Nationalists in Serbia and Montenegro have manipulated memories of the Jasenovac concentration camp and the genocidal crimes committed by the World War II fascist Ustasa movement to stimulate hatred for Croats in general – but that’s no excuse for downplaying atrocities.
In the Balkans, politics is never very far from history and history never far from the politics. In the case of the history of the Independent State of Croatia, NDH, and the Jasenovac concentration camp, in particular, you don’t have to look far for examples.
Only in the past few weeks, the intrusion of Jasenovac into regional nationalist politics has included the resignation of the director of the Jasenovac Memorial Park, Ivo Pejakovic, and last weekend’s hasty resolution in the Montenegrin parliament, in which Jasenovac, Mauthausen and Dachau were declared genocidal. The Croatian government then denounced the resolution as an egregious and divisive attempt at political interference.
There were also a series of announcements and revelations about the relationship between the ruling Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ party in Croatia and the Jasenovac memorial museum, and a controversial interview with Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik in the Jerusalem Post which included a number of claims about Jasenovac and the role of Bosnian Muslims in the Ustasa regime.
Memory culture – in this case the culture of memory of past atrocities and traumas – is an essential part of the story nations tell themselves. It sends a message to victims’ families that the suffering of their loved ones is acknowledged, while ensuring that the memory of those atrocities won’t be used as a cudgel of nationalist resentment or manipulated to impose collective guilt.
However, memory culture becomes a more toxic and counterproductive process when it leads to a hierarchy of victims, with some of the victims of the worst kinds of crime – including internationally recognised instances of genocide – pushed to the margins.
A case in point is the way in which we continue to talk about the hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma as well as antifascists systematically murdered by the Croatian fascist Ustasa regime between 1941 and 1945.
The gravity of the Ustasa crimes against Serbs, Jews, and Roma was established in the-then emerging field of genocide studies before the Second World War was even over.
In his 1945 study, Genocide: A Modern Crime, Rafael Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the term ‘genocide’, specifically identified the crimes of the Ustasa regime as genocidal, a judgement subsequently confirmed at the Nuremburg Tribunal. According to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Ustasa regime committed genocide under every category of Article 2 except one against Serbs, Jews, and Roma.
The terror of the Ustasa regime against the Serbian population in particular was enormous in scope and resources. It included not only waves of pogroms by Ustasa militias in the countryside, the liquidation of tens of thousands of ordinary civilians, including children, in a network of concentration camps, and the mass deportation of others through forced resettlement camps to Serbia but also ghettoization and curfews in the major cities, the confiscation of businesses and property, exclusion from all economic activity, deliberate starvation and, later, forced assimilation and the transfer of Serbian children to other ethnic groups, primarily Croatian families.
This was, in short, a statewide, systematic, and organised programme aimed at the destruction of a community, one which preceded the Wannsee Conference by some months and was the first non-Nazi genocide of World War Two. Genocide case law has further defined genocide as an attempt to destroy a population in whole or in part, where that part is a significant proportion of the wider targeted population.
In the case of the Serbian population, the percentage of the population that perished ranged from a low estimate of 13 per cent to nearly 19 per cent.
Moreover, while Croatian revisionists are fond of making a distinction between the Holocaust and Porajmos (Roma Holocaust) on the one hand – which can be handily blamed on the Nazi occupation forces – and the mass murder of Serbs – which can’t, and which they deny in any case – the fact is that the majority of Jews in the NDH had already been murdered in the concentration camps before the Nazi leadership had embarked on the ‘Final Solution’.
Meanwhile the Ustasa regime was almost entirely responsible for the destruction of the state’s Roma people; they were deported almost en masse in the spring and summer of 1942 and liquidated.
Despite this, the language used in official international commemorations to describe the atrocities by the Ustasa regime are anodyne and euphemistic. In view of the increasingly wide application of the term ‘genocide’, it is notable that it is so rarely used in official commemorations to describe what took place in the NDH between 1941 and 1945.
