Croatia’s Disrespect for Jasenovac Victims Has a Long Tradition
Jewish and Serb organisations have boycotted the official commemoration at the Jasenovac concentration camp since the Croatian Democratic Union government came to power in 2016 - but disrespect for victims of Croatia’s WWII fascist government didn’t start then [...]
For the fourth year in a row, representatives of Croatia’s Jewish and Serbian communities, as well as anti-fascists, will boycott the official commemoration of the victims of the World War II concentration camp at Jasenovac on April 14.
That means there will again be a separate, unofficial and much more well-attended commemoration for more than 83,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews and anti-fascists killed at the camp by the Croatian WWII fascist Ustasa movement, which will be held at the site on April 12.
Representatives of the Roma community, Jasenovac’s second biggest victim group, will again attend both commemorations.
For the fourth year in a row, we have witnessed the government expressing disappointment that the victim groups won’t be present at the official ceremony. Once more, officials have shamelessly expressed sorrow about how Jasenovac is being used to create divisions in society while the government is doing all it can to respect the memory of the dead.
But why did the boycotts start in 2016 – why exactly that year? Did it maybe coincide with the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, taking power in Croatia?
Is it maybe because the HDZ government, when it came to power, appointed a culture minister called Zlatko Hasanbegovic who once wrote that the Ustasa were martyrs? Or because Hasanbegovic never came clean about what he said (until weekly news magazine Novosti reported on it)? Or because he never apologised?
Was it maybe the fact that the government tolerated the presence of a plaque with the Ustasa chant ‘Za dom spremni’ (‘Ready for the Home(land)’) engraved on it, within walking distance of the former concentration camp, for nine months? Or because the government had to beg an open admirer of the Ustasa, Marko Skejo, leader of the 1990s veterans of the Croatian Defence Forces, the HOS, to allow the authorities to remove the plaque?
Could one of the reasons for the boycott be that government hid behind an expert council which confirmed that the ‘Za dom spremni’ slogan can be used in commemorations of fallen HOS soldiers? Or is it maybe the funeral for Ustasa soldiers with full military honours near Plitvice lakes in September 2018?
Undoubtedly one of the reasons for the continuing boycott could be the fact that the government gave 6,700 euros to the Society for Research of the Threefold Jasenovac Camp, an NGO that distorts the facts about Jasenovac, claiming, without academic basis, that up to 50 times fewer people died there than the Jasenovac Memorial Site has established.
But it could also be because 2,700 euros was given to the Association of Police Veterans from the 1990s war – who have somehow become WWII experts as well – to unscientifically claim that an Ustasa detention camp for children in the town of Jastrebarsko wasn’t a camp at all.
One of the more recent triggers for keeping up the boycott could be the fact that Andrej Rora, the head of HDZ’s media and communications office, wrote for the same pro-Ustasa bulletin as Hasanbegovic, declaring in 1996 that the struggle for the Ustasa-led Independent State of Croatia, NDH, will continue.
The crocodile tears of Croatian President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic, a former HDZ member, have also started flowing a few years too late.
Grabar Kitarovic now claims that she would attend the official Jasenovac commemoration if there were no divisions. But what prevented her from attending it in 2015, when she avoided the official commemoration but arrived at the site for a publicly-unannounced personal visit, then publicly posted photos and a message about it?
Certainly, descendants of Jasenovac victims didn’t like the fact that she first said that ‘Za dom spremni’ was “an old Croatian salute” before admitting it was a fascist chant.
This is the problem that the HDZ has been facing from the beginning – trying to have its cake and eat it too. The party has been trying to claim that it is anti-fascist – especially in dealings with Israel – while simultaneously trying to rehabilitate the Ustasa.
This is precisely what the founder and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman had in mind back in the 1980s, when he started to promote his controversial version of ‘national reconciliation’ between the Ustasa and the Communist Partisans.
On the one hand, Tudjman claimed – citing problematic sources – that Jews ran the camp, and that Jasenovac continued to operate after WWII, under Communist rule, for which there is no valid historical proof.
