THE EU AND CROATIA’S FASCIST CHECKERBOARD
William Dorich and Rodney Atkinson
Rodney Atkinson:
Croatia (with its swastika-forming football fans, its Nazi salute loving pop group named after a machine gun and its frequent celebration of fascist clerics of the second world war) has been made very welcome in the European Union. It has always had the support of Germany while Serbia, the country with the most anti-fascist credentials in the Balkans, has been refused entry to the EU.
Nor has Croatia’s acceptance in the EU stopped the vicious ethnic and religious attacks on Serbs. Ruza Tomasic, the Croat MEP, and President of the Croatian Conservative Party, recently said “if Croatia starts cleaning its backyard, many Croatian Serbs will have to leave for Serbia.”
Croat Josip Juratovic, an MP in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the German parliament, said Serbs in Croatia should not have the right to vote. It was evidently not sufficient for today’s Croats that hundreds of thousands of Serbs have been driven out of Croatia. Those Serbs even offered their former homes (to which they fear to return) to Syrian migrants. Croatia is of course driving those very migrants swiftly towards Hungary and Germany!
The Serbian Minister of Labor, Aleksandar Vulin commented on Juratovic’s aggression that “primitivism is not only a characteristic of the Balkans, but also tends to emerge in the Bundestag as well”. Hardly surprising since the first ethnic cleansing in the Balkans was of Serbs (from Croatia) after Germany had illegally recognised Croatia’s break away from Yugoslavia in 1991. This was after a decade or more of activity by the German secret services in the Balkans and pressure (and financing of political propaganda on behalf of Croatia) by the Vatican whose historic aims of driving Catholicism further into Orthodox Christian Europe had been interrupted by the Allies’ victory in 1945.
In early August 2015 Croatia marked the 20th anniversary of Operation Storm (Operacija Oluja) when hundreds of thousands of Serbs were driven out of Croatia (with widespread killing watched by western troops and ignored by western media) by holding a military parade in Zagreb.
As the crypto fascist HDZ party threatens to retake power in the Croatia parliament following the election of President Grabar-Kitarović, the apologists for that ethnic cleansing join the rising tide of apologists for Croatia’s fascist past when the Ustashe, the Nazis murderous allies during the second world war, wiped out Serbs Jews and gypsies in an orgy of Catholic religious bigotry which even appalled the Nazis!
Neither the late President Tuđman (so beloved of Germany and the EU) nor current HDZ politicians will apologize for the crimes carried out by the Ustashe. William Dorich who writes below is a member of a Serb family nearly all of whom were massacred by Croatian fascists during the second world war. He now lives in the USA a country which still fondly believes that 1945 saw the defeat of German imperialism and European Fascism but whose “Democrat” Governments in the 21st century as in the 1930s and 1940s are all too much in tune with European corporatist fascism.
While condemning “nationalism” the Clintons and Obamas of this world see nothing wrong in the German nationalist pursuit of its own economic and political power.
We recognise the character of a regime by the friends it keeps and in Croatia (and in the recent overthrow of an elected Ukrainian Government by Germany and the USA with the help of Nazi gangs) we see the true character of that German Europe which the ignorant and unhistorical David Cameron and Barack Obama are pleased to encourage.
William Dorich
Reading about the “Troubled Legacy of Croatian Symbols and Nationalists Narratives” I am reminded that here in the United States last month we obsessed over a Confederate flag used in the American Civil War 154 years ago.
I grew up in the state of West Virginia and during the Civil War the citizens refused to secede from their union, forming the state of West Virginia in 1863. When Serbs wanted to remain in their union with Yugoslavia in 1991 Western politicians claimed they were “aggressors” in their own country and stood by as their sovereign nation was amputated and sliced into 5 new countries setting a new precedent for future conflicts.
“Legacy and Symbols” are therefore very important, not just to Americans, but all of the ethnic people in the Balkans who rely on self-serving propaganda and the manipulation of history to demonize each other.
In the past when I wrote about the Croatian Checkerboard symbol and how many tens of thousands were liquidated under that flag in WWII, Croatians argued that the symbol “is an Ancient logo.” So, too, is the Swastika—it originated in the Bronze Age—it is not when these ugly symbols were created that is important, it is what they represent. Would the world stand by in silence if Germany used the Swastika again? NO WAY, but the world has stood by in silence allowing Croatia to use this ugly symbol (the checkerboard see above) that is repugnant to millions of Serbs, Jews and Roma whose family members and relatives were murdered by Hitler’s Croatian allies, the Ustashe, under that symbol.
The recent celebration of the 20th anniversary of “Operation Storm” in which 230,000 Serbs were not just “ethnically cleansed” but their homes were burned and more than 90 Serbian Orthodox churches destroyed…it was inhuman destruction at such a vile level that it brings to mind the real nature of these war crimes and the obvious return of WWII Fascism to Croatia.
