Croatia Must Not Whitewash the Horrors of Jasenovac
An article published by Croatia’s best-read newspaper downplaying the atrocities at the Jasenovac concentration camp was an attempt to rehabilitate Croatia’s WWII fascist Ustasa regime and deny its complicity in the Holocaust [...]
There are horrific realities of history that must not be questioned, distorted or denied by anyone with even the slightest integrity or sense of decency.
The slaughter of millions of Jews in the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor during the Holocaust of World War II falls squarely in this category.
So does the fundamental fact that this ultimate crime against humanity was perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its multinational fascist accomplices.
Any attempt to deny or to attempt to trivialise or minimise the enormity of this genocide, or to rehabilitate its perpetrators in any way whatsoever, is, simply put, morally obscene.
This is why denying the Holocaust is a criminal offence in Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Austria, Romania, and numerous other countries. Pope Francis has denounced Holocaust denial as “madness”, and his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, called it “intolerable”.
It is also important to bear in mind that the Germans were not the only mass killers of Jews, Roma, and others during the Holocaust.
In the Transnistria region, part of Romania at the time, the Hitlerite ally Ion Antonescu’s Iron Guard enthusiastically took part in the slaughter of between 150,000 and 250,000 Jews. And in the Independent State of Croatia, the fascist Ustasa, led by Ante Pavelic, perpetrated a brutal genocide against Serbs, Jews, and Roma.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Croatian authorities murdered between 320,000 to 340,000 ethnic Serb residents of Croatia and Bosnia during the period of Ustasa rule, and more than 30,000 Croatian Jews were killed either in Croatia or at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In order to carry out their genocidal scheme, the Ustasa established a network of home-grown concentration camps infamous for their brutality and comparable to the barbarity of the German death and concentration camps.
The most notorious of these was a group of five camps collectively named Jasenovac, near Zagreb, often referred to as the “Auschwitz of the Balkans”.
Again, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, somewhere between 77,000 and 104,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, and Croat opponents of the Ustasa regime were brutally murdered there. The Jasenovac Memorial Site has identified by name 83,145 Serbs, Jews, Roma, and anti-fascists who perished in these camps.
For years, extremist elements in Croatia have sought to rehabilitate the Ustasa and downplay the atrocities perpetrated at Jasenovac.
Ivkosic writes admiringly and seemingly unashamedly about a book entitled Labour Camp Jasenovac by Igor Vukic, which, according to Ivkosic, “is in fundamental opposition to the decades-long myth of Jasenovac”.
While acknowledging that conditions there were severe, Ivkosic grotesquely declares that “there was fun in the camp. There were sporting matches, especially football, concerts, theatrical performances, among which were pieces that were created by the inmates themselves.”
Fun? At Jasenovac? Ivkosic’s attempt to cleanse Jasenovac and the Ustasa of their evil essence is reprehensible. So is his contemptuous reference to a “myth of Jasenovac”.
Jasenovac reality
The brutal murder of tens of thousands of human beings at Jasenovac is not a myth, Mr. Ivkosic.
“Jasenovac was an unheard death camp, no similar in the whole world existed,” former prisoner Milo Despot said in an oral history interview taken by and maintained at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“The Germans liquidated the inmates in a modern way, while in Jasenovac the killing was most cruel – by mallets, hammers and knifes, the least by bullets,” he said.
“There were no gas chambers, but there was also no shortage of barbarity. Many prisoners had their throats slit or their skulls smashed; others were shot or hanged from the trees that lined the Sava,” reporter Nicholas Wood wrote about Jasenovac in the New York Times in 2006.
I wonder whether Ivkosic considers any of the following four examples of the Ustasa’s behavior at Jasenovac to have been “fun” for the camp’s inmates.
In his oral history interview, Milo Despot described witnessing how a Ustasa unit took more than 100 Serb girls on a barge, ordered them to take off their clothes and then grabbed them by their hair, cut their throats, and threw their corpses into the river.
