Yosef Amrani, Israeli Ambassador to Croatia
Photo: politikaplus.com
The deplorable, hateful and blatant lie uttered by Croatia’s Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic on the occasion of Remembrance Day for the Victims of the Holocaust last Monday 27 January can, without doubt, be interpreted as an attempt to justify WWII and post-WWII massive communist crimes rather than to pay due regard and convey deep piety to the victims of the Holocaust.
“Until April 1941 there had been no mass executions of people because of they were of a different religion and origin. That had changed during that April with the formation of the Independent State of Croatia, which had commenced with mass murders within weeks… Only at the end of June 1941 mass murders, primarily of Jews, started in Eastern Europe. That was not yet the time of concentration camps, that was the time of mass murders by firearms … We know what occurred after that. It was necessary to rise against such a State of Croatia and hundreds of thousands of Croats did that … Communism came and so did revenge… Revenge happened but before it mass murders happened … Revenge is simply not morally justified …” said Zoran Milanovic in his speech for the Victims of the Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The problem with Zoran Milanovic is that he omits, purposefully, to characterise the communist revenge for what it truly was: mass murder and mass execution of multitudes of innocent people because of their different political leanings and nationality. This was no different in nature to the mass executions and murders committed by the pro-Nazi Independent State of Croatia regime. So why not call it for what it truly was?
Perhaps Zoran Milanovic, pro-communist, took a particularly bitter issue with the symbolism of the fact that the suspected communist criminal extradited to Germany, Josip Perkovic, had reportedly just been transferred to a Nuremberg jail, pending final criminal charges!? It’s obvious that Milanovic does not see all mass murders as crimes of the same nature. That is a shame for humanity, for Croatia’s path to a future where all crimes from the past are dealt with and condemned with equal moral and judicial wrath is once again obstructed; and more fuel to political slinging matches on the backs of all victims of WWII and post-WWII crime has been poured by no other than the communist protégés at the helm of Croatia’s government.
Although without directly pointing to what Zoran Milanovic had sad Israeli Ambassador to Croatia Yosef Amrani addressed Croatia’s public with statement that clearly rebukes Milanovic’s deplorable claims as to when mass executions commenced in Europe.
History is horrible enough without Milanovic’s falsifications. Yosef Amrani emphasised that people were sent to concentration camps before 1941.
“Holocaust is an historic fact and an incomprehensible historical event and it cannot be tied to the date of the holding of the conference at Wannsee on 20th January 1942 and the decision by the German authorities to destroy the Jewish people through the process called ‘the Final Solution’ … Sadly, that process, that coordinated effort to make the Jewish people the culprits for all social and economic adversities in Europe, began before then and originates from the Nazi ideology and antisemitism … Speeches and comments regarding that important day (Remembrance Day for the Victims of the Holocaust) by people in authority should remind us of the bestiality, of the cruelty of the Nazi regime and of the apathy of the international community,” stated Yosef Amrani and continued:
“Europe kept quiet, the world kept quiet. The Crystal Night (Kristallnacht), which occurred in November 1938, is a direct attack against innocent people; the revocation of German citizenship from Jews just because of their Jewish origins was not enough for Europe and the world to wake up… While remembrance and lessons are alive in our conscience, as human beings we must teach and instruct history as it really happened.”
Back to the deplorable falsification of history thrust upon us by Zoran Milanovic, it’s most opportune to remind ourselves that Adolf Hitler established the first concentration camps in January 1933, and Dachau was opened in March 1933. There were about 45,000 people in those camps before the Reichstag fire ( February 1933). The fact that these were not the so-called death camps at the time does not change the fact that people were murdered in their masses.
Instead of concluding that the establishment of the Jasenovac camp (in Croatia) was modeled upon the Nazi camps, Milanovic imputes in his speech last Monday that the Nazi camps were modeled on Jasenovac.
What an evil communist vomit!
What is Zoran Milanovic still doing as Prime Minister of Croatia!? Who stands behind him to give him courage to utter such blatant lies!?
