Greater Serbia – Croatia, the War, and the Future

Creeping Anti-Croatia Serb Minoritarianism

September 20, 2020 by inavukic 8 Comments

Croatian patriots and those who fought for the independent Croatia in 1990’s are living a political nightmare.

What Croatia is seeing these days more than few years back when minority governments started entering into coalition with rebel Serb minority leaders in order to form a government is that the representatives of rebel Serb political minority have been given the lion’s share of power in Croatia, including the position of a Deputy Prime Minister.

The Serb minority (rebel Serb or Croatian Serbs that vie more for Serbia than Croatia) are almost ruling the country. Andrej Plenkovic’s HDZ minority government evidently finds no fault with Milorad Pupovac, Boris Milosevic etc even though they use every moment to criminalise the Croatian Homeland War, or at least degrade it or make it irrelevant. The same Homeland War in which the Serbs were the aggressors, mass murderers and ethnic cleansers of Croats from their own lands and homes!

But also, the same war that with Croatian victory solidified and founded modern independent Croatia.

To be clear, Croatians do not have a problem with Serbs living in Croatia as an ethnic minority and ensuring the minority is protected and afforded due care and respect. After all, many Croatian Serbs fought with Croats on frontlines to defend Croatia from Greater Serbia onslaught in 1990’s. What Croatians don’t want is the rebel Croatian Serbs who fought with those Serbs and the former Yugoslav Army or stood behind the Greater Serbia politics of expansion and control over Croatia. The latter were the ones who did not want an independent Croatia no matter what the cost to achieve that. The cost was horrifying for Croats and, despite that, their courage prevailed, and victory was magnificent.

The political nightmare in Croatia is that the Croatian Serbs who align with the Greater Serbia politics rather than independent Croatia form that part of the Serb minority in Croatia that has achieved a high-status in Croatian government. The ruling HDZ party is in coalition with them and in this we are no longer talking about the protection of minorities by a government but about minorities taking an upper hand in legislature, in government – in the direction Croatia is going.

To put it bluntly, the murderer (rebel Serbs and former communists) are now, almost thirty years after they lost the war in which they tried to prevent the creation of an independent Croatia, are sitting in the parliament and in the government of Croatia! That would not be so devastating if their politics aligned with the values stemming from Croatia’s Homeland War, but their politics are those that Croats fought against, defended Croatia from Serb aggression and paid with rivers of blood.

This is as macabre as politics could possibly get in a country still grieving its victims of war, still pursuing to locate and bury its missing civilians and soldiers perished in the Serb aggression, still nursing their wounds from torture at the hands of Serb aggressor, still living among the rubble of the devastating war. No wonder barely 16% of the eligible voters in Croatia voted for Plenkovic’s HDZ, that is now a minority government collaborating with rebel Serb minority! The brewing of anger and bitter disappointment within the silent majority must be debilitating for if it was not so, and masses from the silent majority turned up at elections the result would most likely have been different.

So, one must ask: how far should society go (even by standing still) to accommodate the wishes or aims of minorities? And if the relatively largest minority is the one that attacked, ethnically cleansed the absolute majority, mass murdered and persecuted, plundered and devastated their belongings, mass raped their women and girls, men and boys, should that minority be accommodated for anything bar just condemnation and rejection?

Judging by the current official political climate in Croatia forged by the HDZ minority government, the answer to above would appear blatantly clear: yes the minorities should be accommodated in everything bar condemnation of their crimes and compensating Croatia for the grave damage done during the Homeland War of the 1990’s through sheer viciousness of local rebel Serbs and their comrades in Serbia. The way the starkly leftist, or former communist-moulded Croatian government collaborates with the anti-Croatia Serb minorities the answer to above is “yes, give the rebel Serbs anything they want in Croatia!”

I don’t buy this from any perspective whatsoever, not even from the forgiveness or reconciliatory perspective because the rebel Serb minority in Croatia simply do not acknowledge that they have done anything wrong and, yet, they devastated Croatia and its people with the help of their Greater Serbia political strongmen.

