Post by Novus Dis on Aug 10, 2008 23:56:29 GMT -5
Bust of Croatian Fuehrer Unveiled at Croatian Cultural Center in Melbourne.
Just five kilometers from Melbourne’s historic City Centre, in a famous ‘Croatian House’ in Footscray, a bust of Croatia’s far more sadistic version of Hitler, WWII leader Ante Pavelic, was unveiled last month. Pavelic and his Ustashe were responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths during the Serb-extermination orgy that Croatia’s alliance with Hitler was used to achieve. From the Croatian Herald of July 18, translation thanks to “Bobo”:
Bust of Ante Pavelic Unveiled at Melbourne’s Croatian Dom (House)
A commemorative bust of the wartime leader of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) Ante Pavelic was unveiled last Sunday afternoon at the Croatian Dom (house) in Footscray, the club which once carried the name of the NDH leader.
The unveiling took place following a brief, informal ceremony in the lavish complex’s Ante Gotovina Function Room [Ante Gotovina is currently on trial at the Hague for 1990s war crimes] before more than 100 international VIP’s, guests and club members.
..
“Ante Pavelic fought for one thing and that was a free and independent [Axis-allied] Croatia. It is ironic that today’s unveiling is being held in the Gotovina Room next to the Norac Room, two function rooms that are named in honor of General Ante Gotovina and General Mirko Norac,” said Ante Juric, the president of the Croatian Dom. “Both fought for Croatia and one them today is falsely convicted, while the other is awaiting a false trail.”
…
“All three — Pavelic, Gotovina and Norac — fought for the same thing, Croatia’s independence. And all three have been crucified by both foreign forces as well as Croats alike for defending their own homeland.”
One hopes that some day soon Australians — who host the largest Croatian diaspora — will wake up to the fact that there are vast quantities of Balkan fascists in their midst. Here was another Melbourne item, from Jerusalem Post in April:
Melbourne eatery hails leader of Nazi-allied Croatia
Melbourne’s Katarina Zrinski restaurant held a celebration this past weekend to honor World War II Croatian leader Ante Pavelic, whose genocidal policies led to the deaths of 400,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies .
The restaurant is attached to the local Croatian club.
The event honoring the head of the Croatian fascist Ustasha movement and the leader of Nazi-allied Croatia was an “outrageous affront” both to his victims and to any persons of morality and conscience who oppose racism and genocide, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter and Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff said on Wednesday.
According to local press reports, a large photograph of Pavelic was hung in the restaurant, T-shirts with his picture and that of two other commanders in the 1941-1945 Ustasha government were offered for sale at the bar, and the establishment of the “Independent State of Croatia” was celebrated.
Zuroff noted this was not the first time that Croatian émigrés in Australia had openly defended Croatian Nazi war criminals.
“It is high time that the authorities in Australia find a way to take the necessary measures to stop such celebrations, which clearly constitute racist, ethnic, and anti-Semitic incitement against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies,” he said.
About 30,000 Croatian Jews - or 80 percent of the country’s Jewish population - died during the Holocaust.
And here was Melbourne in October, with thanks to Boris in Australia for sending this in at the time:
Nazi sympathisers host US band Final War
MELBOURNE’S Croatian community is under fire for hosting a rock concert for neo-Nazi skinheads, publishing anti-Semitic material on the internet and naming a building after fascist Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic.
The Melbourne Knights Soccer Club yesterday launched an extraordinary attack on its social arm, the Croatia Social Club, for hosting the October 13 concert by groups that incite violence and attacks against Jews and other minorities.
“I am deeply disturbed that the good reputation of our football club has been tarnished by the social club’s incompetence,” Knights chairman Matt Tomas said.
The concert at the Knights’ North Sunshine complex was headlined by US neo-Nazi band Final War.
The band describes itself as “defenders of the Reich”, and its songs boast: “We fight Jews”.
Australian skinhead band Fortress also played. Its song, Parasites, urges repatriation of immigrants: “If they don’t f..king like it, it’ll be in body bags”.
The concert was organised by the Australian chapters of neo-Nazi skinhead groups Blood and Honour and Southern Cross Hammer Skins.
Group members in the US and Europe have been convicted of assaults, bombings and murders.
