Milorad Pupovac, president of the Serb National Council. Photo: Sandro LENDLER/SNV
The Serbian National Council, which represents ethnic Serbs in Croatia, on Thursday said it would file a criminal complaint against Igor Vukic and other participants in a debate staged by far-right parties in the Croatian parliament, accusing them of downplaying the crimes committed in the World War II Jasenovac concentration camp.
The event at the legislature was organised by two small far-right parties, the Domino and Croatian Sovereignist parties. Serbian National Council president Milorad Pupovac said the complaint would be filed under Article 325 of the Criminal Code, which penalises the public approval, denial or significant minimization of genocide and crimes against humanity.
The camp was set up by the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia, NDH, which under its Ustasha rulers enforced harsh racial laws against Jews, Serbs and Roma. It also established death camps, including Jasenovac.
According to the Jasenovac Memorial Area Public Institution, 83,145 people were killed at Jasenovac, of whom 39,570 were men, 23,474 were women and 20,101 were children under 14.
However, at a roundtable discussion in the Croatian parliament on Tuesday, political scientist Igor Vukic, researcher Nikola Banic and publicist Pero Sola denied this.
“There is little point in engaging in debate with people who have only one goal – to persist in their campaign of diminishing the victims of the quisling and criminal Ustasa regime of the Independent State of Croatia, or to completely deny them,” Pupovac said.
“From today, we will begin preparing a lawsuit against Igor Vukic and others,” Pupovac said, adding that, “by rehabilitating the NDH, an attempt is being made to alter the constitutional foundations of the Republic of Croatia.”
The Serbian National Council called on the Croatian Constitutional Court to protect the values upon which the Croatian state is founded, adding that, “denying the Jasenovac victims and the nature of the NDH opens the door to the most dangerous forms of historical revisionism”.
“If this continues and is accepted as such – despite some people thinking otherwise – Croatia, not only the Serbs in Croatia, the few that remain, but also the Jews who remain, will have no future. And ultimately, neither will Croatia itself. Just as the NDH had none,” said Pupovac.
He also recalled that under the NDH, more than 77 per cent of the Croatian Jewish population was killed, or deported to German camps where they perished, as was over 30 per cent of the Roma population and a huge number of Serbs who were the most numerous victims of the NDH regime.
Dragana Jeckov, an MP for the Independent Democratic Serbian Party, SDSS, described the event in parliament as “a disgrace and a slap in the face to every citizen of Croatia”, saying that the parliament had become a place “for promoting and advocating denial of Ustasa crimes”.
The event was also criticised by the centre-right Prime Minister, Andrej Plenkovic, who called the discussion “a political provocation by two political parties who consciously and deliberately organised it in the Croatian parliament”.
