From Left: Stjepan Mesic, Slavko Goldstein, Milorad Pupovac
Photo: Zeljko Mrsic/Pixsell
When an online news article attracts 2,130 comments then you know it’s touching the nerve of a nation; that’s especially so if that country has a population of 4.4 million.
One of such news article appeared Saturday 27 July in Croatia’s Vecernji List portal and it’s title: Mesic: An uprising occurred in Srb and Ustashephiles won’t be able to change that!
Marking the 72nd Anniversary of the uprising of people of Lika and Kordun happened in Srb (Lika region), Croatia, on Saturday. Present were Croatia’s former president Stjepan Mesic (a die-hard communist), and his political chums Milorad Pupovac (a leader of some but not all Croatian Serbs/) and Slavko Goldstein (representing at the event Croatia’s president Ivo Josipovic but otherwise author, historian and served in communist Yugoslav Partisan forces during WWII).
Celebrating the “Srb uprising” (July 1941) has been a very sore and controversial issue in Croatia and to this day it divides the Croatian nation, I dare say because the communist partisan’s crimes committed there have not been either properly acknowledged or prosecuted. Opinions vary regarding the Srb Uprising: some say it was a rebellion against the WWII Ustashe regime in Croatia, some say it was a Serb Chetnik retaliation (with Greater Serbia goals) against local Ustashe, some say it was a part of communist partisan antifascist strategy with majority Serbs forming the lines of uprising, many say it was not an uprising but the beginning of Serb Chetnik killing orgies against Croatian people …
The tally of truth is that the Yugoslav communist partisans here slaughtered multitudes of innocent Croatians and their followers today justify these crimes of “retaliation” as just!
Since when have retaliation or revenge mitigated crimes in the eyes of the law?
Only since communist crimes began it seems.
On Saturday 27 July nearby the Srb commemoration site a group led by the Autochthon Croatian Party of Rights protested against the antifascist Srb commemoration claiming that the Srb Uprising was not an antifascist operation in WWII but a pure Serb Chetnik murderous spree against Croatians.
When Mesic was president of Croatia he said:
“No one defends neither the first nor the second Yugoslavia, or denies the flaws and failures of these states. No one defends or justifies the crimes committed on the winning side by noting that these were individual crimes, even when they were bulk, while the crimes of the Ustasha regime were regime’s policy”.
On Saturday at Srb, the same Stjepan Mesic, now honorary president of Croatian antifascist association, jumped into his own mouth and said that “an uprising against the Nazi fascist occupiers occurred in Srb and the hidden Ustashephiles will not be able to change the history…”. Hence, he is justifying communist crimes and defending them by not even mentioning that there were many of those as a consequence of Srb uprising.
Mesic forgot to mention that during his presidency of Croatia (2000 – 2010) and to this day there have been discovered hundreds of new mass graves, pits, where remains of innocent victims of WWII Communist Partisan crimes lie. He forgot to conclude that such evidence is irrefutable testimony of mass war crimes being the policy of the communist regime. 1,700 mass graves across former Yugoslavia: Slovenia nearly 600, Croatia 850, Bosnia and Herzegovina 90 and Serbia about 190.
That number spells organised crime, is a manifestation of communist and antifascist policy.
So as far as I am concerned Stjepan Mesic and all those who keep insulting the victims of communist crimes (any victim, for that matter) by calling those who want justice for them Ustashephiles, by justifying the communist crimes for political reasons, who keep on with the rhetoric about needing to make those who perpetrated the crimes answerable but do nothing to make prosecution happen when it comes to their communist comrades, should go away or be made to go away and stop obstructing justice. Those like Stjepan Mesic who will not see that the need to prosecute and condemn communist crimes has nothing to do with changing history as a matter of some political juggling game but everything to do with putting the history right in accordance with irrefutable evidence can vanish from my global neighbourhood too. I’m more interested in the pursuit for justice for victims of communist crimes than being exposed to the utter vulgarities Croatia’s so-called antifascists are peddling about. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)