Anti-Semitic messages from the Knights’ Croatian fans are posted on the Knights Army Forum website.
…
Melbourne campaigner Cam Smith said anti-racism activists alerted the Knights to the nature of the concert several hours before it started.
“As soon as we found out, we contacted whoever we could at the Knights through phone numbers on their website,” Mr Smith said.
“They weren’t interested. One of their people asked one of our people if he was a dirty Jew.”
Mr Tomas said he did not know who was attending the concert, but he would investigate Mr Smith’s claim that Knights members were contacted, adding: “I don’t associate with that sort of scum. I’m utterly disgusted about this.”
Mr Tomas said the concert was approved by the Croatia Social Club, a separate legal entity to the football club.
…
B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission director Manny Waks said he was disturbed the concert was held in view of links between the Croatian community and neo-Nazi elements.
Mr Waks said the Croatia Club - a separate entity to the Knights’ social club - had ignored Jewish protests against the naming of its Footscray hall after Ustashi Nazi collaborator Ante Pavelic, who was responsible for the slaughter of 700,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.
After apologizing for “accidentally” booking a neo-Nazi band, the club instead booked the more popular Nazi band:
‘Gestapo club’ strikes again
Serbian and Jewish community leaders are outraged that the social arm of the Melbourne Knights Soccer Club is hosting a concert by a Croatian rock star with a strong following among neo-Nazi sympathisers.
The revelation follows the club’s apology for staging a concert for neo-Nazi skinheads at its North Sunshine complex this month.
A concert by Marko Perkovic will be hosted by the Knights-affiliated Melbourne Croatia Social Club at the complex on December 28.
…
Croatia Social Club committee member Ivan Skunca said the club was not concerned about outside criticism.
“The Serbs can say what they like. It doesn’t bother us,” Mr Skunca said.
Of course, Thompson was on tour of more than just Australia last October-November. He also made it to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago, Vancouver (half-price for kids!), Cleveland, Los Angeles and Manhattan — where New York Cardinal Egan and Archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling denied there was anything Nazi-related about the rocker whose fans greet him with a Nazi salute and who glorifies the genocidal fuehrer Pavelic and sings nostalgic songs about concentration camps.
This nun doesn’t see anything wrong with it either:
As Professor and writer John Peter Maher wrote when the NY Archdiocese shrugged about the Nazi band:
When I was a kid in Catholic parochial high school, our teachers and the parish priests — who knew no better, just following orders — told us that Croatia’s Archbishop Stepinac was a saint being persecuted after WW II by the communists. Some of us ex-kids have gotten old learning the bloody facts and observing our co-religionists blindly swallowing the continuing lies. The good Catholics, speaking solely of decency and Christian principle, are in the pews. “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.”
Cardinal Egan knows what he’s doing. Papa Wojtyla knew, Papa Ratzinger knows: they foster today’s Nazis and beatify yesterday’s.
Illuminating a thing or two about the Croatian diaspora, such as that which recently unveiled the bust of Pavelic, is Svetlana Novko in Canada, who once wrote me:
It is exactly the Croat diaspora that has been clinging to their Ustasha past with a deadly grip all along, enjoying American, Australian, Canadian freedom….It is precisely the emigre-undead whom Tudjman called on to restore Hitler’s creation in Croatia; they were his staunchest supporters and they financed his “campaign”.
…
Natasa Milovanovic’s (the president of the local Serbian Unity Congress [in Vancouver]) mother is a Croat and Natasa told me how, when she went to visit “Croatian Cultural Center” here in Vancouver, the most prominent photo on the central wall of their community hall is the picture of Ante Pavelic, and next to him of [Archbishop] Stepinac.
This seems to be perfectly fine with Canadians, although I’m pretty sure that Germans are not allowed to frame and exhibit photos of Hitler and Goebbels in their ‘cultural center’.
The notion that diaspora Croatians are even more rabid nationalists than Croatians still in the Muterland is seconded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Efraim Zuroff here.
But by all means, if genocide is part of your culture, then certainly a shrine to one’s fuehrer is appropriate at a cultural center. In fact, here is a Croatian nun saying as much to the New York Times in Feb. 1996:
Before a mural covering the wall behind the altar of St. Stephen’s Church…[Sister Maximila] pointed out scenes in the painting, titled “The Suffering of the Croat People.” There is their defeat by the Turks, their battles with the Serbs through history and the establishment of a Nazi-backed Croatian fascist movement during World War II known as the Ustashe.