Croatian mainstream media has currently created the situation when the silent majority opposing such politics living in Croatia are afraid to open a newspaper or turn on the TV or the radio in fear of the Serb minority representatives, headed by the twisted anti-Croatia Milorad Pupovac, jump out at them, bashing them up just because they love Croatia, fought for Croatia, fought for independence and self-preservation. The Serbs and Serbia have one way, or another, been oppressing and torturing Croats for at least one hundred years, never losing sight of their determination not to permit Croats to rule over their own land and destiny.

The other part of the silent majority that’s sick and tired of the political impasse Croatia is in, primarily because of refusing to decommunise the anti-democratic and corruptive ways of leading the country inherited from former Yugoslavia, have been leaving Croatia in droves.

Those of us that are fortunate to have lived and are living in a civilised liberal democracy of the West, know that majorities owe certain things to harmless minorities: tolerance, civility, and the rights affirmed in the Constitution — freedom of speech, assembly, right to work and establish private business, right to education, etc. However, we also know and see that minorities owe something to the majority in return: mainly, a proper respect for their tastes, beliefs and sensibilities, and a decent restraint in challenging them, if there are some reasonable grounds for challenging them.

Take the case where Croatian Serbs, those that belonged to the rebel groups and aggressors against Croatia’s independence and mass murdered for that, insist that the Croatian town of Vukovar (the symbol town of Croatian suffering at the hands of Serb aggressor) must be bilingual. That is, Milorad Pupovac has insisted recently, yet again, that Serb Cyrillic must be introduced on public buildings etc signs in Vukovar. That Cyrillic must come to Vukovar, well, because a Serb minority lives there or has returned there after it had devastated the town in 1991 and mass murdered hundreds of its Croatian civilians. While the relevant legislation in Croatia does state that such two-language signage needs to exist if the minority population reaches at least around 32% of the general or majority population, even seeing the Cyrillic writing opens the terrifying and terrible Homeland War wounds to the Croatian majority there. The census of Vukovar has not been done for several years, it is estimated that the Serb population actually living there, as opposed to having their residence registering there but actually living in Serbia, is much lower than 32%. And the Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic with his government do absolutely nothing to shut Pupovac up on the matter.

One, particularly the leftist lot, could say that it would be a great convenience for all the minorities, including the Serb one, if the government did everything multilingually as there are a number of minorities in Croatia – Serb, Italian, Hungarian, Roma etc. Is that an accommodation we — we, the Croatian-speaking majority — should make? Why not? Where’s the harm in it? The harm is, that every time we make an accommodation of that kind, we lose a bit of the common thread of norms that people who have organised their lives around the Croatian identity (Croatian meaning and independent nation) don’t want to lose their national identity for which they paid for in rivers of blood.

Take the case of the Victory (over Serb aggressor) celebrations on 5 August when Croatian rebel Serb insist that commemoration of their dead must be held at the same time with the presence of Croatian government officials!

Croatian rebel Serb minority simply will not permit Croatians to celebrate and live their victory over the blood-thirsty Greater Serbia onslaught. They are systematically running down the Croatian state through their roles in the coalition government, their NGO’s funded by the Croatian taxpayer, their media and staunch support from Serbia for the pursuit of Greater Serbia.

This is where the modern political concept or reality of Minoritarianism has its players as the rebel Serbs’ representatives in Croatia are given a high degree of primacy in decision-making for Croatia. And yet, these representatives were voted into the parliament with barely a handful of votes, thanks to the ridiculous legislation that permits minority representatives to secure a seat in parliament even with a handful or just one vote!

