Former President Stjepan Mesic said on Saturday that messages from today's memorial ceremony at Bleiburg, Austria represented "a direct attack on Croatia's constitutional order" and seriously questioned its place among civilised and democratic countries founded on antifascism.
"The ceremony held in the Bleiburg Field today is a direct attack on the historical truth, an affront to common sense, and an open and gross challenge to the legally elected government of Croatia, which I hope will know how to respond appropriately," Mesic said in a statement, noting that as former President of the Republic and honorary president of the Federation of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists he considered it his duty to draw attention to it.
Mesic said that the ceremony was marked by insults to the Croatian Parliament, the labelling of the Croatian government as a "Communist beast" and calls for ending the secular nature of the state.
"The rally in the Bleiburg Field was actually a tribute to the so-called Independent State of Croatia and its rehabilitation as 'an expression of the centuries-long aspirations of the Croatian people'. Irrefutable facts from our recent past, as well as those from not so distant past, were systematically avoided, while notorious lies were repeated. While the words 'Ustasha', 'Fascism' and 'Nazism' were obviously banned, all speakers, including the representatives of the Catholic Church and the Islamic religious community, had their mouths full of Communism and the Communist threat," he said.
"The victory of 1945 was referred to as 'so-called', while people who were found guilty by courts of law of war crimes committed during the Homeland War were declared innocent and heroes, directly denying the legitimacy and legality of Croatian courts and the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.
"The casual mention of Jasenovac was nothing but a pathetic and hypocritical attempt at showing that those who even today do not have the strength to condemn the crimes of the Ustasha regime and its criminal nature still allow that there were other victims too," Mesic said.
Mesic concluded by saying that the people who gathered in the Bleiburg Field were not "chosen ones", as one of the speakers had put it, but "excommunicated ones", because they "excommunicated themselves from the facts, from the reality in which we live, and from the European future to which there is no alternative for Croatia."
