ZAGREB, Croatia — Croatia on Thursday declared three senior Montenegrin government officials persona non grata after they led a declaration in Montenegro's parliament stating that genocide was committed in a World War II concentration camp operated by a pro-Nazi Croatian regime at the time.
Croatia's Foreign Ministry informed neighboring Montenegro in a diplomatic note that the country's parliament speaker, Andrija Mandic, lawmaker Milan Knezevic and Vice Premier Aleksa Becic are now unwelcome in the European Union nation.
Montenegro's parliament recently passed a declaration on ''genocide'' in the Jasenovac prison camp in Croatia, where tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs, Jews and anti-Nazi Croats perished during the war.
Zagreb said the passing of the resolution was ''unacceptable, inappropriate and unnecessary" with the intention ''not to build a culture of remembrance" but to exploit the "memory of the victims of Jasenovac for short-term political goals."
Croatia was run by a pro-Nazi puppet regime during WWII. After the war, Croatia became part of a Communist-run Yugoslavia together with several other Balkan nations, including Montenegro. Yugoslavia broke up in a war in the 1990s.
The WWII camp issue came into focus after Montenegro supported a United Nations resolution commemorating the genocide in Srebrenica, a 1995 slaughter of some 8,000 Bosniak Muslims by the Serb forces.
That resolution has angered Serbia, a country that holds considerable sway in Montenegro, where about a third of the population of 620,000 declare themselves as ethnic Serbs.
The three pro-Serb and pro-Russian Montenegrin officials then demanded that the country's parliament also pass a declaration condemning the Jasenovac massacre.