How will all this end with the rebel Serb clan being given the lion’s share of power in Croatia? I don’t have an answer for that, but I do hold grave fears. I am reminded that Greater Serbia nation-building politics have always involved ethnic cleansing! It was so in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990’s and judging by the impetus of Serb-agenda wielded around in Croatia not much ground is visible for the Croatian nation-building. Unless, of course, that invisible ground is solid within the silent majority realms of aspirations. Without a doubt, the time of final reckoning wit former communists, with rebel Serbs in Croatia is on the horizon and HDZ government will have a great deal to answer for. Ina Vukic

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Croatia, Croatian Homeland War, Greater Serbia, Minoritarianism, political nightmare, power of ethnic minorities, rebel Serb minority, should minorities be given power

Labor Camp Jasenovac

August 18, 2018 by inavukic 36 Comments

Igor Vukic, author “Labor Camp Jasenovac”

Wherever you look, whether in books, tourist or other flyers and brochures, newspapers, digital or online media, Jasenovac site for World War II victims is portrayed as Jasenovac Concentration Camp (at times it has been referred to as an extermination camp) – within the context of the Holocaust. This portrayal of Jasenovac camp was initiated and established by the communist Yugoslavia regime in which a great number of Serbs played important, decisive, roles. That is a historical fact! I myself, for the benefit of public attention focus, in my writings throughout many years, have referred to it under that title because that was the name by which the world’s public was trained to recognise it. That is so in spite of the fact that all of my writings delved into the issues of scandalously pumped-up victim numbers and the concealment (by communists and pro-communists) of historical truth which shows that Jasenovac camp remained opened for a number of years after WWII for the purposes of communist purges and murders.

The past few months, in Croatia and worldwide, have particularly been coloured by escalated accusations and malicious allegations of neo-fascism or neo-Nazism supposedly gaining more and more ground in Croatia. Media articles and television and radio sources have been riddled with such fabricated monstrosities. Needless to say that the historical and patriotic greeting/salute “For Home Ready” (Za Dom Spremni) used in Croatia for centuries has, to former communists and pro-Communists and left-leaning political echelons, just like Jasenovac camp, become (utterly undeservingly) a symbol of neo-fascism and neo-Nazism. With leading Croatian journalists, writers, activists… being bullied and sanctioned (losing their jobs and livelihood etc.) for even daring to utter the notion that the WWII and post-WWII recorded Croatian history needs to be properly researched and brought to light, the courage for truth becomes more and more perilous for its seeker. It has come to this: those that sow rejection of fascism actually practice it, hiding their pathetic regard for truth and human rights, under vicious “antifascist” skirts.

Yesterday, I came across a newspaper (Vecernji List, Croatia) article by Milan Ivkosic, who writes about a new book released “Labor Camp Jasenovac” (Radni Logor Jasenovac) by author Igor Vukic (no family relation to me) and it grabbed my attention particularly because, given the persecution of those that even dare offer acknowledgment of the likely possibility that Jasenovac was not exclusively and purposefully an extermination camp, the article represents sound courage and positive, objectively lined credo.

Milan Ivkosic writes (translated into Egnlish): “Almost not a day goes by that Jasenovac is not mentioned, either as part of accusations against Thompson (Croatian popular singer and songwriter Marko Perkovic Thompson), in relation to verdicts regarding ‘For Home Ready’ or in relation to various books and texts, often mutually opposing, contradictory, exclusive.

I have read a splendid book ‘Labor Camp Jasenovac’ (Published by P.I.P.), authored by Igor Vukic, an unusual author of Serb nationality whose family members were in the Jasenovac camp, but his texts are completely different from a great majority of those previously written on the same topic. Even the mere syntagma in the book’s title ‘labor camp’ suggests that the book is about very ‘sinful’ research. It is in significant contradiction to the decades of the imposed myth about Jasenovac. It is in essence contradictory to the decades long myth of Jasenovac in which the reasons for detention, the character of the camp, the number of victims … are completely different to Vukic’s.

The author is a calm researcher, completely devoted to facts, without any negative or positive passion, appropriation, or bias. And those facts are in multitudes of examples that fill the whole book, examples found in archives, mostly in the Croatian State Archives, and those obtained from other trusted sources.

If some content in the book is doubtful to the author, he alerts the reader to take caution. And these are, actually, the only author’s only ‘interventions’, everything else is told by people, their fates, transcripts from post-war court hearings, authentic documents, and information. Naturally, as he does not write about ‘Labor Camp Jasenovac’ as exclusively a place of extermination, as communist authors and propagandists do, Vukic does not deny crimes.