On the mural, next to images of Franciscan priests, is the local hero of the Ustashe period, Ranko Boban, in the uniform worn by the Croatian nationalists who killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Muslims, as well as Croatian opponents of the Ustashe.
“They say bad things about the Ustashe,” Sister Maximila said. “But to us they were defending Croat culture, and they are heroes.”
…
The photograph of Ante Pavelic, leader of the wartime, pro-Nazi Croatian state, is proudly displayed in the home of two Catholic priests.
What could it be about a rock concert that draws parents, children, teenagers, clergy and mainstream political leaders? Patriotism, answer the Croatians. National identity. But when the Hitler-era independent state of Croatia is one’s primary national identity, that identity is inseparable from the Nazism that gave birth to it and that it served. Notice we aren’t hearing from anything like a “silent majority” of Croatians to complain that such concerts, busts, posters, events and symbolism misrepresent them (especially since the Croatian people’s official representatives in government attend these things.) No, the Croatians who speak up do so in defense of these things. Like a source in Pittsburgh, who lives among many “good Croatians” has told me, the problem is that only one in ten of these “good Croatians” will speak up against their “nation.”
Melbourne’s Croatian club with its newly unveiled bust of Pavelic is hardly unique. On August 2, 1992 — for just one other example — one of my sources, an American of mixed Balkan ancestry, visited the Chicago Croatian Cultural Center, with a photographer in tow. After a polite exchange with the administrator on duty, in which he allowed for pictures to be taken and signed off with “at least you’re not Serb,” photographer Goran Mitic — also of mixed Yugoslav heritage — took the following photos. Chicago’s Croatian Cultural Center, incidentally, is located on Devon Avenue — a.k.a. Golda Meir Boulevard. Here is the brief that the source typed up to accompany the photos (located below the brief):
The event was the Croatian National Election, which allowed anyone of Croat descent [living anywhere] a vote (though not if you were a Serb and living in Croatia). Photograph “C” is from the center’s parking lot. The Croatian flag is displayed and a campaign poster of Croatian right-wing extremist and the leader of the “Party of Rights”, Dobroslav Paraga, is posted. Photograph “B” is a photo of the voting room. The sign on the wall reads: “Croatia! God Bless Your Journey into Democracy!” Just beneath and to the right are the official voting boxes. Above the voting boxes is a map and display of Croatian “heroes”, as detailed in Photograph “A”. The photo of the man in the upper right corner of the map is Ustasha leader and World War II criminal Ante Pavelic, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and gypsies. The map is that of former Yugoslavia. Across this map, extending borders known to the rest of the world, is the word “Hrvatska” or “Croatia”, as written in Croatian. This map and its border reflect Croatia as it appeared under Nazi Germany and alliance with the Axis Fascist Powers.
Long story short: This is how people born in the 1980s and ’90s grow up singing songs glorifying WWII concentration camps. And here are their American-reared children out to cut down “Serbian Christmas trees” in Chicago. They’re raised to hate even here.
Remember, Croatia has been put on the fast track to EU accession. As British activist Rodney Atkinson has been trying to call attention to, today’s EU was formed by all the old fascists of WWII and/or their direct descendents and heirs.
Croatia is a place where a sign reading “Welcome Home, Serbs” hangs — in compliance with EU demands for refugee return — while the country celebrates as a national holiday the day it expelled the Serbs. In fact, this biggest national holiday celebrating the largest ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1990s Balkans, in which 700-1900 Serbs were slaughtered with glee and a quarter-million displaced — Operation Storm — was just celebrated this past week on August 5. As activist John Bosnitch wrote in an appeal for people to join a protest in front of the Croatian Embassy in Washington on Tuesday:
August 5 is the 13th anniversary of Croatia’s 1995 genocidal ethnic cleansing of over a quarter million of its own Serb citizens in a blitzkrieg called OPERATION STORM or “Oluja”. Croatia celebrates its ethnic cleansing as “Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day”!
OPERATION STORM was the largest European land offensive since World War II. International officials called it “the most efficient ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.” Almost all of the refugees remain in exile to this day!
