Brussels Event Honouring WWII Croatian Cleric Angers Serbia
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Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said that a conference being held at the European Parliament in Brussels on Tuesday about controversial World War II-era Croatian archbishop Alojzije Stepinac was unacceptable.
“We think that it is an attempt to historically relativise and rehabilitate a movement that was on the side of fascism, a movement that symbolised the genocide of Serbs, Jews, and Roma. A movement that meant the conversion of Serbs to the Catholic faith,” Dacic said in a statement.
Stepinac was head of the Catholic Church in Zagreb from 1941 to 1945 during the rule of the Independent State of Croatia, NDH, which was a puppet regime of Nazi Germany.
He later distanced himself from the NDH but has been accused of not publicly denouncing its policy of killing Jews, Serbs and Roma and of forcibly baptising Orthodox Serbs as Catholics.
“EU institutions were founded on the victory over fascism,” said Dacic. “Those who gave their lives in the fight against fascism, I don’t know how they would look if they were now watching the rehabilitation of Stepinac.”
The conference at the European Parliament on Tuesday, entitled ‘Blessed Alojzije Stepinac – Testimony of Faith, Perseverance and Hope’, was organised by Zeljana Zovko, a Croatian MEP and vice-president of the centre-right European People’s Party club of deputies.
Fred Matic, a Croatian MEP and a member of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats group in the European Parliament, claimed that organising the event was just an attempt by Zovko to raise her public profile.
“Elections are coming up, and the church is very influential in Croatia,” Matic told BIRN.
He argued that the conference will be attended by members of the centre-right Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ party and a few friends of Zovko but that it has no political “weight” in Brussels.
“I don’t think that Dacic needs to worry because no one in the European Parliament has heard of that gentleman [Stepinac],” Matic said.
“It is an event that is on the margins, in the basement, literally no one is interested in it. It is for internal use [in Croatia],” he added.
Stepinac has long been a figure whose legacy has caused friction between Croatia and Serbia.
The Yugoslav Supreme Court sentenced him to 16 years in prison in 1946 for collaborating with Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the NDH.
Zagreb County Court annulled the verdict in 2016, arguing that he did not get a fair trial under the Yugoslav Communist regime.
