For most people outside the Balkans, the name, Dinko Šakic,
the location of Jasenovac, and the group named Ustaša
will have little meaning. For Croatians though, these names
keep coming back time and again to replay on a national and
international level.
In explaining the importance of this, it's best to start
with the Ustaša. This was the name of the ultra-nationalist,
fascist group that seized control of Croatia during WWII
and acted as a puppet government for the Nazi regime with
Ante Pavelic as head of state. They had the distinction of
proving that they were not only just as brutal as their Nazi
counterparts, but actually even more so
Such an example was the creation of the Jasenovac Concentration
Camp which the Croatian regime used to imprison, torture, and
kill Jews, Serbs, Roma, Partisans (Croatians fighting against
the Ustaša regime), and just about anyone else that they
found to be an enemy. It is difficult to ascertain the exact
number of prisoners killed at this Croatian version of Auschwitz,
but the official and generally accepted figure is approximately
70,000-85,000 people with other estimates in the past putting
the number as high as 500,000 (higher figures have been discredited
as being inflated). The commander of the camp was a man named
Dinko Šakic, who managed to flee Europe to hide in Argentina
once the Ustaša regime fell in 1945.
Marko of the blog Greater Surbiton summed up the legacy
of the Ustaša:
The history of the Ustasha movement, in other words, was
utterly shameful - not only from the moral, but from the
patriotic Croatian perspective. Nevertheless, ever since
the Communist regime in Croatia fell in 1990, there have
been those Croats who have sought to perpetuate the disgrace
by their loud statements upholding the legacy of the former
Ustasha regime.
In 1998, Šakic was found in Argentina and shortly after
extradited to Croatia to stand trial for his term as commander
of the Jasenovac prison. He was sentenced to 20 years in
jail, which it turns out he would only serve half of as he
just recently died on July 20, 2008. His death was a minor
event given that he was 86, but his funeral has caused a
great deal of controversy in Croatia and with Jewish people
at large whom he directed the extermination of at Jasenovac.
His funeral called for him to be buried in his Ustaša
uniform. When taken out of this Croatian context and transposed
on another setting, many people would find this ludicrous
as was pointed out by Matthew on the Serbian news portal
B92:
Could you imagine such a funeral for the commander of Auschwitz?
As if that wasn't enough, as stated by Marko of Greater
Surbiton:
…at his funeral the presiding clergyman, Vjekoslav
Lasic, said that the ‘court that convicted Dinko Sakic
convicted Croatia and the Croatian nation'; that the ‘NDH
is the foundation of the modern Croatian homeland', and that ‘every
honourable Croat should be proud of Sakic’s name'.
Bear in mind that this is not an opinion shared by every
Croatian, but these words carried far with their meaning.
On both a national and international scope, those who were
effected by the killings of Šakic's command of Jasenovac
were outraged by these events as was relayed by LimbicNutrition
Weblog:
Vice-President of the Jewish Community Jasminka Domas claimed “the
disgraceful events that occurred at the funeral of Dinko Šakic
in Zagreb insult the memory of all the victims of the Ustasha
regime, and besmirch the Republic of Croatia's good name.”
Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem Efraim
Zuroff has written to Croatian President Stjepan Mesic to
express his anger at the way Šakic’s funeral was
organized and at the priest’s speech.
Ari Rusila of BalkanPerspective also commented on the issue
by quoting what Shmuel Meirom, the Israeli ambassador to
Croatia said of the funeral:
“I'm convinced that the majority of the Croatian people
are shocked by the way the funeral of the Jasenovac commander
and murderer, dressed in an Ustasha uniform, was conducted,” ambassador
Meirom said in a written statement to the state news agency
Hina. “At the same time, I strongly condemn the inappropriate
words of the priest who served at the funeral and said that
Sakic was a model for all Croats” Meirom said.
And indeed Zoran Oštric of Zelena Lista (The Green
List) [Croatian] is one of those Croatians who is against
the honoring of such a man as Šakic and laments how
the popular culture of Croatia is holding him to be a Croat
worthy of respect:
It is unfortunate, that when Croatia convicted him ten years
ago that whether from the urging of their grandfathers or
on their own that his name [Šakic] was chanted at soccer
matches by many of the youth.
Why do these people become cultural icons despite the hard
facts that they have murdered countless people? The simple
answer to this is that it is much easier to forget about
such figures in history as opposed to actually coming to
terms with the actions that they did at the bequest of the
government at the time. One sentence on Ljevica (the Left
Hand) [Croatian], an otherwise very left blog states:
They convicted him because he was a person with the pistol
who killed forty detainees and ordered the hanging of 22
prisoners of war, but now this is not important.
While an admission of the crimes that he committed, it has
been seen that those who were directly affected by the killings
ordered by Šakic do not agree that just because he is
now dead that what he did no longer matters.
globalvoicesonline.org
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