…
WHAT WE DEMAND: A public apology from Croatia, the end to Croatia’s celebration of “Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day” and the unconditional return home of all the refugee victims of Croatian ethnic cleansing.
Here is an outtake from the U.S.-assisted Operation Storm, from the 1999 book Operation Deliberate Force: The UN and NATO Campaign in Bosnia 1995. It was written by Tim Ripley, who covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995 for Jane’s Intelligence Review and Flight International.
…Operation Storm was a massive operation, involving more than 100,000 assault troops backed up by hundreds of artillery pieces and armoured vehicles. A similar number of troops were mobilised to support it. Dozens of helicopters and fighter-bombers participated in the attack….
President Tudjman’s national security council gave the final go-ahead to launch Operation Storm proper at 6pm on the evening of 3rd August [1995]. H-Hour was set for 5am the following morning. At 8pm, the HV high command tried to contact the UNPF commander, Janvier, to warn him of the impending attack.
During the early hours of 4th August, UN troops throughout the Krajina were warned to be in their bomb shelters by 5am. Exactly at 5am, the Croatian artillery barrage began. All along the front hundreds of guns and rocket launchers rained shells and rockets on the hapless Serbs.
In Knin, the barrage was indiscriminate. Some 300 shells landed around the city in the first 30 minutes. UN personnel and Serb civilians raced for whatever cover they could find. After an intense barrage lasting for 90 minutes, the shelling subsided, and the city’s residents emerged from the cellars to see the effect of the barrage.
According to UN personnel, bodies were lining the streets and ambulances roamed Knin collecting corpses to be taken to the city mortuary to prevent disease breaking out in the hot summer heat. UN soldiers in the Sector South Headquarters on the outskirts of city watched in horror as Croat artillery fire resumed during the day, seeming to move around the Krajina Serb capital effortlessly destroying houses and blocks of flats….
Thousands of Serb refugees were streaming into Knin from frontline areas. They did not stop, but headed northwards out of the city, along the back roads to Bosnia. Knin residents were joining the exodus in droves. The UN checkpoint at Boricevac, south of Bihac, reported 72,000 people and 700 vehicles crossing into Bosnia during the first 36 hours of the Croat offensive….
An all-out effort was made by the HV to break though the Serb defences on the morning of 5th August. At l0am the barrage reached a crescendo. Forty-five minutes later it stopped and the Croat ground assault went in. Soon small arms and tank fire could be heard on the outskirts of the town. By midday, three Croat tanks were parked outside the UN compound.
Canadian UN personnel rushed to defend the gate and perimeter fence of the camp after Slovak and Jordanian troops fled their posts. Colonel [Andrew] Leslie went to face down the Croat commander who wanted to enter the camp and search for Krajina Serb soldiers. For the second time in a month, a UN compound was being ringed by hostile troops wanting to hunt down and kill their opponents.
The UN troops had neither the political mandate or military means to resist the Croat advance or even protect civilians. The Multi-National Brigade (MNB) had just been committed to Sarajevo, and 24 Airmobile Brigade had yet to fully deploy in Ploce because of Croat obstructions.
Eventually, the Croat troops outside the UN compound backed down and agreed to leave the UN in peace, but only as long as the peacekeepers remained inside…For five days the UN personnel were trapped inside the compound while the Croats mopped up the city….
UN troops watched horrified as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs along the road outside the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from their AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the tracks of a tank.
When they were able to get out of the camp, UN officers described the scene as “horrific.” The city was all but deserted apart from drunken Croat soldiers who were robbing UN personnel at will. UN officers, mostly Canadian, French, Belgians and a few British, as well as UNMOs and personnel from UNPF Headquarters in Zagreb, started to patrol the area around Knin to find out if any Serbs had remained. In village after village, they found carnage…On the morning of 7th August, the UN were at last able to broker a ceasefire that held….
During the five days of Operation Storm, some 180,000 Serbs fled the Krajina, in what was then the largest single refugee exodus since World War Two. What had started out as a well planned and executed military operation had descended into a squalid exercise in looting and murder….Most of this took place out of sight of the world’s media who were kept out of the area by the Croats during the first days of the operation….
UN and other international personnel have submitted evidence on Croat atrocities during Operation Storm to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. However, the Tribunal refuses to confirm if they are to issue indictments against any Croat political leaders or soldiers even though press reports emerged in early 1999 that three HV generals were to be indicted.
