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The Fifth International Conference on Jasenovac

May 24-25, 2011

Banja Luka

D E C L A R A T I O N

OF THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JASENOVAC,
DEDICATED TO THE GENOCIDE COMMITTED AGAINST SERBS, JEWS AND ROMA IN THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA

DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

1. The Fifth International Conference on Jasenovac,

- Starting from the fact that in the present-day Republic of Croatia the memory of the genocide committed during World War II against Serbs, Jews, and Roma by the quisling government of the Independent State of Croatia, which at that time also included the area of today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially the Muslim people, whom they called “the flowers of the Croatian nation”, has been deliberately and systematically blotted out;

- Bearing in mind that the casualty rate of this genocide, especially the number of victims in Jasenovac, has not only been suppressed in the Croatian public media and quasi-historiographic works, but also radically diminished to a mere 40,000 killed Serbs, Jews and Roma, just as Franjo Tudjman, the first president of the Republic of Croatia, did in his capacity as a historian;

- Having in mind that nowadays some very influential and very partial parties in Croatia present the Ustasha, as perpetrators of genocide in the Independent State of Croatia, along with Ante Pavelic, as fighters for Croatia’s national liberation and independence, based on alleged historical and national rights of the Croatian people;

- Given the fact that the historically proven genocide against Serbian, Jewish and Roma people has never been properly condemned by politicians, either in Tito’s communist Yugoslavia or the present-day Croatia; that unlike the German people, who have accepted responsibility for the Holocaust committed in their name by ​the Nazis, the Croatian people have never taken responsibility for the genocide committed in their name; and that the Roman Catholic Church has failed to condemn the crimes of genocide in the NDH, the way it has condemned crimes committed at other World War II execution sites across Europe and apologized for the involvement of some of its members in them;

Given that the authorities of the People’s i.e. Socialist Republic of Croatia, as a federal unit within the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY), and later the SFRY, as well as the authorities of the present-day Republic of Croatia, as an independent state, have never offered to pay any reparations to the victims of genocide and their descendants;

- Given the fact that the execution sites at which the victims of this genocide were tortured, massacred and killed, and the mass graves into which they were thrown and buried without due respect or a respectable funeral, have never been marked and protected in a proper way;

- Since Ante Pavelic and many of his associates fled the Independent State of Croatia after the war using the so-called rat lines, along with the support of some Vatican prelates and clerics, and that many of them have not been tried in the country, which would have led the Croatian people to acknowledge the unfathomable crimes committed on their behalf, and to their moral enlightenment and purification;

1. Keeping all this in mind, the Fifth International Conference on Jasenovac hereby concludes that:

- The Ustasha crimes against Serbs, Jews and Roma during the Second World War in the Independent State of Croatia were a premeditated and planned genocide, as defined by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on the 9^th of December, 1948;

- In the perpetration of this genocide, 700,000 Serbs, 23,000 Jews and 80,000 Roma were tortured, robbed, raped and eventually killed by the Croat Ustasha in the Croatian system of concentration camps Jasenovac alone, used for the extermination of Serbs, Jews and Roma and the regime’s ideological opponents, only because they belonged to another nation, religion or race;

- The Independent State