It is not an exaggeration to say that a more foul, criminal, and murderous state than the NDH has rarely appeared on the world stage. They racked up their appalling death toll in a mere four years: at least a half-million Jews, Roma, leftists and other dissidents, and most of all the large Serbian minority. In an age of mechanized mass murder, the Ustase resorted to sheer brutality to dispose of their victims, using bullets, clubs, knives, axes, even their bare hands.
In a 1990 interview, Simon Wiesenthal confessed, "I must admit that I have been obsessed with the criminal character of the Independent State of Croatia. Even the Germans were appalled by the crimes committed in it." This is true. High-ranking German officers, such as General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, repeatedly expressed their feelings of anger, outrage and disgust, provoked by Ustase atrocities. After an inspection of one of the Ustase's concentration camps, Glaise von Horstenau wrote that "Such places have reached their peak of abomination here in Croatia, under a Poglavnik installed by us. The most wicked of all must be Jasenovac, where no ordinary mortal is allowed to peer in."
Nowhere in the world will ordinary men and women celebrate February 27, the day of the Reichstag Fire, or October 28, the day of Mussolini's March on Rome. Public support once enjoyed by Hitler and Mussolini has long since evaporated in light of their crimes and the defeat of their criminal regimes. And yet, among a small but vocal minority of the Croatian emigre community, April 10th is an unofficial independence day. From Australia to the United States, several Croatian emigre organizations will pull their flags from storage, march and share a toast in honour of a barbarous, genocidal regime and its founding fathers.
Among these misguided patriots, prominent right-wing extremist Tomislav Sunic, a former official in the Croatian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and diplomat, speaks for many. In interview in The Voice of Saint George, a British skinhead publication, Sunic explains that "After a millennium of nonexistence, Croatia resurfaced on the land map under Ante Pavelic in 1941. Alas, this was the wrong time and wrong place, because Croatia chose a losing side! The second time, the late Franjo Tudjman in 1991, played a smarter and more realistic game. Hence the need all over Croatia today to drum up chest [sic] with slogans of 'democracy' and the religion of 'human rights,' and occasionally recite the Liberal Credo in order to preserve a modicum of sovereignty."
Sunic, now a private citizen, represents a new trend among the Ustase's Croatian apologists, in that he has formed a dangerous alliance with neo-Nazis and White Supremacists in the United States. Sunic has recently traveled to America to make appearances at white nationalist rallies (one at "Euro-Fest 2003," described as "a formal family event to celebrate White heritage") as well as being a featured speaker at the anti-Semitic Institute for Historical Review, "intellectual" neo-Nazis dedicated to forwarding the agenda that the Holocaust - and, it follows, the Ustase Terror - never really happened.
There are two reasons why we must remember April 10th, 1941, and why we must never forget the nightmare which descended across the territory of the Independent State of Croatia on this day, sixty-two years ago.
First, we honour the memory of the victims, including the survivors we are fortunate enough to still have among us. Those who survived the NDH were not given much benefit in Tito's Yugoslavia: in a nation decimated by war and force-fed a diet of Soviet socialism, little care and consideration was paid to the few who managed to outlast their Ustase captors. Later, a curtain of "Brotherhood and Unity" was thrown over the slaughterhouse of Jasenovac, and study of the Ustase was discouraged as an unwelcome intrusion of the past into contemporary Yugoslav life.
Secondly, we must remember April 10th because of those, like Tomislav Sunic, who have the perversity to revere mass-murderers and weep bitter tears on this date for a state built on a cornerstone of genocide. Those who would like to transform the sadistic and cruel Ustase into the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers have made many inroads in the last decade in trying to convince the public that Ustase founder Ante Pavelic was "a good Catholic" or even a man forced by circumstances to reluctantly throw his lot with the most evil movement that the world has ever known.
"Mainstreaming" the Ustase represents more than a gross falsification of history: it is an insult to the hundreds of thousands of innocents who perished at the hand of Ustase brutality, to their families, and those who remain among us today as living witnesses to a terror that most of us can only imagine - with a shudder.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has devoted more time than anyone to the study of the Holocaust, estimates the Ustase murdered 30,000 Jews (75% of the total number in the NDH's pre-war boundaries), 29,000 Roma (97%) and some 600,000 Serbs (about one-third). These were people with faces, with names, with families and aspirations. Their stories, and their fate, must be made known.
The fact that eugenics - "balanced breeding" - was among the founding principles of the Ustase movement as written by Pavelic's own hand more than a decade before the hideous nightmare of the NDH began must be also be known. The fact that Jasenovac preceded Auschwitz in making the jump to a full-fledged extermination camp must be known. And the story of how these executioners, the camp guards and the ringleaders of the Ustase Terror managed to escape from justice for all these years - hidden in Italy and spirited away with American assistance to South America, Canada, and even the United States - must also be told.
That is why April 10th is an important day, sixty-two years later. "Never forget" is not a slogan, or even a command. It is a warning, a call to action.
Poet Ivan V. Lalic, whose words precede this article, feared what would happen if the seven hundred Serbian victims of the Glina Church Massacre - stabbed and then left inside as their church was burned to the ground by the Ustase in July 1941 - were forgotten:
I cannot stay silent; the walls stayed silent
Cali Ruchala
And crumbled. But the ones from the church, the ones
Who are dead, have not yet fallen asleep. They lie awake,
Unbidden, in one who was once a boy. I cannot evict them
Into the space of wind where the church once stood,
Where the weeds grow red with their blood.
So let them stay awake, unbidden, for they would despise me
If I were to try to sing them to sleep.
April 10, 2003
