Jerusalem – The Simon Wiesenthal Center expressed its outrage and disgust at the news published on a Croatian media website that a local NGO, the Croatian Cultural Movement, plans to unveil a monument in Zagreb on December 26, 2009 to honor mass murderer Ante Pavelić, the leader of the Croatian fascist Ustasha and the country’s head of state during World War II. In a statement issued today in Jerusalem by its chief Nazi-hunter, Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center harshly criticized the planned initiative as “historical revisionism of the worst sort imaginable and a whitewash of the horrific crimes committed by the NDH-Independent State of Croatia as state policy.”
According to Zuroff:
“It is simply inconceivable that a country on the verge of entry to the European Union would allow such a monument to be erected in its capital city or anywhere else on its territory. Such a monument constitutes an outrageous falsification of Croatia’s World War II history and is an insult not only to the memory of the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians-Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croatians-murdered by the Ustasha, but to any person with any sense of moral integrity and knowledge of the history of Croatia during the years 1941-1945. I am certain that saner minds in Zagreb will prevail to halt this infuriating initiative.”
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