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In 2013, Pope Francis publicly stated he'd get to the bottom of several scandals plaguing the Catholic Church. Despite the pontiff's investigation, one scandal remains shrouded in mystery: that of the Vatican Bank and Nazi gold. You see, some bits of evidence suggest the Vatican collaborated with Nazi party members responsible for plundering Jewish citizens' gold during World War II. But other evidence casts doubt on the extent of the Catholic Church's direct participation in Nazi activities. The Holy See has long denied any sort of affiliation between the Church and the Third Reich ever existed. Still, limited independent research...

ICTY - Tribunal Update Zagreb awarded damages to families of victims killed in detention. Croatia secretly paid 1.8 million kuna (250,000 euro) to the families of people killed in the notorious Lora prison camp in the early 1990s, confirmed officials this week. Lora, a Yugoslav-era naval base in the coastal city of Split, was taken over by Croatian forces in 1991, the start of the Croatian war of independence, as the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, JNA, forces withdrew. From 1992 to 1997, it functioned as a prison camp for mainly Serbian, but also Bosnian and Montenegrin, civilians and prisoners of war,...

Dinko Sakic arrived at the concentration camp known as the “Auschwitz of the Balkans” riding a white horse, wearing a tailored black uniform with polished black boots and carrying a whip and a submachine gun, survivors remembered. His brazenness continued even after Croatia went down to defeat with Nazi Germany, its ally. He fled to Argentina, where he lived for a half century under his real name, making no attempt to hide. In his last decade of freedom, he gave interviews saying he was proud of what he had done and would gladly do it again......

The head of the Holocaust memorial group the Simon Wiesenthal Center criticized Croatia over a newly opened museum at the site of a fascist World War II concentration camp, in written comments. "I saw an exhibition which was a big disappointment," Efraim Zuroff wrote in an article published in the weekly Globus. "To my disbelief, there was not a single photograph of the commanders of Jasenovac," he said of the camp at which his organization estimates some 600,000 mostly Serbs and Jews were killed during World War II. Zuroff said that any young visitors to the museum would "leave probably...

BBC Monitoring International Reports - August 4, 2006 Friday Excerpt from report by Belgrade-based Radio B92 on 4 August Belgrade, Zagreb, Banja Luka, 4 August: The 11th anniversary of Croatia's military Operation Storm was marked with a commemoration in St Mark's Church and a gathering in Nikola Pasic Square [in central Belgrade] today. Following the commemoration, a protest walk from St Mark's Church to Nikola Pasic Square was organized by the Association of Families of Missing Persons from Krajina [part of Croatia formerly with Serb majority]. A resolution was read out in Nikola Pasic Square to several hundred Serbs from...

Juan Peron was an Argentinian president who was a dictator who Fascist tendencies from 1946-1955 and 1972-1974, when he died. He was a soldier originally who in a coup became Secretary of Labor in 1943, then he went to prison, because some military personals feared he was getting powerful in 1945, which he goes to jail. Then in October 17th, a large rally occurs calling for the release of Juan Peron, which he is released. He marries Maria Eva Duarte, who becomes Evita Peron. This was Juan Peron's second marriage. His first wife died of cancer. He is elected in...

The American Spectator March 2006 SECTION: The railroading of a former U.S. ally. LENGTH: 1511 words HEADLINE: America, The Hague, and Ante Gotovina BYLINE: Robin Harris BODY: GREAT POWERS LIKE AMERICA CANNOT AFFORD to be too sentimental about foreign friends whose purpose has been served. But sometimes it pays to keep faith with individuals who collaborate successfully in one's policy goals. This is particularly so when those concerned know the inside story of U.S. covert activity and when their fate sets a precedent that jeopardizes U.S. personnel. Such is the case of the former Croatian General Ante Gotovina, arrested in...