While trying to combat Serbian nationalist propaganda that inflated Jasenovac’s death toll, he lowered it to 40,000. To achieve his ‘reconciliation’, he proposed burying the remains of both Ustasa and camp victims at Jasenovac, only to back down under heavy international pressure.
On the other hand, Tudjman accused the Croatian Defence Forces of Ustasa sympathies and wrote anti-fascism into the constitution.
The HDZ is going in Tudjman’s direction, no matter how much it denies this reality. What’s worse, it’s not only the HDZ’s attitude that the Jasenovac victims’ descendants should be angry about.
Former Croatian President Stjepan Mesic, who is now honorary president of the League of Anti-fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists of Croatia, is widely known for downplaying the Jasenovac crimes while he was casually eating and drinking with HDZ members in Novska in 1992. This wasn’t the only time that Mesic made unacceptable comments about the Ustasa, but it was also problematic that he never came clean about the Novska incident before videos popped up in the media.
Meanwhile in 2001, Tonino Picula, who at the time was the Croatian foreign minister from the then-ruling Social Democratic Party, SDP, ventured into dubious territory when he wanted to make the point that Croatia and Serbia shouldn’t dig up the past too much.
Picula said that Croatia could ask “what preceded Jasenovac”, probably trying to suggest that the pre-war Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s repression was responsible for the WWII killings of Serbs – a common trope among the far-right. Just a few months before, while visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, he didn’t make a similar analogy about Jewish victims.
Then in 2016, when SDP president Zoran Milanovic was talking with 1990s war veterans, he said that he personally didn’t care about the ‘Za dom spremni’ chant.
It was also an SDP politician, State Administration Minister Arsen Bauk, who allowed the obscure Society for Research of the Threefold Jasenovac Camp to be registered as an NGO. Bauk and the 2000-2003 SDP government was further responsible for not pressuring HOS veterans’ associations to remove the words ‘Za dom spremni’ from their coat of arms.
The point is that the majority of politicians honestly don’t care – even when they point out Ustasa crimes. Jasenovac is seen as the place where the ethnic ‘Other’ were killed, not ‘Us’, the Croats.
Although a massive proportion of the Serbs, Roma and Jews who were killed at the camp were living in territories that are now part of Croatia, they are still symbolically seen as ‘guests’.
Even when Jasenovac is commemorated by officials, it’s done out of obligation; a concession to ‘them’. This is something that is done to score political points, both domestically and internationally.
Until Jasenovac is commemorated sincerely and in good faith, without tricks or excuses, no one, not least the government and the political elite, should complain that there are multiple commemorations of the victims every year.
Originally published on 2019-04-11
About the author: Sven Milekic is a Ph.D. candidate at Maynooth University, funded by the Irish Research Council under the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Programme.
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.
When it comes to ‘apologising’ for genocides, which it either directly instigated or facilitated through tactical support, the Vatican is a conjurer adept in sleight of words and institutions. You are made to believe that the Vatican has changed; that the Vatican has apologised but then you go through what has been actually said officially and by whom, and you realise that nothing has changed.Take for example the absolutely safe sounding name for one of the oldest congregations in the Vatican — ‘Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’. That is the modern name. The original name? ‘Supreme Sacred Congregation ...
Part IThe basic cornerstones of the Croat ultraright nationalistic ideologyFrom the point of the ideology of the extreme Croat nationalism, the cardinal goal of ultraright nationalistic parties, groups, ideologists and politicians was to create for the first time after 1102 an independent, as much as a Greater and finally “Serben-frei” Croatia. In the 1990s it was an exactly ultraright nationalistic ideology that provided the main background for creation of a new normative order and values in the HDZ’s Croatia. This ideology had five cardinal cornerstones which gave the framework for building a new institutional order, political values and means to ...
Genocide accusations are, it would seem, the latest fashion spreading out of the Balkans. On December 5, a former minister in the “government” of NATO occupied and administered Kosovo, Ivan Todosijević, who happens to be an otherwise occupation friendly and cooperative ethnic Serb, was sentenced to a two-year prison term. The court found him guilty of making what it considered the outrageous claim that the so-called genocidal “Račak massacre,” which in 1999 triggered NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, was an imposture. Since the trial began just two days before, by Balkan standards the swiftly reached verdict was remarkably expeditious, suggesting the ...