The dirty little secret behind “Operation Storm” is the fact that 15 retired American generals from MPRI in Alexandria, Virginia went to Croatia in 1992 and in nearly nightly secret flights the US armed Croatia in violation of every international agreement. These American mercenaries for hire are war criminals, they trained and planned “Operation Storm” and arranged to turn off the AWACS radar in order for Croatia to violate the “No-Fly” zone so they could bomb and strafe fleeing Serbian refugees—a war crime by every definition of Geneva.
Evidence today reveals that over 1,100 Serbian refugees were killed and many were dragged off of their carts and wagons and beaten to death as the State Department and the American media pretended not to notice. President Clinton, Madeleine Albright and General Wesley Clark were responsible for ordering these war crimes and were part of the international conspiracy and criminal enterprise.
As a direct victim of this Genocide, the last five relatives of my name were too old and too sick to flee. The Red Cross notified me a month later that they were found with their throats slit. When can I expect justice?
“Born-again” Nazi nationalism along with the return of Ustashi symbols saturate Croatia today where you can buy Nazi souvenirs and Nazi flags in Zagreb. The truth about the Ustashi has been muzzled for far to many years and concentration camps like Jasenovac will never be reconciled if Croatia continues to resort to their Nazi past. Croatian criminals MUST be brought to justice. The statute of Limitation on murder does not expire with time!
For the president of Croatia to deny Serbians “any human rights” is a mockery of democratic ideals that have costs American taxpayers billions of dollars to bring about this new country. The EU, NATO and the UN should have addressed Croatian war crimes before giving them any status…the United States that lied and fabricated the facts while preaching “Neutrality” and their alleged goal of “Human Rights” was more dishonest than the Croats committing the crimes using these honorable terms. It is clear that the politics of hatred and the skillful emotions of prejudice are currently permeating Croatia. It has sent a clear signal that their independence was coordinated and planned in a criminal enterprise and based on the complete extermination of their Serbian citizens. President Tudjman was quoted as saying “I am a doubly lucky man: my wife is neither a Serb or a Jew.” But such bigoted remarks were further elevated in the media when Secretary of State Eagleberger said: “Serbs are not too smart,” or Richard Holbrooke unashamedly calling Serbs “Murderous Assholes,’ as Senator Biden, now Vice President of the United States, called Serbs “Illiterates, degenerates, baby killers, rapists, terrorists, cowards, aggressors and Nazis” during a five minute interview on CNN, August 3, 1993. Imagine what would have followed had he been given more time? This was a planned frontal attack on the Serbian people deliberately orchestrated to be as destructive of the Serbian culture and their existence as possible… it was planned and perpetrated at the highest levels of the American government and military. New documents have surfaced about “Operation storm” that reveal the American generals secretly trained Croatians fully intending to erase every aspect of Serbian existence. Those retired American generals need to be standing in the dock at The Hague…
Worth repeating here are the powerful words of Antun Miletich, a Croatian writer in 1945: “There is not a pen capable of describing the horror and terror of the atmosphere at Jasenovac. A terror more dreadful than any that ever before existed anywhere, run by bloodthirsty wild animals whose most hidden and disgusting instincts had come to the surface in a way never before seen in human beings—and till you have not said enough.” The Vatican and hundreds of Croatian Catholic priests participated in this genocide then fled through the “Vatican Ratline” for Argentina where they escaped justice—a symbol of the power of the Vatican in these ugly crimes against humanity.
In Croatia today the vast majority support and defend these Nazi ideas as some hideous anchor linked to Croatian independence as though the Serbs had enslaved them—persecuted them—or held them back from any success as a people. For 50 years Croatia was one of the most prosperous republics in Communist Yugoslavia and it’s worth mentioning that the Serbs ranked in 4th place among politicians, ambassadors and government officials in their own country in which Serbians were the majority.
However, a closer look at real history reveals the Croats were vassals of the Austrian Empire as late as 1918. They were the enemies of Serbia in WWI until it became apparent that Serbia would win the war when they provided the first victory at Cer, Serbia and marched from the shores of Salonika to the gates of Austria liberating Serbia… meanwhile, the Croats were like rats fleeing a sinking ship. They ran into the arms of their Serbian enemies and welcomed Churchill and his ilk that demanded that Serbia relinquish her nationhood and create the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as the solution to the war… it was a shot-gun marriage made in hell.
Today when you read Croatia’s version of history you are led to believe that there was a Croatian nation a thousand years ago as well as a Croatian king, and claiming that since joining the Serbs in the past 87 years the Croats were made into slaves… none of this Croatian propaganda is real and too many in the American government and the press were too ignorant of Balkan history and bought into this historical revisionism, “hook, line and sinker.”
Most Americans are totally unaware that Serbia lost 32% of her adult male population in WWI as our allies and 25 years later went on as Allies in WWII losing 26% of their overall population while the Croats, Austrians, Slovenes, Albanians and Bosnian Muslims were all Nazi collaborators who murdered more than 1.5 million Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 70,000 Roma. No Croatian symbols can erase the worse crimes of the 20th century, no matter how many American politicians they can bribe…
