[ Da W.P.Schulz - che ringraziamo! - riceviamo questo interessantissimo
articolo apparso sull'israeliano Jerusalem Post. In esso si parla:
1) della recente polemica sui monumenti ai nazisti Budak e Francetic -
eretti in Croazia e rimossi solo in seguito a polemiche il cui eco e'
giunto in tutto il mondo;
2) della attuale perversione culturale croata, che porta ad equiparare
nazisti ustascia e partigiani comunisti in un unico calderone
storico-revisionista improntato alla "unita' patriottica" - in Italia
si parlerebbe (a proposito di partigiani e repubblichini) di "storia
nazionale condivisa", non meno vergognosamente;
3) degli ambigui rapporti tra Croazia ed Israele;
4) del crescente fondamentalismo islamista in Bosnia-Erzegovina, dove
(dopo il contributo diretto di mujaheddin ed imam wahabiti alla guerra
di secessione anti-jugoslava) affluiscono tuttora abbondanti i
finanziamenti sauditi e spuntano moschee e centri di cultura islamica
come funghi;
5) del sostegno ebraico e statunitense alla parte dei musulmani di
Bosnia nel corso della guerra fratricida.
Non possiamo esimerci, in questa occasione, dal notare comunque come
non solo Israele, ma anche gran parte del mondo ebraico organizzato
(specialmente negli USA) abbia svolto un ruolo assolutamente negativo
nella guerra in Jugoslavia, contribuendo a spostare l'attenzione sugli
aspetti "etnici" del conflitto ed a diffondere propaganda
anti-jugoslava, e segnatamente anti-serba, anziche' sottolineare la
comune memoria del nazismo e del genocidio sofferto da ebrei e serbi
nel corso della II Guerra Mondiale. Di fatto, quelle di S. Schwartz
sulla attuale deriva reazionaria in Croazia e Bosnia sono lacrime di
coccodrillo. (a cura di Italo Slavo) ]
The Jerusalem Post
September 10, 2004
A New Balkan History
By STEPHEN SCHWARTZ
Zagreb, Croatia - On Saturday, August 28, the people of Croatia woke to
extraordinary news, with banner headlines reporting that the government
of prime minister Ivo Sanader had destroyed monuments honoring two of
wartime Croatia’s most notorious collaborators: author Mile Budak
(1889-1945) and military leader Jure Francetic (1912-43).
It was but another manifestation of a paradoxical transition, whereby
the former Yugoslavia’s perceived centers of reaction and tolerance
trade places.
Budak and Francetic are among the worst figures associated with the
reputation of “Nazi Croatia,” based on the domination of its people
after 1941 by the pro-Axis dictatorship of the ultra-nationalist
Ustasha movement.
The Ustasha are unsurpassed in Jewish collective memory for the
viciousness of their hatred and violence. The Ustasha government was
headed by Ante Pavelic (1889-1959), who escaped to Argentina after the
triumph of Tito’s anti-Fascist partisans.
Budak was Pavelic’s minister of education and religious affairs, and
supervised the Ustasha campaign against the Jews, in which at least 70
percent of Croatian Jewry was killed by the Nazis. He was also a
leading participant in the attempt to rid Croatian culture of Serbian
influence. He was tried and executed by the Tito authorities.
Francetic was a Croat from the region of Lika and a major in the
Ustasha army, who founded the Black Legion, an elite, SS-style unit
dedicated to the massacre of Bosnian Serbs and the deportation of
Bosnian Jews.
As noted in the Croatian mass-circulation magazine Nacional, Francetic
was “personally ‘credited’ with the murder of more than 3,000 Serb
civilians in the Romanija mountains” near Sarajevo. Francetic was
seriously wounded and committed suicide after his plane crashed in
territory held by the Partisans.
Budak’s memorial was set up only days before on a wall that encircles a
Catholic church in his birthplace, the small town of Sveti Rok.
Francetic’s memorial could not be erected at his birthplace in the
Croatian town of Otocac, and in 2000 was placed instead at Slunj, a
highly scenic location in Croatia, where he died.
