Modern-Day Croatia is a Carbon Copy of WWII Nazi-Monstrous Independent State of Croatia
The radical and revisionist messages of far-right Croatian politicians and historians find a sympathetic audience among many members of Croatia’s huge émigré community [...]
Ante Pavelic – a leader of the Independent State of Croatia with the Roman Catholic clergy
Scattered over almost two centuries across the globe – in Germany, the US, Canada, Argentina and Australia – most members of the Croatian diaspora are still closely linked to their homeland.
The Croatian state responds in kind; it pledges to take “special care” of Croats living abroad, a pledge outlined in the country’s 1990 constitution. Subsequently, Croatia has set up the Central State Office for Croats Abroad, as well as a government body, the Council for Croats Abroad.
More controversially, some in the diaspora maintain close ties with the extreme right in Croatia, pushing a very sympathetic view of the Fascist Ustasa movement that ran the so-called Independent State of Croatia, NDH, under German-Italian patronage during World War II.
In late December, the appointment of Ante Juric, a prominent representative of the Croat community in Australia, to the government’s Council, attracted media attention.
Controversy arose after Juric told a Croat-language TV show on Australia’s SBS radio that the NDH was not a reviled Nazi satellite state but “a Croatian state, and I’m glad it was – while [its leader, Ante] Pavelic was for me one of the greatest Croats in history”.
Germany is home to the biggest Croat community in Europe, numbering some 440,000 people – equal to just over 10 per cent of Croatia’s total population.
Searching for better life, many Croats left what was then Yugoslavia for Germany back in the 1960s, and this trend has continued, increasing after Croatia joined the EU in 2013.
Danijel Majic, a German-Croat journalist who writes about right-wing extremism in Germany for the daily Frankfurter Rundschau, says the connections between parts of Croatian diaspora in Germany and the far right in Croatia are well established.
Croatia’s conservative Christian values NGO, “In the Name of the Family”, has a de facto branch in Germany. This was the NGO that pushed successfully for a referendum in Croatia in 2013 on marriage, defining it as an exclusively heterosexual union and effectively blocking the path to legalised gay marriage.
The NGO also helped file a successful plea for the legal rehabilitation of Filip Lukas, an intellectual close to the Ustasa regime. In July, the Zagreb County Court quashed the verdict passed decades ago by Yugoslav courts, rehabilitating him in full.
Majic says the Catholic Church provides important help for rightist movements among the émigrés.
“The only serious infrastructure among the Croat émigrés in Germany are the missions of the Catholic Church there … Since they the only ones that can offer venues for different political rallies or debates, almost exclusively for rightist politicians and NGOs,” he says.
While Majic says the German Catholic Church often “is not informed” about the activities organised within Croat Catholic missions, they are part-financed by the German Catholic Church, which is also financed partially from the German state budget.
Among those visiting these missions is Croatia’s far-right TV star Velimir Bujanec, host of the controversial TV show, Bujica, which is shown on the four biggest local TV stations in Croatia and aired abroad.
He has become increasingly influential thanks to the high-level guests appearing on his show, and his acquaintances, who include Croatia’s President, Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic.
Another controversial figure, Admiral Davor Domazet Loso, recently visited the German cities of Munich, Stuttgart and Offenbach on a mission organised by a Croatian priest.
In September, as tensions peaked between Croatia and Slovenia over the disputed waters in the Piran Gulf, Domazet Loso released an inflammatory statement declaring that the Croatian military “could be in Ljubljana in two days”.
Majic says events in the diaspora are organised also with the help of right-wing news sites, like Dnevno.hr and its weekly magazine 7 dnevno.
“It is a part of an obvious system, a political concept under which the Catholic Church, in a way, fosters far-right positions,” Majic adds.
Croat-run death camp of Jasenovac, Croatia (1941-1945): Around 700.000 killed, among them 500.000 Serbs
The film that premiered in Zagreb in April 2016, was screened also in cities across Germany, such as Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Offenbach and Darmstadt.
It has been fiercely criticised for seeming to downplay the crimes committed by the Ustasa in the camp, where over 83,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews and leftists were killed between 1941 and 1945.
Majic says the right-wing radicals in the diaspora constantly push a narrative that the Ustasa “weren’t as bad as the Communists”, and even that “the Ustasa weren’t villains at all”.
The recent verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, ICTY, against six Bosnian Croat officials, and the suicide in court of one of those convicted, Slobodan Praljak, resonated strongly among Croatian communities in Germany, with the Church clearly taking the side of those who claimed Praljak was innocent and blamed the ICTY for his death.
