Posted on 02/24/2015 7:58:05 PM PST by Ravnagora
JAGODINA – Krajina Serbs will file a lawsuit against Croatia for genocide in World War II and ethnic cleansing in the 1990s, says former Republic of Serb Krajina Prime Minister Borislav Mikelic.
Ustasa militia execute prisoners near the Jasenovac concentration camp.
The work of the Serbs of Krajina, Kozara and the Grmec area does not end with the recent verdict by the International Court of Justice in The Hague and the dismissal of the Croatian lawsuit and the Serbian countersuit, Mikelic told Jagodina-based Palma plus television on Sunday.
“For World War II, there is undeniable, crystal-clear evidence that the Independent State of Croatia committed genocide against the Serbs,” Mikelic said, noting that, in World War II, Croatia “killed 70,000 Serbian children in camps.”
Jasenovac was not the only camp where Serbs were killed, as there were 26 such camps, Mikelic said, adding that “there is no statute of limitations for the crime of genocide.”
“In addition to the genocide and ethnic cleansing lawsuits, the Krajina Serbs will also request that their status as a state-building, constitutive nation in Croatia, which they were stripped of by Franjo Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Community, be restored,” Mikelic said.
He added that 531,000 Serbs and 440,000 Yugoslavs lived in Croatia according to the 1981 census, and that there were 581,000 Serbs and 224,000 Yugoslavs there according to the 1991 census.
“Therefore, 800,000 Serbs lived in Croatia in 1991, accounting for 16 percent of the population, while now the number is reduced to below four percent. The question is where those people are, where those people have gone and who is to blame for that,” Mikelic said.
He stressed that, in the 1990s, Croatia committed the largest ethnic cleansing since World War II, which culminated with “Operation Storm”.
The Serbs must persevere in trying to establish the truth, Mikelic concluded.
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Ping!
Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?
Short answer: The Ustashi.
The Croats were allied with Nazi Germany and the Croats had their own “bad guys”, the Ustashi.
The “bad guys” are the Croatian “Ustashe” (worse than the German Nazis, even by official accounts) and the “good guys” are all the innocent Serbian civilians and Serbian Orthodox clergy, etc. that were their victims.
The Ustashi leader (Pavelic) was a terrorist living in exile--the Germans used him because the leader of the main Croatian political party, the Peasant Party, refused to collaborate. It's as if an outside power had made Timothy McVeigh President of the US.
The current government of Croatia has no links to the wartime puppet government--it is legally the successor to the Communist regime that ruled Croatia as one of the republics in Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1991.
And the winners write the history books.
1. No group funded by either Hitler or Stalin can claim to be clean; it's merely a question of the degree of evil, at an individual level.
2. Do the Krajina Serbs actually expect reparations from Croatia at this point?
The question is whether the current government of Croatia owes reparations for what the puppet state did. Very few of the actual perpetrators can be still alive.
According to David Rodogno in Fascism's European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War (2006), in reference to early 1943, "The Ustase were profoundly hated: isolated and devoid of any prestige, they were incapable of resolving the country's difficulties. Fully 80% of the Croatian population were opposed to the regime; 10% declared themselves 'apolitical,' while only a tiny minority still supported the Ustase." (Half of the area of the Croatian puppet state was under Italian occupation.)
Also, "Elevated to power by circumstance, Pavelic was obscure, almost unknown; he had neither the reputation nor the prestige to construct a solid political base and frorm an efficient state apparatus. The country treated him with cold indifference or ill-concealed hostility: who, the people enquired, is this nonentity imposed by foreign bayonets?"
That is part of my second point. I don't believe in group guilt. If I did, I could not also believe in repentance. The two concepts are diametrically opposed to one another.
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