THE TRANSNATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR PEACE AND FUTURE RESEARCH (SWEDEN) Srebrenica Muslims Remembered, The Rest Silenced PressInfo # 222 July 11, 2005 By Jan Oberg, TFF director There is every reason to commemorate the massacre by Serb soldiers on innocent Muslim civilians in Srebrenica ten years ago today. But unless it is considered acceptable to quantify crimes and politically misuse human suffering, there is no plausible reason to forget or silence other cases of massacres, ethnic cleansing and terror bombings in which other innocent people lost their lives. Other crimes silenced In September 2003, mainstream media around the world forgot to...

A class-action lawsuit charges the Vatican Bank with a role in the flight of pro-Nazi henchmen and loot from Europe after World War II Like any new pope, Benedict XVI inherits some problems from his predecessor, among them sexual abuse scandals and a Catholic Church deeply divided between progressives and traditionalists. Then there are William Dorich's accusations. Dorich, a Los Angeles book publisher, is the force behind a class-action lawsuit against the Vatican Bank and the Franciscan Order.

San Francisco, Jun. 15, 2005 (CNA) - A ruling this week by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld an earlier decision that Holocaust survivors can continue their claims against the Vatican for the restitution of funds plundered from former Yugoslavia during the Second World War. The majority of the victims of genocide in Croatia during World War II were Orthodox Christian Serbs. More than 500,000 of them were liquidated by the Croatian Ustasha, with the backing of some Catholic clerics. These funds have been referred to as the Ustasha or Croatian treasury. According to a report by Matt...

Split, 12 August: The association of the Homeland War survivors from the Makarska Primorje region says in a statement that the recently unveiled monument to a Croatian defender in Makarska has been surrounded by "the soil and grass from Banja Luka in (Bosnian) Serb Republic". (Croatian) Minister (of the Family, Veterans' Affairs and Intergenerational Solidarity) Jadranka Kosor unveiled the monument a few days ago. According to the statement, the association will remove "this Serb grass and soil" if the town authorities do not remove them within 48 hours. (Passage omitted) "Why does it matter where the grass came from? We...

Ethnic Discrimination Slows Refugee Return (Zagreb, September 3, 2003) Eight years after the end of the war in Croatia, ethnic discrimination continues to impede the return of hundreds of thousands of Croatian Serbs displaced by the war, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. "The impediments to return are insurmountable. It is time that the government of Croatia starts being part of the solution rather than part of the problem." Lotte Leicht, Brussels office director of Human Rights Watch. The 61-page report, “Broken Promises: Impediments to Refugee Return to Croatia," describes the plight of displaced Croatian Serbs...

Was the US behind the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia? By Stephen Gowans It was one of those peeks into what really happened that are occasionally glimpsed long after anyone cares, like finding out after the invasion of Iraq that the US and Britain had already begun aerial operations to pick apart Iraq's defenses long before the invasion had begun, at a time both countries were denying they had already made a decision to go to war ("U.S. Moved Early for Air Supremacy: Airstrips on Iraqi Defenses Began Long Before Invasion, General Says," The Washington Post, July...

Rastko and Stojan Colovic are two and five years old, and this is the only home they've ever known: a former barracks near Belgrade, converted into a centre to house refugees from the wars which tore apart the former Yugoslavia. The Colovic family have lived in the centre for eight years Their grandparents, Croatian Serbs, came here with their mother eight years ago, fleeing the advance of the Croatian army as it re-took the breakaway Krajina Serb Republic in August 1995. The boys' mother met and married their father in the Rakovica centre. The family have no intention of returning...

THE VAMPIRE NURSE OF VUKOVAR VESNA BOSANAC http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/politics/war_crimes/vukovar/vukovar9d.html Involuntary blood taking from Vukovar Serbs In the Vukovar Hospital, which was between 30 July and 19 November 1991 managed by Dr. Vesna BOSANAC, many serious abuses of medical ethics and international law of war have been committed - from refusal to provide adequate medical treatment to wounded Serb civilians and members of the Serb territorial defense to physical liquidation. Among the gravest crimes committed in the Vukovar Hospital, which are that more serious since some perpetrators were physicians, is involuntary blood taking from Serb civilians, who were for this particular...