It’s of note that in this his anti-Croatian propaganda speech Milanovic completely disregarded the mass executions by the communist regime of Joseph Stalin and perhaps there lies the fact that Milanovic decided to talk about Europe and not the whole region affected by Nazi regime and its expansionist thrusts? But just for the record and for the devastating fact that Joseph Stalin’s judges sat on Nuremberg trials against Nazis, and that Stalin was an ally of the Allies in WWII here are some facts of communist crimes in Russia, which actually strike a harrowing resemblance in nature and intensity to communist crimes in post-WWII Croatia.
In February 1989, two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, a research paper by Georgian historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev published in the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti contains grim bookkeeping that included the following tragic episodes: 1 million imprisoned or exiled between 1927 to 1929; 9 to 11 million peasants forced off their lands and another 2 to 3 million peasants arrested or exiled in the mass collectivization program; 6 to 7 million killed by an artificial famine in 1932-1934; 1 million exiled from Moscow and Leningrad in 1935; 1 million executed during the ”Great Terror” of 1937-1938; 4 to 6 million dispatched to forced labor camps; 10 to 12 million people forcibly relocated during World War II; and at least 1 million arrested for various “political crimes” from 1946 to 1953.
In “Europe A History,” British historian Norman Davies (1996) counted 50 million killed between 1924-53 in communist purges, excluding wartime casualties.
And so, once again, Zoran Milanovic (and pro-communist echelons) calls the WWII and the post-WWII mass murders and mass executions of innocent people by the communists – revenge! Milanovic uses the crimes committed by the Independent State of Croatia regime as justification for the horror that occurred at the hands of communists! He uses the word “revenge” in order to soften the brutality of the communist crimes that were perpetrated – the Bleiburg massacres, the Croatian Way of the Cross … the 850 + filled mass graves of innocent Croats executed by the communists!
Clearly, Zoran Milanovic puts justification of communist crimes before piety for the victims of the Holocaust. Why else would he contaminate the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust in such a twisted and evil manner? Does he really believe that the Jewish people, the victims of the Holocaust accept revenge murder as just?
I would think that no-one bar communists can truly justify indiscriminate revenge murders that include innocent lives. Hence, a possible reason why the Israeli Ambassador Yosef Amrani found it necessary to speak out about the real truth of the beginnings of persecution of the Jews in 1930’s Europe, to indirectly rebuke Zoran Milanovic’s claims as to where and when mass executions commenced in Europe. And indeed, it is so important for humanity to offer each victim the respect and space he/she deserves and not to poison the remembrance and piety as Zoran Milanovic did. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)
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Jews were also murdered during the Communist regime.. Milanovic omitted that part too!! He also omitted that the communists took all the property that belonged to Jews, nationalized it and distributed it among themselves after WWII! He is such a deplorable man, who hates his own people for the sake of a regime that continued mass murder after 1945 and continued to 1995…
Yes Robert Voltrusky, and the former communists of today in Croatia, including the president, have the hide to accuse the WWII Independent State of Croatia of taking the Jewish property and yet when communists won the war they made no attempts to restore the properties to their rightful owners or their descendants or to Jewish community. They gave themselves the best properties, lived in them for decades and the purchased them from the government for pittance. A corrupt regime, indeed.
You are over sensationalizing, PM Milanovic is right, the Serbs post WW2 did seek revenge against the remenants of the so called N.D.H. Ustashi regime for the crimes committed in that Nazi German / Italian fascist created puppet state. Post WW2 retribution against Ustashi N.D.H. supporters mirrored crimes committed by the Ustashi against the Serbs from 1941-1945, Tito tried but failed to stop the Serbs lust for revenge. To label post WW2 extrajudicial killings as “communist crimes” is miss-leading & denies the Nationalistic reality behind those killings
It is just so, so sad that Milanovic did this, he has no respect for the victims of the Holocaust. He only uses them to cover up communist crimes. How awful!
It is awful, Mary K
The time has arrived when all mass crimes of WWII and post-WWII (and beyond) must be dealt with, with equally brutal force. No revenge is acceptable. However, Milanovic is wrong: Communists did not become active to save Croatia from Nazism they took arms to save Yugoslavia with Croatia in it! And that is the truth. And that is why people like Milanovic do not care about Jewish victims and the Holocaust. Absolutely appalling. Why that government in Croatia is tolerated is anyone’s guess but I bet it has support from Croatia’s Jewish lobby which also participated in the communist regime …
Interesting observation Spectator.