Sanader was elected prime minister late in 2003, representing the
Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party, a centrist conservative force
created by the late Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman, who remains
infamous for his revisionist views of the Holocaust.
But Sanader represents a reformed, more moderate HDZ, and he had been
challenged by the ultra-Right in the party, which favors glorification
of the Ustasha past.
IN TRUTH, the Ustasha burden on the Croats is unfair, since more than
200,000 of them joined the Tito Partisans, and Josip Broz Tito himself
was half-Croat and half-Slovene.
The Yugoslav Partisan conflict, as it was fought in Croatia, was
basically a civil war between the Croatian Left, which had the support
of most of the peasants and nearly the whole working class, and the
Ustasha, which was a small party of disaffected demi-intellectuals.
But Tudjman, although he was a Tito general, had a fantasy that he
could reconcile the two sides of Croatian history. He was wrong; his
consistent flattery of the Ustasha and their heritage, as well as his
paranoiac, illiterate views on Jewish influence (of which I know much,
having interviewed him twice), did nothing but harm Croatia as it
fought for survival in the Yugoslav combat of the 1990s.
Tudjman’s Croatia established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1997.
Still, a bad taste remained with most Jews, given that Ustasha
propaganda and symbology remained uncontrolled in the young republic.
The destruction of the monuments to Budak and Francetic has been hailed
by two of the country’s leading intellectuals, Ivo Goldstein, a member
of the Croatian Jewish Community and professor of history at the
University of Zagreb, and Ivo Banac, the leading American historian of
the South Slavic lands and a professor at Yale, both of whom are
exceedingly distinguished authors.
Goldstein told The Jerusalem Post, “the decision to destroy the
memorials to Budak and Francetic came after a long debate originating
with Tudjman’s Holocaust revisionism in the 1990s. It was a problem for
Croatia for 15 years. Although the HDZ is Tudjman’s party, the new
leaders know that if they want Croatia to join Europe they have to show
no quarter to revisionism and prove that there is no debate with
fascism.”
Banac commented: “The Sanader government has broken with the policy of
tolerance toward the Ustasha revival, which was habitual under Tudjman,
and has set a new standard in post-independence politics.”
He pointed out that 125 “so-called intellectuals” had recently called
for the rehabilitation of Budak, portraying him as mainly a literary
man who was forced into political actions he might not have wanted to
undertake, including those against Croatian Jews. In addition, the
destruction of the Budak monument at a church site implied a challenge
to Catholic coddling of the Ustasha legacy, according to Banac.
The decision to obliterate the monuments was taken at a special session
of the Croatian cabinet, under a law authorizing actions in defense of
the constitutional order. Reaction by the HDZ ultra-Right has included
demands that monuments to Tito and the partisan movement also be torn
down.
THE CROATIAN desire to finally and definitively account for pro-Nazi
elements in its past, including its complicity in the Holocaust, is
visible in other ways. The Zagreb City Museum includes a rather
charming room with memorabilia from the Jewish community, including a
model of the lovely Zagreb synagogue destroyed by the Ustasha in 1941.
But not far away, the exhibits display Ustasha posters on one wall,
opposed by Partisan art on the other, suggesting, as Tudjman hoped to
convince his constituents, that the two sides were moral equivalents.
A better effort to account for Croatian Jewish history occurred when
the gorgeous, historic city of Dubrovnik hosted the Fifth Conference on
the Social and Cultural History of the Jews on the Eastern Adriatic
Coast in late August. Sponsored by the University of Zagreb Center for
Advanced Academic Studies, the conference mainly included work by
Israeli academics, although I presented an essay on Abraham Kohen
Herrera, a Kabbalist who lived in Dubrovnik in the 17th century.
Other papers included a useful study of rabbinical responsa dealing
with the problems of Sephardic exiles in the Ottoman Balkans during the
16th century, by Professor Alisa Meyuhas Ginio of Tel Aviv University,
and a presentation on “The Image of the Converso in Spanish Proverbs,”
by Professor Tamar Alexander of Ben- Gurion University.