Just five kilometers from Melbourne’s historic City Centre, in a famous ‘Croatian House’ in Footscray, a bust of Croatia’s far more sadistic version of Hitler, WWII leader Ante Pavelic, was unveiled last month. Pavelic and his Ustashe were responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths during the Serb-extermination orgy that Croatia’s alliance with Hitler was used to achieve. From the Croatian Herald of July 18, translation thanks to “Bobo”:
Bust of Ante Pavelic Unveiled at Melbourne’s Croatian Dom (House)
A commemorative bust of the wartime leader of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) Ante Pavelic was unveiled last Sunday afternoon at the Croatian Dom (house) in Footscray, the club which once carried the name of the NDH leader.
The unveiling took place following a brief, informal ceremony in the lavish complex’s Ante Gotovina Function Room [Ante Gotovina is currently on trial at the Hague for 1990s war crimes] before more than 100 international VIP’s, guests and club members.
..
“Ante Pavelic fought for one thing and that was a free and independent [Axis-allied] Croatia. It is ironic that today’s unveiling is being held in the Gotovina Room next to the Norac Room, two function rooms that are named in honor of General Ante Gotovina and General Mirko Norac,” said Ante Juric, the president of the Croatian Dom. “Both fought for Croatia and one them today is falsely convicted, while the other is awaiting a false trail.”
…
“All three — Pavelic, Gotovina and Norac — fought for the same thing, Croatia’s independence. And all three have been crucified by both foreign forces as well as Croats alike for defending their own homeland.”
One hopes that some day soon Australians — who host the largest Croatian diaspora — will wake up to the fact that there are vast quantities of Balkan fascists in their midst. Here was another Melbourne item, from Jerusalem Post in April:
Melbourne eatery hails leader of Nazi-allied Croatia
Melbourne’s Katarina Zrinski restaurant held a celebration this past weekend to honor World War II Croatian leader Ante Pavelic, whose genocidal policies led to the deaths of 400,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies .
The restaurant is attached to the local Croatian club.
The event honoring the head of the Croatian fascist Ustasha movement and the leader of Nazi-allied Croatia was an “outrageous affront” both to his victims and to any persons of morality and conscience who oppose racism and genocide, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter and Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff said on Wednesday.
According to local press reports, a large photograph of Pavelic was hung in the restaurant, T-shirts with his picture and that of two other commanders in the 1941-1945 Ustasha government were offered for sale at the bar, and the establishment of the “Independent State of Croatia” was celebrated.
Zuroff noted this was not the first time that Croatian émigrés in Australia had openly defended Croatian Nazi war criminals.
“It is high time that the authorities in Australia find a way to take the necessary measures to stop such celebrations, which clearly constitute racist, ethnic, and anti-Semitic incitement against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies,” he said.
About 30,000 Croatian Jews - or 80 percent of the country’s Jewish population - died during the Holocaust.
And here was Melbourne in October, with thanks to Boris in Australia for sending this in at the time:
Nazi sympathisers host US band Final War
MELBOURNE’S Croatian community is under fire for hosting a rock concert for neo-Nazi skinheads, publishing anti-Semitic material on the internet and naming a building after fascist Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic.
The Melbourne Knights Soccer Club yesterday launched an extraordinary attack on its social arm, the Croatia Social Club, for hosting the October 13 concert by groups that incite violence and attacks against Jews and other minorities.
“I am deeply disturbed that the good reputation of our football club has been tarnished by the social club’s incompetence,” Knights chairman Matt Tomas said.
The concert at the Knights’ North Sunshine complex was headlined by US neo-Nazi band Final War.
The band describes itself as “defenders of the Reich”, and its songs boast: “We fight Jews”.
Australian skinhead band Fortress also played. Its song, Parasites, urges repatriation of immigrants: “If they don’t f..king like it, it’ll be in body bags”.
The concert was organised by the Australian chapters of neo-Nazi skinhead groups Blood and Honour and Southern Cross Hammer Skins.
Group members in the US and Europe have been convicted of assaults, bombings and murders.
Anti-Semitic messages from the Knights’ Croatian fans are posted on the Knights Army Forum website.
