Kolinda Grabar KItarovic, President of Croatia
Mauricio Macri, President of Argentine

Upon her current visit to Argentine Croatian president Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic said that many Croats had found their freedom” in Argentina after World War II, fleeing persecution in Communist Yugoslavia, adding that she felt proud of all the generations of Croats who came to the Latin American country. Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic also said earlier this week in Buenos Aires that “after WWII many Croatians sought and found indeed in Argentina the space of freedom where they were able to prove their patriotism”.

The Nazi-hunting Efraim Zuroff from the Israel-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre on Wednesday 14 March 2018 condemned the Croatian president Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic for praising during her current visit to Argentina the Croats who emigrated to the country and warned they included “many officials of its World War II pro-Nazi regime”. While Zuroff has for some 12 years now caught/hunted the last Croat indicted for WWII crimes, Dinko Sakic, the mere fact that Zuroff in his Nazi-crimes collaborators hunt cannot point a finger for having committed any crimes in WWII at a single Croat whom president Grabar Kitarovic addressed during her visit to Argentine can only mean one thing: with his appalling inferences Zuroff is wickedly relentless in pursuing his filthy work of stigmatising as criminal that significant part of the Croatian nation that fought for Croatian independence from Yugoslavia in WWII.

Grabar Kitarovic remarks “constitute a blanket whitewash of some of the worst criminals of WWII”, Efraim Zuroff said in a statement.

President rejected the criticism as a “malicious interpretation of her statement”. In a letter to Zuroff she accused him of “repeated attempts to impose a collective stigma on Croatia, Croatian people and Croatian immigrants” which she deemed “unacceptable”.

Thursday 15 March Zuroff responded to accusations of collective stigmatisation, saying, “I never spoke negatively about all Croatians, that would be absurd. Of course if the government makes errors, I feel justified in criticising them.” 

“The only question is whether her (Grabar Kitarovic’s) statement stemmed from admiration for these murderous Ustasha or ignorance of their postwar escape,” Zuroff said. If this is not collective stigmatisation then I find it impossible to find a better example. Croatian community in Argentina is certainly not made up of former members of WWII Ustasha forces although a minor number of them form a part of it and certainly none living there now were murderous (if they were one has no doubt that Zuroff in his work of hunting WWII criminals would have caught them a long time ago, to mention just that detail).. And it is to be noted that being a member of the WWII independence fighting Ustashas was and is not a matter wrapped up in suspicion and dishonourable veil. There was and there isn’t anything dishonourable wanting freedom from oppression as a movement.

It is a historical fact that Croats, essentially forced  into the Serb-led kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes/ Kingdom of Yugoslavia after WWI, via the Treaty of Versailles, throughout the subsequent decades suffered intolerable oppression and cruelty out of which resulted among other, the Ustasha movement.

It is a historical fact that one of the main principles of the Ustasha movement was: The Croat nation, taken as a whole, has a right to happiness and prosperity, and every Croat has the same right as a member of this whole. This happiness and prosperity can be achieved, either by the nation as a whole or by the individual as a member of this whole, only in a fully self-governing and independent Croat state, and therefore no part of it can ever become, in any form, a component of another state.

Well, actually, as Zuroff denies that Serbs committed genocide in Srebrenica (1995), even though it was genocide; as he denies and covers-up or diverts the guilt for the extermination by Serbia’s WWII Milan Nedic government of 94% of Jews in Serbia, among other morally suspect assessments he has put out over the years he is neither justified nor qualified to criticise Argentinian Croats or the WWII freedom fighters in Croatia as a group. Furthermore, Zuroff is a staunch denier of communist crimes against Croats that far outnumbered any crimes reportedly committed by and during the WWII Ustasha regime.

General Zeljko Glasnovic, Member of Croatian Parliament representing the Croatian Diaspora, of which Croats in Argentine is a are a significant part, said the following in parliament on Thursday 15 March 2018: “…during the past 25 years the Croatian diaspora has sent over $60 billion to Croatia, during the war, those Croats in Argentina has taken mortgages against their homes to send help … Mr Zuroff is dishing out moral rights to us, he has no moral right to dish out any moral rights to the Croatian people. I would like to draw attention to one example, that from year 2000 to 2018 almost 10,000 Palestinian residents have been killed in Palestine, 2175 children were children and if we remember the invasion of Lebanon, Israeli Army’s operation Free Galilee… some 3 to 4,000 civilians were killed, all international war rights were breached and they are dishing out lessons to us. I would recommend to Mr Zuroff to read the book by Ilan Pappé ‘Ethnic cleansing of Palestine’, he is also an Israeli… and one more thing about Mr Zuroff, which is shameful, he negated the Serbian genocide in Srebrenica…’