ZAGREB, August 2, 2018 – A memorial ceremony was held Thursday at the Roma cemetery in Uštica, about 100 kilometres southeast of Zagreb, for 16,173 Roma killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp during the Second World War.
The commemoration, organised by the Roma organisation Kali Sari and the Council of the Roma Ethnic Minority in Croatia, was held on International Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day, or the Porajmos, which is marked in Croatia on August 2.
Wreaths were laid by delegations of the parliament and government, local authorities, Roma organisations and the envoy of the Croatian president.
Addressing those gathered, the representative of the Roma community in the Croatian parliament Veljko Kajtazi said that Uštica was the site of the mass killing of the Roma people, who were not killed by the occupiers but by the Ustasha and the criminal regime of the so-called WWII Independent State of Croatia.
The commemoration in Uštica is the largest annual gathering of the Roma in Croatia at the place where the largest genocide in this part of Europe occurred and the date was symbolically chosen, being the day when the last group of 2,987 Roma were killed in Auschwitz.
