President Milanović at ceremony commemorating liberation of prisoners of fascist concentration camp Kampor: Croats and Slovenes were treated like objects here
“This event, this horrific one year period that ended, not by liberation but by Italy’s capitulation, is a reminder of everything that the banality of human evil is capable of – ever present, resident and residual in man – lurking the whole time. These fifteen thousand people who passed through here should remind us of it”, the President of the Republic Zoran Milanović stated at the site of the former Italian fascist concentration camp Kampor on the island of Rab on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp prisoners.
President Milanović attended the commemoration together with the President of the Republic of Slovenia Nataša Pirc Musar. The two presidents laid a joint wreath at the memorial cemetery of the victims of the one of the most infamous WWII Italian fascist camps.
Addressing the gathering, President Milanović said that talking about numbers is always the biggest trap. “There was Jasenovac, there were large camps, one thousand and five hundred people perished within a few days of fighting to conquer Monte Cassino, a secondary military target in Italy that did not change the course of the war, yet in defending or attacking a tractor factory in Stalingrad on the Volga that many people were killed on a daily basis. That many people even today are dying in Ukraine, on both sides, and we are watching it, slowly getting used to it. That has nothing to do with human kindness either, it’s become a way of life,” and when humanity turns into analytics, into the disposal and explanation of numbers, that means that humankind needs to take a deep breath and wonder where we are going.”
President Milanović also talked about the eternal dilemma and debate about evil in man, saying it is a constant today as it was eighty or one hundred years ago. “The power of control and self-control not to allow the evil that exists in every man to prevail, that is actually the only essential task of every human community and modern policy, controlling evil in man. All else is decoration”, he noted.
“Those were Italian officers, educated soldiers of the Kingdom of Italy, what they thought, how did that superego function when looking in silence at people dying before their eyes? They died before their eyes. What training did they undergo as soldiers to watch something like that and remain mute?”, President Milanović wondered about the fascists who opened the camp in Kampor. The instant people started dying, women and children, at that instant it became a death camp”, the President added, and underlined that is the banality of the evil he had talked about. “Slavs were treated like objects here because, among others, they sought their human realization through their affiliation to a people – Slovenian and Croatian – and ended up treated like objects”, President Milanović stated.
Accompanying President Milanović and President Pirc Musar at the ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the prisoners from the Italian fascist concentration camp Kampor on the island of Rab were the spouse of the President of the Republic Sanja Musić Milanović and the spouse of the President of Slovenia Aleš Musar.
PHOTO: Office of the President of the Republic of Croatia / Marko Beljan