Croatian President Zoran Milanovic on Monday dismissed the claims made by Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik as untrue and unacceptable, regarding the assertion that only a small number of Croats did not sympathise with the crimes of the Ustasha regime.

“In addition to the repeated falsehood about the number of victims in Jasenovac, Milorad Dodik stated that ‘very few members of the Croatian people did not sympathise with the crimes of the Ustasha regime,’ which absolutely does not correspond to the truth and constitutes an insult to all Croatian anti-fascists and the Croatian people,” the Office of the President said in a statement.

Serbian politicians from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro commemorated the victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Donja Gradina on Sunday, greatly exaggerating the number of those killed there and claiming that there were 700,000 victims, despite documented data indicating slightly more than 83,000 victims.

Dodik additionally said that in Croatia, “hatchets had been sharpened for a hundred years” to begin killing Serbs since 1941, suggesting that the Croatian people are collectively guilty of the crimes of the Ustasha.

“The Croatian people emerged from World War II on the right side of history, on the winning side. Any other interpretation of history, including Dodik's mentioned above, constitutes a gross distortion of the truth … Such claims, besides being completely untrue, also represent an unacceptable attempt to impose collective guilt on the Croatian people,” the statement said.

President Milanovic's statement adds that Croats were among the first in Europe to establish an anti-fascist partisan unit and fought “not only for liberation from German and Italian occupation but also against the terror perpetrated by the Ustasha regime.”

“The fact that the first partisan anti-fascist unit was established so soon after the establishment of the so-called Independent State of Croatia and that it was mostly composed of Croats clearly indicates that Croats did not accept the Ustasha regime,” Milanovic said, adding that “Croatia has nothing to be ashamed of because by participating in the anti-fascist struggle, the majority of the people chose a just and victorious path.”