…
Melbourne campaigner Cam Smith said anti-racism activists alerted the Knights to the nature of the concert several hours before it started.
“As soon as we found out, we contacted whoever we could at the Knights through phone numbers on their website,” Mr Smith said.
“They weren’t interested. One of their people asked one of our people if he was a dirty Jew.”
Mr Tomas said he did not know who was attending the concert, but he would investigate Mr Smith’s claim that Knights members were contacted, adding: “I don’t associate with that sort of scum. I’m utterly disgusted about this.”
Mr Tomas said the concert was approved by the Croatia Social Club, a separate legal entity to the football club.
…
B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission director Manny Waks said he was disturbed the concert was held in view of links between the Croatian community and neo-Nazi elements.
Mr Waks said the Croatia Club - a separate entity to the Knights’ social club - had ignored Jewish protests against the naming of its Footscray hall after Ustashi Nazi collaborator Ante Pavelic, who was responsible for the slaughter of 700,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.
After apologizing for “accidentally” booking a neo-Nazi band, the club instead booked the more popular Nazi band:
‘Gestapo club’ strikes again
Serbian and Jewish community leaders are outraged that the social arm of the Melbourne Knights Soccer Club is hosting a concert by a Croatian rock star with a strong following among neo-Nazi sympathisers.
The revelation follows the club’s apology for staging a concert for neo-Nazi skinheads at its North Sunshine complex this month.
A concert by Marko Perkovic will be hosted by the Knights-affiliated Melbourne Croatia Social Club at the complex on December 28.
…
Croatia Social Club committee member Ivan Skunca said the club was not concerned about outside criticism.
“The Serbs can say what they like. It doesn’t bother us,” Mr Skunca said.
Of course, Thompson was on tour of more than just Australia last October-November. He also made it to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago, Vancouver (half-price for kids!), Cleveland, Los Angeles and Manhattan — where New York Cardinal Egan and Archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling denied there was anything Nazi-related about the rocker whose fans greet him with a Nazi salute and who glorifies the genocidal fuehrer Pavelic and sings nostalgic songs about concentration camps.
This nun doesn’t see anything wrong with it either:
As Professor and writer John Peter Maher wrote when the NY Archdiocese shrugged about the Nazi band:
When I was a kid in Catholic parochial high school, our teachers and the parish priests — who knew no better, just following orders — told us that Croatia’s Archbishop Stepinac was a saint being persecuted after WW II by the communists. Some of us ex-kids have gotten old learning the bloody facts and observing our co-religionists blindly swallowing the continuing lies. The good Catholics, speaking solely of decency and Christian principle, are in the pews. “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.”
Cardinal Egan knows what he’s doing. Papa Wojtyla knew, Papa Ratzinger knows: they foster today’s Nazis and beatify yesterday’s.
Illuminating a thing or two about the Croatian diaspora, such as that which recently unveiled the bust of Pavelic, is Svetlana Novko in Canada, who once wrote me:
It is exactly the Croat diaspora that has been clinging to their Ustasha past with a deadly grip all along, enjoying American, Australian, Canadian freedom….It is precisely the emigre-undead whom Tudjman called on to restore Hitler’s creation in Croatia; they were his staunchest supporters and they financed his “campaign”.
…
Natasa Milovanovic’s (the president of the local Serbian Unity Congress [in Vancouver]) mother is a Croat and Natasa told me how, when she went to visit “Croatian Cultural Center” here in Vancouver, the most prominent photo on the central wall of their community hall is the picture of Ante Pavelic, and next to him of [Archbishop] Stepinac.
This seems to be perfectly fine with Canadians, although I’m pretty sure that Germans are not allowed to frame and exhibit photos of Hitler and Goebbels in their ‘cultural center’.
The notion that diaspora Croatians are even more rabid nationalists than Croatians still in the Muterland is seconded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Efraim Zuroff here.
But by all means, if genocide is part of your culture, then certainly a shrine to one’s fuehrer is appropriate at a cultural center. In fact, here is a Croatian nun saying as much to the New York Times in Feb. 1996:
Before a mural covering the wall behind the altar of St. Stephen’s Church…[Sister Maximila] pointed out scenes in the painting, titled “The Suffering of the Croat People.” There is their defeat by the Turks, their battles with the Serbs through history and the establishment of a Nazi-backed Croatian fascist movement during World War II known as the Ustashe.