One has to be reminded that Milanovic’s diatribe against NDH is the result of his generation’s indoctrination by Communist Partisan propaganda over the last 70 years to view WWII and post WWII events from a pro-Yugoslav perspective. Their aim during the war was to destroy the govt. of the Independent State of Croatia and establish a Communist dictatorship over not only Croatia, but several nation-states and call it Yugoslavia. The Partisans who fought during WWII were fighting in conjunction with Serbs (among others) against an established and internationally recognized country – Croatia; in order to establish a communist Yugoslavia. There can be no doubt about this fact. Those who took arms against NDH did so not because they were altruistic antifascists, as they would like us to believe, but because they were communist Yugoslavs – they were fighting against the Croatian state, against Croatian nationalism and against Croatian people’s desire for their own country within their historic borders. In order to achieve their aims they did not hesitate to kill ‘their own’ – both during and after the war – in the hundreds of thousands. What patriots, what self-sacrificing idealists!
True Velebit, communists don’t give a hoot about victims of any kind, they fought for Yugoslavia not against Independent State of Croatia in WWII.
Milanovic is a useless incompetent.
He tries to justify the Communist mass executions without trial by saying that it was a reaction to crimes by elements of NDH.
Well, the Ustasa movement was a reaction to greater Serbian imperialism, and the crimes of some participants of the Ustasa movement and certain elements of power in NDH were justified as revenge; for 27 years of occupation, state sponsored terrorism, wholesale economic pillaging of Croats and Croatia, of cultural imperialism, and of course, the massive, systematic attrocities committed by retreating VJ forces and local Chetnik bandits fleeing the advancing Germans across Lika, Kordun, Banovina, W Hercegovina and Slavonia during the German invasion. All BEFORE NDH came into being.
This bit of history always seems to be conveniently ignored by 1945 Croatian and Jewish property “liberators” and their apologists.
In terms of the Partisan movement. I have to disagree to a point with Velebit as Pavelic, while forced to sign over Istra, Kvarner, the Islands and chunks of Dalmatia to that shaven fascist degenerate Mussolini, he did not make it a point to get support for himself and the Ustasa movement in the Italian fascist occupied areas of Croatia and tell the Croats to rise up, or send his agents to lead a revolt and support them tacitly.
The Italians carried out a genocide against Croats in the occupied areas, and the Italians were openly subverting NDH at every step through until its capitulation.
That condemned Croatia to a civil war within a world war as the Croatian Istrians, Islanders, and Dalmatians under the boot of that inbred fascist monkey Mussolini, all of whom supported HSS (and not a small number the Ustasa movement) before the war and who were, before the Communist commessars began brainwashing them, very good patriotic Croats and Catholics, were victims of genocide and cultural imperialism at the hands of Mussolini’s undisciplined, effete feather-wearing unshaven and unwashed rabble.
Unfortunately, due to Pavelic’s inaction (not sending agents or officers on the ground to lead a rebellion and sending supplies being smuggled in) they felt betrayed, and the Communists, who were sent to infiltrate the Croatian Catholic uprising against genocidal Italian fascist imperialism, began to condition some (definitely not all) and turn them against NDH.
Well all know the result.
This fatal inaction, which automatically alienated (and turned hostile) a large swath of the Croatian national corpus, along with the sending of 8,000 of Croatia’s best trained and equipped forces to fight and die for German imperial interests on the Eastern front while NDH was not even remotely close to controlling its own territory; in addition to sticking to Germany to the very bitter end, condemned NDH to fail, and ensured that no Croatian state in any form would be in existence after war’s end – outside geopolitical factors aside.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
However this regime and the Yugolevica media’s incessant repetition of fables, fantasies and gross, perverse exaggerations regarding WWII is a subversive discourse to change the topic (their gross incompetence), and cover up for their own crimes, and in terms of this government, gross, treasonous incompetence and failure at all levels – political, economic, and diplomatic.
Every time WWII is brought up, they are covering up / blowing smoke for something.
They don’t like the fact that Croatia defeated Tito’s JNA and that a Croatian state rose from the ashes of Chetnik and JNA destruction of Croatia under the brilliant leadership of Pres. Dr. Franjo Tudman and his Generals, and their military and police forces.
