George W. Bush recently echoed Vice- President Dick Cheney’s support for Croatia to join the European Union, a bid that has been stalled because of the former Yugoslav republic’s slowness to prosecute its 1990s war crimes, and its failure to ensure protections for minorities, including returning Serb refugees.

But Croatia’s problems go a lot deeper than the Balkan wars of the Clinton era. Consider the fact that the country faces the possibility of being excluded from the 2008 European soccer championship. The reason: When an Italian team’s fans taunted the Croatian team’s fans by waving Yugoslavia’s old communist flag at a match last August, the other side formed a giant human swastika and gave Nazi salutes.

Old habits are hard to break. “In World War II, Hitler had no executioners more willing, no ally more passionate, than the fascists of Croatia,” A. M. Rosenthal wrote in The New YorkTimes in 1998. “They are returning, 50 years later, from what should have been their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany. TheWestern Allies who dug that grave with the bodies of their servicemen have the power to stop them, but do not.”

In 1995, the London Evening Standard’s Edward Pearce wrote that “you can understand Croatia best by saying flatly that if there is one place in the world where a statue of Adolf Hitler would be revered, it would be Zagreb,” Croatia’s capital.

And The Washington Times reported: “A German tank rolls through a small village, and the peasants rushout, lining the road with their right arms raised in a Nazi salute as they chant, ‘Heil Hitler.’ Mobs chase minorities from their homes, kicking them and pelting them with eggs as they flee into the woods. Europe in the 1940s? No. Croatia in the 1990s.”

Last month, Croatian TVbroadcast video of a speechmade 10 years ago by Stjepan Mesic, now Croatia’s President. Mr. Mesic is seen saying, “This thing they’re asking Croats to do: go kneel [in atonement at a Croatian concentration camp.] We have no reason to kneel anywhere. We Croats won twice in World War II, while all the others did it only once. We won on April 10, [1941], when the Axis powers recognized Croatia’s independence [by creating the Fascist Independent State of Croatia], and we won after the war since we once again found ourselves with the victors.”

Such were the “allies” to whom retired American generals were dispatched in the 1990s to train against the Serbs and help restore Croatia to its Hitler-defined borders. (We later did the same for Kosovo, whose independence Washington continues to push for.) One has to wonder at the ubiquitous “Nazi” analogies hurled at the Serbs — the designated villains of the Balkans. It was Croatia, not Serbia, which was a trueto-life Nazi state where thousands of Serbs, Jews and other “undesirables” died in Second World Warera concentration camps (withassistance from Bosnian Muslims); and which as recently as 1995 ethnically cleansed 350,000 Serbs.

To placate the European powers, Croatia has finally apprehended two of its most notorious criminals from the Balkan wars, Ante Gotovina and Branimir Glavas. The move is unpopular because, as withBosnian and Albanian Serb-killers, Croatian Serb killers are national heroes.

While “Serb” has become synonymous with “war criminal” to the world, Croatians, Albanians and Bosnians accused of war crimes get acquitted, or get convicted and released to a hero’s welcome, or go unpunished and pursue political careers, as is the case withindic ted war criminal and Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku (and RamushH aradinaj before him). All the while, the United States has refused to admit its 1990s alliance not only withN azi nostalgists but, in Bosnia and Kosovo, withM uslim forces supplied and trained by al-Qaeda and Iran.

The Serbs weren’t angels, but they are the only Balkans players to have admitted as much and actively done something about it. The media, our policymakers and our pundits still refuse to take a messier but more accurate view of the Balkans. Nazism is not “part of the ugly past.” It was not a bout of madness that has been straightened out. The undead are among us.

=== 2 ===

When will world confront the undead of Croatia?

Croatia also faces the possibility of being excluded from the 2008 European soccer championship because when an Italian team's fans taunted the Croatian team's fans at a match in August by waving Yugoslavia's old communist flag, the other side took great offense and showed the competition what it was really made of: They formed a giant human swastika and gave Nazi salutes.

In 1995, The London Evening Standard's Edward Pearce wrote that "you can understand Croatia best by saying flatly that if there is one place in the world where a statue of Adolf Hitler would be revered, it would be Zagreb," Croatia's capital.

