Around the same time that a new mass grave of communist crime victims was being exhumed in Dubrava, Zagreb, in late May 2026—one among the thousands of mass graves uncovered across Croatia and the hundreds more identified in Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina—a very different event was taking place.

On 13 June 2026, former communist partisans, their descendants, and those who identify as antifascists gathered at Zagreb’s Lisinski Concert Hall for a Concert of Partisan Songs.

I found the contrast staggering.

How could the authorities of the City of Zagreb permit such an event at a time when the remains of communist victims were still being unearthed from the soil? How could the Croatian Government remain silent while a publicly owned venue was being used to celebrate a movement whose legacy remains inseparable from the mass graves that continue to surface throughout Croatia and other states of the former Yugoslavia?

Supporters of the event justified it as a commemoration of Anti-Fascist Struggle Day and the eighty-fifth anniversary of the beginning of the National Liberation Struggle. Yet for many Croatians, including myself, this explanation only deepens the discomfort.

The fundamental historical dispute remains unresolved. While today’s self-described antifascists celebrate the partisan movement as a force of liberation, many others remember that the partisan victory resulted not in Croatian statehood but in the restoration of Yugoslavia under communist rule. They remember that countless Croatians who sought an independent Croatia found themselves persecuted, imprisoned, executed, or buried in unmarked graves or dumped into pits after the war.

For those families, celebrations of partisan heritage can feel less like commemorations and more like triumphalism over the dead.

It is difficult not to conclude that such events amount to dancing on the graves of hundreds of thousands of victims—soldiers and civilians, women and men, the elderly and the young—whose lives were extinguished in the violent aftermath of the Second World War.

The concert was organised by the Alliance of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists of the Republic of Croatia and supported by the City of Zagreb under the administration of the Možemo political movement. Taxpayer funds contributed to the event, as they have to many similar commemorations over the years. Choirs performed songs celebrating the National Liberation War, tributes were paid to Josip Broz Tito, and the symbolism of the communist era was prominently displayed.

The timing was impossible for me to ignore. While forensic teams were uncovering the remains of communist victims, others were publicly celebrating the movement under whose authority those crimes occurred.

That is why the event struck me not as a cultural gathering but as a political statement. Repulsive at that.

As commentator Ivica Granić, Narod.hr, argued, it conveyed a message many families of communist victims have heard for decades: that their dead do not matter, that their suffering is secondary, and that the perpetrators remain worthy of admiration regardless of the crimes committed in their name.

The phrase “dancing on the graves of communist crime victims” is, of course, a metaphor. It expresses the moral outrage felt when societies minimise, excuse, ignore, or celebrate regimes responsible for mass repression and political killings.

Those who know what occurred in Croatia after 1945 and yet choose silence or celebration over truth risk abandoning their responsibility to history. The mass executions, political purges, forced marches, prison camps, and unmarked graves were not crimes against only those who died. They were crimes against future generations, deprived of truth and justice.

Sites such as Huda Jama, Kočevski Rog, Tezno, Jazovka, Macelj, Lug Forest, Čučerje, Dubrava, and numerous other execution grounds throughout Croatia and neighbouring countries deserve a permanent place in public memory. Their existence is not a matter of myth or political invention. The graves exist. The remains exist. The forensic evidence exists.

Too often, the victims are dismissed as “enemies of the people”, “collaborators”, or “fascists”—the very labels used by the communist authorities when justifying their liquidation. Such labels are frequently applied indiscriminately, despite the fact that many of the dead were civilians, peasants, women, children, students, members of the clergy, the wounded, and countless others caught in the chaos and communist vengeance that followed the war. Vengeance because the murdered preferred independent Croatia to communist Yugoslavia.

Celebrating partisan heritage without confronting partisan crimes is not merely disrespectful to the victims. It diminishes their humanity a second time. It strips them of dignity once more and perpetuates the injustice that began when they were denied a grave, denied a name, and denied the truth.

A democratic society owes its victims more than silence. It owes them remembrance, honesty, and the courage to confront even the darkest chapters of its history. Only by doing so can future generations hope to build a society in which such crimes are never repeated. Instead of Partisan Song Concerts, I believe the antifascists should commence their path to accepting the truth by organising a “Sorry Day”. Ina Vukic