Ivo Goldstein offered a statistical survey of conversions in the Zagreb
Jewish community from 1918 to 1945. Prof. Jacob Allerhand of the
University of Vienna described the life and history of the Turkish
Sephardic Congregation in Vienna, which ended with the destruction of
the Turkish synagogue in 1938 and the deportation to Dachau of those
unable to escape. Journalist Wolf Moskovich presented a vivid and
affecting comparison of the problems of anusim (Jews who were forcibly
converted to Catholicism), who fled the Spanish Inquisition and Russian
Jews after the fall of Soviet Communism.
While Croatia evinces a new and sincere affinity to the Jews and
Israel, and genuinely seeks a compact among its various religious
communities, a journey through Bosnia-Herzegovina unveils signs of
withdrawal from an illustrious heritage of ethnic harmony, and an
embrace of an Islamism dominated by the Saudi-financed cult of
Wahhabism.
The Saudi High Commission for Relief in Bosnia-Herzegovina no longer
occupies a major building in downtown Sarajevo. The Saudi Commission’s
offices were raided by Bosnian police after the terrorist attacks on
the U.S. of September 11, 2001, and considerable documentation on
al-Qaida was seized, including the crucial list of “the Golden Chain”
– the roster of Saudi financiers of Osama bin Laden’s organization. A
small group of Algerian Islamists was arrested in Sarajevo and sent to
Guantanamo Bay.
UNFORTUNATELY, HOWEVER, notwithstanding the notable role of the US in
saving the Bosnian Muslims from massacre at the hands of Serbs and
Croats, disaffection with the Bush administration is palpable in
Sarajevo. Some Bosnian Muslims seem resentful that Iraq has drawn
international funds and attention away from their country, even though
the record of the United Nations in achieving the reconstruction of
Bosnia-Herzegovina is a poor one, to say the least. (Croatia, which
rejected significant involvement in its affairs by the so-called
“international community,” seems to have benefited from this policy.)
Other Bosnians may simply be expressing their emulation of Germany and
Turkey, both countries that have strongly influenced Bosnian society,
when they condemn the US in Iraq.
But a Bosnian Islamist journal, SAFF, bears headlines such as:
“Exclusive from Iraq: Suicide Actions as A Defensive Strategy,” along
with attacks on the chief Bosnian Muslim scholar, Mustafa Ceric, who is
well-known for his pro-American views, and propaganda blasting the
recent 10th Sarajevo Film Festival for showing a film on homosexuality.
The festival, let it be noted, also included the premiere of a
wonderful Albanian-French production, Dear Enemy, about an Albanian
family that sheltered a Jewish refugee, and other fugitives, during
World War II.
The same magazine sought to present the Algerians locked up in
Guantanamo as if they were actually Bosnians, which they are not.
Evidence of rising Islamist influence in Sarajevo is also found in the
increased adoption of hijab, or covering, by women, and in an extremely
disturbing new phenomenon, the exclusion of non-Muslim visitors from
historic mosques.
In the old Bosnia, which I first visited in 1991, non-Muslims were
always welcome to visit the country’s mosques. Now, at the Governor’s
Mosque in the historic center of Sarajevo, a giant security guard and
his obvious supervisor question visitors and turn away non-Muslims.
Until recently, this practice was only observed at the enormous,
garish, King Fahd Mosque, recently built with Saudi money.
In addition, the mosque guards are strident in their propaganda. When
introduced to two Spanish visitors who indicated that their country’s
population is not bigoted about their history of eight centuries of
Muslim rule, the guards excitedly declared that Spain would soon return
to Islam, an opinion that most Bosnians would consider lunatic.
Bosnia’s Jewish community remains confident of its safety, and enjoys
immense moral credit with the Bosnian people. Some of its leading
members, such as the hazan (cantor) of the Sarajevo synagogue, David
Kamhi, played a notable role in defending Muslims against aggression.
But Bosnia is poor, and even three years after September 11, Saudi
money talks.
As Croatia looks north across its border with Slovenia, which joined
the EU earlier this year, for its model, Muslim Bosnia would do much
better to emulate its Croatian neighbor than to continue down the
slippery slope to Arab-based Islamic radicalism.
