Nazi nostalgia in Croatia

by Diana Johnstone

When I visited Croatia three years ago, the book most prominently displayed 
in the leading bookstores of the capital city Zagreb was a new edition of 
the notorious anti-Semitic classic, The Protocols of the Elders of 
Zion.

Next came the memoirs of the World War II Croatian fascist Ustashi dictator 
Ante Pavelic, responsible for the organised genocide of Serbs, Jews and 
Romany (gypsies) that began in 1941, that is, even before the German Nazi's 
"final solution".

However, if the Croatian fascists actually led, rather than followed, the 
German Nazis down the path of genocide, that doesn't mean they have 
forgotten their World War II benefactors. After all, it was thanks to 
Hitler's invasion of Yugoslavia that the "Independent State of Croatia" was 
set up in April 1941, with Bosnia-Herzegovina (whose population was mostly 
Serb at the time) as part of its territory.

And the hit song of 1991, when Croatia once again declared its independence 
from Yugoslavia and began driving out Serbs, was Danke Deutschland, 
in gratitude to Germany's strong diplomatic support for Zagreb's 
unnegotiated secession.

In the West, of course, one will quickly object that the Germany of today 
is not the Germany of 1941. True enough. But in Zagreb, with a longer 
historical view, they are so much the same that visiting Germans are 
sometimes embarrassed when Croats enthusiastically welcome them with a 
raised arm and a Nazi "Heil!" greeting.

So it should be no surprise that this year's best seller in Croatia is none 
other than a new edition of Mein Kampf. This is not a critical 
edition, mind you, but a reverently faithful reproduction of the original 
text by that great European leader, benefactor of Croatian nationalism and 
leader of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler.

The magazine Globus reported that Mein Kampf is selling like 
hotcakes in all segments of Croatian society. For those who want to read 
more, there is a new book entitled The Protocols of Zion, the Jews and 
Adolf Hitler by Mladen Schwartz, leader of the Croatian neo-Nazi party 
New Right, and Talks with Hitler by the Fuhrer's aide Herman 
Rauschning, as well as various other memoirs celebrating the Ustashi state 
whose violent massacres of Serbs shocked the Italian fascist allies and 
even German diplomatic observers at the time.

The dissident Croatian writer Predrag Matvejevic, who has Italian 
citizenship, has sent the Rijeka daily Novi List an open letter to 
the Association of Croatian Writers and the Croatian centre of the 
International PEN club denouncing their failure to protest at this 
promotion of the absolute worst of racist Nazi propaganda.

"Passing through the streets of Zagreb, Split, Dubrovnik and other cities 
in Croatia, countless Croatian citizens whose parents took part in the 
anti-fascist Partisan struggle are ashamed to see the works and photographs 
of Hitler and other Nazi and Ustashi criminals displayed in bookshop 
windows," he wrote.

"Their publication is a disgrace to Croatia and its culture". This is "no 
accident", he said, "in Tudjman's Croatia". For this is the same regime, he 
noted, that has allowed the destruction of thousands of monuments to the 
victims of fascism, from one end of Croatia to the other, and in which mass 
is celebrated non-stop in honor of the Ustashi "fuhrer" Pavelic in the 
churches of Split and Zagreb, the Italian daily Il Manifesto 
reported on September 3.

In another report in Il Manifesto, Giacomo Scotti reported from 
Zagreb that the terrorist campaign by nationalist bands led by the 
neofascist "Croatian Party of Rights" has been stepping up its pogroms 
against the small number of Serbs now living in the Krajina region. The 
overwhelmingly Serb population was driven from the Krajina by the US-backed 
"Operation Storm" in August 1995.

Officially, under heavy international pressure, the Croatian government has 
allowed some Serbs to come back, mostly old farmers. However, on August 25, 
the Croatian Supreme Court denied local tribunals the right to hear 
complaints from citizens who had not been allowed to enter their property, 
thus encouraging lawlessness.

With the complicity of the authorities, armed bands have been breaking into 
the few homes reoccupied by their Serb owners, beating and threatening old 
people and devastating their farms, chopping down trees and destroying 
crops to force them to leave. These facts are contained in two letters to 
the Croatian government from the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human 
Rights.

By now, however, it is abundantly clear to everyone that crimes of 
intimidation, physical violence, murder, robbery, vandalism or "ethnic 
cleansing" are of no interest to Western governments, to the international 
media or to any court in the world so long as the victims are Serbs.