Fourteen years ago the U.S. Government de-classified the now famous “La Vista Report” of May 15, 1947, a top-secret U.S. Army Intelligence report documenting the Vatican’s role in aiding the escape of numerous high-ranking Nazi war criminals, among them Ante Pavelic, fascist leader of wartime Croatia; Franz Stangel, Commander of Treblinka; Eduard Roschmann, “the Butcher of Riga”; Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon”; SS General Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas truck; Adolf Eichmann, “architect of the Holocaust”; and tens of thousands of others. Writing about the document prior to its release, internationally renowned Nazi hunter Charles R. Allen ...
Part IPart II The policy of language and political parties until the prohibition of the Illyrian name (1843)During the years of 1832–1836 the Hungarian assembly (Dieta) hold several sessions in Pozsony (Bratislava/Pressburg), where Croatia-Slavonia’s deputies, particularly count J. Drašković, fought for the introduction of the national (Croat) language in Croatia-Slavonia instead of the Latin or Hungarian, as well as for the Croatian state-historical rights (the so-called Croatian pravice) as they were claimed as such by the Croat political leadership. At the same time, in 1834 Ljudevit Gaj obtained a permission from the Habsburg Emperor Francis I (1806–1835) to publish the first ...
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 ...
Only a few recent Holocaust movies have provoked so many vituperative reviews or elicited so many strong opinions for reasons almost entirely divorced from the film itself.Even before Predrag Antonijevic’s new film ‘Dara of Jasenovac’, about the Ustasa-run World War II concentration camp complex at Jasenovac in Croatia has been released in its native country – Serbia – it found itself at the centre of a welter of criticism, accused of a laundry list of transgressions by American and British film critics.In August 1941, the Croatian WWII fascist Ustasa movement established the Jasenovac camp system, where over 83,000 Serbs, Roma, ...
‘Radni logor Jasenovac’ (‘Jasenovac Labour Camp’), the latest work by Croatian author Igor Vukic on the Croatian World War II concentration camp Jasenovac, published by Naklada Pavicic this year, seems like it is inspired by the publications of established Holocaust deniers.Instead of studying all the available archival records, testimonies and other publications, Vukic avoids confronting the totality of known information on the Jasenovac concentration camp system, and instead cherry-picks and publishes only carefully selected data which supports his ideologically-motivated agenda – the fabrication that Jasenovac was merely a labour camp where no mass murders took place.The argumentation and evidence cited ...
The Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was a World War II puppet state of Germany and Italy, which was established in parts of Axis-occupied Yugoslavia. The NDH was founded on 10 April 1941, after the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers.A poster from the WWII Nazi Ustashi Independent State of Croatia with the state flag (Source: Instagram)The NDH consisted of modern-day Croatia and most of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as some parts of modern-day Serbia and Slovenia. The regime targeted Serbs, Jews, Roma people and anti-fascist or dissident Croatians and Muslims, as part of a large-scale genocide campaign ...
November 1991 is a month and year that will forever live in infamy when it comes to one of the most grievous crimes committed under the rubric of Western foreign policy, as it was on this month in this year that the break-up and destruction of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was set in train.The Arbitration Commission of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia was a body set up in 1991 by the Council of Ministers of the European Economic Community (EEC) in response to the conflict that had broken out between separatists in Slovenia and Croatia and the ...
Chris Deliso of Balkanalysis points out the latest travesty of the Western media: 59,000 stories on Auschwitz, three on Jasenovac. As if the third-largest death camp in Nazi-occupied Europe simply never existed. Franjo Tudjman certainly thought so, and it appears the current Croatian leadership shares his "historical" perspective.Contemporary German estimates of Serbs murdered by the Ustasha (in Jasenovac and elsewhere) ranged as high as 750,000. Wiesenthal center uses the number of 600,000. Serbian researchers have spoken of up to 700,000 victims. Modern revisionists, Croat and otherwise, talk of 30-100,000, at most. Among them is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which ...