And The Washington Times reported: "A German tank rolls through a small village, and the peasants rush out, lining the road with their right arms raised in a Nazi salute as they chant, 'Heil Hitler.' Mobs chase minorities from their homes, kicking them and pelting them with eggs as they flee into the woods. Europe in the 1940s? No. Croatia in the 1990s."

Last month Croatian TV broadcast video of a speech made 10 years ago by Stjepan Mesic, now Croatia's president. Mr. Mesic is seen saying, "This thing they're asking Croats to do: go kneel in [Croatian concentration camp] Jasenovac ... we have no reason to kneel anywhere. We Croats have won twice in World War II, while all the others did it only once. We won on April 10, when the Axis powers recognized Croatia's independence, and we won after the war since we once again found ourselves with the victors."

Such were the "allies" to whom retired American generals were dispatched in the 1990s to train against the Serbs and help restore Croatia to its Hitler-defined borders. (We later did the same for Kosovo, whose independence we continue to push for.) One has to wonder at the ubiquitous "Nazi" analogies hurled at the Serbs - the designated villains of the Balkans - considering that this analogy was started by a former Nazi state that in 1995 ethnically cleansed 350,000 Serbs and by its Muslim former apprentices who helped kill hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and other undesirables in 40 of Croatia's World War II concentration camps.

One has to wonder also because Croatia (along with Bosnia and Kosovo) hired American PR firms to make the analogy stick. Sure enough, our policymakers and our media - on the same page when it comes to the Balkans - bought it and recycled the propaganda to us, and continue to do so today. This despite the fact that our ally, President Franjo Tudjman - the "Father of Croatia" - was about to be hit with a war crimes indictment that was finally, slowly and quietly being prepared by the United Nations, allowing him to die a free man. (As was the case with wartime Bosnian-Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, a fundamentalist who asked to be buried "next to the martyrs.")

To placate the European powers, Croatia has finally apprehended two of its most notorious criminals from the Balkan wars, Ante Gotovina and Branimir Glavas - despite the move being very unpopular because, as with Bosnian and Albanian Serb-killers, Croatian Serb killers are national heroes.

While to the world, "Serb" is synonymous with "war criminal," Croatians, Albanians and Bosnians accused of war crimes get acquitted, or get convicted and released to a hero's welcome, or go unpunished and pursue political careers, as is the case with indicted war criminal and Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku (and Ramush Haradinaj before him). All the while, we refuse to admit our 1990s alliance in Croatia with Nazi sympathizers, and in Bosnia and Kosovo with forces supplied and trained by al-Qaida, Iran and others.

A recent breakthrough occurred in October, when Zarko Puhovski, the Croatian president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, said on a radio program that war crimes in the Croatian town of Osijek are still unsolved because 1990s Croatia was a place where killing Serbs was normal. "In the first few years it was normal to kill Serbs, then it was normal to forget they had been killed, and now we finally talk about it," he said.

The Serbs weren't angels, but they are the only Balkans players to have admitted as much and actively done something about it. The media, our policymakers and our filmmakers still refuse to take the messier but more accurate view of the Balkans. For it is the more daunting task, one that could force the realization that the Serbs weren't just fighting their enemies; they were fighting ours.

Nazism is not "part of the ugly past." It was not a bout of madness that has been straightened out. The undead are among us.

How can we fight the jihad when Kidman and Gere are being used to enable it? Just when the Aussie gave us some hope in so prominently signing her name to an anti-terror ad in the L.A. Times — going against the grain and calling terrorism against Israelis by its name — we’re still at Square One when it comes to terrorism against Serbs.

Of course, if our own government is helping the jihad secure its Balkan base, what does one want from two actors?

For Gere’s movie — a “light-hearted thriller” entitled Spring Break in Bosnia that has him hunting down the fugitive former Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic — filming is being done in Croatia and Bosnia, with the help of local propagandists as consultants, of course. The Serbs, yet again, will be collectively portrayed as the villains in the Balkan tale. Never mind that Gere returned from Bosnia to Croatia ahead of schedule last month, after only 10 days of shooting, reportedly because he was “too scared to stay” in the area.

