Three years and three months after the Jasenovac Research Institute filed its application, and after encountering many difficulties in the process, the Jasenovac Research Institute finally won approval today from the City of New York for the first public monument to the victims of Jasenovac to be unveiled outside of the former Yugoslavia.
The inscription for the Jasenovac monument was formally approved by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation's Holocaust Advisory Committee yesterday afternoon, 15 February 2005, with some minor changes to the inscription.
The information was transmitted to the JRI at 3 PM this afternoon, although the actual decision had been made 24 hours earlier.
Several changes were imposed on the inscription. The City's Holocaust Advisory Committee removed a sentence stating that the total number of victims was between 350,000 and 700,000. However, they did allow the sentence stating that "hundreds of thousands of victims" were killed there. This was the fourth time that the JRI's original inscription had been revised.
The JRI's National Coordinator Barry Lituchy will go to the Holocaust Park Committee office tomorrow to review and sign the final agreement.
The main struggle now will be to insure that the final paperwork and engraving is completed in time for the Day of Jasenovac Commemoration Ceremony on April 17th.
Had the JRI not made an enormous effort and numerous protests, even this advisory meeting may never have taken place as soon as it did.
The establishment of a permanent monument in New York City and the significant help obtained along the way from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the New York Museum for Jewish Heritage for this project marks an important achievement in the JRI's global efforts to increase worldwide awareness of Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia.
But most important of all is that the victims of Jasenovac now will never be forgotten. And the families of those victims will forever have a place to recognize and remember them. Moreover, Jasenovac is finally being recognized as central to the study and commemoration of the Holocaust around the world.
THE DESECRATION OF THE MEMORIAL AREA
Jasenovac Memorial Park is the largest graveyard in the Balkans. It has been believed for a long time that the Ustasha's crimes committed in Jasenovac presented an eternal warning to the people from these areas. However, that was not true. >>The young Croatian democracy<<, as the new nationalistic Croation authorities called themselves, under the leadership of Franjo Tudjman, immediately after coming to the scene took the Ustasha symbols, and took a series of concrete further steps (seceeding from Yugoslavia, adopting laws with racist characteristics very similar to those of 1941, organizing state terror against the Serbs and so on), thus showing clearly that it accepted the politics of the Ustasha's Independent State of Croatia.
Even before the beginning of the new war in 1991, the Croatian authorities reduced the financing of the Jasenovac Memorial Park and declared >>Lonjsko polje<< a natural protected area, probably in order to turn the attention from the victims to the flora and fauna of the region. Croatian propaganda and Franjo Tudjman himself tried to minimize the crime with numerous articles, >>studies<< and statements, asserting that there were >>not more than<< 20,000-50,000 victims in Jasenovac.
At the end of September 1991, the Croatian Army entered the Jasenovac memorial park by force. According to the Hague Convention on the protection of historical and cultural monuments, the Croatian Army severely broke the agreement by entering the protected area. Although the international public informed about desecration of the memorial park. there was not much of a response.
The Serbian forces liberated Jasenovac Memorial Park on October 8, 1991. During the withdrawal the Croatian Army placed explosives blew up the bridge on the Sava River which connected the two parts of the Memorial Park; they also blew up the graves, destroyed the Museum artifacts and stole the Museum equipment. Due to the courage and enthusiasm of individuals who worked at the Memorial Park, some historical materials and objects were saved.
WE WONT FORGET !!!!