In another interview, Mara Vejnovic said that she saw the Ustasa kill a group of children with poisonous gas in a barracks at Jasenovac.
Eduard Sajer was assigned to dig a mass grave in one of the Jasenovac camps. He described how Ustasa guards killed inmates by hitting them on the head with mallets, including Eduard’s younger brother, and how he and his fellow grave diggers had to drag the corpses into the mass grave. All Eduard could do for his brother was to take him in his arms and put him gently to rest.
In his memoir, 44 Months in Jasenovac, Egon Berger described the Croatian Franciscan friar Tomislav Filipovic Majstorovic, also known as Fra Sotona (‘Brother Satan’), the notorious commandant of Jasenovac:
“Friar Majstorovic, his face all made-up and powdered and dressed in an elegant suit and a green hunting hat, watched his victims with delight. He approached the children, even stroked their heads. He was accompanied by Ljubo Milos and Ivica Matkovic.
Friar Majstorovic told the mothers that their children would be baptized and took them from the mothers, the child whom Friar Majstorovic had in his arms, innocently touched his killer’s made-up face. The mothers, distraught, recognized the situation. They offered their lives in exchange for mercy for the children. Two children were placed on the ground, while the third was thrown like a ball into the air. Friar Majstorovic, pointing a dagger up, missed three times, but the fourth time with a joke and a laugh, the child was impaled on the dagger.
The mothers threw themselves on the ground, pulling their hair, and began to shout dreadfully. The Ustasa guards of the 14th Division from Osijek took them away and killed them. Once all three children had been so brutally killed, these three two-legged beasts exchanged money, because they seemed to have a bet who would be the first to stick a dagger in a child.”
By distorting the gruesome reality of Jasenovac, Milan Ivkosic has desecrated the memory of the thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women, and children who were murdered there.
And by publishing Ivkosic’s shameful column, Vecernji list has become complicit in the impermissible campaign to rehabilitate the Ustasa and whitewash its crimes. Both Ivkosic and Vecernji list must now be held to account.
Croat soldiers in Jasenovac after killing the prisoners by knives
Originally published on 2018-08-27
About the author: Menachem Z. Rosensaft is General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress. He teaches about the law of genocide at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities in the United States.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Israel’s Maariv newspaper has revealed that the government of the Zionist state is planning to drop a political bombshell in the coming weeks by presenting a bill in the Knesset (parliament) calling for the annexation of land occupied since 1967. It is likely to have the support of the majority of Knesset members. The newspaper added that the right wing has chosen this time for the move ahead of the US presidential election; America, it is believed, will be too preoccupied to care about what is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories.Preliminary talks about a first stage have been held, ...
George Mauropoulos, "The Forgotten Genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor", AHIF Policy Journal, American Hellenic Institute Foundation, Inc., Vol. 8, Spring 2017, pp. 3Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
On November 21st, 2015 it was the 20th anniversary of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord – a treaty signed by four Presidents (the USA, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) that led to an end of the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. As a result of the Dayton Peace Accord a new “independent and internationally recognized state” emerged: Bosnia-Herzegovina as a confederation of two political entities (the Republic of Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation) but ethnically strictly divided into three segments composed by the Serb, Croat and Muslim (today Boshnjak) controlled territories. In contrast to the Republic of Srpska (49% of the territory ...
A massive destruction of the Ottoman (Orthodox Christian) Armenian population in 1915−1916 is probably the greatest atrocity committed during the WWI and for sure a first 20th century case of the genocide as up to 1.500.000 ethnic Armenians were executed by the Ottoman authorities and their collaborators (the Kurds). As a consequence, the survivors are scattered across the globe. Today it is already a century old event, but the issue of the 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide is undoubtedly still alive and divisive political issue firstly between the Armenians and the Turks[1] but also and among the western “liberal democracies” on the ...