One wonders what could have spooked him. What did he have to fear from Bosnia? Could it be the ominous signs that the country has been reawakened by the Saudis from its Communist slumber to its Islamic roots? Or did something happen that might have reasserted Bosnia’s fascist sympathies, which the UK Telegraph’s Robert Fox described in 1993:

These are the men of the Handzar division. “We do everything with the knife, and we always fight on the frontline,” a Handzar told one U.N. officer. Up to 6000 strong, the Handzar division glories in a fascist culture. They see themselves as the heirs of the SS Handzar division, formed by Bosnian Muslims in 1943 to fight for the Nazis. Their spiritual model was Mohammed Amin al-Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who sided with Hitler. According to U.N. officers...  “[m]any of them are Albanian, whether from Kosovo... or from Albania itself.”

They are trained and led by veterans from Afghanistan and Pakistan, say U.N. sources... The first political act in this new operation appears to have been the murder of the two monks in the monastery... Mysteriously the police guard disappeared a few minutes before.

Or maybe something happened after Gere “disappeared down a small street in Sarajevo’s old Turkish quarter to film the next scene,” as BBC.com reported. “It is the early hours of the morning and a Hollywood film crew with blazing lights and buzzing walky-talkies is being put through its paces in the shadow of a mosque.”

Whatever it was, Gere returned to the “villa on a hill” where he’d been staying in Zagreb, Croatia. Though the Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians are often at each other’s throats, they have an uncanny similarity. You see, “Croatian” is more or less a synonym for “Nazi.” Except the Croatians managed to sicken even the Germans with the creative lengths they went to for Serb-slaughter, including sawing heads off slowly. (Bosnian Muslims, meanwhile, served in Croatia’s concentration camps such as Jasenovac, where 7o0,000 Serbs were killed alongside tens of thousands of Jews.)

Nazism is not just part of Croatia’s past; it is their present as well.

In 1998, NY Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal wrote: “In World War II, Hitler had no executioners more willing, no ally more passionate, than the fascists of Croatia. They are returning, 50 years later, from what should have been their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Western Allies who dug that grave with the bodies of their servicemen have the power to stop them, but do not.”

Indeed, we happily assisted them — even providing Croatia with Serbian weapons to kill Serbs.

In an article titled “Pro-Nazi extremism lingers in Croatia,” the Washington Times in 1997 reported: “A German tank rolls through a small village, and the peasants rush out, lining the road with their right arms raised in a Nazi salute as they chant ‘Heil Hitler.’ Mobs chase minorities from their homes, kicking them and pelting them with eggs as they flee into the woods. Europe in the 1940s? No. Croatia in the 1990s.”

In 1995, the London Evening Standard’s Edward Pearce wrote that “you can understand Croatia best by saying flatly that if there is one place in the world where a statue of Adolph Hitler would be revered, it would be in Zagreb.”

An AP report the same year described NATO American Commander Colonel Gregory Fontenot in Bosnia turning to two black soldiers in his brigade and saying, “It’ll be interesting to hear what you two see, because the Croatians are racist... They kill people for the color of their skins.”

In 2000, Julius Strauss wrote in the UK Daily Telegraph, “Five years may have passed since the end of the Bosnian war but in Ljubuski, one of dozens of Croat villages scattered through the mountains of southwestern Bosnia, hardliners are still in control. By way of greeting, the Croat party official said: ‘I hope you’re not a Jew or an American. My father fought at Stalingrad. He wore the German insignia with pride. At the end it was only us Croats who stayed faithful to the SS.’

The same year, there was this from The Washington Post: “It was not unusual to see such chilling graffiti as: ‘We Croats do not drink wine, we drink the blood of Serbs from Knin,’... [referring] to the capital of the Krajina region of Croatia where hundreds of thousands of Serbs were ethnically cleansed in 1995 by troops commanded by Gen. [Ante] Gotovina.”

In her September 1999 book Nazi Nostalgia in Croatia, Balkans expert Diana Johnstone wrote:

When I visited Croatia three years ago, the book most prominently displayed in the leading bookstores of the capital city Zagreb was a new edition of the notorious anti-Semitic classic, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Next came the memoirs of the World War II Croatian fascist Ustashe dictator Ante Pavelic, responsible for the organized genocide of Serbs, Jews and Romany (gypsies) that began in 1941, that is, even before the German Nazi ‘final solution’.

