Croatian Ministers Salute Criminals and Dishonour the Dead
When two ministers praised two Croatian war criminals last week, it highlighted senior officials’ moral failure to accept that these men were convicted of terrible crimes or to show the slightest respect for those who died [...]
Last 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 killed
Croatian 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 recipient of the spa treatment, “as I regularly do” when war veterans are serving prison time for war crimes.
“Croatia has its Homeland War [term officially used in Croatia for the 1990s war] as the foundation of a modern Croatian state, has its Croatian defenders [war veterans], of whom we are proud,” Krsticevic added, reminding reporters that the war and its veterans are sacrosanct here in Croatia.
A few days earlier, while marking the 25th anniversary of the successful Medak Pocket military operation in the Lika region, Krsticevic issued a special greeting to Norac, who was present at the ceremony in the town of Gospic.
“We have to be proud of the Medak Pocket action, as far as Mirko Norac is concerned, it was war, he was the commander of the Gospic headquarters zone, and because of what happened here, he carries his cross. I’m glad he’s here with us today,” Krsticevic said.
It is not clear when Krsticevic referred to Norac’s ‘cross’ if he was implying that Norac was innocent of the crimes or simply suggesting it was tough that he had to serve a sentence.
Medved, who publicly welcomed Norac during this year’s official ceremony to mark the anniversary of the 1995 military operation ‘Storm’, defended Krsticevic, reminding reporters of the merits of war veterans and of Norac.
“He has served his sentence, but let’s not neglect the contribution he has made. Everyone should be honoured and respected for what he did in defence of the homeland… All who have contributed to defending the homeland have their place in history,” Medved said.
While both Mercep and Norac are without doubt war veterans, their potential merits should be seen in the light of the deaths they ordered or failed to prevent.
A war criminal Tomislav Merčep
A girl in pink pyjamas
“The girl came out through the door; her hands were tied. However, snow was falling so she started to slip on the snowy ground. I picked her up in my arms and carried her… Someone told me to cover her eyes; I took a piece of linen that hung over her neck…
“After that, I turned around, and I didn’t want to watch. Then I heard multiple shots. When I turned again, I saw in Munib [Suljic’s] hand a Heckler [& Koch automatic rifle],” Sinisa Rimac, a member of a Croatian reserve police unit, told police investigators in December 1991.
Rimac and his colleague Nebojsa Hodak then picked up the lifeless body of 12-year-old Aleksandra Zec, dressed in pink pyjamas, and threw her in a pre-prepared pit in which the body of her mother Marija – killed only moments earlier – was already lying.
Hearing someone’s last breath in the pit, Igor Mikola, another unit member, fired a round at Aleksandra and Marija to make sure neither remained alive.
After burying the bodies, police officers threw some trash over the burial site to further cover their tracks, which were covered by snow where the pit have been dug on Mount Medvednica, overlooking Zagreb.
Aleksandra and Marija Zec, who were Croatian Serbs, were kidnapped from their family home in Zagreb around midnight on December 7, 1991, after witnessing the murder of the girl’s father, local businessman Mihajlo Zec.
In the botched prosecution that followed, all five policemen were acquitted. Many of the unit’s members received medals, while Rimac was even made responsible for the security of wartime Defence Minister Gojko Susak.
The unofficial name of the unit was the Mercepovci (Mercep’s Men). It got itself a notorious image in the 1990s, and the wider public became more or less familiar with its criminal deeds.
But the murder of the Zec family was not an isolated incident. It was more or less the modus operandi of the unit.
“My name is Miro Bajramovic, and I’m directly responsible for the deaths of 86 people. Knowing this fact, I fall asleep at nights and get up in the morning if I fall asleep at all,” ,” Bajramovic, another of Mercep’s men, told the weekly magazine Feral Tribune in 1997.
“I alone have killed 72 people, including nine women. We did not differentiate; we did not ask anything; for us, they were Chetniks [derogatory term for Serbs during the 1990s war] and enemies. The hardest thing was to burn the first house and kill the first man. After that, everything goes according to a pattern,” Bajramovic said.