The writer, author of The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and
Its Role In Terrorism and the forthcoming Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan
Jewish Notebook, has traveled and lived in the Balkans since 1990.
articolo apparso sull'israeliano Jerusalem Post. In esso si parla:
1) della recente polemica sui monumenti ai nazisti Budak e Francetic -
eretti in Croazia e rimossi solo in seguito a polemiche il cui eco e'
giunto in tutto il mondo;
2) della attuale perversione culturale croata, che porta ad equiparare
nazisti ustascia e partigiani comunisti in un unico calderone
storico-revisionista improntato alla "unita' patriottica" - in Italia
si parlerebbe (a proposito di partigiani e repubblichini) di "storia
nazionale condivisa", non meno vergognosamente;
3) degli ambigui rapporti tra Croazia ed Israele;
4) del crescente fondamentalismo islamista in Bosnia-Erzegovina, dove
(dopo il contributo diretto di mujaheddin ed imam wahabiti alla guerra
di secessione anti-jugoslava) affluiscono tuttora abbondanti i
finanziamenti sauditi e spuntano moschee e centri di cultura islamica
come funghi;
5) del sostegno ebraico e statunitense alla parte dei musulmani di
Bosnia nel corso della guerra fratricida.
Non possiamo esimerci, in questa occasione, dal notare comunque come
non solo Israele, ma anche gran parte del mondo ebraico organizzato
(specialmente negli USA) abbia svolto un ruolo assolutamente negativo
nella guerra in Jugoslavia, contribuendo a spostare l'attenzione sugli
aspetti "etnici" del conflitto ed a diffondere propaganda
anti-jugoslava, e segnatamente anti-serba, anziche' sottolineare la
comune memoria del nazismo e del genocidio sofferto da ebrei e serbi
nel corso della II Guerra Mondiale. Di fatto, quelle di S. Schwartz
sulla attuale deriva reazionaria in Croazia e Bosnia sono lacrime di
coccodrillo. (a cura di Italo Slavo) ]
The Jerusalem Post
September 10, 2004
A New Balkan History
By STEPHEN SCHWARTZ
Zagreb, Croatia - On Saturday, August 28, the people of Croatia woke to
extraordinary news, with banner headlines reporting that the government
of prime minister Ivo Sanader had destroyed monuments honoring two of
wartime Croatia’s most notorious collaborators: author Mile Budak
(1889-1945) and military leader Jure Francetic (1912-43).
It was but another manifestation of a paradoxical transition, whereby
the former Yugoslavia’s perceived centers of reaction and tolerance
trade places.
Budak and Francetic are among the worst figures associated with the
reputation of “Nazi Croatia,” based on the domination of its people
after 1941 by the pro-Axis dictatorship of the ultra-nationalist
Ustasha movement.
The Ustasha are unsurpassed in Jewish collective memory for the
viciousness of their hatred and violence. The Ustasha government was
headed by Ante Pavelic (1889-1959), who escaped to Argentina after the
triumph of Tito’s anti-Fascist partisans.
Budak was Pavelic’s minister of education and religious affairs, and
supervised the Ustasha campaign against the Jews, in which at least 70
percent of Croatian Jewry was killed by the Nazis. He was also a
leading participant in the attempt to rid Croatian culture of Serbian
influence. He was tried and executed by the Tito authorities.
Francetic was a Croat from the region of Lika and a major in the
Ustasha army, who founded the Black Legion, an elite, SS-style unit
dedicated to the massacre of Bosnian Serbs and the deportation of
Bosnian Jews.
As noted in the Croatian mass-circulation magazine Nacional, Francetic
was “personally ‘credited’ with the murder of more than 3,000 Serb
civilians in the Romanija mountains” near Sarajevo. Francetic was
seriously wounded and committed suicide after his plane crashed in
territory held by the Partisans.
Budak’s memorial was set up only days before on a wall that encircles a
Catholic church in his birthplace, the small town of Sveti Rok.
Francetic’s memorial could not be erected at his birthplace in the
Croatian town of Otocac, and in 2000 was placed instead at Slunj, a
highly scenic location in Croatia, where he died.
Sanader was elected prime minister late in 2003, representing the
Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party, a centrist conservative force
created by the late Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman, who remains
infamous for his revisionist views of the Holocaust.
