ANNIVERSARY OF USTASHE BLOOD ORGY ON PAG AND VELEBIT
BANJALUKA, August 15 (SRNA) – On this day 71 years ago, the Croatian Ustashe conducted a mass murder of the remaining inmates of the Slana concentration camp on Pag Island and in the Jadovno concentration camp on Mount Velebit. At least 791 Serbs and Jews were killed on Pag Island and about 1,500 on Mount Velebit.
“Disgusted with the monstrosity of the crimes and the number of killed inmates, the Italian occupation forces took over the civilian and military authority in this area from the Nazi-puppet Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and ordered that the death camps be closed,” SRNA was told by the president of the Jadovno 1941 Association, Dusan Bastasic.
An additional cause for concern for the Italians was a mass uprising of Serbs in the Lika against the Croatian Ustashe tyranny.
“In a desire to destroy all trace of their crimes and kill the remaining inmates in short order, the Croatian Ustashe motivated the inmates gaolers by paying them an additional 100 Kunas per hour of butchering. The night before the Catholic holiday, Velika Gospa [Assumption of the Virgin Mary], the Ustashe butchered – literally – the remaining inmates, men, women and children in Slana Bay on Pag Island,” Bastasic says.
He says the Croatian Ustashe ended their bloody orgy the following morning, on August 15, after which they, drunk and bloodied from head to foot, joined in the Catholic procession which moved down the streets of Pag and ended at the Catholic church in the town centre.
“Almost simultaneously, the Ustashe in the Jadovno concentration camp on Mount Velebit, killed by machinegun some 1,500 remaining inmates and put them in pits dug in the camp,” Bastasic says.
He added that an Italian military medical unit exhumed and cremated 791 “freshly buried bodies,” as they recorded. Among the victims were 407 men, 293 women and 91 children. Their ashes were buried in the Pag quarry.
Today, at the place of the concentration camp on the Pag island, there is no monument to remind of the horrific crime against at least 8,020 people, innocent victims, Serbs and Jews, killed in the summer of 1941.
A memorial plaque in Slana Bay, which was re-erected two years ago, was smashed by the Croats after only two days and has not been replaced.
At the Jadovno concentration camp, the memorial was toppled and the bodies of the victims still lie unexhumed. The descendents of the victims have recently put up a cross at the place of the former Croatian Ustahe concentration camp.
“Today, 71 years later, almost no one remembers the butchering committed on August 15, 1941 on Mount Velebit and Pag Island. But we must remember, for our forefathers, our dignity and our descendents,” Bastasic says
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeSMeQDaxjk&list=PLBB1EC10FCFAA8323&index=1&feature=plpp_video