After years on trial, in 2017 the Supreme Court sentenced Mercep to seven years in prison for not preventing or sanctioning his subordinates who killed 43 civilians, mostly Serbs, in 1991 and 1992. Although he was initially indicted for ordering the crimes, the prosecution amended the indictment as the trial was reaching its end.
‘Who hasn’t fired yet?!’
“You aren’t going to kill us, you aren’t going to shoot us,” an elderly Serb women shouted as they were taken to the execution site near Gospic in October 1991.
Mirko Norac told his men that everyone would be given someone to kill. To set an example, he takes out his pistol and shots an elderly woman in the head. He then tries to kill a younger prisoner, but his pistol seizes up and fails to fire three times, and he gives up.
“Fire! Fire! Who hasn’t fired yet?!” he screams to his subordinates, wanting them all as accomplices in the murder of at least 50 Serb civilians.
Less than two years after these killings, in the same region, Gospic, Norac was involved in another huge crime. During the ‘Medak Pocket’ operation, aimed at pushing back Croatian Serb forces from Gospic, the Croatian Army took control of a few villages, capturing some Serb soldiers and elderly villagers.
During and after the operation, some of the Croatian soldiers showed unprecedented brutality, killing 22 civilians and two prisoners of war, some through torture. The atrocities included putting salt on wounds and soldiers doing target practice with knives using an elderly man who was still alive.
So what happened in 1991 was not an isolated incident; this was also more of less Norac’s modus operandi.
In 2004, Norac was found guilty of the crimes committed in 1991 and sentenced to 12 years in prison. For the crimes committed during the ‘Medak Pocket’ operation, he got six years in 2009.
In the end, he was given a joint 15-year-long sentence. After serving only ten years, Norac was given early release in 2011, despite never expressing remorse.
A war criminal Mirko Norac
After prison, profit
Although legally there are no obstacles to sending a war criminal to a medical spa or welcoming a war criminal who “carries his cross”, there are moral issues.
Mercep apparently had a doctor’s prescription for a medical spa treatment, along with his legally-guaranteed veteran’s privileges, but it does look as though he has been getting a better deal than some of his wartime comrades.
While one can live with the fact that war veterans have advantages in receiving medical services, there are many war veterans who struggle to secure a place in a spa for treatment they need.
I am not advocating that prisoners should be kept in solitary confinement, without access to proper medical treatment, or be subjected to torture or made to do forced labour. However, they should not have more privileges than an ordinary citizen who has been waiting for medical treatment for months.
If the status of a war veteran is so sacred, then what about Aleksandar Antic, a Croatian soldier killed in Pakracka Poljana in 1991 by Mercep’s unit, whose body was never recovered? Why isn’t Medved thinking of him and his family?
Meanwhile Norac, as well as the damage he has done, has also cost the state financially; Croatia had to pay tens of thousands of euros in compensation to the families of his victims.
Although the state has tried to force him to pay part of the compensation, Norac should have no complaint about the way the state has treated him.
Upon his release from prison, he got a pension of some 1,350 euros a month – some five times more than an average pension at the time.
Additionally, state companies and institutions have become some of Norac’s biggest clients, buying services from his security company. His company’s income jumped 200 per cent in 2017 compared to the year before.
While justice has evaded Aleksandra Zec and nothing can bring back the dead in Gospic, both Norac and Mercep have been treated rather well.
If their health allows them, the two men will enjoy long lives that will not end like those of their victims. With their pensions, houses and companies, they will have an everyday standard of living that is better than average Croatian citizens.
Therefore, besides their privileges, which are completely in line with legal norms in Croatia, the state shouldn’t offer Norac and Mercep anything more – especially not the respect they have been granted by ministers in recent days, which they clearly do not deserve.
EuroCroatia today: Split, September 14th, 2018.
