12 December 2006
Croatia's president Stipe Mesic has defended himself against accusations that he had glorified Croatia's pro-Nazi World War II government in a decade-old speech. A person who sounds like Mesic in a recording posted Saturday on the "Index.hr" website said that Croats won twice during the war - when they established the pro-Nazi state in 1941, and later when they crushed the Nazis in 1945. Mesic said he could not remember ever praising the fascist Croatian state but added that if he did say it, it should not undo the "countless" times over the past decade that he has condemned Croatia's wartime atrocities. "Index.hr" said the speech was made in the early 1990s, when Mesic was a member of then-president Franjo Tudjman's Nationalist party, which refused to recognize the crimes committed by the pro-Nazi regime. Mesic left the party in 1993. In recent years, Mesic repeatedly apologized to Jews, Serbs and Roma, or Gypsies, for their suffering during Croatia's wartime regime. He has attended several commemorations at Jasenovac, the country's World War II concentration camp.
