Historian Predrag Lozo told SRNA that denying and negating the crime is an integral – final part of the execution of the crime of genocide, such as the one against the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in which the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church undoubtedly participated.

Lozo said that criminal behavior was always defined by the perpetrator’s need to promote oblivion, often attacking the victim’s credibility, and if he could not silence the victim, he tried to ensure that no one listened to them or simply declared them as criminals.

“The thesis that Jastrebarsko was not a camp has been represented before in Croatian historiography, as well as, for example, in the recent book about Diana Budisavljević by the author Nataša Mataušić. The book, unfortunately, was also published in Serbia by a Serbian publisher, although it abounds in justifying the role of the Roman Catholic Church and Alojzije Stepinac in the genocide of Serbs in the NDH,” said Lozo.

Although, he says, it is inadmissible to discuss such matters, and if the harsh statistics on the death and burial of children from the camp were to be ignored, the question arises – if Jastrebarsko was not a camp, why are Serbian children from Kozara and Potkozarje, but also from other areas, in these camps dressed in Ustasha uniforms and subjected to religious conversion and violent identity change.

“It is generally recognized that this is part of a wider process of crime in which the Roman Catholic Church undoubtedly participated, no matter how hard they tried to justify it,” Lozo pointed out.

He pointed to the predictable dispute of widespread systemic crime – it never happened or the most prevalent, that it is time to forget the past and move on.

In other words, he added, it is about processes that name and create a new artificial image of the present in accordance with contemporary geopolitical trends, but also a new-old ideological narrative about events in the past, which ends in the glorification of a crime and the criminal.

According to Lozo, current events in Croatia should be observed, first of all, the recent letter of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia to His Holiness the Serbian Patriarch Porfirije, in which, among other things, the character of the NDH children’s camps is denied.

The website of the Zagreb Archdiocese recently published an open letter sent by the Croatian bishops, led by Josip Bozanić, to Patriarch Porfirije, in which they claim that the SPC is spreading falsehoods related to the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia and Archbishop Stepinac in the Second World War and that they are defaming him.

They especially underlined that what the Serbian Orthodox Church said about children in “war shelters in Jastrebarsko and Sisak” was untrue.