But Sanader represents a reformed, more moderate HDZ, and he had been
challenged by the ultra-Right in the party, which favors glorification
of the Ustasha past.
IN TRUTH, the Ustasha burden on the Croats is unfair, since more than
200,000 of them joined the Tito Partisans, and Josip Broz Tito himself
was half-Croat and half-Slovene.
The Yugoslav Partisan conflict, as it was fought in Croatia, was
basically a civil war between the Croatian Left, which had the support
of most of the peasants and nearly the whole working class, and the
Ustasha, which was a small party of disaffected demi-intellectuals.
But Tudjman, although he was a Tito general, had a fantasy that he
could reconcile the two sides of Croatian history. He was wrong; his
consistent flattery of the Ustasha and their heritage, as well as his
paranoiac, illiterate views on Jewish influence (of which I know much,
having interviewed him twice), did nothing but harm Croatia as it
fought for survival in the Yugoslav combat of the 1990s.
Tudjman’s Croatia established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1997.
Still, a bad taste remained with most Jews, given that Ustasha
propaganda and symbology remained uncontrolled in the young republic.
The destruction of the monuments to Budak and Francetic has been hailed
by two of the country’s leading intellectuals, Ivo Goldstein, a member
of the Croatian Jewish Community and professor of history at the
University of Zagreb, and Ivo Banac, the leading American historian of
the South Slavic lands and a professor at Yale, both of whom are
exceedingly distinguished authors.
Goldstein told The Jerusalem Post, “the decision to destroy the
memorials to Budak and Francetic came after a long debate originating
with Tudjman’s Holocaust revisionism in the 1990s. It was a problem for
Croatia for 15 years. Although the HDZ is Tudjman’s party, the new
leaders know that if they want Croatia to join Europe they have to show
no quarter to revisionism and prove that there is no debate with
fascism.”
Banac commented: “The Sanader government has broken with the policy of
tolerance toward the Ustasha revival, which was habitual under Tudjman,
and has set a new standard in post-independence politics.”
He pointed out that 125 “so-called intellectuals” had recently called
for the rehabilitation of Budak, portraying him as mainly a literary
man who was forced into political actions he might not have wanted to
undertake, including those against Croatian Jews. In addition, the
destruction of the Budak monument at a church site implied a challenge
to Catholic coddling of the Ustasha legacy, according to Banac.
The decision to obliterate the monuments was taken at a special session
of the Croatian cabinet, under a law authorizing actions in defense of
the constitutional order. Reaction by the HDZ ultra-Right has included
demands that monuments to Tito and the partisan movement also be torn
down.
THE CROATIAN desire to finally and definitively account for pro-Nazi
elements in its past, including its complicity in the Holocaust, is
visible in other ways. The Zagreb City Museum includes a rather
charming room with memorabilia from the Jewish community, including a
model of the lovely Zagreb synagogue destroyed by the Ustasha in 1941.
But not far away, the exhibits display Ustasha posters on one wall,
opposed by Partisan art on the other, suggesting, as Tudjman hoped to
convince his constituents, that the two sides were moral equivalents.
A better effort to account for Croatian Jewish history occurred when
the gorgeous, historic city of Dubrovnik hosted the Fifth Conference on
the Social and Cultural History of the Jews on the Eastern Adriatic
Coast in late August. Sponsored by the University of Zagreb Center for
Advanced Academic Studies, the conference mainly included work by
Israeli academics, although I presented an essay on Abraham Kohen
Herrera, a Kabbalist who lived in Dubrovnik in the 17th century.
Other papers included a useful study of rabbinical responsa dealing
with the problems of Sephardic exiles in the Ottoman Balkans during the
16th century, by Professor Alisa Meyuhas Ginio of Tel Aviv University,
and a presentation on “The Image of the Converso in Spanish Proverbs,”
by Professor Tamar Alexander of Ben- Gurion University.
