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res=F20715F93454127B93C2A81789D85F458785F9&scp=2&sq=%22Slobodan%20Lang
%22&st=cse

Croatian Nationalism Gets New Impetus

By ALFRED FRIENDLY Jr.Special to The New York Times

February 10, 1971, Wednesday

Page 4, 671 words

ZAGREB, Yugoslavia, Feb. 6 -- A strange alliance of Communists and Roman Catholics,

politicians and intellectuals, has coalesced here to assert the rights of some 4.5 million Croats
to guide their own destinies and control their own riches. [ END OF FIRST PARAGRAPH ]
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May 19, 1996

Croatian War-Shrine Plan Revives

Pain
By CHRIS HEDGES
The anguish of tens of thousands of people killed during the 1940's at the concentration camp
that was built here along the marshy banks of the Sava River still reverberates from the
overgrown brush and deserted buildings.
For while the camp lies neglected and derelict, those who died here have become the
centerpiece of a plan that has outraged survivors and threatens to distort historical truth for
political gain.
Defying international criticism, the Croatian Government says it will press ahead with plans
to turn the camp into a memorial for victims of Communist and fascist terror.
President Franjo Tudjman, who fought the Germans as a young member of Tito's Partisans,
said a few days ago that he wanted to turn the camp into "a memorial for all victims of war."
Those who died under fascist and Communist rule, along with the dead from the 1991
Croatian war against the Serbs, would lie side by side at Jasenovac.
Mr. Tudjman has even called for the return of the remains of the fascist wartime dictator Ante
Pavelic, who is buried in Spain.
This has sparked outrage because the victims at Jasenovac, who were mainly Serbs but
included Jews and Gypsies, were killed by the fascist Croatian regime backed by the Nazis.
Many survivors see the President's plan, which has been criticized by several European
leaders and Secretary of State Warren Christopher, as a desecration of the site.
"This is like reburying the bones of German SS officers and building a monument in their
memory at Auschwitz," said Slavko Goldstein, a Holocaust survivor who now lives in Zagreb,
the capital.
The Jasenovac camp, 45 miles southeast of Zagreb, was the largest of 27 concentration camps
in Yugoslavia during World War II. It was set up by the fascist government in Croatia and
administered by the Ustashe, the Croatian equivalent of the Nazi SS.
The Croatian fascists adopted Nazi racial laws and set out to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and
Serbs. Many other Croatian dissidents, including 12 Catholic priests, also died.
President Tudjman, seeking to defuse criticism of the wartime government, says 28,000
people were killed at Jasenovac. Tito, eager to demonize his fascist rivals, said 700,000
people died. Both figures are dismissed as unrealistic by independent scholars in the United
States, who estimate that about 80,000 people were killed here.
"The tragedy that took place here has become a dispute about numbers," said Dr. Slobodan
Lang, whose grandparents died at the camp. "Because the pain is painted in gray, collective
tones, the suffering of individuals is ignored and manipulated. It is shameful."
Many victims were unloaded from freight cars and killed immediately on the banks of the
river, their bodies tossed into the water. The rest worked as slave laborers, digging clay out of
the swampy banks to make bricks. Thousands died of disease, hunger and beatings.
Crematoriums were built late in the war.
The Communist Government of Yugoslavia kept the camp open until 1947, killing thousands
of former Ustashe members and anti-Communist dissidents.
Serbs use the camp to brand the Croats as unrepentant fascists. Croatian nationalists say the
slaughter was about equal to the numbers of Croats killed by Serbian partisans and guerrillas.
Croatian Jews -- of whom 80 percent of the prewar population of 68,000 died during the war
-- are not acknowledged in Jasenovac. Gypsies are also ignored.
"If the truth is exposed, then the complexity of what took place can be revealed," said Ivan
Juric, the city manager of Jasenovac, who had family members who were killed on both sides
during World War II. "But there are too many people who only want easy answers. We must
finally let those who suffered speak or this will never end."
Croatian Serbs, who held this part of Croatia until last year, trashed the small museum. The
parking lots, which once accommodated school buses, have weeds poking up from the
asphalt. The gates lay open, the grounds deserted, save for swarms of mosquitoes.
Mr. Juric stood in the gutted entrance hall of the museum. When asked if the tattered pictures
of the emaciated children, the rows of dead and the bewildered families getting off transports
were taken at Jasenovac, he paused.
"That," he said, "is what we were told."
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May 5, 1996

