KARAN: BY REMEMBERING ŠUŠNJAR CRIME, WE DEMONSTRATE OUR RESPONSIBILITY TO OUR SLAIN ANCESTORS

BANJA LUKA, AUGUST 1 /SRNA/ – Republika Srpska President Siniša Karan said that during the Second World War, the Ustasha persecuted, tortured and massacred Serbs throughout the Independent State of Croatia /NDH/, and that Šušnjar near Sanski Most is a place where their brutality was displayed on a horrific scale.

"It was not a crime committed against some nameless 'people' or 'population,' but against Serbs, who were not random victims. They were killed deliberately and systematically as part of the Ustasha ideology, whose objective was the destruction of everything with Serb prefix," Karan told SRNA ahead of today's republic-level commemoration of the 1941 NDH crime against Serbs at Šušnjar near Sanski Most. He said that for decades there had been attempts to portray the suffering of Serbs in the NDH as a general tragedy, without identifying the victims by name, identity or nationality. However, with the establishment of Republika Srpska, its institutions began commemorating the suffering of the Serb people. "By remembering the Šušnjar crime, we demonstrate our responsibility to those who perished, as well as to future generations. It is our duty to preserve the memory of their sacrifice and to teach future generations the truth. Their sacrifice obliges us to safeguard peace, freedom and the dignity of our people, but also to remember, because our forgetting would amount to killing the victims of our own people all over again," Karan stressed.