Commemorating the 76th anniversary of the breakout of inmates of the WWII Jasenovac concentration camp, President Zoran Milanovic said on Thursday that Jasenovac was a death camp for people who could not protect themselves, describing separate commemorations as a lame excuse.

The delegation, headed by Milanovic, included former presidents Stjepan Mesic and Ivo Josipovic, former prime minister Jadranka Kosor, and representatives of the VEDRA association of Homeland War veterans, and they paid tribute to the victims at the Stone Flower monument.

“This was an Ustasha-run camp, and the Ustasha were Croats, and since I am a Croat and president of Croatia, I cannot say that it does not concern me and that we have nothing to do with it. We have everything to do with everything that happened between us, both good and noble things and bad and base things, regardless of what any of us may think about it,” Milanović said after laying a flower and a pebble at the monument.

He recalled that the escape of the Jasenovac inmates was led by Ante Bakotić, a Communist and Partisan from Sinj, who was the first to get killed, noting that the breakout happened three months after Auschwitz was liberated and that around one hundred inmates survived it.

President Milanovic expressed regret that there was not one, joint commemoration today, stressing that the reasons cited for separate commemorations were “flimsy, fake excuses.”

“A year after a joint commemoration here, we are now commemorating the victims separately. I didn’t bring a wreath, I brought a rose and a pebble. To bring a pebble is a Jewish custom, and my bringing the rose is an act of humanity because at events like this one, where there is no protocol, there is no restriction as to the amount of wreaths so very soon they become a local sanitation problem rather than a symbol of respect for the victims who were real and whom we must recognise,” said Milanovic.

Speaking of the camp, he said that it had always been controversial because of manipulation concerning the number of victims, which was why Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito had never visited it.

Milanovic said that the figure of 80,000 people killed in Jasenovac was equally horrible as the previous exaggerations and claims that 700,000 people had been killed there. In that context, he mentioned the Serbian film “Dara of Jasenovac”, describing it as “unconvincing and bad.”

“The authors depicted the functioning of the camp as if a few thousand people had been killed there while actually wishing to show that 700,000 had been killed. You just can’t win with this place,” he said.