After some Croat Catholic missions announced that Church services would be held in Germany for Praljak, the German Catholic Church distanced itself with a statement noting that “pastoral staff serving the dioceses should not question the verdict of The Hague Tribunal”.
Memories of the Croatian war of independence in the 1990s also loom large among the Croatian diaspora in Germany; back then, many members of the diaspora were actively involved in it.
Croatian communities collected money to buy arms for Croatia, which was under a UN-imposed embargo on arms reaching former Yugoslavia. They also assisted the Croat side in the three-way war in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, between Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks.
“I remember that Croats in Frankfurt gathered money to buy a tank for the HVO [the Bosnian Croat armed force] in Kupres [in Bosnia] … I also remember how young men went to the war in Croatia as well. Some would go to fight during the vacation and then return to work in Germany,” Majic says.
Community in Latin America is in decline
Another sizeable Croat community is located in Argentina, which is home to around 250,000 of people of Croat decent.
However, many of these left what was then Austria-Hungary back in the 1900s, and have weaker ties to the country.
In Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, only around 5,000 of them have Croatian citizenship and can vote in the country’s elections.
The first wave of Croats reached Argentina in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Mostly came for economic reasons, after a vine disease devastated the vineyards on which many people depended in the coastal region of Dalmatia.
The second wave of arrivals that came after World War II, were mostly affiliated to the Ustasa regime, reaching Argentina from refugee camps in Italy and Austria, after the Communists took power in Yugoslavia in 1945.
Among them were some of the highest NDH officials, including Pavelic himself, as well as Eugen “Dido” Kvaternik who was in charge of the NDH concentration camps.
Along with them came Catholic clergy and intellectuals who opposed the new Communist regime.
While the role of the Latin American diaspora was strong during Yugoslav times, when it was seen as a dissident hub, its role has declined since the 1991-95 war in Croatia.
During the 1990s, however, members of the diaspora in Argentina gathered money to buy arms for Croatian forces in both Croatia and Bosnia. Arms were bought from Argentina and the deals involved some of top Argentinean officials, including the then President, Carlos Menem.
In 2013, an Argentinean court jailed Menem for seven years for taking part in an illegal shipment of arms to Croatia defying the UN embargo. The sentence was later commuted to house arrest.
Some Croats from Argentina went to Croatia to fight during the war as volunteers. One of them, Branko “Pilino” Pilsel, who was killed by the Yugoslav army in 1991 in Dalmatia, still has a special place in the memory of the community in Argentina.
Jasenovac: “Final Solution” of the Serb Question in the Independent State of Croatia
Kazimir Katalinic, who was 18 when he left Yugoslavia in 1945, wrote a four-volume book, From Defeat to Victory, chronicling the Croatian diaspora from 1945 to 1990, which the far-right former Culture Minister of Croatia, Zlatko Hasanbegovic, helped to promote.
However, the influence of the radical diaspora in Argentina had faded, as former NDH officials or political dissidents slowly die away.
The turnout of Croat voters in Argentina in Croatia’s recent elections or referendums has been low.
Due to their lack of interest and because they can only cast votes in Buenos Aires, only 181 people voted in the second round of the Croatian presidential elections in 2015 and 130 in the parliamentary elections in 2016.
While now small in size, the diaspora in Argentina remains mostly oriented to the right. Its members voted against Croatia’s accession to the EU in 2012, and in favour of defining marriage as an exclusively heterosexual union in the 2013 referendum.
More radical elements among them also downplay the crimes committed in Jasenovac.
In 2017, at the Croat community centre in Buenos Aires and on their radio show Croacias Totales, members of a revisionist Croatian NGO, the Society for Research into the Threefold Jasenovac Camp, held lectures in which they insisted that Jasenovac had not been a concentration camp after all.
Despite much documentation and historical research to the contrary, the NGO claimed that Jasenovac was merely a labour camp under the Ustasa – and only became a death camp when the Communists took over.
Most members of the Croatian diaspora there follow the Croacias Totales radio show, which also has its website, as well as a Facebook page. These sites closely follow various events in Croatia, and replay controversial messages from Croatian clergy, among others.
Other radio shows such as Bar Croata and Croacia en mi corazon [Croatia in my heart], are all present on Facebook as well.
Some in the diaspora in Argentina keep up with the far right in Croatia by watching TV shows like Bujica and Markov trg, which was put under a temporary ban of local Z1 TV in 2016 after its host, Marko Juric, warned people in Zagreb to beware of so-called “Chetniks” lurking in the city’s Serbian Orthodox church.