The 1945 Croatian and Jewish property “liberator”‘s days are numbered, and no amount of foreign intelligence and NGO front funding will be able to save them.
While they reversed many gains made between 1991 through December 1999, Croatia is still here. And it will rise from its decade long slumber soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk5Y7iHO8nA
Therealamericro, there is no arguing with the truth, you tell it as it was, including the fact that the WWII Independent State of Croatia arose out of Serbian-led oppression and imperialism. Croatia is still here, yes, and will as you say rise from its decade longer slumber soon, from the rickety fragility its hard-fought for democracy suffers at the hands of Yugo-communists…all that’s needed is to listen again what Franjo Tudjman had to say and listen carefully, following that by decisive action…in the first video clip you posted here Tudjman says: “…and we will not permit the remnants of Yugo-communist system nor Yugo-Serbian situation, which we found in Croatia at the time of creating Croatian free democracy, we will not permit that to bring everything we created into question… we will not permit those Yugo-communist remnants and those political amateurs, headless queers who don’t see what we are really dealing with today. In Croatia and in the world with all sorts of regional plans. We will not permit those who tie themselves even to the black devil against Croatian freedom and independence. Not only to the black but also to green and yellow devils. We will not permit those who tie themselves to all opponents of Croatian independence, not only tie to, not only do they offer themselves to them but they sell themselves for Judah’s pieces of silver… we will not permit those on the sidelines to decide for us, to force their decisions upon us… Croatia has earned its right to decide for itself about its destiny …” … and so we help move Croatia “back to the future”! We must condemn at blow to invisible and impotent smithereens the Yugo-communist veins that poison any chance of true democratic society in Croatia
Well said therealamericro. Insightfull,articulate and sraight to the point. Thank God for people like yourself & Ina who selflessly continue to push Croatia’s cause.
Thank you very much for visit,like,greeting and video !
A beautiful saturday and a wonderful Sunday.!
Sincerely and respectfully .
http://youtu.be/EirO0fwgt3I
Aliosa.
😀
Humans have an incredible ability to forget, distort, and completely twist things around so that the facts somehow conform to their own interests. For me, it comes down to the idea that, as far as we know, each of us is born with just one life. Therefore, anyone who destroys or ends the life of another for personal gain is committing the highest crime possible.
Thank you, Ina, for your courage to speak out. It’s a rare and important quality.
Thank you Bronxboy55 for your feedback, much appreciated
“mass murder and mass execution of multitudes of innocent people because of their different political leanings and nationality.” – they were Nazis!
… DELETED AS OFFENSIVE …I am very disappointed how little or no progress there is in minds of some (hopefully not all) Croatians…
John, part of your comment has been deleted as offensive, or personal attack. Now it seems you have missed the point and misunderstood the article. To your understanding Communists are justified to have murdered anyone who did not agree with their political regime or ideas. Do not forget that Nazis are condemned for having murdered people because of their religion and/or race and the communists post-WWII did similar and it was not the Nazis they mass murdered it was multitudes of innocent people, men of no army status (some they murdered did wear uniforms but sadly there victims had no court trial to prove them personally guilty of any crime before they were pushed alive into pits or executed), women and children – pits are filled with innocent bones. Nazis have answered and are still answering for their horrible crimes. Rightly so. Communist have not yet answered for their in Croatia but I pray that anyone who has committed a crime will answer for it soon. But it seems you don’t like justice to be applied to all with equal foundations based on humanity?
Milanovic is typical of the cadres who swear allegiance to the Red flag/hammer and sickle and pray to the ‘altar’ of their dictator hero Tito everyday…they create history from nothing and if repeated often enough it becomes reality. Croatians have had to put up with this nonsensical communist version of history. Sadly many people are quite ignorant and believe it all because it was pumped out through diplomacy/the Yugoslav consulates, through historians, etc. It would be like reading Soviet history about the people of Ukraine or Poland. Utter garbage.
Agree Veronika – utter garbage!
Content sounds better to read compare to others.
http://worldleaks.com
How about the Armenian Genocide, where 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by the Turks in April of 1915.
And victims still waiting for justice, Mihrank
Some of the most powerful leaders in the American Jewish community have stepped forward in recent days to acknowledge the 1915 Armenian Genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turkey.
That is good news Mihran