Byzantine Blog

Croatian Holocaust Denial Becomes Politically Correct

The opening of the “new memorial” in Croatia to the victims of the Croat Ustasha bestiality in Jasenovac has been nothing short of a scandalous attempt at yet another Holocaust denial, this time widely accepted by the Western mainstream media and even by those who have, supposedly, dedicated their lives to making sure that the victims of fascist ideology and genocide get properly honored and remembered, such as the new head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, Efraim Zuroff.

To his credit, Jared Israel happens to be among the handful of researchers who have raised their voices against this shameless attempt at minimizing the victims of the “third most productive death camp,” the “Yugoslav Auschwitz” where, according to the survivors and the records of Serbian Orthodox Church, over 840,000 men, women and children were slaughtered in the most brutal fashion: 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 30,000 Gypsies (the researchers cited in the previous link mention the number of 26,000 Gypsies, instead of 30,000). This documentary filmed at the very end of the WWII, while all the wounds and terrifying memories were still fresh, confirms the same number of innocent victims of Croat Ustashe pathological sadism.

Faced with the mockery of a Holocaust Memorial, such as the one erected in Croatian Jasenovac, most people will brush off the shameful denial like any irrelevant disagreement, as if it’s no more than a matter of personal views and a subjective issue, adding that “the numbers are not THAT important,” since each life is invaluable and the whole thing is horrific regardless if we are talking about the slaughter of 8,000, 80,000 or more than 800,000 of innocent civilians. True.

But it is equally true that every one of the 840,000 men, women and children who have suffered the unspeakable horrors in the hands of Croat fascists in Jasenovac extermination camp, and were killed merely for being of different faith and ethnicity deserves to be remembered and honored, instead of being wiped off everyone’s memory as if they never existed, simply because erasing their names from the history books serves the interests of certain political circles in power today and is a politically correct thing to do nowadays — to the eternal shame of us all.

Croatian Government’s Holocaust-Denying Exhibition at the Jasenovac Death Camp

Part of report by Jared Israel, Editor of Emperor’s Clothes

Here is some background needed to understand the terrible significance of the 27 November 2006 opening of the Croatian government’s exhibition at the site of the Jasenovac death camp in Western Slavonia, which territory was seized by Croatia in a military blitz in May 1995.

Serbian Charges that Croatia is Resurrecting Ustasha Politics Widely Mocked

In June 1991, the Yugoslav Republic of Croatia, under the domination of the HDZ (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica or Croatian Democratic Union), led by Franjo Tudjman and by Stjepan Mesic (who is now president of Croatia), launched a war of secession that helped destroy Yugoslavia. The HDZ revived symbols and policies of the notorious Croatian Ustasha, a movement inspired by fanatical Catholicism and directed against “foreign elements” (meaning primarily Serbs).

In April 1941 the Ustashe had formed the first Independent State of Croatia, in which they committed mass murder of Slavs (in this case, Serbs), Jews, and Roma (‘Gypsies’) on a par with their German Nazi allies. (See Encyclopedia of the Holocaust article on Croatia.)

In launching the second Independent Croatia in 1991, Tudjman, Mesic and their associates minimized or denied Ustasha crimes, at the same time mobilizing the Ustasha apparatus and mass base that had flourished in the Croatian Diaspora since the Ustashe’s World War II defeat. The Serbian charges that Croatia was resurrecting Ustasha politics and policies, particularly the Ustasha attempt to make Croatia and Bosnia serbenrein, and that the HDZ was recruiting Ustasha personnel from the Diaspora, were mocked by the world media, which has for the most part suppressed the evidence linking modern Croatia to its Ustasha past. An example of this evidence (and its suppression): a video was broadcast, first on the Internet, and then on 9 December 2006 on prime time Croatian Television, in which the current president of Croatia, Stjepan Mesic, is shown addressing a crowd of Australian-Croatians in the early 1990s, saying:

Suppressed: Croat President Mesic Claims Croats Won Twice in WWII

You see, in the Second World War, the Croats won twice and we have no reason to apologise to anyone. What they ask of the Croats the whole time, ‘Go kneel in Jasenovac, kneel here...’ We don’t have to kneel in front of anyone for anything! We won twice and all the others only once. We won on 10 April when the Axis Powers recognized Croatia as a state and we won because we sat after the war, again with the winners, at the winning table.

Croatian leader’s alleged speech glorifying WW2 pro-Nazi state widely condemned, Text of report in English by Croatian news agency HINA, BBC Monitoring Europe - Political Supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring, December 10, 2006 Sunday, 498 words

(A Windows Media Video of Mesic’s speech in the original Serbo-Croatian)

Despite the political significance of this video, both in terms of understanding the Serbian-Croatian conflict over the past sixteen years and judging the sincerity of Croatian President Mesic’s current claim to abhor Ustasha politics, and despite the fact that three leading Croatian TV newspeople were suspended for broadcasting the video and subsequently reinstated, following an uproar in Croatia, despite these highly newsworthy events, and despite the fact that some of the main international news agencies - including Associated Press, Agence France Presse, ANSA and BBC Monitoring - all covered this story, nevertheless, out of the thousands of English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch newspapers and TV news stations archived by the Lexis-Nexis media search engine, we could find only one - the Dutch newspaper, Dagblad van het Noorden - that even mentioned the scandal.