And the hit song of 1991, when Croatia once again declared its independence from Yugoslavia and began driving out Serbs, was “Danke Deutschland” in gratitude to Germany’s strong diplomatic support for Zagreb’s unnegotiated secession. In the West, of course, one will quickly object that the Germany of today is not the Germany of 1941. True enough. But in Zagreb, with a longer historical view, they are so much the same that visiting Germans are sometimes embarrassed when Croats enthusiastically welcome them with a raised arm and a Nazi “Heil!” greeting.

So it should be no surprise that this year’s best seller in Croatia is none other than a new edition of “Mein Kampf”. The magazine “Globus” reported that “Mein Kampf” is selling like hotcakes in all segments of Croatian society.

Despite the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s requests for it to seek extradition, the Croatian government remains uninterested in going after two Croatian Nazis (Ustashi) who killed hundreds of Jews, Serbs and gypsies and now live in brazen retirement in Argentina and Austria.

As independent journalist Stella Jatras summed up, “Today, Croatia arrogantly and blatantly flies its fascist checkerboard flag without fear of condemnation from the world. It has renamed its streets after its Nazi war heroes, and proudly displays its ‘Sieg Heil’ salute at weddings, funerals, and other functions.”

Reenter the moviemakers. Croatian film director Antun Vrdoljak has cast his son-in-law, “ER” actor Goran Visnjic, to play the role of the Hague’s top Croatian war crimes suspect Ante Gotovina. According to BBC.com, director Vrdoljak “said he wanted to make the feature film because Gen Gotovina ‘is a real hero of the homeland war’... Gen Gotovina is charged with committing atrocities against Croatian Serbs during the 1990s Balkan wars.”

“Gotovina is a metaphor for today’s Croatia,” Vrdoljak said proudly. According to London’s The Independent, “posters with his photo are still plastered across Croatia; T-shirts, mugs and lighters bearing his image are sold and the Spanish wine he was drinking when arrested quickly sold out when it appeared in Croatian stores in December.” Vrdoljak has said that he is certain Gotovina will be set free.

He has reason to be certain. While to the world, “Serb” is synonymous with “war criminal” and there is a permanent fixation with the two Serbian fugitives Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, killers of Serbs go unpunished, get acquitted or convicted and released to a hero’s welcome — as Serbs are sentenced to death for killing people who aren’t even dead. In Croatia, Serb-cleansing is a national holiday. Whereas Serbia established its own war crimes court in cooperation with the Hague and has been convicting its war criminals, Croatians, Albanians and Bosniaks rally behind their Serb killers, make cinematic homages to them and allow them to pursue political careers .

As for the subject of Gere’s fascination — Karadzic, wanted for “ordering the massacre of ‘8,000’ Muslim males”: five thousand were reported missing by their families when they fled to fight elsewhere before Srebrenica’s fall, and 3,000 of those have since voted in elections. The remains of the other 3,000, which have been found in and around Srebrenica, died during the three years of fighting, not just when the enclave was overtaken by the Bosnian Serbs. These three years of fighting included the Srebrenica Muslims raiding nearby Serb villages and slaughtering several thousand people. But they’re only Serbs and, in practice at least, Serb-killing is a legal, internationally sanctioned sport.

As with Bosnia’s Handzar division, in Croatia’s Serb-cleansing war of secession from Yugoslavia, the Croats were gifted with an Albanian volunteer — Agim Ceku — such a Serb-hunting enthusiast that when the early, Croatian leg of the wars kicked off, this Kosovo Albanian high-tailed it to Croatia and became a colonel in its army. He led Croatian troops in the 1993 offensive on Croatia’s Medak Pocket, where Serbs lived. As Canadian journalist Scott Taylor wrote:

It was here that the men of the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry came face to face with the savagery of which [Agim] Ceku was capable. Over 200 Serbian inhabitants of the Medak Pocket were slaughtered in a grotesque manner (the bodies of female rape victims were found after being burned alive). Our traumatized troops who buried the grisly remains were encouraged to collect evidence and were assured that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.

