Byzantine Blog

Fascists Banned in Serbia, Hailed in Croatia and Bosnia

When a non-registered group consisting of some twenty self-proclaimed neo-Nazis announced they intend to organize a march on October 7 in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad, all of Serbia stood up in revolt: apart from the town’s Jewish community, various NGO’s, Serbian Anti-Fascist League and Jasenovac Survivors, leaders of every single political party in Serbia (including the maligned Radicals) unanimously condemned the event, demanding that it gets banned.

Novi Sad mayor Maja Gojkovic, a prominent member of the Serbian Radical Party, said that Novi Sad, a town which was the scene of a 1942 massacre of about 800 Jews and 400 Serbs by the German and Hungarian Nazi occupiers during World War II, “bears heavy wounds the Nazis inflicted and considers such an announcement as the most offensive provocation.” The “march” was banned without the further ado, and rightly so.

And, while nobody seems interested in taking a closer look into the ethnic composition of the neo-Nazi group that was prevented from marching through Serbian town, it would be instructive to learn how many of the hooligans happen to be ethnic Croats. It is a well know fact that northern Serbian province of Vojvodina has a large Croat community, beside a large Hungarian and Romanian population. Besides, it seems highly unlikely for ethnic Serbs to call themselves by the resoundingly Croat Ustasha terminology — “Nacionalni stroj”.

Serbia is decidedly the most multi-ethnic country in the Balkans, so the fact something is happening within Serbia’s borders doesn’t necessarily mean that the Serbs are behind it.

Canonization of the Ustasha Spiritual Father to Proceed With No Obstacles

However, around the same time when the world was intensely focusing upon the “rise of nationalism” in Serbia, head of the Croat state, Prime Minister Ivo Sanader invited Pope Benedict XVI to visit Croatia for the “canonization ceremony of Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac,” the spiritual father of the dreaded Ustasha movement during the WWII, which took over 1,5 million mostly Serbian, but also Jewish and Roma lives in the most ghastly fashion. But that failed to register a bleep in any of the Jewish or Western papers and went entirely unreported.

For some reason, the offensive actions of the head of state which is all but openly fascist since the 1990s are considered less threatening than announcement by the group of twenty anonymous hooligans in Serbia, where they keep being arrested, banned and condemned by the Serbs.

Ustasha Extravaganza in Bosnia Goes On as Planned

Today, Serbian press reports that thousands of Croats from Bosnia and Herzegovina were on their way to Mostar to see Croat neo-Nazi, proud Ustasha Marko Perkovic, aka Thompson, in concert that was not banned by either the Bosnian or Croat police, despite the Serbian and Jewish protests.

The singer who reportedly couldn’t sing if his life depended on it, but is rather “braying” and screaming, whose “poetry” harbors extremely sinister fascist overtones, has divided the ethnically mixed Croat/Muslim city of Mostar in the Croat/Muslim federation in Bosnia, and opened up unhealed wounds of war.

In the city, already deeply split along ethnic lines, Thompson’s arrival marked some kind of return to the war, with the last night’s concert serving as a parade of fascism, such as cannot be seen anywhere else in Europe. Fascist insignia, songs glorifying torture and war crimes, hundreds of youths in Ustasha uniforms are all part and parcel of any Thompson concert wherever he goes.

Remaining Mostar Serbs and Jews launched a protest against last night’s event — a “musical extravaganza” in the words of the organizers — which they see as nothing but an excuse for fascist revelry.

A respected member of the town’s Jewish community, Zoran Mandelbaum, feels that to hold such a gathering is, “to say the least, politically inappropriate.” Moreover, no-one in Mostar can deny the fact that such an event glorifies fascist ideology.

A representative of the city’s Muslim community, Mufti Seid Smajkic said that the problem with this concert is “not just the promotion of fascist ideas,” but also the already long-established habit of audiences at Thompson concerts, exhilarated by battle-cries from the concert, “to go on a spree of chaos and destruction.”

Jews and Muslims Invited to Ustasha Parade — It Was Only Calling for a Slaughter of Serbs Anyway

According to the Belgrade reporter, “as views on Thompson’s life’s work have been known for a long time, it is truly frightening to hear the opinions of certain Mostar Croat associations who, as they say, do not understand ‘what Bosniaks and Jews have against Thompson singing songs about killing Serbs’.”

Serbian reporter surmised that “listening to Perkovic, one would say that he revels in the controversy. He even goes so far as to say that he believes ‘the Bosniaks have been hypocritical towards him’, as his well-known song ‘Chavoglave’ — which includes the line ‘Listen you gang of Chetniks, Our hand will reach you in Serbia itself’ — at the very beginning of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was effectively adapted and remodeled for the Bosnian Muslims, and was so popular that everyone knew it and sang it, from schoolchildren to old-age pensioners.”

Perkovic remembers Bosnian Muslims loving his braying when the verses were adapted to signify a Muslim call for a slaughter of Serbs, so he wonders why are they pestering him with this sudden outrage.

But some of the Bosnian Muslims appear willing to shake off the head-severing policy, so to them, calls from the organizers of the Perkovic’s Ustasha extravaganza for the representatives of the local Jewish and Islamic communities to attend the concert, together with the Bosnian Muslim army veterans’ associations, sounded like a pure provocation.