Croatia Protests Montenegrin Push for Jasenovac Resolution

Protest note to Montenegro condemns 'manipulation of the Jasenovac victims for political purposes' in the context of the postponed UN resolution marking the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica.

Montenegrin and Creation foreign ministers Filip Ivanovic and Gordan Grlic Radman at a press conference. Photo: Montenegrin Government

Croatia on Wednesday delivered a note of protest to Montenegro after the president of its parliament and leader of a pro-Serbian party, Andrija Mandic, urged it to adopt a resolution on the victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia from World War II.

Mandic previously announced that representatives of the Serbian people in Montenegro would propose a resolution on Jasenovac after the government of Montenegro said it will most likely support the United Nations Resolution on the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia, attributed to Bosnian Serb forces.

The Prime Minister of Montenegro, Milojko Spajic, said earlier that his government will support all resolutions condemning genocides and crimes on the territory of the former Yugoslavia.

“This resolution that we have in front of us – Srebrenica. It’s not a problem at all. We will vote for it, we have said many times. I spoke publicly about it, we condemned the genocide. We are one 100 per cent aligned with European foreign and security policy,” Spajić said recently in the Montenegrin parliament.

The UN vote has since been set for May 23.

The note delivered to the Embassy of Montenegro in Zagreb condemns the inappropriate manipulation of the Jasenovac victims for political purposes, and the instrumentalization of Croatia for internal politics and putting it in the context of the discussions on the UN General Assembly Resolution on the genocide in Srebrenica.

Croatia also called on Montenegro to refrain from doing anything that could jeopardize its path to the EU, Vecernji list newspaper reported.

The fascist Ustasa movement which governed in Croatia in World War II created and ran theJasenovac camp from August 1941 to April 22, 1945. So far 83,145 names of victims have been collected.

At least 39,570 men, 23,474 women and 20,101 children under the age of 14 died at the camp. However, the final number is estimated to be much higher, and it is likely that some victims’ names will never be known.

Most of the victims were Serbs, Jews and Roma, who were persecuted for their ethnicity and religion, as well as some anti-fascists.

At the end of World War II, when the defeat of the Nazi forces was imminent, the Ustasa began to destroy the all the camp’s documentation and kill the remaining inmates. When they realised that the end was coming, about 600 inmates organised themselves and broke out of the camp. Only 103 of them survived.

The UN vote on marking July 11 as the day of the Srebrenica genocide has meanwhile been postponed owing to opposition from Serbia and its ally Russia among others.