BOSNIAN SERBS, TOO, HAVE VOWED:
"NEVER AGAIN!"

  By Sonja Myers
  Houston Chronicle
  Outlook

  March 16, 1995

For fair use only
Published under the provision of
U.S. Code, Title 17, section 107.

During the time when the world is remembering the 50th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, it seems appropriate to remind the American public of an often overlooked fact: After the Jews and the Russians, the next largest group to suffer the most from the genocide in WW2 were the Serbs. Especially hard hit were the Serbs living in Krajina and Bosnia.

In 1941 Hitler established a Nazi puppet government of the Independent State of Croatia, led by the notorious Ustasha - Croatian fascist extremists, headed by Ante Pavelic. That puppet state comprised mainly the territories of today's Croatia plus Krajina and the territories of today's Bosnia-Herzegovina.

If the U.S. sponsored Muslim-Croat Bosnian federation established a year ago, forms a confederation with the present-day Croatia as planned, the resulting entity will closely match the borders of Hitler's fascist Croatia.

Recommitting A MAJOR WAR CRIME

It has been estimated that 1,750,000 Yugoslavs - almost 11 percent of the population - died during the war [WW2]... The worst fratricidal massacres occured in the so-called Independent State of Croatia (NDH), where Ante Pavelich ruled as fuhrer (poglavnik)... The NDH ... was hardly a state, and it was only 50 per cent Croat. This monstrous product of former wrongs, conceived in hatred and false national pride, represented an attempt by a group of warped extremists to revive the past... of Croatia. It succeeded only in degrading the Croat name. The creation of the NDH [Independent Croatia] was judged by the Nurnberg Tribunal to be a MAJOR CRIME.  Professor Fred Singleton  "Twentieth-Century Yugoslavia," pp. 86-88  Columbia University Press  New York, 1976

Following in the footsteps of their German masters, Croatian Ustasha and their Bosnian Muslim collaborators, immediately declared the Christian Orthodox Serbs to be a "worthless race" like the Jews.

Many Jews from Sarajevo were sent by the Ustasha to Auschwitz in train-loads manned by the Muslims' "SS Handzar Division." Most of the Jewish population of the Independent State of Croatia was exterminated. At the time Pavelic boasted to Hitler that "the Jewish problem" was solved in Croatia.

The Ustasha/Muslim solution for the 2.5 million Orthodox Serbs was to kill a third, convert a third to Catholicism and expel the remaining third. During the Ustasha reign of terror about 750,000 Serbs, 35,000 Jews and several thousand Gypsies, perished together in the Jasenovac concentration camp alone.

Men, women, children and Orthodox clergy were hideously tortured, decapitated or thrown half alive into the huge pits to die.

By the end of WW2, over one million Serbs, almost half of the Serbian population in the region, were exterminated. The unprecedented cruelty of their puppets shocked even the Nazis. The Serbian people of Bosnia and Krajina suffered the highest losses per capita in the war.

Second only to The Jewish Holocaust

...IN BOSNIA...THE CROATIAN FASCISTS BEGAN A MASSACRE OF SERBS WHICH, IN THE WHOLE ANNALS OF WORLD WAR II, WAS SURPASSED FOR SAVAGERY ONLY BY THE MASS EXTERMINATION OF POLISH JEWS.  All editions of Encyclopedia Britannica (Macropedia)  between 1971 and 1989  Entry: Yugoslavia, World War II

Just like the Jews, the Serbs vowed: "Never again!"

The unilateral and forceful secession of Croats and Muslims from the multiethnic Yugoslav federation in 1991 and 1992 placed the Serbian population in Bosnia and Krajina at the mercy of the same States that had tried to annihilate them only 50 years ago. The Serbian people of Krajina and Bosnia rose to fight for their RIGHT TO REMAIN IN YUGOSLAVIA.

Croatia is today involved in repugnant historical revisionism and rehabilitation of its Nazi past.

The state symbols of present-day Croatia, including its currency, are identical to those of Nazi Croatia.

While promoting inclusion of Krajina into Croatia, Mr. Tudjman's government insists on calling the Serbs who have lived in the region for centuries - "terrorists, invaders and aggressors." This is hardly a reassuring gesture to the Serbs, who not so long ago suffered Croatian government sponsored genocide.

Increasingly, in Muslim controlled areas of Bosnia, the study of the Koran and the Arabic language is becoming compulsory in schools, mixed marriages are discouraged, women are forced to wear scarves, and eating pork is stigmatized. The Bosnia's Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic is an Islamic fundamentalist [who spent two jail terms in Yugoslavia for fanning ethnic and religious hatred. In 1970, he wrote "The Islamic Declaration," that was recently reprinted in Sarajevo. According to the prominent Israeli writer and columnist Joseph Lapid, this booklet is "a program for the Islamization of the Moslem Peoples, a tract of which Khomeini could have been proud of." Mr. Izetbegovic also] describes the Serbs, who lived in Bosnia long before the Muslims arrived, as "aggressors and invaders." This can hardly inspire the Bosnian Serbs into believing Mr. Izetbegovic's rhetoric about multi-ethnic Bosnia. In fact, even the current multi-ethnic Muslim-Croat federation exists only on paper. Serbian civilians in both Croatia and Bosnia are harassed, threatened, robbed, "ethnically cleansed," raped and killed with the acquiescence of [Mr. Tudjman and Mr. Izetbegovic.] The government. Many of these crimes are documented by the UN and are repeatedly reported by the president of Helsinki Watch in Zagreb, Mr. Zvonimir Ivan Cicak.

As we watch commemorations at the Holocaust memorials in Europe, we should also remember that the children and grandchildren of the Serbian victims of the WW2 genocide are themselves the victims of a renewed genocide by the Croats and Bosnian Muslims. The tragedy is that, again, nobody cares. Indeed, the Serbs are presented as brutal aggressors over the ["innocent and angelic"] Croats and Muslims. Modern sound-bites feed the public with scattered data instead of real information.

This is why well-financed Croatian and Muslim propaganda has succeeded by applying Adolph Hitler's doctrine: "The great masses of people... would more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one." (Mein Kampf)

It should be clear for all to see that the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina died together with the multi-ethnic Yugoslav federation four years ago...

Partitioning Bosnia and allowing the Serbs in Krajina (ironically refered to by our media as "Croatian Serbs") and the Serbs in Bosnia the right to form their own states, or make confederal links with Yugoslavia, if they wish to do so, is the only way for lasting peace in the Balkans.

As long as the international community tries to defy this reality, against all historical reason and common sense, the Serbs will be mourning their dead, praying for the souls of those who perished in the shamefully forgotten Holocaust in Yugoslavia, and vowing - "Never again!"

Ms. Myers is a president of Texas American-Serbian Community based in Houston.