Dear brothers and sisters, Most Reverend Father Bishops, Priests, NGO members, respectable president of and members of the NGO Macelj
It is my special honour to address you in the name of the President of the Republic of Croatia Kolinda Grabar Kitarović
I deliver to you Her greetings as well as the expressions of profound condolances to all the families of innocent victims of the communist crimes
who lie before us in the Mount of Macelj and in almost one thousand of unearthed mass graves throughout our beautiful Homeland.
Today we prayed for their souls, we have again weeped over their lives, and we have asked ourselves again:
How is it, that after seventy years the murderers have still not been named, the graves of the victims have still not been unearthed and marked?
We pray and demand dignity for every victim, regardless of their affiliation, because the life of a human is the greatest value on Earth.
Our conscience is not clean, because our generation has not returned its debt to the victims of the Croatian Way of the Cross.
We ask ourselves: How is it that we have so many times elected those to lead us whose main political objective was to maintain silence about the greatest peace-time massacre in Europe?
How is it that the here buried one thousand one hundred and sixty three victims of Macelj lay in sacks for more than ten years waiting for a dignified burial, and it happened so in our independent democratic State of Croatia?
And who knows utill when those remains would have to lay in such undignified way had we not organized the burial
thanks to the huge patriotic and Christian energy of (the then Bishop --lapsus--) the then Parish Priest Friar Drago Brglez and our NGO Macelj 1945!
The killing of the innocent wire-tied prisoners is the expression of the insensibility and inhumanity of the Communist criminals.
Up untill then antifascist, the red star has rendered itself of the same kind as other movements which built their power on the dead remains of those who did not politically agree with them.
The Resolution of the European Parliament teaches us on these crimes, which reads that there is no reconciliation without truth.
The lie about Communists' victims so heavily promoted in regime's media and school books of Eastern Europe is the cause of deep divide in Croatian society. Because of that divide, we can not progress.
In this day and age when there exists a publish admission of UDBA's colonel Jefto Šašić that the order to kill 200,000 men, after the end of WWII, was issued to him by Josip Broz,
the followers of his ideology still hide that truth from our people.
That is the crime in which the red star has turned from anti-fascist symbol into a symbol of evil.
The next time, under the same emblem of the red star, crimes were commited in our Homeland war.
The protectors of the red star keep silent about the fact that on Croatian defensive side 8,000 civilians were killed of which one half were women and children.
Even though evidence has been published on that, they hide that truth and they make reconciliation all the more unlikely.
They don't lend their ears to the peaceful message of Pope Francis who told us on that war: "You don't have the right to forget about your past, you are to build peace from it."
The civilian victims of our Homelan war are the best proof that a nation of people who forget their past is distined to repeat it.
Today, over the remains of these martyrs we have to say the truth. On these victims of Communism, the crime has happened three times.
The first time was when the wire-tied victims were eliminated in quick procedure.
The second time was when Račan's coalitional government forbid the Parliamentary Commission which investigated mass graves like this one on Mount Macelj to do their work.
The third crime has been committed by the actual Milanović's government.
when they right at the onset of their mandate abolished the Office for Investigation of Communists' Crimes which we founded in agreement with European institutions,
to research and mark these places of plight.
By then we had managed to research the first some thirty localities and unearth remains from only first three mass graves, on the hillsides of Gračani.
In those mass graves we found remains of wire-tied underage persons and slain patients of the nearby Brestovac hospital.
Those underage children and patients as well as the hair of girls found in Huda Jama
proove that Mesić and Josipović lied when they said that those mass graves hold some guilty criminals, some enemy soldiers.
No! Priests, women, children, sick people were being killed.
Because of the proof of truth that the Office for Investigation of Communists' Crimes offered, Milanović's government has promptly abolished it,
and entrusted further investigations to a man who has up until the last moment been a high ranking UDBA official,
up until year 1990, of the organization which organized those slaughters.
It is clear that the investigations slowed down again so that even the last living witnesses would disappear and that the Croatian soil would forever hide the truth.
That is the third crime on the same victims.
The biggest crime of our generation is that still, after 25 years of our independent State,
we still haven't revealed the truth about the victims of Communists' crimes.
That is the exact reason of deep divides in our nation, divides which exhaust us and which don't let us progress.
To those who tell us to stop busying ourselves with the past, we respond that any nation who have not solved their dilemmas of the past
do not have any future of theirs either.
On that Pope Frances pronounced himself clearly. "A nation who forgets their memories, does not have a future." he said.
Still, we have the opportunity to mend our ways. On the remains of the Communists' victims we learned what is Communism and therefore we overthrew it and created free Croatia.
On these same victims we must build our reconciliation and with it our successful future.
That is our debt to the remains before which we stand and pray, that is what we owe to the innocent slaughtered, because only if we do so their sacrifice will not be futile.
We owe that to future generations, which must be brought up on truth. It is upon us to straighten the greatest human, moral and political injustice of the peace-time Europe and of our dear Croatia.
We can succeed in doing so only if we choose that the lovers of historical truth and lovers of their own Homeland lead us.
Soon the opportunity will come, let it not pass us by again, let's unearth the hidden truth of Croatian caves, we owe that to our dead, but also to those who come after us.
For them we created Croatia, for them let us make it a happy state which is founded on respect to all victims, on love of man, and on patriotism, that beautiful energy that moves all nations of the world.
Let us do so, and let us render the debt of this generation to our history, and to the future. Thank you for your attention.