project for arranging the military graveyard for NDH soldiers had been given the consent of the Ministry of War Veterans’ Affairs and the previous mayor of Zagreb, the deceased Milan Bandic.

The project includes the graves of roughly 550 soldiers who were members of the armed forces of the Ustasha-led regime, and one of the graves is of the NDH-era parliament speaker Marko Dosen.

The committee rejected a proposal by member MP Katarina Peovic for the condemnation of referring to the Ustasha and Home Guard men (Domobrani) as the Croatian Army. She said that it was also contrary to the Constitution.

The committee’s head Josip Djakic said that all the victims of the Second World War should have their graves decently marked, and that it was a civilisational achievement to allot them graves.

Peovic said that this was not about marking the graves of individuals at Mirogoj but about marking graves as those of Croatian army members.

Djakic said that Germany had arranged at Mirogoj a graveyard of its own WWII soldiers, and Croatia allowed the Germans to do so.

The other members of the committee also insisted that the marking of the graves in question was not an ideological issue. This is about victims, regardless of which army they belonged to, Ante Deur said.

The ministry’s state secretary Darko Nekic said that there was no legal obstacle to greenlighting the project. The permission refers only to erecting crosses for Christians with name and date of death, and Islamic formats of graves for Muslims and name and date of death.

There are no other insignia, according to the documentation sent to us, Nekic said.

The Alliance of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists of Croatia (SABA) on Tuesday strongly opposed plans to arrange this memorial graveyard at Zagreb’s central Mirogoj cemetery where members of the WWII Ustasha and Home Guard forces would be described as “the Croatian army”.

“One must not accept under any terms that the Ustasha were ‘a Croatian army’,” SABA president Franjo Habulin said at a news conference.

He noted that SABA did not have anything against putting up memorial plaques with the names of those killed and the dates of their birth and death. However, the plaques must not glorify the Ustasha movement or display the term ‘Croatian soldiers’, he said, adding that it must be visible that the plaques commemorated the Ustasha and the Home Guards.