Ivo Goldstein offered a statistical survey of conversions in the Zagreb
Jewish community from 1918 to 1945. Prof. Jacob Allerhand of the
University of Vienna described the life and history of the Turkish
Sephardic Congregation in Vienna, which ended with the destruction of
the Turkish synagogue in 1938 and the deportation to Dachau of those
unable to escape. Journalist Wolf Moskovich presented a vivid and
affecting comparison of the problems of anusim (Jews who were forcibly
converted to Catholicism), who fled the Spanish Inquisition and Russian
Jews after the fall of Soviet Communism.
While Croatia evinces a new and sincere affinity to the Jews and
Israel, and genuinely seeks a compact among its various religious
communities, a journey through Bosnia-Herzegovina unveils signs of
withdrawal from an illustrious heritage of ethnic harmony, and an
embrace of an Islamism dominated by the Saudi-financed cult of
Wahhabism.
The Saudi High Commission for Relief in Bosnia-Herzegovina no longer
occupies a major building in downtown Sarajevo. The Saudi Commission’s
offices were raided by Bosnian police after the terrorist attacks on
the U.S. of September 11, 2001, and considerable documentation on
al-Qaida was seized, including the crucial list of “the Golden Chain”
– the roster of Saudi financiers of Osama bin Laden’s organization. A
small group of Algerian Islamists was arrested in Sarajevo and sent to
Guantanamo Bay.
UNFORTUNATELY, HOWEVER, notwithstanding the notable role of the US in
saving the Bosnian Muslims from massacre at the hands of Serbs and
Croats, disaffection with the Bush administration is palpable in
Sarajevo. Some Bosnian Muslims seem resentful that Iraq has drawn
international funds and attention away from their country, even though
the record of the United Nations in achieving the reconstruction of
Bosnia-Herzegovina is a poor one, to say the least. (Croatia, which
rejected significant involvement in its affairs by the so-called
“international community,” seems to have benefited from this policy.)
Other Bosnians may simply be expressing their emulation of Germany and
Turkey, both countries that have strongly influenced Bosnian society,
when they condemn the US in Iraq.
But a Bosnian Islamist journal, SAFF, bears headlines such as:
“Exclusive from Iraq: Suicide Actions as A Defensive Strategy,” along
with attacks on the chief Bosnian Muslim scholar, Mustafa Ceric, who is
well-known for his pro-American views, and propaganda blasting the
recent 10th Sarajevo Film Festival for showing a film on homosexuality.
The festival, let it be noted, also included the premiere of a
wonderful Albanian-French production, Dear Enemy, about an Albanian
family that sheltered a Jewish refugee, and other fugitives, during
World War II.
The same magazine sought to present the Algerians locked up in
Guantanamo as if they were actually Bosnians, which they are not.
Evidence of rising Islamist influence in Sarajevo is also found in the
increased adoption of hijab, or covering, by women, and in an extremely
disturbing new phenomenon, the exclusion of non-Muslim visitors from
historic mosques.
In the old Bosnia, which I first visited in 1991, non-Muslims were
always welcome to visit the country’s mosques. Now, at the Governor’s
Mosque in the historic center of Sarajevo, a giant security guard and
his obvious supervisor question visitors and turn away non-Muslims.
Until recently, this practice was only observed at the enormous,
garish, King Fahd Mosque, recently built with Saudi money.
In addition, the mosque guards are strident in their propaganda. When
introduced to two Spanish visitors who indicated that their country’s
population is not bigoted about their history of eight centuries of
Muslim rule, the guards excitedly declared that Spain would soon return
to Islam, an opinion that most Bosnians would consider lunatic.
Bosnia’s Jewish community remains confident of its safety, and enjoys
immense moral credit with the Bosnian people. Some of its leading
members, such as the hazan (cantor) of the Sarajevo synagogue, David
Kamhi, played a notable role in defending Muslims against aggression.
But Bosnia is poor, and even three years after September 11, Saudi
money talks.
As Croatia looks north across its border with Slovenia, which joined
the EU earlier this year, for its model, Muslim Bosnia would do much
better to emulate its Croatian neighbor than to continue down the
slippery slope to Arab-based Islamic radicalism.
The writer, author of The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and
Its Role In Terrorism and the forthcoming Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan
Jewish Notebook, has traveled and lived in the Balkans since 1990.