Members of the diaspora in Argentina also criticised the recent verdict against six Bosnian Croat officials in the papers and radio shows.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
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.
[wpedon id=”4696″ align=”left”]
Modern-day Croatia is a carbon copy of WWII Nazi-monstrous Independent State of Croatia
Outrageous: Slobodan Milosevic cleared of charges by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. But no-one is talking about it!The ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) has discharged Slobodan Milosevic from 1992-95 Bosnian war crimes allegations. This is definitely prime time news, while it holds endless political implications. Oddly enough, though, no major international mainstream media seems to have noticed.Well, it is understable for everyone to be keeping it quiet: those who with one voice did dub him the “butcher of the Balkans”; those who associated him to Hitler, initiating a pattern which would later be extended ...
Last month was the 18th anniversary of the attack on the Serbian village of Kravica committed by Moslem forces from Srebrenica under the command of Naser Orić on Orthodox Christmas day, January 7, 1993. Several dozen villagers were killed in the attack, the remaining Serbian population was forced to flee to safety, and many homes were pillaged, demolished and torched during the several weeks that Kravica was forcibly occupied by neighbours from nearby Srebrenica. Regardless of arcane debates of who started the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, on a human level the attack on the village of Kravica and the ...
Obama has announced new sanctions on Russia based on unsubstantiated charges by the CIA that the Russian government influenced the outcome of the US presidential election with “malicious cyber-enabled activities.”The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a report “related to the declaration of 35 Russian officials persona non grata for malicious cyber activity and harassment.”The report is a description of “tools and infrastructure used by Russian intelligence services to compromise and exploit networks and infrastructure associated with the recent U.S. election, as well as a range of U.S. government, political and private sector entities.”The report does not provide ...
On 4 April 2019, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known as NATO, marked the 70th anniversary of its existence with a conference attended by the foreign ministers of member nations in Washington DC. This will be complemented by a meeting of the heads of state of member nations in London next December.Coinciding with the anniversary event on 4 April, peace activists and concerned scholars in several countries conducted a variety of events to draw attention to, and further document, the many war crimes and other atrocities committed by NATO (sometimes by deploying its associate and crony terrorist armies – ISIS, ...
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 ...
Serbs: Basic factsEthnic location: Central and western part of the Balkan Peninsula (South-East Europe)Population: 10.2 million (1.8 million Serbs live outside their ethnic location)Language: SerbianReligion: Eastern Orthodox Christians1 Introduction Serbs belong to the Southslavonic group of Indo-European peoples. As their tradition, culture, language, beliefs, and customs show, the ethnogenesis of Serbs goes far back into the past. Serbian ancestors, Protoslavs and Old Serbs, were described in the 5th century BC by Herodotus, under the names of Neuri and Budini, living north of the Danube in the region between Dniepar and north-eastern Carpathian Mountains.The first mention of the name “Serbs” appears ...
Israeli propaganda about the “expulsion” of Arab Jews from Arab countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s continues without respite. Earlier this month, Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, informed UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that he “intends to submit a draft resolution requiring the international body to hold an annual commemoration for the hundreds of thousands of Jews exiled from Arab countries due to the creation of the State of Israel”, according to a report in Ynet.Israel’s fabrications about the immigration of Arab Jews to Israel are so outrageous that the country holds a commemoration on 30 November each year. ...
Russian President Vladimir Putin put it succinctly when he recently warned that prospects for peace in Ukraine were negligible as long as the current authorities in Kiev remain in power. Worse, given a new rash of provocations by the Kiev regime, the entire region is being threatened with conflict, and even all-out war.It seems clear – and criminally reprehensible – that the Kiev regime and its President Petro Poroshenko are intent on dragging the United States and the NATO military alliance into a war with Russia. The incendiary conduct of Ukrainian politicians and their military is that of a regime ...
The WarmongersThe war, which began in August 1914 – to contemporaries the Great War, to posterity the First World War – marked the end of one period of history and the beginning of another. Starting as a European war, it turned in 1917, with the entrance of the US into a world war. The spark that triggered it off was the assassination of the Austrian heir-presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1864−1914), by a Bosnian nationalist of Serb origin – Gavrilo Princip[1], a member of the Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna) movement, in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914 on his official visit to ...
The painful issue of using the Russian language in Latvia appears on the agenda once again. Ethnic Russians “knock at the doors” of international organizations trying to defend their rights to speak and get an education in their native language. Their hope for understanding in Latvia is melting every day.It has become known that the Russian Community in Latvia sent a letter to the Council of Europe about the violation of human rights. The message addressed to Secretary-General Thorbjorn Jagland also calls for a request from the Venice Commission to amend the two Latvian language laws which were adopted by ...
