Croatia's slow and steady whitewashing of their actions during the Holocaust

 

The Jewish community in Croatia boycotted the government-sponsored Holocaust commemoration in 2016. This year, they did it again. 

Why would a Jewish community do such a thing? Because they can tell when somebody is speaking out of both sides of their mouth. Croatia's politicians have a Nazi problem, and it seems to be getting worse, not better.

Croatia is a country that is at war with it's past. As part of the former Yugoslavia, Croatia's Ustasha regime acted as the willing militant arm of Hitler's occupation force in the area. The far-right party which was active before the Nazi invasion and subsequent occupation came to friendly terms with the Nazis and were installed as the governing body for the Independent State of Croatia. With this power, the Ustasha carried out a systematic ethnic cleansing of Serbians, Jews, and Romani living in the area. These actions are well documented and collaborated by survivors held in Ustasha camps. It happened. 

But, the current powers that be in Croatia would prefer to ignore that past. While other Axis nations have worked to come to grips with the sins of their fathers, Croatia is a state in deep denial about its past, and that denial extends straight to the top.

Take president Grabar-Kitarovic for example, a woman who seems to change her sentiment depending on which audience she's in front of. During a 2015 visit to Israel, she expressed contrition at Yad Vashem to the Jewish people, saying "I express my deepest regrets to all the victims of the Holocaust in Croatia, killed at the hands of the collaborationist Ustasha regime during World War II,”  

But, this same woman also leads a party that makes its bread and butter by appealing to a far-right nationalism base that not only denies the criminal deeds of their ancestors, but lionizes them. For all of Mrs. Kitarovic's statements in front of the world's premier Holocaust museum, she has also been spotted proudly posing with the Ustasha flag, all smiles and grins, shoulder to shoulder with holocaust deniers. She has also repeatedly gone out of her way to express her fondness for a pro-Ustasha musician who goes by the stage-name Thompson. Thompson's music is the anthem of the nationalist movement and frequently invokes sentiment that glorifies the Ustasha's history.

We all know every politician flip flops a little, but this is more than just an awkward photo-op at a gala. This is an intentional playing to both audiences, an insidious kind of dog whistling that allows her to maintain a position as historically aware and condemning of the Ustasha, while also letting her far-right nationalist base know she is actually sympathetic to their views. Accuse her of antisemitism and her defenders will be quick shout about her empty Yad Vashem statements while lapping up the little nods that let them know what she really thinks. Publicly she's saying the right things, but winking at the camera the whole time.

In fact, let's look at that statement she made during the 2015 visit, because even that is a bit of a verbal card shuffle. She expresses regrets to victims killed by the "collaborationist Ustasha regime.” It might seem like a normal statement, but note the use of "collaborationist.” By positioning the Ustasha as "collaborators” it makes them seem like just another cats-paw of the Nazis. Another regime forced by circumstance and fear into doing the Nazis dirty work. That they enforced the Nazis views of racial purity and superiority to save their own skins. This lets them be seen by history as perhaps cowardly, but not evil.

But this is of course a dodge. The Ustasha regime was a brutally racist and violent organization well before the Nazis began exerting any kind of force on Yugoslavia. They organized in 1929 as a populist movement with a large base of support. They carried out violent demonstrations, beatings, acts of vandalism and intimidation, and even assassinations all on their own for years before the start of WWII. The movement was founded on and energized by a vision for a racially "pure" Croatia, its leaders held speeches openly promoting genocide against Serbs, Romani, and of course, the Jews. The Independent State of Croatia might have been a fascist puppet state of the Axis powers, but the Ustasha were right on board with Hitler's ideology and practices. They were enthusiastic partners to the Nazis final solution, not a bunch of coerced and cowed victims.

Sadly, Grabar-Kitarovic is far from the only one in the Croatian government playing to the nationalist crowd, and others are far less subtle about it. Cultural Minister Zlatko Hasanbegović openly flirts with nationalist sentiment so often that it would be a stretch to consider him a closet fascist – more like a coy one.  

Hasanbegović  made waves recently after he attended the Croatian premiere of a documentary film titled Jasenovac—The Truth. The film alleges the infamous Jasenovac concentration camp (the execution site of over 100,000 innocent Serbs and other "undesirables” including 12,000-20,000 Jews) was not in fact a death camp (despite overwhelming evidence of the horrors committed there), but a "labor camp” with far more luxurious living conditions than the camps historically documented squalor. 

The film further alleges that the death toll of the camp was a post-war fabrication and that the harshness of the camp's conditions were purposefully exaggerated to illicit pity for the Serbs and Jews held there and as an excuse to excise certain political organizations from public consideration. 

This is all text-book holocaust denial, the same tricks trotted out by Nazis sympathizers again and again since the war. Yet, despite its transparent false narrative, Hasanbegović had high praise for the film, saying "Such films are useful because they speak about a number of taboo topics. This is the best way to finally shed light on a number of controversial places in Croatian history.” 

Of course, this is par for the course for Hasanbegović, he has a storied history of blatant Ustasha revisionism and sympathy. Hasanbegović has been criticized in the past due to pro-Ustasha articles he wrote as a college student for nationalist publications  in which he lauded Ustasha hatchet-men as heroes. There are also photos of him as a teenager dressed in Ustasha badges and markings, seeming to be a member of a nationalist youth group. 

Yet, despite these obvious sympathies and a massive outcry from the Croatian Jewish community to remove him, he remains in his position. His fellow cabinet-mates offering only deflections and apologies on his behalf, no action or real condemnation. Make no mistake, his soft stance on Coratia's antisemitic history is not a bug, but a feature to his party. It was not a mistake that he was given the post of Cultural Minister.

All the while, public institutions continue to downplay and distance themselves form their historical actions. The public Jasenovac exhibit, for example, the memorial built on the site of mass executions, shows the facility as more of work camp than anything else. The mass executions are downplayed and talked around. It's acknowledge that people suffered in the camp, but in the way anyone would suffer in a prison. No photos of bodies or executions are displayed anywhere despite the vast amount of photographic evidence of those crimes readily available. If one was to tour the Jasenovac site today without any external knowledge, they'd leave thinking it was more akin to an internment camp or corrections facility than the brutal "Auschwitz of the Balkans” that it was. Again, that is not a mistake or an oversight, but a subtle and deliberate distortion of history.

What is happening in Croatia is just one example of the historical revisionism going on in Eastern Europe. As more politicians blow louder dog whistles to their antisemitic base, pundits become more blatant with their rhetoric, and public displays of outrageous behaviour become more common, we all need to take guard, even in North America. 

It is to the Jewish community in Croatia's credit that they have taken such a stand against the growing radicalization they see around them, but they cannot be expected to fight alone. It is up to all citizens of good conscience and moral clarity to recognize the resurgent groundswell of Nazism that is taking hold around the globe and set themselves against it.