The Bosnian Cardinal would have been better off visiting the World War II concentration camp of Jasenovac, instead of comparing Bosnia’s general election result to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the newly elected Croat member of Bosnia’s Presidency said, responding to Cardinal Vinko Puljic’s earlier remarks.
“Since he’s showing all this interest in criminals like Hitler, I’d suggest he visits Jasenovac concentration camp and pray for to all the innocent camp victims who were slaughtered and killed with sledge hammers by Hitler’s war comrad Ante Pavelic,” Komsic said. “In this way he would make a historic step forward and denounce the Ustasha crimes, as is expected of him as Cardinal.”
The Ustasha Movement was a Croatian fascist, racist, ultranationalist and terrorist organization, active, in its original form, between 1929 and 1945. Its members murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma as well as political dissidents in Yugoslavia during World War II. The Movement was founded by general Ante Pavelic
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“In 1945, the law took away our property and destroyed everything that was Croat. We were persecuted in line with the law, just like Hitler came to power in line with the law,” the Cardinal said at a mass in Zepce, central Bosnia, marking the 560th anniversary of the first mention of the municipality. “The question is, what is this law that takes away a people’s rights and wants to erase any trace of its existence, as it is done to Bosnian Croats.”
The Cardinal’s statements came after the recent general election in the country when the centre-left candidate Zeljko Komsic defeated his opponent from the Croat nationalist party the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ BiH), Dragan Covic, for the position of the new Croat member of Bosnia’s tripartite Presidency.
Namely, all the Croat nationalist parties in the country contest Zeljko Komsic’s election, saying he was not elected by the Croat people, therefore his election is illegitimate. However, according to the state Election Law and the Constitution, Zeljko Komsic’s election was legal and constitutional.
