Jasenovac

Home > News & Events > Sanader condemns 'Croatia's Auschwitz', Agence France Presse...

News & Events

Sanader condemns 'Croatia's Auschwitz'
Agence France Presse
Tue Mar 16, 2004

ZAGREB (AFP) - In a significant gesture, Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader condemned his country's World War II atrocities and paid tribute to the victims of the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp.

The leader of a reformed nationalist party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), said Croatia had to face up to the crimes of the pro-Nazi regime which ruled the Balkan republic during the war.

He was speaking during a visit to the site of the Jasenovac camp, 100 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of Zagreb, where a ceremony was held to mark the end of restoration works on a memorial to the victims of Croatia's fascist WWII regime.

"No goal, political or any other, could justify crimes. That is a principle defended in modern Europe, and Croatia, on the path of integration, is also part of that," Sanader told state television.

"I condemn all forms of extremism and racial, ethnic or religious hatred as well as intolerance."

Jasenovac, set up in 1941 by the Ustasha regime of Nazi sympathisers, was the most notorious concentration camp in Croatia.

The Wiesenthal Centre estimates that some 600,000 people -- Serbs, Jews, gypsies and anti-fascists -- were murdered in the camp, while the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts the figure at up to 100,000.

The camp is still a cause of intense bitterness between Croatia, where some historians claim only 50,000 people were killed there, and neighbouring Serbia, which puts the toll at around 750,000.

Croatia and Serbia established diplomatic relations in 1996 at the end of Croatia's 1991-1995 war of independence from the former Yugoslav federation.

Sanader warned against manipulations with number of victims on both sides, encouraging independent historians to conduct inquiries into the matter.

"Lies of 700,000 Jasenovac victims and thesis about the genocidal nature of Croatians served as the basis for aggressive policy of carving up Greater Serbia," Sanader said.

His words were echoed by Jasenovac memorial council head, historian Slavko Goldstein.

"The tragedy of Jasenovac is of two sorts -- it concerns suffering of its victims and manipulations with their number. We cannot get over Jasenovac tragedy without the truth," he stressed.

"As a result of the blowing up the number of victims the Serb population was 'infected' with wrong assumptions and became an easy prey to criminal political propaganda," of then Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites), he added.

Milosevic is on trial at the UN war crimes court in The Hague (news - web sites) facing several charges, including genocide, for the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia which claimed more than 250,000 lives.

Serb rebels backed by Belgrade fought against Croatian forces during the independence war, partly out of fear of the nationalist HDZ-led government of then-president Franjo Tudjman.

Israel accused Tudjman of failing to adequately denounce the mass murders committed by the Ustasha and many Serbs saw his policies as a dangerous return to the past.

But ties between Zagreb and Belgrade have improved since Tudjman's death in 1999 and Sanader, who brought the HDZ back into power in elections last November, has been eager to show that the party has shed its nationalist skin.

His reforms designed to bring the HDZ into the mainstream of European conservatism are seen as necessary for Croatia's progress into the European Union (news - web sites), which the country hopes to join by 2007.