Protest in front of Tuđman monument in Zagreb

ZAGREB, (Patria) - Under the slogan "Against political repression", about a hundred demonstrators gathered tonight in front of the monument to the first president of the Republic of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, at the intersection of Vukovar Street and Croatian Brotherhood Street, HRT reported.

They demanded that the indictment against Filip Drača, who drew a hammer and sickle on the monument's pedestal, be dismissed, and they consider it to be police and political repression, a witch hunt, and a lynching. The media report that the police blocked access to the monument, but that there were also arrests.

The protesters, including Drača, carrying the flags of the Workers' Front and the Socialist Workers' Party of Croatia (SRP), also demanded that the competent institutions begin prosecuting and punishing those responsible for the destruction of monuments and memorial sites of the National Liberation War (NOB).

Workers' Front presidential candidate Katarina Peović stated that the "repression by institutions in the case of Filip Drača was excessive", and described the publication of his photo as "political persecution". She asserted that the perpetrators who destroyed more than 3,000 NOB monuments and memorial sites have not been prosecuted, or if they have been prosecuted - their photos have never been published in the media.

"This is a political persecution aimed at intimidating those who believe that the hammer and sickle are symbols that warn us that there is a division in society. Society is divided in the way that this man (Tuđman), below whose pedestal the hammer and sickle were drawn, divided society. These are divisions between, as he said, the 200 richest families and the disenfranchised majority who live from their labor. The hammer and sickle are symbols that warn that in society there are those who live from their labor and those who live from the labor of others," said Peović.

According to her, these divisions must end, and she described Drača's act of drawing the hammer and sickle as an "important act of civil disobedience".

Expressing support for Drača, Kristofor Štokić (SRP) asserted that "historical revisionism since the beginning of the 1990s has systematically discredited the brightest pages of our people's history - the NOB and post-war socialist construction" and that "forces of the defeated ideology and army of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) have been reintroduced and affirmed into everyday life". "Revisionism has been carried out at all levels, from the media to education," he said.

Štokić also stated that the "witch hunt for Drača resembled those in the Wild West" and that only a "poster with his picture and the inscription - dead or alive - was missing". He also noted that in Croatia, damaging a partisan monument or cemetery is not a crime, but for "scribbling a hammer and sickle, a media lynching is carried out".

The impunity of perpetrators of NOB monument destruction was also pointed out by Sandra Kasunić from Antifašistički vjesnik and Dimitrije Birač from Radnički portal.