Unfathomable as that may appear, yes, it was quite possible for the second-ranking slaughterhouse in Europe in recent memory to have slipped off the radar screen. Even such a renowned authority as Professor Gideon Greif is having an exceptionally difficult time of it in trying to put it back on.Precisely because it has not been the theme of any Hollywood spectaculars, Jasenovac does not attract any school excursions and textbooks are largely silent about it. Some background information on Jasenovac therefore seems like a good place to start.The Jasenovac death camp (1941 – 1945) is inextricably bound up with the ...
During World War II, Japan’s imperialist military invaded Northeast China and afterward spread throughout Southeast Asia, then on to an ill-fated attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese crimes were many during the war and included the coerced services of ianfu (comfort women) for Japanese troops, slave labor, and experimentation on living humans.Today Japanese right-wingers clamor for a re-expansion of Japanese militarism; prime minister Abe Shinzo pays visits to a shrine venerating Japanese dead — among them war criminals; the Diet demonstrates belligerence toward North Korea, a country Japan had formerly occupied; Okinawans’ (Japanese living on the southern archipelago) call for the removal of ...
Donald Franciszek Tusk, (born 22 April 1957) is a Polish politician and historian. He has been President of the European Council since 1 December 2014. Previously he was Prime Minister of Poland (2007–2014) and a co-founder and chairman of the Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) party.Tusk began his public career as an activist in his home town of Gdańsk, supporting Solidarity and organizing his fellow university students. With the exception of one four-year stretch, Tusk has served in the Third Republic Sejm (parliament) continuously since its first elections in 1991. He was Vice Marshal (deputy speaker) of the Senate from 1997 ...
Most people have no idea of who is pictured above, but you should. The sight of this man should cause a similar revulsion to that of seeing Mussolini, Mao, Stalin or Hitler, as he committed an African genocide that resulted in the killing of over 10 million people in the Congo.His name is King Leopold II of Belgium.Most of the people never learned about him in school, and have also most likely never heard about him in the media either. This is because he’s not included in the popular narrative of oppression (which includes things like U.S. slavery and the ...
Two decades later Bosnia is still suffering the consequences. ISIS has declared the Balkans the next front for the Islamic Caliphate, and in remote mountain villages, Muslims are already flying the ISIS flag.Central Bosnia in 2015Russia Insider (h/t Maksim) The Balkans is the latest arena where the West is trying to circumcise any attempt of Russia to regainits influence. This anti-Serbian resolution and initiative is the part of the broader strategy and the latest Western attempt to demonize Serbs and delegitimize pro-Russian Republic of Srpska (Serbian part of Bosnia) in an effort to forcefully centralize Bosnia and give the driving seat to ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]
One sharp and interesting analysis of situation in Serbian province of Kosovo Metohija came last week from Andrew Korybko, program host at Radio Sputnik.Mr. Korybko speaks on how the whirlwind of geopolitics, military interests and global giants of business, as well as the change of US administration, could impact the fragile peace in Balkans and what’s behind the latest tensions:”Serbia’s NATO-occupied province of Kosovo has been up to its old tricks lately in trying to provoke Belgrade into another military confrontation conveniently timed to coincide with Trump’s inauguration.The former so-called “Prime Minister” of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, was detained in France ...
Wednesday, December 5, 2012, the Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha advocated granting Albanian citizenship to all Albanians, wherever they reside. This statement was made during a visit of the city of Vlora where the independence of the Albanian state was declared, only 100 years ago. At the time Albania had just liberated itself from Ottoman rule.This declaration follows a separate statement, collective this time, that Sali Berisha had made with his Kosovar counterpart Hashim Thaci a few weeks ago, promising the union of all Albanians. The place was, I must say, well chosen since the vast majority of the inhabitants ...
The Western-backed myth of a Greater SerbiaMuch space, time, and effort have been devoted to the recent history of West Balkans, and in particular in the latest political upheavals, about the alleged project of Greater Serbia especially by Western authors either academic scholars or journalists.[1] The issue must be, however, considered together with its counterparts from Croatia (a Greater Croatia) and Albania (a Greater Albania).Two focal questions arose here: Were all these projects serious and what was the origin of this maximalist concept of forming national states in the otherwise ethnically mixed area? Whose exact interests were involved and to ...
