The following is a response sent in to the Washington Times regarding the Kuhner commentary. The author is Dragan Rakic from France. He quotes Kuhner, then responds.
Regarding Jeffery Kuhner’s statements that “Hundreds of thousands of Croatians were systematically butchered by Tito’s Partisans; priests, nuns and peasants were massacred; their lands were confiscated; and slave labor camps were established. My grandfather’s brother - a priest - was murdered in his own church, hung with piano wire through the back of his head. My grandfather and his wife and family were rounded up into a concentration camp for three agonizing years - he and my grandmother survived, most of my other ancestors didn’t. Upon leaving the death camp, my grandfather’s small farm was seized, his family persecuted and eventually driven into exile. Despite all their suffering, my grandparents managed to rebuild a life for themselves and their children”.
If Mr. Jeffrey Kuhner did not forget his glorious grandfather, he did forget, or never learned the history of Balkans, particularly the period from 1940 to 1945. In his above sentence he refers to the event when Croat Nazis tried with the help of Vatican’s priest Draganovic,( see the documentary: The Rat Lines), to cross the border and reach Italy and Austria.
Why should the Nazi try to escape the justice? Because they were Croats or because they committed crimes, maybe worse than German Nazis did in Yugoslavia. Those “good” Croat Nazis murdered a cousin of mine just because her name was Sarah, burned my grand uncle and all the members of his parish in the concentration camp of Jasenovac, executed and committed genocide against Serbs, Jews, and Roma. And while the Serbian royalist leader Draza Mihajlovic was executed, the Croat Nazi Ustasha leader, Pavelic died in the age of nearly 90 years in Argentina, his right hand Andrija Artukovic hada Mickey Mouse judgment in Zagreb and died in age of 85, and many other war criminals still live and write odious articles to ignorant American readers.
Mr. Kuhner should know better who started and when the last civil war in the former Yugoslavia. It was not in 1990 but in 1989, when irregulars started attacking the federal army., and expulse Serbs from Croatia. Before the war there were 12% of Serbs in Croatia, and if you go to CIA site and take a look at the recent data about Croatia, you will find out that there is only 3% of Serbs left there. So who committed crimes or ethnic cleansing, it is up to normal people to judge according to facts and figures and not fairy tales and stories.
Sincerely
Dragan Rakic
Strasbourg
France
EU
__________________________
Ping!
Ping!
Who knows? During the war, there were more than atrocities to go around committed on both sides, by Nazis and Communists.
As for the current state of Croatia, who knows? I’d prefer to hear from someone who doesn’t have a dog in this fight, as this writer evidently does.
Wow!
bttt