Croatia Remembers Victims of WWII Jasenovac Camp

Croatian officials and representatives of anti-fascist groups and Croatia's Serb, Roma and Jewish communities gathered on Wednesday for the annual commemoration of the victims of Jasenovac, a World War II concentration camp run by the Croatian fascist Ustasa regime.

President Zoran Milanovic, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and parliamentary speaker Gordan Jandrokovic laid a wreath in front of the huge monument to the victims of the camp, named the 'Stone Flower' because of its shape.

Franjo Habulin, Milorad Pupovac, Veljko Kajtazi and Ognjen Kraus, representatives of anti-fascist, Serb, Roma and Jewish groups, also laid flowers.

Due to the coronavirus epidemic, this year's memorial event was modest and without the usual commemorative programme.

Milanovic also laid a wreath and lit a candle in the nearby village of Ustica, where the so-called 'Gypsy Camp' - part of the Jasenovac camp system - was located during WWII.

The annual commemorations are organised at the former camp to mark the last attempted break-out by inmates on April 22, 1945, before the Ustasa liquidated the camp and the regime fell.

Since 2016, representatives of Croatia's Jewish and Serbian communities, as well as anti-fascists, have boycotted the official state commemoration, insisting that the state has not taken real measures to stop or even limit revisionist denials of the Holocaust and genocide in World War II.

Croatian Jewish community leader Ognjen Kraus told media on Wednesday in Jasenovac that he was "reaching out a hand, to show that I am ready for serious discussions about the attitude of the government and the authorities towards history".

Kraus said that "some progress has been made" but warned: "If nothing [more] happens, we will...