Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic. File photoBELGRADE, May 1.The West is trying to change the Serbs and Serbia and does not admit its mistakes, is not ready to talk about them and apologize, said Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić at the site of the largest Nazi concentration camp in the former Yugoslavia. The authorities of Serbia and the Republic of Serbian Bosnia and Herzegovina (RS BiH) with the participation of Vučić and a member of the Presidium of BiH Milorad Dodik on Sunday commemorated the victims of the Donja Gradina camp, which is located in RS BiH across the Sava River from the main part of the Jasenovac concentration camp located in Croatia. The camp complex stretched over 210 square kilometers and served as a place for the Croatian Ustaše fascists to exterminate Serbs, Jews and Gypsies held in the camp and brought from the territory of the Independent State of Croatia (NCH, 1941-1945).
Serbia will continue friendly relations with Russia, Vučić said The commemorative event, officially dedicated to hundreds of thousands of victims of the «crime-genocide of the NGH», began with a funeral Orthodox service for the dead, conducted by Bishop Ephraim of Banja Luča. Prayers for the Jews killed in the camp were read by the rabbi, the spiritual leaders of the Roma (Gypsy) community honored the memory of the victims. «After 10 years that I spent in power in our Serbia, I can say this. More Serbs, Jews and Gypsies died in Jasenovac than all of us in the wars since 1941. And who is ready to talk about it? Do they talk about it in the West? Of course they don’t,» the President of Serbia told the audience, the broadcast is conducted by the Tanjug agency. «They do not allow us to make decisions on our own, they try to change us They are trying to make us apologize for things that we are not guilty of, but they don’t want to apologize for anything,» Vucic stressed. The President and members of the Serbian government in the presence of Russian Ambassador Alexander Botan-Kharchenko erected a memorial plaque in memory of the victims of fascism in World War II at the site of the former Staro Saimishte concentration camp in Belgrade on the left bank of the Sava River, which during the Nazi occupation was part of the NGH, where, in addition to the victims of the camp itself, the river carried numerous bodies of those killed in Jasenovac, tens of kilometers upstream. A distinctive feature of the Jasenovac concentration camp complex was the destruction of people in cruel ways — killing with special knives and hammers, drowning, burial and burning alive. There is no exact data on the number of victims of Jasenovac. 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.