On 15 December 2006, the Speaker of the Croatian parliament compounded the scandal by admitting on TV that he and current president Mesic might have “possibly” sung songs celebrating “Jure and Boban” during the 1990s. (Boban was a commander of the Black Legion, the Ustasha SS unit comprised of Croatian Catholics and Muslims that slaughtered untold tens of thousands of Serbian civilians during World War II — nobody knows the total number of Serbs they killed because entire villages were wiped out, leaving no witnesses, with people burned alive, or thrown dead or alive into rivers or dumped still alive into mountain crevasses, which, by the way, Yugoslav President Tito ordered sealed with cement after World War II, in the interest of brotherhood.) Here is an excerpt from the report from HINA, the Croatian news agency. The comments in brackets are from the BBC Monitoring news service, which translated the HINA dispatch:

Croatian Assembly Speaker Vladimir Seks said on HTV’s [Croatian TV] ‘Otvoreno’ [Openly] programme this evening — in response to a journalist’s question on the truthfulness of the claim that he and state President Stjepan Mesic sang [Ustasha — WWII pro-Nazis] songs about “Jure and Boban” [Ustasha commanders] - that: “It is possible that this occurred, it is not out of the question.

Croatian Speaker admits he may have sung Ustasha songs with president, Text of report in English by Croatian news agency HINA, BBC Monitoring Europe — Political Supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring, December 15, 2006 Friday, 201 words

As with the Mesic speech, BBC Monitoring sent the Croatian new agency dispatch to its worldwide network of media subscribers, many if not most of whom would also get it direct from Croatia, but no newspaper or TV news program archived by Lexis-Nexis has covered the story. I discovered the dispatch quite by accident.

Western Media Deliberately Misinformed the Public About the Character of Modern Croatia

The manifest suppression of these shocking stories supports my charge that the Western media has deliberately misinformed the public about the character of modern Croatia. It constitutes indirect support for the related charge, that the Western media (as well as various Western government and semi-government institutions) have promoted the effort, begun by Croatian secessionist President Franjo Tudjman, to deny the Croatian Holocaust — cutting the numbers killed by 80-90%; suppressing all discussion of the leading role of the [Roman] Catholic church in the killing (see Encyclopedia of the Holocaust on the role of the Catholic church, p.328); and denying that the Ustashe had a mass base among Croatian and Bosnian Catholics and Muslims.

Holocaust Denier Franjo Tudjman’s Line Gets Publicly Endorsed

In recent times Croatian Holocaust denial has been resisted by Jewish organizations and groups defending the Serbs, especially the Serbian Orthodox Church. In response, there has been a relentless drive to ‘turn’ these groups, to get them to publicly endorse Franjo Tudjman’s line, a drive led by the German and US foreign policy establishments (e.g., by the State Department, in the guise of employees of Washington’s Holocaust Museum). Which takes us to the importance of the opening of the Croatian government’s Holocaust exhibition at the site of the Jasenovac death camp on 27 November 2006.

The opening was of great — and grave — political significance because, even though the exhibition

1. avoids all discussion of the ideology and personnel of Croatia’s Holocaust regime and of its mass base, made possible by the Catholic church,
2. avoids the unsurpassed ferocity of the attack on Serbian civilians, with the Ustashe wiping out entire villages, decimating whole regions, and
3. puts forward the Croatian Holocaust-denying line that 70,000 people died at the Jasenovac death camp complex, the biggest of the many death camps in Ustasha Croatia - nevertheless:

Shameful Jasenovac Exhibit Whitewashed by Serbs and Jews Also

• The exhibit was, shockingly, co-sponsored by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, two articles from whose Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (which was published in 1990, when the campaign to rewrite the Croatian Holocaust was still in an embryonic stage) are reprinted on this page, and
• It was, also shockingly, whitewashed by the presence of: His grace, the Serbian orthodox bishop of Slavonija Sava (Jurić); by Serbian Ambassador Radivoj Cvjetičanin; and by Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, and by others, whom the media described as representing the Serbian, Jewish and Roma communities, and who, by attending instead of boycotting and denouncing this travesty, provided cover for Western-backed, Croatian Holocaust denial.

It is true that one of the guests, Efraim Zuroff of the Israel office of the Wiesenthal Center, was subsequently quoted in an Agence France Presse dispatch, raising a few criticisms of the exhibit. (He said it would confuse children because it didn’t name any individual Ustasha or explain the Ustasha ideology.) However, these criticisms are secondary, given that, as described above, the exhibit is an attempt at Holocaust denial.

Efraim Zuroff Viciously Mocks Serbian Records

Moreover, Zuroff undermined even these weak criticisms by subsequently publishing an article, under his own byline, viciously mocking the Serbs and suggesting that the assertion that 700,000 Serbs, Jews and ‘Gypsies’ were murdered at Jasenovac is the “unlikely” fabrication of Serbian propagandists, taking their cue from earlier Communist propagandists. Zuroff supported these sneering attacks with exactly zero factual discussion of anything, and just for the record, his sneering does not reflect the views of the late Simon Wiesenthal, whose name he uses: Wiesenthal strongly opposed the Croatian Holocaust deniers. The Wiesenthal Center’s website, which apparently Mr. Zuroff does not control, asserts that 600,000 people, Serbs (the overwhelming majority) and Jews and Roma were murdered at Jasenovac. Another Wiesenthal page describes Jasenovac.

In the event that either page is removed or altered, TENC has archived both, as they appear, this 31st day of December 2006, beacons of resistance to the nightmarish attempt to market Holocaust denial as Holocaust education. The Wiesenthal page with the number of people murdered at Jasenovac is archived here; the Wiesenthal page that describes Jasenovac is archived here.