Ignoring the victims’ ethno-religious identities
It’s also worth remarking upon the general omission of the identity of the main victim groups, never mind the perpetrators. The way we speak about the atrocities of the Ustasa regime has its roots in the memory culture of post-war socialist Yugoslavia. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Yugoslav Partisans held a series of countrywide war crimes trials in which Ustasa officials as well as members of its military forces featured prominently.
By the time the term ‘genocide’ entered into the global legal lexicon, as Croatian historian Hrvoje Klasic has recently pointed out, most of the Ustasa trials were over.
At the same time, mindful of the fact that they were building a multi-ethnic state, in their commemorations of the atrocities by wartime collaborationist forces, the Yugoslav authorities tended to avoid – in contrast to Yugoslav historians and political scientists – identifying either the victims or perpetrators by national affiliation.
For a short period, war crimes trials even categorised ‘Ustasa’ as a nationality, while throughout the existence of the socialist state, in common with most states under socialism, the victims were often described as having fallen in the ‘anti-fascist struggle’ which was true of some victims certainly, but not most – few of whom had strong political views or were killed because of them.
When the new Jasenovac memorial museum exhibition was opened in Croatia in 2006 – then emerging from the Franjo Tudjman era – the museum’s administration similarly decided not to indicate the ethno-religious identity of the victims or ascribe responsibility for their deaths, using the reasoning that Serbian nationalists had misused the memory of Ustasa genocide (although they didn’t use that terminology) to stimulate hatred against Croats as a people and to legitimise war crimes against Croatia’s citizens during its war of independence.
Instead, the initial museum exhibition – following the trend towards the Europeanisation and universalisation of the Holocaust pioneered by Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – focused very much on the individuality of the victims.
While this sounded progressive, it is more reasonable to view it as a form of erasure, since the majority of victims who perished in Jasenovac and in other concentration camps did not perish there because of individual character traits but because of their (assumed) collective identity.
At the same time, it was a classic example of reading history backwards: framing the victims of genocide in a specific way on the basis of how their deaths were appropriated by a subsequent generation with which they had no connection.
There is little doubt that the traumatic legacy of the NDH and the Ustasa genocide was misused and manipulated in the 1990s by certain Serbian institutions, politicians, and intellectuals both in the lead-up to the war in Croatia and then once conflict had broken out, amplifying the impression that the newly independent Croatia was the NDH reborn or that Croats were somehow genetically prone to genocide against Serbs, usually deploying a highly selective reading of history.
It should be added that Croatian nationalist writers, journalists, and politicians were more than happy to reciprocate while the ruling party did little to assuage fears among ordinary Serbs, not least by attempting to rehabilitate the Ustasa regime and whitewash its massive crimes. More recently, the (over)emphasis on Jasenovac, crowding out all other aspects of the Ustasa genocide – itself a legacy of Yugoslav memory politics – has created the impression that Ustasa terror is reducible to one particular concentration camp when its politics of mass destruction went much wider than that.
But irrespective of nationalist manipulation or misuse, it cannot be healthy to have a memory culture where some victims of ethnonationalist hatred are identified publicly by their ethnic or religious identity and others remain anonymous, pushed to the margins.
It also cannot be healthy that some victims of genocide and mass murder should be commemorated in the name of reconciliation and good neighbourly relations while commemorating others is seen as inflammatory and provocative ethnonationalism, not least because such a twin-track approach is fuelling resentment and the nationalist capture of the past.
While Serbian, Jewish and Roma victims of the Ustasa genocide – the overwhelming majority of wartime casualties in the NDH – were individuals, first and foremost, and should not be reduced to ethno-nationalist bodies, they were murdered not because of anything they had done but because of the ethno-religious identity they were assumed to have.
As Ivo Pejakovic recently commented, the genocide of the Serbs – still disputed among some scholars in Croatia – as well as the less contested genocide of the Jews and Roma in the NDH, is a fact. It is time our language about the victims reflected that fact.