The inscription on the car from Serbia: “Kill the Serb”. A photo by the car’s owner
Originally published on 2018-09-14
About the author: Sven Milekic is the outgoing Zagreb correspondent for BIRN’s Balkan Transitional Justice project. This article is written in a personal capacity.
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.
EuroCroatia today: Croatia’s President Kolinda Grabar Kitarović with a flag of a Nazi-fascist WWII Independent State of Croatia
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 ...
Magnum Crimen the book about clericalism in Croatia from the end of 19th century until the end of the Second World War.The book, whose full title is Magnum crimen – pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj (The Great Crime – a half-century of clericalism in Croatia), was written by a former Catholic priest and professor and historian at Belgrade University, Viktor Novak (1889–1977). The book was first published in Zagreb in 1948.Immediately after the book was published, the Vatican Curia placed this book on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (English: List of Prohibited Books) and pronounced anathema against the author.BackgroundNovak wrote a ...
Of the 22 Nazi concentration camps operating in the clerical fascist state of Croatia during World War II, nearly half were under the command of Roman Catholic priests.They were responsible for the grisly slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. Serbs, Roma, and Jews were specifically targeted for extermination.Catholic clergy was especially keen to eradicate the Serbian Orthodox Church. This led to the murder of Christian Serbian Priests, forced conversions of Serbian Christians, and the destruction of 450 Christian Orthodox Churches during World War II.“Kill all Serbs. And when you finish come here, to the Church, and ...
August 24th, Ukrainian Independence Day, will see a ceremony introducing the country's new official army salute, as prescribed by Ukraine’s Presidential decree: Glory to Ukraine! - Glory to the Heroes!"We have consulted with the Minister of Defense, National Security and Defense Council, Government and I have decided that starting from August 24 these words will be heard for the first time as part of the official military parade ceremony on the Independence Day of Ukraine," Petro Poroshenko was quoted saying on the Ukraine President's official site.Glory to Ukraine! - Glory to the Heroes! is a slogan of the UPA, the ...
It was in 2015 hundred years anniversary of secret treaty signed between three Entente members of the U.K., France and the Russian Empire on the one hand, and Italy on the other, in London on April 26th, 1915 nine months after the break up the Great War of 1914−1918.[1]In a political-military effort to involve Italy in the war on their own side against the Central Powers members of Germany and Austria-Hungary within a month, these three Entente block members confirmed the Italian possession of the ex-Ottoman province of Libya (acquired by Italy in 1912) and the Dodecanese islands in the ...
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 ...
Part IThe political purpose of Vitezović’s writingsThe ultimate political purpose of P. R. Vitezović’s works, based on his ideological construction, was of a triple nature.First of all, he tried to refute the Venetian claims on the territory of Dalmatia, the Istrian Peninsula, the Dalmatian Islands and Boka Kotorska (Cattaro Gulf in present-day Montenegro) that rose during the Great Vienna War 1683–1699 in which the Republic of St. Marco successfully fought the Ottoman Sultanate in a coalition with the Habsburg Empire [Banac 1984, 73]. The war clearly marked the beginning of the irreversible decline of the Ottoman power which consequently opened ...
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 ...
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 ...
Tito’s policy in the 1970s of the so-called “encourage and suppress” for the sake to struggle against politically undesirable and threatening ethnic nationalisms especially the Croat and the Serb ones appeared to be incoherent one. In another words, while some ethnic nationalisms and their ideologies were considered to be dangerous to the system and, therefore, were suppressed and their advocates were jailed or banned from employment[i] (the case, for instance, of the Serbian dissident professors from Belgrade University), other nationalisms, supposed to be non-dangerous for the regime were encouraged by the local Communist elites (for instance, the Albanian nationalism in ...
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 ...
The Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941. Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) which was the most influential party in Croatia at the time, rejected offers by the Nazi Germany to lead the new government. On 10 April the most senior home-based Ustaša, Slavko Kvaternik, took control of the police in Zagreb and in a radio broadcast that day proclaimed the formation of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). The new Independent State of Croatia" was established as a pro-Nazi government. It was dedicated to a clerical-fascist ideology influenced both by ...
