Ustashe

OPLENAC - The terrorist assassination of King Alexander I Karadjordjevic of Yugoslavia (1888-1934) was an event that made history as his death was essentially the first shot of WWII, Serbian PM Milos Vucevic said at the main state ceremony at Oplenac, central Serbia, that commemorated the 90th anniversary of the assassination.

BELGRADE - In occupied Europe during WWII, only the Ustasha Independent State of Croatia had specialised death camps for Serb, Jewish and Romani children, notes a resolution on Ustasha killings of Serb, Jewish and Romani children in death camps for children in the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945.

The Serbian Museum of Genocide Victims said on Friday that it has obtained a list with the names and details of 5,800 Serbian children rescued from Ustasa death camps in the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia, which was thought to have been lost or destroyed.

Tens of thousands of names are written on the walls of the former Jasenovac camp complex. They are the names of the victims, whose old clothes are on display what is now a memorial site, reinforcing a sense of horror at the conditions in which they were forced to live and die.

Seventy-eight years ago, on April 22, 1945, brothers Mate and Stjepan Zukolo were among around 600 prisoners who took part in a major breakout from the main part of the Jasenovac concentration camp and death camp complex.

As the prisoners stormed the gate, attacking the guards with bricks and planks, the Zukolo brothers were immediately separated in the commotion.

A woman holds a picture of Alozije Stepinac at an open-air mass in Zagreb in June 2011. Photo:EPA/ANTONIO BAT.

BELGRADE - Serbian FM Ivica Dacic said on Wednesday it was inconceivable the European Parliament was to host a conference aimed at revisionism and another attempt of historical rehabilitation of Croatia's Roman Catholic Archbishop Alojzij Stepinac.

In a written statement to Tanjug, Dacic noted that Stepinac had played a significant role in the WWII-era Independent State of Croatia.

Predrag 'Gaga' Antonijevic, director and producer of 'Dara of Jasenovac', Serbia's entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 2021 Oscars, which deals with crimes committed at the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, said on Sunday that he intends to sue the Los Angeles Times for denying war crimes committed against Serbs at the WWII camp.

A photograph that was circulated on social media of a group of Dinamo Zagreb fans holding lighted flares and a banner with an obscene anti-Serb slogan has provoked outrage.

"There does not seem to be a rock bottom," Dario Brentin, associated researcher from the University of Graz in Austria, an expert on sport and nationalism in Croatia, wrote on Twitter on Friday.

The Court of High Misdemeanours in Zagreb on Wednesday ruled that the controversial nationalist singer Marko Perkovic, widely known as Thompson, did not violate public order and breach then peace with his use of the chant "Za dom spremni" ("Ready for the homeland") in his song Bojna Cavoglave.