North from Nazareth’s city limits, a mile or so as the crow flies, is an agricultural community by the name of Tzipori – Hebrew for “bird.” It is a place I visit regularly, often alongside groups of activists wanting to learn more about the political situation of the Palestinian minority living in Israel.Tzipori helps to shed light on the core historic, legal and administrative principles underpinning a Jewish state, ones that reveal it to be firmly in a tradition of non-democratic political systems that can best be described as apartheid in nature.More than a decade ago, former U.S. president Jimmy ...
Part I, Part IISplit, Croatia: "Kill Serbs" written on the car arrived from SerbiaTerritorial imperialism of the HDZ’s CroatiaThe fact was that all ultranationalistic parties and organizations in the 1990s struggled for the creation of a Greater Croatia according to the principle of the ethnographic, historical and even natural rights. In all of those concepts, Bosnia-Herzegovina was seen as an integral part of united Croatia. There were, in principle, two concepts of united Croatia: A minimal concept of Croatia within the borders of the Banovina Hrvatska as it was in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1939−1941 (when a Greater Croatia ...
What is wrong with the American people? After several years of horrific policy toward the waking world, democracy’s standard bearers seem to be drowning in a lake of selfishness. Distracted, apathetic, or simply dumbed and numbed by unrelenting propaganda, the most admired society on Earth has turned to a wriggling mush of diverging ideals. I fear that American have become what we ultimately deplored, just another despicable cultural hegemony. Here’s a short brief on the matter.A recent article by James Carden at The Nation prompted me to discuss this unsavory truth today. The title of the piece, “Trump’s Syria Policy: ...
Over the past several years, analysts and commentators have noticed a rising tide of domestic support for the Croatian homegrown Nazi movement of the Second World War, the Ustashe, which actively exterminated Serbs, Jews, and Roma in the territory it controlled from 1941-45. Far from condemning this alarming development, the Croatian government, the European Union, and non-state actors within it have tacitly and actively supported the rising tide of sympathy towards the Ustashe.This disconnect between the ostensible “European values” of human rights and tolerance that the European Union claims to represent, and its tacit support of trends towards extremist politics ...
Protesters have called for all statues of the former imperial ruler to be removed in recognition of his massacres in the Congo. As 10,000 people took to the streets of Brussels on Sunday (7 June) to protest as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, there was one landmark which drew their ire more than any other: the equestrian statue of King Leopold II outside Belgium’s royal palace.“Murderer!” the protesters cried as they climbed the statue and waved the flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Had the statue been flimsy enough to pull down they would have done it, just as fellow BLM protesters toppled ...
While this excellent analysis by Srdja Trifkovic focuses on the “internal” history of Croatia, it is important to note that four days after Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, Hitler’s staunch ally the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) declared war on both the United Kingdom and on the United States on December 14, 1941. What makes this especially significant is that less than three years later, on April 16, 1944, which was Easter Sunday for the Serbian Orthodox, the Anglo-American forces bombed Belgrade, the capital of their loyal and devoted ally Serbia, even though there was no strategic ...
After the Donald Trump administration’s decision to recognize the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv, the national aspirations of the Palestinian people to live in their own state have been severely dashed by Washington’s move. Ever since the formation of the United States, it has been American policy to destroy aspirant nations like the internationally-recognized State of Palestine.The first nation destroyed by the United States was the Cherokee Nation, or Tsalagihi Ayeli, which, beginning in 1794, was slowly decimated by forced removals from territory in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, ...
So does the fundamental fact that this ultimate crime against humanity was perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its multinational fascist accomplices.
Jasenovac reality
Croat soldiers in Jasenovac after killing the prisoners by knives
Jasenovac reality