On the mural, next to images of Franciscan priests, is the local hero of the Ustashe period, Ranko Boban, in the uniform worn by the Croatian nationalists who killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Muslims, as well as Croatian opponents of the Ustashe.
“They say bad things about the Ustashe,” Sister Maximila said. “But to us they were defending Croat culture, and they are heroes.”
…
The photograph of Ante Pavelic, leader of the wartime, pro-Nazi Croatian state, is proudly displayed in the home of two Catholic priests.
What could it be about a rock concert that draws parents, children, teenagers, clergy and mainstream political leaders? Patriotism, answer the Croatians. National identity. But when the Hitler-era independent state of Croatia is one’s primary national identity, that identity is inseparable from the Nazism that gave birth to it and that it served. Notice we aren’t hearing from anything like a “silent majority” of Croatians to complain that such concerts, busts, posters, events and symbolism misrepresent them (especially since the Croatian people’s official representatives in government attend these things.) No, the Croatians who speak up do so in defense of these things. Like a source in Pittsburgh, who lives among many “good Croatians” has told me, the problem is that only one in ten of these “good Croatians” will speak up against their “nation.”
Melbourne’s Croatian club with its newly unveiled bust of Pavelic is hardly unique. On August 2, 1992 — for just one other example — one of my sources, an American of mixed Balkan ancestry, visited the Chicago Croatian Cultural Center, with a photographer in tow. After a polite exchange with the administrator on duty, in which he allowed for pictures to be taken and signed off with “at least you’re not Serb,” photographer Goran Mitic — also of mixed Yugoslav heritage — took the following photos. Chicago’s Croatian Cultural Center, incidentally, is located on Devon Avenue — a.k.a. Golda Meir Boulevard. Here is the brief that the source typed up to accompany the photos (located below the brief):
The event was the Croatian National Election, which allowed anyone of Croat descent [living anywhere] a vote (though not if you were a Serb and living in Croatia). Photograph “C” is from the center’s parking lot. The Croatian flag is displayed and a campaign poster of Croatian right-wing extremist and the leader of the “Party of Rights”, Dobroslav Paraga, is posted. Photograph “B” is a photo of the voting room. The sign on the wall reads: “Croatia! God Bless Your Journey into Democracy!” Just beneath and to the right are the official voting boxes. Above the voting boxes is a map and display of Croatian “heroes”, as detailed in Photograph “A”. The photo of the man in the upper right corner of the map is Ustasha leader and World War II criminal Ante Pavelic, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and gypsies. The map is that of former Yugoslavia. Across this map, extending borders known to the rest of the world, is the word “Hrvatska” or “Croatia”, as written in Croatian. This map and its border reflect Croatia as it appeared under Nazi Germany and alliance with the Axis Fascist Powers.
Long story short: This is how people born in the 1980s and ’90s grow up singing songs glorifying WWII concentration camps. And here are their American-reared children out to cut down “Serbian Christmas trees” in Chicago. They’re raised to hate even here.
Remember, Croatia has been put on the fast track to EU accession. As British activist Rodney Atkinson has been trying to call attention to, today’s EU was formed by all the old fascists of WWII and/or their direct descendents and heirs.
Croatia is a place where a sign reading “Welcome Home, Serbs” hangs — in compliance with EU demands for refugee return — while the country celebrates as a national holiday the day it expelled the Serbs. In fact, this biggest national holiday celebrating the largest ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1990s Balkans, in which 700-1900 Serbs were slaughtered with glee and a quarter-million displaced — Operation Storm — was just celebrated this past week on August 5. As activist John Bosnitch wrote in an appeal for people to join a protest in front of the Croatian Embassy in Washington on Tuesday:
August 5 is the 13th anniversary of Croatia’s 1995 genocidal ethnic cleansing of over a quarter million of its own Serb citizens in a blitzkrieg called OPERATION STORM or “Oluja”. Croatia celebrates its ethnic cleansing as “Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day”!
OPERATION STORM was the largest European land offensive since World War II. International officials called it “the most efficient ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.” Almost all of the refugees remain in exile to this day!
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WHAT WE DEMAND: A public apology from Croatia, the end to Croatia’s celebration of “Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day” and the unconditional return home of all the refugee victims of Croatian ethnic cleansing.