Foreign Affairs;Expiration Date:

12/20/96
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
When you go to apply for your NATO press pass in Zagreb the first thing you notice is that it
comes with one line already filled in -- the expiration date: "December 20, 1996."
That is the date President Clinton has set for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Bosnia. The
question I have been posing to a range of people from Zagreb to Sarajevo is: What do you
think Bosnia will look like on the day NATO press passes expire? The most common answer
is: "Anything can still happen" -- from a return to fighting to a hard partition to an uneasy
coexistence. In other words, with seven months to go before the scheduled end of the NATO
mission there is still no clear-cut trend in Bosnia. On any given day, in any given village, you
can see both the forces of unification and the forces of partition busy at work. Though the
forces of partition unquestionably have the upper hand, they are not yet decisive.
It's like a bad marriage," one U.S. official said of the current state of affairs between Serbs,
Croats and Muslims. But as in any bad marriage, he added, the couple could stay together
indefinitely for the sake of the kids, in a loveless arrangement, or they could get a divorce.
Slobodan Lang, a doctor and Croatia's leading human rights activist, described to me a car trip
he just took across Croatia and Bosnia, beginning in the Croatian village of Erdut on the
Danube. There he found a meeting of Serbs and Croats, discussing an amnesty for Croatian
Serb refugees who want to return to their homes in the area. Just a few miles after that he
came upon an intersection in Bosnia where Serb, Croat and Muslim taxi drivers all gather
each day in one taxi station to ferry passengers to either Serb-held Brcko, Muslim-held Tuzla,
or Croatian-held Sava. Still farther along, in Croatian-held Brcko Ravno, he met a Croatian
surgeon who had performed 8,700 operations during the war, saving Serbs, Croats and
Muslims alike.
Continuing down to Tuzla, he found that city's Muslim Mayor organizing a business fair there
at which Serbian, Muslim and Croatian businessmen were paying 200 German marks apiece
to set up showrooms. But along the way, he passed a cemetery where Muslims had broken all
the crosses over Croatian graves. In Sarajevo, he visited with angry Muslim refugees, who
had managed to survive the Serbian massacre in Srebrenica and were now occupying the
abandoned homes of Sarajevo Serbs, who had fled to the Serb Republic, where they are now
living in squalor. He passed by Mostar, a city divided between Croats and Muslims that is
supposed to be reunited but is instead being partitioned, largely because Croats refuse to share
control of the city with their Muslim neighbors. Mostar's division is also being reinforced by
Croatian criminal gangs that don't want to see Mostar reunited because it would be bad for
their protection rackets. Mr. Lang ended up in Selce, where a Muslim Croat conference was
being held on how to help those left handicapped by the war.
That's Bosnia today. The only thing that's clear is that while NATO press passes will expire
on Dec. 20, the Bosnian conflict will not. There is still too much rage loose in this land. There
are still too many people not living in their homes (1.7 million out of a population of 4
million). There are still too many killers walking free. And, most of all, too many of the
leaders responsible for wrecking Bosnia are still around posing as architects of its new dawn.
No, there will have to be an ongoing NATO peacekeeping presence here after Dec. 20, and it
will have to include some U.S. forces to have credibility. As long as NATO does not become
a target, its remaining here with a smaller force for a longer period is worth it. It's a small
price to pay to prevent more mass killing and to insure stability in southern Europe. Anyway,
you need a longer cease-fire and period of reconstruction to really test whether a stable new
order here is possible.
"You Americans are like a doctor who wants to help a woman have a baby, but tells her that
her pregnancy can only last three months," said Dr. Lang. "Well, you can't make a baby in
three months. You must have more respect for the suffering and the pain and the prejudice
that went on here. It is not something that goes away in a year." That's why everyone is
simultaneously rebuilding and rearming, he added: "If your house was burned, if you were
taken away to a concentration camp by your neighbors, and then NATO says, 'We'll help you
for a while, but we're leaving by Dec. 20,' you would be a fool not to be preparing for the next
round."