[Pecos]

I'd like to suggest two thoughts:

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?

[Verginius Rufus]

Certainly none of those groups had clean hands, the Ustashi least of all (although Tito may have killed more people between 1941 and the early 1950s than they did between 1941 and 1945). There was also a German-imposed puppet regime in Belgrade which cooperated in handing over Jews to the Nazis--something like 94% of the Jews in Serbia died in the Holocaust vs. 80% of those in the so-called Independent State of Croatia.

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?"