When the civil war in Ukraine started, the question that arised is whether there are similarities between Ukrainian and Yugoslavian civil wars. So let’s compare these two countries, one that is falling apart – Ukraine and the other one that doesn’t exist anymore – Yugoslavia.Multinational countryYugoslavia was a multinational country with different national and ethnic groups coexisting together and two dominant nations Serbs and Croats. Ukraine is also quite a diverse country with Ukrainians, Russians (around 20% of Ukrainian population) and few minorities (Rusyns, Romanians, Hungarians) living together. Once the Yugoslavia collapsed, in a newly created ex-Yugoslav republic Croatia and ...
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 ...
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 ...
Croatia's President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic with Croatian diaspora in Canada holding the flag of WWII Nazi-Ustashi Independent State of CroatiaCroatia’s president, the former deputy NATO secretary general for public diplomacy Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, decided to pay homage to Nazis of the Ustasha Nazi puppet regime of Croatia shot by Yugoslav partisans at the end of World War II. Grabar-Kitarovic’s tone deafness in choosing Victory in Europe week to honor dead Nazis shocked the Balkans and the rest of Europe.The Ustasha, along with their Slovenian and Serb loyalists to the Nazi puppet regime, were killed by the partisans under the command of anti-fascist ...
The ethnic division of SFR Yugoslavia in 1991“Thousands joined a peaceful protest on Saturday in the Croatian town of Vukovar to express their anger at Croatian institutions for their “silence” over war crimes committed during the 1990s war” (Balkan Transitional Justice, 2018-10-13).The following essay is my constructive contribution to the above article.PrefaceOn the occasion of more than two decades of the end of the civil war on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia (1991−1995), it is necessary to reassess the real causes and cardinal perpetrators of Yugoslavia’s internal and external bloody destruction. In the western scientific literature of the “liberal democracy” scholars ...
The Serb holocaust during the WWII in the Independent State of Croatia is not a misnomer, an accusation, and even less a speculation. It is an historical fact. Rabid nationalism and religious dogmatism were its two main ingredients. During the existence of Croatia as an independent Catholic State, over 700,000 men, women and children perished. Many were executed, tortured, died of starvation, buried alive, or were burned to death. Hundreds were forced to become Catholic. Catholic padres ran concentration camps; Catholic priests were officers of the military corps which committed such atrocities. 700,000 in a total population of a few ...
IntroductionYugoslavia as a state was officially created hundred years ago on December 1st, 1918 as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed on January 6th, 1929 to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). The country emerged legally from the Corfu Pact of 1917 (signed agreement between Serbia’s government and the South-Slavic representatives from the Habsburg Monarchy) and was an extremely heterogeneous state from ethnic, geographic, historical, confessional, and linguistic points of view.Yugoslavia’s religious and ethnic diversity was expressed in two mutually opposite national-political ideas about the nature and future of the new state. It is true that Slovenia and Croatia had ...
The so called "Croatian scenario", is something that has been periodically brought up after the start of the armed conflict in Donbass. (Among other instances, yours truly noted this in articles from this past December 17 and August 24, 2015.) Promoted at Johnson's Russia List, the December 28 Euromaidan Press article "What Ukraine Can Take from the 'Croatian Scenario' of Conflict Resolution", omits some key factors for being apprehensive about the probability for success of an Operation Storm like strike against the Donbass rebels.In 1995, the Serb Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, had essentially dropped the Krajina Serbs, with the hope that he could improve his relationship with the West. At ...
Neo-Nazi Ustashi in Zagreb today
A WWII Independent State of Croatia in which 700.000 Serbs were brutally killed
A war criminal Tomislav Merčep
A war criminal Mirko Norac
EuroCroatia today: Split, September 14th, 2018. 
EuroCroatia today: Croatia’s President Kolinda Grabar Kitarović with a flag of a Nazi-fascist WWII Independent State of Croatia
