President attends commemoration for victims of the Italian-Chetnik war crimes in Gata

A commemoration was held in village of Gata, near Omiš, on Thursday to mark the 78th anniversary of the massacre of 96 villagers, including eight children, by Serbian Chetniks and the Italian army.

The commemoration was held under the auspices of President Zoran Milanović, who was personally on hand for the commemoration. Milanović made it clear that it is still important to remember who was responsible for this cold-blooded war crime. He added that Italian fascists had hired 150 Chetniks to massacre the locals. He went on to note that the crime was even more disgusting, given that the Italian fascists had only one month earlier agreed to join Croatian Ustaše forces in fighting communists and Partisans, only to then take the arms and money made available to them and proceed to kill Croatians in Gata. He further noted that Gata wasn’t even a Partisan stronghold, and that the Partisans did nothing to protect the locals.

In 1942 Andrija Pivčević, one of the few residents of Gata to survive the massacre, was nine years old: "A Chetnik walked up to me and asked me which would I prefer, that he kill me with his rifle or his bayonet. My hand was all slashed, my intestines were hanging out. It is a miracle that I survived. We must not forget this. We must remind our children of this, but without hate … without hate."

Source: HRT