He only brings them out, describes them, and there were many, those with excuse, those with fabricated excuse, but there was also punishment of the Ustashas who committed some of them, and punishments included execution by shooting. Those who had committed some crime against the State were taken to the camp, but as time passed a frightening rule for Jews became valid – that they could be incarcerated only because they were Jews. The longest sentence was three years, after serving the sentence the detainees were released, some even before having served the full sentence, when they had good advocates or for other reasons. Food was generally very poor, except when it was sourced from outside, from Jewish communities or other sources, which was done completely freely and was permitted. There were a lot of illnesses and deaths, which were certified by a doctor and a local official.

“Labor Camp Jasenovac” front book cover

Breaches were most strictly punished, sometimes most cruelly – by imprisoning detainees in areas where they died of hunger and thirst. These were the strictest punishments causing escape. If a fugitive was not arrested or killed, a number of people from his group were killed. The book also mentions the attitude of Archbishop Stepinac about Jasenovac as ‘the shameful stain on NDH’ (Independent State of Croatia/WWII). There were plenty of workshops in the camp where detainees could demonstrate their creative abilities and abilities to create complicated products. Thus, in one workshop, parts for cars and aircraft were made. These workshops made into work camp, everyday life was marked by work. But in that life there was something which the promoters of the myth of criminal Jesenovac find hardest to accept. That is, there was entertainment in the camp. There were sporting matches, especially football, concerts, theatrical performances, among which performances were the works created by the detainees themselves.

A renowned musician, detainee and communist sympathiser Natko Devcic, who, after the war, wrote about the performances in the camp in an unpublished diary, led the camp’s orchestra. There were also sketches in which they participated and permitted even the highest officials at Jasenovac, such as Dinko Sakic, to be ironised. The detainees also occupied themselves with science, ad when Vuk Vernic, a detained professor of sociology and statistics, asked from the Ustashe leaders to obtain for him books from the University library in Zagreb – he got them! International inspectors also visited the camp, and one of these visits was recorded in the AVNOJ (Antifascist Council for the Liberation of Yugoslavia) 1942 publication, which states that in order to build new facilities faster the detainees received better food.

Vukic does not deal much with the number of victims, but only at the end he mentions an incredible example: although in 1941, according to documents and detainee testimonies, there were about 1,200 detainees in the camp, the official list of victims contains 10,700 killed there in that year! One could bring out a whole array of characteristics of Jasenovac from this book, which, given the data in it, is comprehensive and with its 330 pages is not a large book. Being as such, the book is an enormous contribution to the research of the truth of Jasenovac that is ideology-free, bias-free, affect-free and free of heritage entailed in the Greater Serbian and communist falsifications.” Ina Vukic

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Alojzije Stepinac, Communist Yugoslavia, Croatia, Greater Serbia, Holocaus, Igor Vukic, Labor Camp Jasenovac, Milan Ivkosic, Ustasha

Communist Yugoslavia Leprosy Resurrected In Move For Regional Nationality

April 2, 2017 by inavukic 33 Comments

An initiative, by nature and intent profoundly ominous for peace and freedom to develop and enjoy the relatively newly created states that broke away from communist Yugoslavia in 1990’s as prosperous sovereign entities, was launched in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) on March 30th by notables and NGOs, however notorious or not, marked a major effort to bolster a politically disquieting consensus that Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, and Montenegrins all speak the same language, thus erode each of the existing major four distinct (regardless of any commonalities) languages used – Croat, Serb, Bosniak, Montenegrin. All who in desperation for freedom and democracy have often argued into deaf ears that the Balkan region is riddled with political barbarians that huddle together with the view to keeping the decrepit and failed Yugoslav region alive as unified in one form another, including fusing all the different national groups into one, have, regretfully, on March 30th tucked another feather in their told-you-so cap.

