Bosnian Serb President Dragan Cavic and about 3,000 people, mostly Serbs, gathered in Bosnia's northern village of Donja Gradina on Sunday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the dismantlement of the Jasenovac camp, Croatia's most notorious death camp in World War II.
The Jasenovac camp, known as Croatia's Auschwitz and located about 100 km southeast of Croatia's capital Zagreb, was set up in 1941 by Croatia's pro-Nazi Ustasha regime. Donja Gradina used to be part of the Jasenovac camp complex.
"In this place genocide was committed, the most serious crime against humanity, by killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, children and elderly only for being of another religion, nation or ideology," Cavic said at the ceremony which marked an attempted escape in 1945 by about 600 inmates, of whom only 90 survived, several days before the camp was dismantled.
"Blood cannot be removed by (another) blood," Cavic said, reminding people of the bloody Balkans wars in the 1990s that killed more than 200,000 people during clashes between people with different nations and religions.
"We in Bosnia, but also people in our neighborhood, are facing a historic exam to show whether we have found the strength to end the vicious circle in which today's victim becomes tomorrow's criminal, and today's hatred becomes tomorrow's revenge," the president said.
Boris Tadic, president of Serbia and Montenegro, also attended the ceremony.
Croatians and Serbs have held separate commemorations for the dismantlement of the Jasenovac camp since the Balkans wars.
Following Sunday's ceremony, Croatia will hold another ceremony next Sunday in Jasenovac, reports from Zagreb said.
The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center estimates that about 600,000 people, including Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Croatian resistance supporters against the fascist regime, were murdered in the Jasenovac camp, while the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts the figure at up to 100,000.
(Xinhua News Agency April 17, 2005)
