Crime without punishment: the genocide forgotten by Europe
70 years ago, in April 1941, a new state appeared on the political map of the world - “Independent State of Croatia”. Created on the ruins of Yugoslavia captured by German and Italian troops, this state formation did not last long - just four terrible years. Terrible for the "aliens" inhabiting Croatia - Jews, Gypsies and Serbs.
The head of the Independent State of Croatia became the head of the radical organization Ustaši Ante Pavelic. The Ustashi was a nationalist organization typical of the Eastern Europe of the interwar period: terrorist in their methods (it was Ustasha in the 1934 that killed King Yugoslavia Alexander and French Foreign Minister Luis Barto) and fascist in their ideology. Having come to power, Ante Pavelic immediately struck a blow at the "foreigners" who inhabited Hovatiya - Serbs and Jews.
In the state of Croatia, there were about 6,5 of millions of inhabitants, including more than 2 of millions of Serbs (Orthodox, as opposed to Catholics-Croats) and 90 of thousands of Jews. Already on April 30 a decree was issued, according to which the Serbs were obliged to wear a blue armband with the letter "P" ("Orthodox"), and the Jews - a bandage with the star of David. At the same time, Serbs and Jews were deprived of civil rights. “Jews and Serbs are not citizens of a Croatian independent state, but state-owned,” the government said. “Only Aryans have political rights.” Public places in Croatia were decorated with signs "Forbidden to enter for Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and dogs." Soon began the eviction of Serbs and Jews from Zagreb, and then the massacres.The killings were committed by Ustashes in all provinces of Croatia; killed by hundreds and thousands, men and women, old people and children. “20 August 1941, the Ustashi arrested all the Serb men of my city and took them to the nearby Koprivnica forest where they were killed,” recalled an eyewitness to the events. - Then it was the turn of their families, who were killed in the same place. They raped women and girls, cut off their breasts, planted children on the pins, quartered the old men, after having blinded them. ”
Soon private killings were replaced by centralized killings - in the “internment and work camps” created in the summer and autumn of 1941. The head of these camps, Colonel Vekoslav Lubouric later boasted that "he destroyed more people in the Jasenovac camp than the Ottoman Empire during the entire long period of occupation of European countries." And the Croatian Minister of the Interior, Andrie Artkovich, claimed that about 700 thousand people were killed in the Jasenovac camp.
Eyewitness testimony about what was happening in the Croatian camps make shudder. “Lyuburich ordered me to raise my right leg. I raised her, and he planted a child for me. “Bay!” He ordered me. I kicked and crushed the child’s head. ”
In total, 1941 - 1945 was destroyed on the territory of Croatia, according to various estimates, from 750 thousand to a million Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. It was a real genocide, carried out on ethnoreligious grounds. It is significant that in neighboring Slovenia, divided into occupation zones by Hungary, Italy and Germany, no such nightmare occurred.
Ethnoreligious genocide, carried out by the authorities of the Independent State of Croatia, is comparable to the crimes of the Nazis in Poland and in the occupied territory of the Soviet Union. However, Ustashi had their own political subjectivity, pursued their own, different from the Nazi, political goals. And the genocide organized by them is not part of the Nazi genocide, but an independent crime against humanity.Unfortunately, this crime went almost unpunished. The head of the Independent State of Croatia, Ante Pavelic, died in December 1959 in Madrid, having received the personal blessing of Pope John XXIII before his death. The head of the Croatian death camps Vekoslav Lubouric, who settled in the same Madrid, led an active social and publishing activities until, in 1969, he was killed by an unknown person. Interior Minister Andrie Artukovich fled to the United States, from where he was extradited to Yugoslavia only in the 1986 year, shortly before his death. One of the ideologists of the genocide, the Archbishop of Croatia, Aloiziy Stepinats, to whom the Ustashi military chaplains obeyed, was convicted in 1946, but he spent all five years in prison. In 1953, he received the rank of Roman Cardinal, and in 1998, he was canonized by Pope John Paul II - despite the protests of Jewish organizations.
Will the Croatian genocide of Serbs and Jews ever carried out by the authorities of the state be the subject of a pan-European public debate like the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide?
May be. But obviously not soon.
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