ZAGREB, Croatia,
June 30 — On a hot Sunday evening in June, thousands
of fans in a packed stadium here in the Croatian capital
gave a Nazi salute as the rock star Marko Perkovic shouted
a well-known slogan from World War II.
Some of the fans were wearing the black caps of Croatia’s
infamous Nazi puppet Ustashe government, which was responsible
for sending tens of thousands of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews
to their deaths in concentration camps.
The exchange with the audience is a routine part of Mr.
Perkovic’s act, and the gesture seemed to lack any
conscious political overtones. The audience — most
of whom appeared to be in their teens and early 20s — just
seemed to be having a good time. But Mr. Perkovic’s
recent success among a new generation — many of them
apparently oblivious to the history of the Holocaust — has
prompted concern and condemnation from Jewish groups abroad
and minority groups in Croatia.
[Despite those objections, the concert — his biggest
ever, with an estimated 40,000 fans in the soccer stadium — was
shown in prime time on Sunday night on state-owned television,
prompting further protests from Jewish and Serbian groups.]
“We don’t want to pay for something that strikes
fear into my children, or distances them from their friends
or neighbors,” said Milorad Pupovac, leader of the
largest Serbian political party in Croatia, referring to
the plan for the broadcast.
What has shocked those groups more, though, is that in the
ensuing debate, many senior politicians and journalists have
said that they see no problem with the imagery or salutes.
“They just don’t seem to get it,” said
Efraim Zuroff, the Jerusalem director of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center, who has urged President Stipe Mesic to ban future
concerts and help outlaw the use of extremist symbols and
slogans.
The Croatian government has been trying to improve its image
so it can join the European Union, and it did issue a statement
after the concert criticizing the open display of Ustashe
memorabilia and slogans. But much of Croatia’s political
establishment cannot understand what all the fuss is about.
“You can’t see any anti-Semitism here,” Dragan
Primorac, Croatia’s education minister, said in an
interview. He said he had planned to attend the concert,
before rain caused it to be postponed by a day. Others who
did get there, though, included a former foreign minister
and two Croatian basketball stars.
“At most, you could blame four to five people,” Dr.
Primorac said, for wearing Ustashe regalia, or giving the
Nazi salute during the concert. He emphasized, too, that
Croatia was a good friend of Israel and pointed to a photograph
on his mantelpiece of himself with the Israeli elder statesman
Shimon Peres as evidence.
Over the last three years the conservative prime minister,
Ivo Sanader, has to some extent managed to shed the country’s
image as a nationalist state that once harbored war criminals.
The effort has been successful enough that Croatia is a favorite
to join the European Union. What was seen for much of 1990s
as a war-torn nation is now widely perceived as a prime tourist
destination, with 10 million tourists a year and visitors
flocking to its Adriatic coast.
Photographs and memorabilia from the Ustashe period are
no longer sold openly in Zagreb’s city center. Restaurants
no longer display photographs of Ustashe units on their wall.
But souvenir shops do still sell key rings and baseball caps
with the Ustashe U, as well as the slogan used in Mr. Perkovic’s
concerts, “Za Dom: Spremni!” or, “For the
Homeland: Ready!”
And many Croats still display an insensitivity to Holocaust
issues. Mr. Perkovic’s public affairs manager, Albino
Ursic, has a large poster that he designed in 1994 on the
wall of his office with the words “final solution.” The
poster shows a package of cigarettes marked with a large
Swastika and labeled “Adolf Filters,” poking
out of a black leather jacket. “It’s an antismoking
picture,” he said.
“It won an award in Lisbon,” he added, emphasizing
that he viewed himself as left of center. As for Mr. Perkovic’s
performance, Mr. Ursic said, the fascist salute is made by
soccer hooligans across Europe who have little understanding
of it. “It is just teenage rebellion,” he said.
Mr. Perkovic’s patriotic — and sometimes violently
nationalistic — songs first became popular here during
the Balkan wars, when he fought in the Croatian Army. Most
Croats know him better by his stage name, Thompson, given
to him during the war, when he carried the British-made submachine
gun of the same name. He, too, has recently sought to distance
himself from the Ustashe association. In an interview, the
soft-spoken singer said he had never raised his own arm to
make a fascist salute. Nor, he said, did he encourage people
to wear Ustashe uniforms. As for the Ustashe slogan he uses,
he claims it is a traditional Croatian salute that predates
World War II.
Others are unapologetic. Vedran Rudan, a columnist with
the Croatian center-right daily Nacional, accused Mr. Zuroff
of “extreme arrogance” for writing a letter to
the president of Croatia asking the government to bar future
Thompson concerts.
She also accused him of branding Croatian youths fascists
while ignoring the activities of a well-known ultranationalist
member of Parliament, who has close ties with Israel.
“Why do Jews forgive him everything, and the beardless
youth and Thompson do not have right to mercy?” Ms.
Rudan wrote.
But rights groups here say there is a fundamental problem.
While Croatia is now seeking to move away from the nationalist
period of the 1990s, the current generation of young people
has largely been schooled to believe that the Ustashe government’s
actions were no worse than those of Communist leaders in
Yugoslavia during the same period.
“They want to put them on an equal footing,” said
Danijel Ivin, the president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee
for Human Rights. “The education about the recent history
of Croatia is not adequate.”
Dr. Primorac said that was slowly beginning to change and
pointed out that since 2004, Croatian schools had dedicated
a day each year to studying the Holocaust.
Others do not think it is changing quickly enough. “It
is an issue,” said Tomislav Jakic, an adviser to President
Mesic. “It is far from Ustashe nostalgia that was 15
years ago, when the ghost was first let out of the bottle.
But the ghost is still here and it will be for years to come.”
nytimes.com
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