The decision of the Croatian government to prevent the President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić from visiting Jasenovac speaks to the fact that the government is fully committed to continuing the policy of Ante Pavelić’s Ustasha regime.

To describe the visit of a Serbian president to the largest killing ground of the Serbian people as a provocation, without an ounce of shame, speaks to the fact that this government in Zagreb does not feel an ounce of remorse for the horrific genocide of our people that they committed.

If today they keep the President of Serbia from paying tribute to the innocent victims of their historical role models from the Second World War, then tomorrow they can keep any Serb whose loved ones had been killed from visiting Jasenovac and paying tribute to them.

We have never harbored any illusion about what the authorities in Croatia thought of Serbia and Serbs, given that their greatest holiday is Storm and the exodus of 200,000 innocent Serbs from Krajina, but such a reprehensible act has fully laid bare the nature of their anti-Serbian hysteria.

The most important thing now is for Serbia to firmly and strongly react to this shameful act of the Croatian authorities, and show that it will never accept that Serbs be kept from visiting the greatest killing ground of our people.

We must persist in claiming our right to never forget the genocide of our people and to use any opportunity to tell the world that we are a suffering nation and a victim in the fight for freedom.

And certainly, we ought to notify their bosses in Brussels, with the question — do they consider it acceptable that through the hatred towards Serbs and the banks on visits to the most depraved concentration camps in Europe, a member of theirs is promoting the most horrific ideology, that they believed had been finally defeated in 1954.

(Statement of Dr. Nenad Popović, Minister in the Government of the Republic of Serbia and head of the Serbian People’s Party.)