Croatian President Stjepan Mesić issued a message on the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day:
"On January 27, the world which experienced the horrors of World War II and which cannot forget those horrors, remembers the unimaginable crime of Holocaust, committed against the Jewish people in the name of a notion of racial supremacy and existence of two kinds of people - those who deserve to live and those who don't.
The Jews were without doubt the greatest victims of the Holocaust, however, the so-called Final Solution - a term used by Nazi-Fascists to conceal their plan for the physical extermination of millions of people - was also applied to all other people who were considered less worthy and who did not fit into the concept of a world of people of 'pure blood'.
People in Croatia too remember the Holocaust, not only because that monstrous crime must never be forgotten so that it is prevented from recurring, but because it happened on Croatian soil as well, and because Croats too took part in it.
The Ustasha regime willingly repeated everything that was being done in the Nazi Germany and the occupied parts of Europe.
By taking part in the Holocaust the Ustasha criminals tainted Croatia's reputation and only Croatian anti-fascists were able to clear its name. These two facts must not be forgotten.
Holocaust Remembrance Day provides an opportunity to warn that facing without reservations the facts of one's own past, both more distant and more recent past, is one of the main conditions for the Europeanisation of Croatia.
It also provides an opportunity to once again resolutely reject all theories and ideologies that are based on inequality, intolerance and segregation of any kind, and to reaffirm the policy of respect for and exercise of human rights."