Posted on 08/22/2004 9:56:38 PM PDT by Jane_N
ZAGREB, Croatia - The Croatian government Sunday urged officials in a local village to remove a monument honoring a member of Croatia's World War II Nazi regime.
The plaque commemorating Mile Budak, a poet who served as education minister in the German-backed 1941-1945 government, was apparently erected late Saturday or early Sunday morning in the village of Lovinac, in central Croatia.
Villagers on their way to Sunday Mass found the monument near a church.
Croatian state television showed pictures of the monument, a black marble plaque engraved with Budak's name and profile.
It wasn't immediately clear who had put it up, but a group of emigrants from Lovinac living in Canada and Australia had recently said they were considering erecting such a monument.
Prime Minister Ivo Sanader's party urged local officials to remove the plaque, saying: "It damages the region, Croatia and its national interests."
Croatia's Roman Catholic Church and also human rights groups in the Balkan country condemned the monument.
President Stipe Mesic had earlier warned against putting up such a plaque, saying such monuments were particularly unacceptable in regions struggling to rebuild ethnic relations strained by war.
Budak, who was born in the region, was responsible for racial laws imposed during the Nazi-backed regime of dictator Ante Pavelic and was executed after a postwar trial on July 7, 1945. He was also an author of poems and other literary works, and the emigrants' group contended it meant to celebrate those works and not his political deeds.
"Obviously they were aware that what they were doing was questionable since they did it secretly," local resident Hrvoje Racic told state television.
Some of the most fierce fighting between Croats and ethnic Serbs, who rebelled against Croatia's independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, took place in the ethnically mixed area of Gospic, where Lovinac is located.
Clinton/clark/Muslim pig alert!
Many members of my family died in that area during WW-II fighting the nazis - and no telling how many more died at the hands of Clinton & Clark as they saved Osama's heroin trade!
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