Ukraine:
Class action lawsuit against Vatican
Two Ukrainian organisations, The Ukrainian Union of Nazi Victims and Prisoners, and The Organisation of Antifascist Resistance Fighters, representing over 300,000 Ukrainian World War II victims of Nazi and Fascist aggression, filed a class action lawsuit on November 15 in San Francisco alleging complicity in war crimes by the Vatican Bank and the Franciscan Order. The class action is based in part on a 1997 US State Department Report which linked the disappearance of the treasury of the wartime Nazi puppet state of Croatia to the Vatican Bank and Roman Catholic Church officials. The Fascist Croatian state is credited with murdering over 700,000 Serbs (as well as Croatian communists and anti-fascists, Jews and Gypsies) between 1941 and its demise in 1945. The Serbs were brutally liquidated in a state sponsored killing spree aimed at cleansing Croatia of adherents to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and founding an ethnically pure, Roman Catholic state. Prime movers in this genocide were militant Franciscan monks, many of whom held military and civil commands in wartime Croatia. The Ukrainian organisations allege that Croatian army, navy, and air force divisions assisted the German Army in occupying Ukraine during the war. The Croatian forces also participated in the well documented, systematic looting of Ukraine by the Nazis. The lawsuit seeks to recover a percentage of the Croatian hoard estimated to have been worth as much as US$180 million in 1945. Another Ukrainian class action was filed last August in New York on behalf of former Ukrainian slave labourers. While the Vatican lawsuit is smaller in scope, it is hoped that it will force the Vatican to finally reveal the active participation of Roman Catholic factions in war crimes. Recent books, including the best selling Hitler's Pope, and a soon to be released Argentine Government report, firmly link Vatican organisations to the Fascist Croatian state and subsequent disappearance of its treasury following the Nazi defeat.