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Austrian MEPs Call Croatian Memorial ‘Platform for Extremists’

April 24, 201813:00
Three MEPs criticised an upcoming ceremony at Bleiburg in Austria commemorating the deaths of Nazi-allied Croatian troops and civilians, arguing that the event is being misused to display fascist symbols.

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Commemoration at Bleiburg field in 2015. Photo: EPA/OSKAR HOEHER/EXPA.

Three Austrian MEPs on Monday criticised an upcoming commemoration in the Austrian border town of Bleiburg, where Croats and Bosniaks from across Europe will pay tribute next month to tens of thousands of Nazi-allied Croatian troops and civilians killed by Yugoslav Partisans in 1945.

MEPs Othmar Karas from the governing Austrian People’s Party, Josef Weidenholzer from the opposition Social Democratic Party of Austria, and Angelika Mlinar from the opposition New Austria and Liberal Forum told a press conference in Vienna that the annual Bleiburg commemoration should not be held in its current format.

The MEPs said they do not oppose the event itself, but are against it being used as a platform for extremists, at which Croatia’s WWII fascist Ustasa movement is praised and its symbols displayed.

“The problem is not the commemoration itself, but the misuse of the remembrance,” Karas said.

He pointed out that Ustasa symbols are banned in Croatia but not in Austria, and called for a law on the EU level that would ban all Nazi and fascist symbols.

Weidenholzer wrote on Twitter on Monday that the Ustasa should not be commemorated in Austria.

“No to the celebration of Croatian fascist Ustasa on Austrian soil. It harms the reputation of Austria and Europe,” he wrote on Twitter.

The MEPs held the press conference along with Rudolf Edlinger from the Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance, Helmut Edelmayr from the Austrian Mauthausen Committee, an association that does scientific and educational work on the Nazis’ Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, and Raimund Fastenbauer from Austria’s Jewish community.

Edlinger called the Bleiburg commemoration “Europe’s largest fascist meeting”, while Fastenbauer called it “an outrageous provocation” for the Jewish community.

Fastenbauer called on the Austrian Catholic Church to exert pressure on its Croatian counterpart, whose bishops hold a mass for the victims at Bleiburg each year.

The Austrian ambassador to Zagreb, Andreas Wiedenhoff, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that the Austrian Catholic Church has distanced itself from the event.

Meanwhile Peter Kaiser, the governor of the Austrian region of Carinthia, where Bleiburg is located, described the commemoration as an “an extremist event”.

But according to the organisers, the Bleiburg Honorary Platoon, flags with the Ustasa slogan “Za dom spremni” (“Ready for the Home(land)”) will be banned from the event, even if incorporated into the flag of the Croatian 1990s paramilitary Croatian Defence Forces, on which use of the slogan is legal in Croatia.

Thomas Baumgartner from the Bleiburg Honorary Platoon told N1 TV on Monday that only official Croatian national flags and the flag of the Catholic Church will be allowed at the event, which is scheduled for May 12.

In May 2016, the Croatian parliament decided to reintroduce the sponsorship of the event, after it was withdrawn back in 2012, due to concerns that it serves to rehabilitate the Ustasa ideology.

Read more:

20,000 Mourn Croatia’s Dead at Controversial WWII Site

Croatian President Mourns at Controversial WWII Memorial

Croatia Fascist Slogan Threatens to Topple Govt

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