Croatian Society (Still) Accepts Anti-Semitism
Croats Like their Sugar Packets with Hitler’s Image and Anti-Semitic Jokes
JERUSALEM, ZAGREB, Feb. 19, 2007 — The Simon Wiesenthal Center has asked Croatia to stop the distribution of sugar packets featuring Hitler’s image.
The Center has called on Croatian authorities to put an end to the production and distribution of sugar packets with Hitler’s image and printed anti-Semitic jokes.
The Center has issued a statement signed by its director Ephraim Zuroff, expressing its “revulsion and disgust that such an item could be produced these days in a country in which the Holocaust not only took place, but was for the most part carried out by local Nazi collaborators.”
“If nothing else, this is a disgusting expression of nostalgia for the Third Reich and a period during which Jews, Serbs and Gypsies were mass-murdered (in Croatia),” the Simon Wiesenthal Center statement said.
Zuroff urged Croatia to force the factory owners to recall the sugar packets immediately, in line with a law against racial, religious or ethnic hatred.
Zarko Puhovski of the Helsinki Committee said the most worrying aspect of the scandal was a lack of reaction in the Croatian society.
“This is not about someone spraying graffiti, this was printed in several thousand copies, for weeks, perhaps months, and no one reacted. Then Novi List journalist reacted. Then there was silence again, and then the Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a statement,” Puhovski said.
Puhovski said he hoped the company producing the sugar packets as well as those distributing them would be punished, adding that the main problem still remained with the Croat society which “accepts anti-Semitism.”
For her part, owner of the Pozega-based factory, Croat Anita Ivanecic declined to offer any comment.