General Franjo Tudjman, Croatian President #1
Vitaca Milut
The Guardian, 18 October, 1993
Plan to honour Ustashe killers outrages minorities in Croatia
Ian Traynor, East Europe Editor
President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia sparked a fresh historical
contorversy this weekend by proposing that the Croatian dead from the
recent war with the Serbs be commemorated at an infamous second world
war concentration camp, where Croatian fascists slaughtered tens of
thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.
He further outraged the hostile Serb minority by saying that "all the
victims of communism" in Croatia should also be honoured at Jasenovac,
the camp in sourthern Croatia where some of the worst Balkan atrocities
were perpetrated - overwhelmingly against Croatian's Serbian minority.
Mr Tudjman made his proposals at a congress of his ruling Croatian
Democratic Union in Zagreb, which ended on Saturday. The call for a
common memorial at Jasenovac, which would commemorate both the victims
of Croatian fascism and some of the perpetrators of those war crimes, is
seen as the latest element in an attempt to partially rehabilitiate the
Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia, the fascist Ustashe state that
lasted from 1941 to 1945, and included all modern Bosnia-Herzegovina.
"It's an insult", Simon Wiesenthal, the veteran Nazi-hunter, said of Mr
Tudjaman's call. "He wants to put the guilty next to the victims. Tito
had many of the Ustashe killers executed after the war. Now Tudjman
wants them to be remembered alongside their victims."
Slavko Goldstein, a Zagreb opposition figure and a leader of Zagreb's
small Jewish community, said the suggestion could "only cause new
disturbances and bad feelings".
"The families of the people killed at Jasenovac will not be satisfied
that Ustashe are buried with them. This is bad thing. It's one thing to
be killed on the battlefield. It's another to be killed in a
concentration camp," he said.
Mr Tudjman's, statement recalls one of his first moves after being
elected president in 1990, when he ordered a main Zagreb square
dedicated to "the victims of fascism" to be renamed. It is now called
"the Square of Croatian Giants".
Mr Tudjman, aged 71, was a young communist partisan officer in the
second world war, fighting against the Ustashe. But as a nationalist
historian, he has sought for 20 years to revise Croatian history, many
say by belittling the atrocities against the Serbs.
Belgrade claims more than 1 million Serbs were slaughtered by the
Ustashe. Mr Tudjman has put the figure at 60,000. The true number is not
known.
In Croatia, Ustashe memorabilia are now openly traded, and streets have
been renamed after Mile Budak, a deputy Ustashe leader. The Croatian
parliament recently voted to rename the national currency the kuna,
which was last in circulation in 1941-45.
The Croatian foreign ministry has nominated Ivo Rojnica as a foreign
ambassador. As the Ustashe chief in the Dubrovnik region during the
second world war, he was, according to Mr Wiesenthal, the first local
Croatian leader to order and evening Curfew on Jews.
Mr Tudjman said a "special place" in Jasenovac should be reservced for
Croats killed in the 1991 war that United Nations officials say is on
the brink of re-igniting.
Mr Tudjman also paid tribute to Ante Starcevic, a virulent 19th-century
nationalist whom the president hailed as a heroic guiding spirit for
todays's ruling party.
Starcevic is widely regarded as the intellectual godfather of the
Ustashe, whose savage policy against the Serb minority was to kill
one-third, expel another third and convert the remainder to Catholicism.
The artrocities shocked even some German and Italian occupying forces in
wartime Yugoslavia.
The historian Aleksa Djilas has described the Starcevic ideology as
"mystical and fanatical, territorially expansionist and nationally
homogenous".
The Serbian insurgents, who seized a quarter of Croatia in the 1991 war,
control the Jasenovac site, regarding it as the Serbs' Auschwitz, and
are unlikely to surrender it. So Mr Tudjman's proposal has little change
of being implemented. By calling for "reconcilliation" at Jasenovac, he
was pitting the extremist, fascist wing in his governing partyagainst
the moderates, with their roots in the partisan movement.
Vitaca Milut (Pronounced: Vitacha Milut)
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Pravda je kad stojis uspravno
(Olovka pise srcem, str. 92)
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