Neo-Nazi Ustashi in Zagreb todayLast week was marked by the moral acrobatics of two Croatian ministers – War Veterans’ Minister Tomo Medved and Defence Minister Damir Krsticevic – who publicly endorsed two convicted Croatian war criminals, Tomislav Mercep and Mirko Norac.A WWII Independent State of Croatia in which 700.000 Serbs were brutally killedCroatian news site Index reported last week that Mercep, who is serving a prison sentence, spent a total of 45 days at a spa instead of in jail this year and last year. As Mercep is a Croatian war veteran, Medved said he vouched for him as worthy ...
PrefaceDue to the current conflict in (East) Ukraine (historically known as Russia Minor), the world is more and more becoming informed about the genocide of the Poles, Jews, and Russians on the territory of West Ukraine during WWII committed by Ukrainian Nazi-nationalists (the Banderists). However, at the same time, in the Balkans, parallelly with the Ukrainian case, the organized (sadistic) genocide of the Jews, Roma, and above all the ethnic Serbs were on agenda but the world audience is still not properly informed about the case – the case occurred in the Nazi-shaped Independent State of Croatia.At the very start, ...
The brutal destruction of ex-Yugoslav Federal state-system was in a form of the civil wars or, in another word, a chain of violent conflicts from 1991 to 1995. From the spring of 1992, the SFRY already did not exist as a state and, therefore, the conflicts were turned into the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession.The Yugoslav civil wars can be comprised of the three closely related armed conflicts:1) War in Slovenia in 1991.2) War in Croatia from 1991 to 1995.3) War in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995.[i]In the year of 1990, the real potential for the armed conflict became quite ...
Split, Croatia, September 14th, 2018: "Kill Serb" written on the car with the plates from SerbiaThe mugshots show Ivo Goldstein, a Jewish librarian and book dealer, looking bright-eyed and calm — even after nine days of confinement in a Croatian police cell. One of the prints bears the number 28888 and a date: April 21, 1941.Seventy-six years after they were taken by a police photographer, the photos hang as a triptych on the bedroom wall of Goldstein’s son, Daniel, in a drab apartment block in Zagreb’s Zaprudje neighborhood.Daniel, 85, is a historian and human rights activist. He was nine when ...
Jasenovac in Croatia was the third largest World War II concentration camp in Europe by number of victims. It was operated by the Catholic and Nazi-allied Ustasha government. Wartime Croatia has been called “one great slaughterhouse.”The prisoners – mostly Serbs, Jews and Roma had their throats cut with specially designed knives, or they were killed with axes, mallets and hammers; they were also shot, or they were hung from trees or light poles. Some were burned alive in hot furnaces, boiled in cauldrons, or drowned in the River Sava.Here the most varied forms of torture were used. Finger and toe nails were pulled out with ...
Last year, antifascists in Poland commemorated the country’s international brigades on the eightieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War. Their gathering came under attack and a smoke grenade was thrown through the door. Inscribed on the projectile was the phrase “ha pasado,” “we have passed,” Franco’s retort to Dolores Ibárruri’s “no pasarán” on the day the Republic fell.Another iconic turn of phrase associated with the civil war owed much to Poland’s influence. “A las Barricadas,” the anthem of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT federation, became the war’s most famous song — but it wasn’t exactly an original. Its tune had been written by ...
I travel frequently to the countries which once made up the now defunct Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, satisfying a passion of mine that stems back to my childhood days. For me, the Balkans’ history, its people and its cultures are both enigmatic and magnetic, as they have been, too, for countless others, of many nationalities, over centuries gone by. Accounting for the enchantment of the Balkans, its captivating allure, is a challenge to put into writing. Because no words can truly embellish what is one of the most absorbing parts of the world. To understand and feel what it is ...
The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazis iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.“To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other ...
The internal and much more external destruction of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s was celebrating in 2015 its 20th year of anniversary. However, this historical and much more geopolitical event still needs a satisfactory research approach in regard to the true geopolitical reasons and political-military course of the destruction of this South Slavic and Balkan state. During the last quarter of century, the (western) global mainstream media unanimously accused Serbia and the Serbs of the national chauvinism as the main cause of the bloody wars on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. However, the role and direct impact ...