Last time I checked the Declaration’s website, “Languages and Nationalisms” project some 228 people (a crew from former Yugoslav states evidently joined at the hip by the distinctly destructive and freakish streaks of “my nationality is Yugoslav” surging demeanour) have signed the Declaration. The Declaration seeks, among other demands, the abolishing of all linguistic segregation and discrimination in the educational and public institutions; the stopping of repressive, unnecessary and damaging practice of separating the languages; cessation of rigid definitions of standard variations (among languages); the avoidance of unnecessary, senseless and expensive ‘translations’ in court and administrative practices as well as in means of public information…

The Declaration claims that most of the former Yugoslav nations speak different variations of the same language and it stands to good reason and justice that it has been met with official outrage across the region. Opponents of the Declaration, rightly, see the initiative as reviving the ghost of the former Yugoslavia, one of whose official languages was at points in time and as form of Yugoslav communist oppression Serbo-Croatian. The signatories of the Declaration did not openly promote a “Serbo-Croatian” language and say they are comfortable with different versions of the same language having different names: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin. The problem here is that they do appear promote Serb linguistic forms immersed thorough single words in the very text explaining the Languages and Nationalisms Project on their website and that in itself is unshakeably indicative of the underlying political bias and underhanded attempts to keep the “Serb language forms” at a superior level to the other three, just as it used to be in the days of communist Yugoslavia.

When it comes to its implications for Croatia the Declaration could well represent an attempt to undermine the Croatian language as the only official language of the nation and install the Serbian language as another official language in the country not just in pockets of the country where the Serb ethnic minority population is or exceeds the 34% as stipulated in the constitutional law. The threads that keep Greater-Serbia expansion in the region are foully intricate indeed. To beef up this conclusion one only needs to ponder upon and weigh-up politically the sickening fact where Croatia’s Minister for Culture, Nina Obuljen, had last week sent two signatories of the Sarajevo Declaration from Croatia – writers Slobodan Snajder and Damir Karakas – as Croatia’s representatives at the Leipzig book fair! It goes without saying that this move of hers suggests that she too rides the train that transports those who would have the world believe that the Croatian language does not really exist in its own right. Given that Croatia has hundreds of writers, language professionals and academics who have toiled for decades even within the communist Yugoslavia to retain the Croatian language as a pure and distinct language of the Croatian nation, Minister Obuljen’s move can truly be considered perverse and insulting – politically and otherwise.

When asked about the Declaration a day before it was made public, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic responded with questions about the need for such an initiative: “How could I support that [declaration]? Who in Croatia can support it?” What else can one expect from the PM who, faced with the outrage against the Declaration among the Croatian people, just does not act as if he possesses the fight necessary for Croatian interests.
Plenkovic added – feebly: “The Croatian language is defined in our constitution. Croatian is one of the official languages of the EU. That’s the only thing that matters to me. There is no need to waste words on sundry informal initiatives.” Well, how about defending the Croatian language when attacked, Prime Minister!

The former Croatian culture minister and current Member of Croatian Parliament, Zlatko Hasanbegovic, used strong language to denounce the Sarajevo Declaration as “a wolf howl of Yugoslav nationalists for their lost country.” On the ball – Hasanbegovic!

To illustrate the political depravity among signatories of the Sarajevo Declaration among Croats one only needs to visit the words of the largely mistrusted and seemingly dangerously anti-Croatian independence politically biased Croatian journalist Ante Tomic, when he asked rhetorically in his regular column in Jutarnji List whether “we are so stupid that we cannot memorise more than one word for a certain thing.” Tomic added that through a language policy based on “pure Croatian,” the state is not only controlling its subjects but also creating confusion and stoking animosity against ethnic Serbs. “I signed [the Sarajevo Declaration] because it is a measure of reconciliation and it recognises and includes everyone. It affirms differences, and allows for the fact that one thing can be called by many names, and that we all speak the same language, which is variously named Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, or Montenegrin,” Tomic said.

How a Declaration such as the Sarajevo one, claiming that distinctly different languages are one single language, can be a measure of reconciliation is only clear (albeit wickedly to my taste) to Tomic and other signatories of the Declaration. Successful reconciliation unconditionally depends on the truth and there is no underlying truth in this Declaration except the one that points to the worn-out mantra “tell lies often enough and they become the truth”. This is a cause worth fighting against. Ina Vukic