Here is an outtake from the U.S.-assisted Operation Storm, from the 1999 book Operation Deliberate Force: The UN and NATO Campaign in Bosnia 1995. It was written by Tim Ripley, who covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995 for Jane’s Intelligence Review and Flight International.
…Operation Storm was a massive operation, involving more than 100,000 assault troops backed up by hundreds of artillery pieces and armoured vehicles. A similar number of troops were mobilised to support it. Dozens of helicopters and fighter-bombers participated in the attack….
President Tudjman’s national security council gave the final go-ahead to launch Operation Storm proper at 6pm on the evening of 3rd August [1995]. H-Hour was set for 5am the following morning. At 8pm, the HV high command tried to contact the UNPF commander, Janvier, to warn him of the impending attack.
During the early hours of 4th August, UN troops throughout the Krajina were warned to be in their bomb shelters by 5am. Exactly at 5am, the Croatian artillery barrage began. All along the front hundreds of guns and rocket launchers rained shells and rockets on the hapless Serbs.
In Knin, the barrage was indiscriminate. Some 300 shells landed around the city in the first 30 minutes. UN personnel and Serb civilians raced for whatever cover they could find. After an intense barrage lasting for 90 minutes, the shelling subsided, and the city’s residents emerged from the cellars to see the effect of the barrage.
According to UN personnel, bodies were lining the streets and ambulances roamed Knin collecting corpses to be taken to the city mortuary to prevent disease breaking out in the hot summer heat. UN soldiers in the Sector South Headquarters on the outskirts of city watched in horror as Croat artillery fire resumed during the day, seeming to move around the Krajina Serb capital effortlessly destroying houses and blocks of flats….
Thousands of Serb refugees were streaming into Knin from frontline areas. They did not stop, but headed northwards out of the city, along the back roads to Bosnia. Knin residents were joining the exodus in droves. The UN checkpoint at Boricevac, south of Bihac, reported 72,000 people and 700 vehicles crossing into Bosnia during the first 36 hours of the Croat offensive….
An all-out effort was made by the HV to break though the Serb defences on the morning of 5th August. At l0am the barrage reached a crescendo. Forty-five minutes later it stopped and the Croat ground assault went in. Soon small arms and tank fire could be heard on the outskirts of the town. By midday, three Croat tanks were parked outside the UN compound.
Canadian UN personnel rushed to defend the gate and perimeter fence of the camp after Slovak and Jordanian troops fled their posts. Colonel [Andrew] Leslie went to face down the Croat commander who wanted to enter the camp and search for Krajina Serb soldiers. For the second time in a month, a UN compound was being ringed by hostile troops wanting to hunt down and kill their opponents.
The UN troops had neither the political mandate or military means to resist the Croat advance or even protect civilians. The Multi-National Brigade (MNB) had just been committed to Sarajevo, and 24 Airmobile Brigade had yet to fully deploy in Ploce because of Croat obstructions.
Eventually, the Croat troops outside the UN compound backed down and agreed to leave the UN in peace, but only as long as the peacekeepers remained inside…For five days the UN personnel were trapped inside the compound while the Croats mopped up the city….
UN troops watched horrified as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs along the road outside the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from their AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the tracks of a tank.
When they were able to get out of the camp, UN officers described the scene as “horrific.” The city was all but deserted apart from drunken Croat soldiers who were robbing UN personnel at will. UN officers, mostly Canadian, French, Belgians and a few British, as well as UNMOs and personnel from UNPF Headquarters in Zagreb, started to patrol the area around Knin to find out if any Serbs had remained. In village after village, they found carnage…On the morning of 7th August, the UN were at last able to broker a ceasefire that held….
During the five days of Operation Storm, some 180,000 Serbs fled the Krajina, in what was then the largest single refugee exodus since World War Two. What had started out as a well planned and executed military operation had descended into a squalid exercise in looting and murder….Most of this took place out of sight of the world’s media who were kept out of the area by the Croats during the first days of the operation….
UN and other international personnel have submitted evidence on Croat atrocities during Operation Storm to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. However, the Tribunal refuses to confirm if they are to issue indictments against any Croat political leaders or soldiers even though press reports emerged in early 1999 that three HV generals were to be indicted.