Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic reacted to the decision of the Croatian authorities to deny him a visit to the former Jasenovac concentration camp.
⠀
On his Twitter page, he published a post to which he attached a photo with the caption: “Only you do your job! The Serbian people will live and never forget.”
⠀
The Serbian leader planned to visit the Jasenovac memorial center as a private person, but Zagreb did not coordinate the trip.
⠀
The Serbian Foreign Ministry has already sent a note of protest to the Croatian authorities. Belgrade views Zagreb’s decision as scandalous, frightening and unbelievable after World War II. The Serbian Foreign Minister warned that retaliatory measures would be taken against Croatia.
⠀
In turn, Croatian Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Gordan Grlich-Radman said that the country’s authorities perceived Vucic’s possible visit to Jasenovac as a political provocation, and therefore did not agree on it.
⠀
The minister stressed that the visits of heads of state are not “a trip to the sea”, because the president is a protected person.
⠀
A network of Jasenovac concentration camps existed on the territory of the so-called Independent State of Croatia during World War II. This territorial entity, under the leadership of the leader of the Croatian Nazi Ustashe Ante Pavelić, occupied the territory of present-day Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Serbia.
⠀
In Jasenovac, the Ustaše massacred more than a hundred thousand Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and dissidents, but there is no exact data on the number of victims. In various sources, the numbers range from hundreds of thousands to a million. The Jasenovac memorial complex contains information about 83,000 victims, half of whom are women and children.