Nevertheless in 1995, Ceku, by then trained by U.S. instructors as a general of artillery, was still at large. In fact, he was the officer responsible for shelling the Serbian refugee columns and for targeting the UN-declared “safe” city of Knin during the Croatian offensive known as Operation Storm [which the New York Times called “the largest single ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the war”]. Some 500 innocent civilians perished in those merciless barrages, and senior Canadian officers who witnessed the slaughter demanded that Ceku be indicted. Once again, their pleas fell of deaf ears.

Today Ceku is the Prime Minister of Kosovo, and he enjoyed a warm reception from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when the two met over the summer to discuss how best to speed along independence for the Serbian province that this war criminal governs, sans rule of law and beholden to al-Qaeda.

“Throughout the air campaign against Yugoslavia,” continues Taylor, Ceku — by then commanding KLA terrorists in driving two-thirds of the remaining Christian Serbs out, along with the gypsies, Croats, Jews, Ashkalis, Gorani, and other non-Muslim or non-Albanians in Kosovo — “was portrayed as a loyal ally and he was frequently present at NATO briefings with top generals such as Wesley Clark and Michael Jackson.”

Today, the “bin Laden Mosque,” built in 2001 (aptly enough), stands tall in Kosovo, where Bill Clinton murals and Wesley Clark Streets are almost as prevalent as bin Laden keychains.

Re-enter Richard Gere, who in 1999 traveled to Macedonia to volunteer in a Kosovo refugee camp. “Reuters reports Hollywood heart throb Richard Gere took tea with ethnic Albanian Kosovo refugees in Macedonia yesterday and promised he would do all he could to help them.” On the UK Biography Channel’s website at the time, it read, “If nothing else, he uses his star status to give greater voice to his heartfelt beliefs.”

And now Gere will use his star status to naively promote the Muslim and Croat causes. Bosnia and Croatia, our modern Fascist allies against our multi-ethnic World War II ally against Fascism — Serbia.

In 1999, Gere said, “Look, I have the resources and the inclination to find out what’s going on in the world. So I feel this responsibility to find out and do the best I can.”

In which case he should want to know something about WWII, to better appreciate how the Croatia and Bosnia stories played out in the 1990s, and why the Serbs reacted as they did. Yugoslavia’s 40+ years of Communism were a mere interruption in the multilateral genocide of Serbs, which picked up where it left off immediately upon Communism’s decline.

Though he ultimately came around to the dominant, de riguer view of the Albanian-Serb conflict, Gere initially had this to say in 1999: “We had been told it was a totally black and white situation and in my estimation it’s not black and white. Obviously the violence is horrific, but it’s horrific on all sides.” And this is precisely the point: The Serbs weren’t angels, and they are the only Balkan players to have admitted as much. The trouble is that they were less guilty than their enemies, whose side we inexplicably took. And so it is the Serbs whom we hunt. Because it’s easier.

Gere, who is passionate about “learning” why war criminals remain uncaught, recently said of them, “I’m interested in people who cause so much mischief, so much suffering... I think we can learn from them. Why they are the way they are and why are we so vulnerable to them.”

Director Richard Shepard echoed that he hopes the film “is asking a bigger question, which is why are there war criminals throughout the world who the world said they want to catch and yet they don’t.”

But in choosing a Serbian war criminal as the vehicle through which to answer this question is a hackneyed copout. It is yet another uncontroversial, effortless, risk-free Hollywood choice. (See reality-departure flicks The Pacifier (2004) and The Rock (1999), where the setups involve “Serbian terrorists.”) The obsession with Balkans war criminals who are exclusively Serbian is all the more defamatory, given that wartime Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic and Croat leader Franjo Tudjman escaped justice by dying free men as their own war crimes were quietly and reluctantly being investigated by The Hague.

Our policymakers and our media, on the same page throughout the '90s Balkans, took the Hollywood approach themselves, picking the easy side and recycling Muslim and Croatian propaganda about the conflict. They wanted a tale of easy morality, with clear-cut good guys and bad guys. But in no region has this been less clear than the Balkans. “Spring Break in Bosnia” is based on real events in which three American journalists who returned to Sarajevo to try to track down Karadzic themselves — proving
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