Zagreb, 19 Feb. (AKI) - The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, an international group famous worldwide for its hunting down and bringing to justice of Nazi criminals after World War II, has protested to Croatian authorities over the serving in some Croatian cafes of sugar packs bearing Hitler’s image and printed with vulgar jokes about Jews. The Wiesenthal Centre has demanded Zagreb stop the distribution and production of the controversial sugar packs by the Croatian company Pink, the national news agency Hina reported on Monday.

In a statement signed by its president Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center said it was "abhorrent and disgusting that such a product could have been produced today in a country in which the Holocaust [the World War II slaughter of some six million Jews by the Nazis] not only took place, but was perpetrated by local Nazi collaborators."

Referring to hundreds of thousands Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, killed by under the Nazi puppet Ustashe state, Zuroff said it was inconceivable that such a product could appear in a nation aspiring to join the European Union. 
 
"In a country in which Ustashe and Nazis killed so many innocent civilians, there should be tolerance for the products which not only insult the memory of fascist victims, but encourage and revive the deadly ideology of the killers," Zuroff said.
 
Pinki owner Anita Ivanecic remained tight-lipped about the row. "You can write whatever you want, but I won’t comment anything," she said. Holocaust denial is not a crime in Croatia, unlike a dozen European countries including Austria. There was no immediate response from the authorities, but Zuroff said that the existing law against ethnic, religious and racial intolerance should be applied.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is an international Jewish human rights organisation named after the famous Nazi hunter and survivor of the Nazi death camps, who died in 2005.

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