Russia, Oil and RevolutionBy the 1870s, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Empire had a virtual monopoly over the United States, and even many foreign countries. In 1890, the King of Holland gave his blessing for the creation of an international oil company called Royal Dutch Oil Company, which was mainly founded to refine and sell kerosene from Indonesia, a Dutch colony. Also in 1890, a British company was founded with the intended purpose of shipping oil, the Shell Transport and Trading Company, and it “began transporting Royal Dutch oil from Sumatra to destinations everywhere,” and eventually, “the two companies merged ...
For decades, much of the world seemed to believe the fairy tale that the United States was a neutral broker, working for a solution to the issues plaguing Palestine and Israel. The U.S. sponsored endless rounds of negotiations, ostensibly looking for an end to these issues.Before this writer points out the nonsense of that belief, allow him to state two, self-evident (one would think) truths:(1) No broker is needed. All that is required is for Israel to adhere to international law. This means removing all the illegal settlers, ending the blockade of the Gaza Strip, allowing all Palestinian refugees to ...
Clinton/NATO Intervention In Balkans Revealed As Half-Witted DhimmitudeFebruary 26, 2007- San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Twelve years after the alleged Srebrenica massacre, the International Court of Justice [ICJ] has found that charges alleging that a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing by the Bosnian Serb government was used against the Bosnian Muslims are baseless, yet the court adamantly maintains a belief in the myth of Srebrenica, much in the way that Islamists worldwide hold on to the Jenin hoax because both serve to stoke anti-Western, anti-Israel sentiment.From the beginning it should have been clear that the Clinton administration's decision to ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & 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"]
If you want to know the untold history of the U.S.A., then a good place to start is with the history of US imperialism in Asia from the mid-19th century until today. Not only will that reveal the history of the criminality of US foreign policy, but it will also reveal the true nature of U.S. capitalism, imperialism, fascism and U.S. wars of aggression: past, present and future.For centuries the U.S. has preached that it believes in democracy, freedom and self-determination, but its actions towards other countries speak louder than words. Internationally the U.S. is a predator and a bully. ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & 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"]Save
For the 11th year running, the center of Lithuania’s beautiful capital, Vilnius, was gifted in the high afternoon hours this past Sunday, March 11th, to far-righters and neo-Nazis on the annual holiday cherished by the free world for its historic importance, in 1990, in the series of events that toppled the Soviet Union’s hated misrule. The Defending History community, all resolute admirers of Lithuania who celebrate its success, has monitored this event annually. The international outcry after the 2008 event, which featured “Juden raus” and a throng of swastikas had led to curious “compromises” each year between organizers and the municipality ...
The UK Parliament just confirmed what the alternative media has been saying for years.Specifically, a new report from the bipartisan House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee – based on interviews with all of the key British decision-makers, review of documents, and on-the-ground investigations in Africa – found that the Libyan war was based on lies, that it destroyed the country, and that it spread terrorism far and wide.The War Based On Bogus Intelligence … Like the Iraq WarInitially, the report finds that the threat to civilians from Libyan government forces was dramatically overstated:Former French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, who introduced ...
The 1775−1783 American War of IndependenceThe American Revolution or the American War of Independence against British colonial lordship started in 1775 when the Thirteen Colonies began to fight for their political independence from London. In fact, fighting began at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in April 1775. In June the colonies’ Continental Congress created a Continental Army under General George Washington. However, despite several defeats, and the loss of New York (former New Amsterdam) in September 1776, Washington hung on, and at Christmas 1776, with the successful crossing of the Delaware, won several battles. The campaign culminated in Saratoga in 1777. ...
Dear Readers, some of you are pushing me to continue with the Las Vegas shooting story while others are asking to know what to make of the release of files pertaining to President Kennedy’s assassination. I appreciate that you are interested and are unsatisfied with official explanations.My answer is that we already know, thanks to exhaustively researched books such as James W. Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable (Simon & Schuster, 2008), far more than is in the released files. My answer is also that it doesn’t matter what we know or what the facts are, the official story will never be changed. ...
Ante Pavelic – a leader of the Independent State of Croatia with the Roman Catholic clergy 
Croat-run death camp of Jasenovac, Croatia (1941-1945): Around 700.000 killed, among them 500.000 Serbs
Jasenovac: “Final Solution” of the Serb Question in the Independent State of Croatia
Modern-day Croatia is a carbon copy of WWII Nazi-monstrous Independent State of Croatia
