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Museums in Eastern Europe Museums in Eastern Europe

Map of the Jasenovac concentration camp. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Goran tek-en

of resistance and began to attack the Serbian Orthodox The associate analysist Ioannis Michaletos writes: “the 90s
clergymen. They forced 250,000 orthodox people to con- in the Balkans brought to memory the WWII atrocities: a
vert to Catholicism and vandalized approx. 400 churches vicious genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Serbian popu-
and monasteries. lation occured in the midst of the World War ... The crimes
committed are of the uttermost brutality and resulted in
Presumably it was the dominant role which the Catho- hundreds of thousands of deaths along with the destruc-
lic church played in the Croatian fascism of the 1940s, tion of the way of life for most Serbs-along with other na-
that conversion under pressure, a medieval element of tionalities in the then occupied Yugoslavia.“ 8
religious domination, became an element of the death
machinery of a fascist regime of the 20th cent. In this way For the Krajina Serbs (!) it was as if German Jews would
the Serbian genocide became a mixture of political-reli- face another “Reichskristallnacht". Croatian nationalists,
gious terror against the orthodox church with origins in supported by the government, sang the songs of the Usta-
the division of the Roman Empire in the late Antiquity and sha, painted the symbols of the Croatian fascists on Ser-
the relatively young idea of (biological) racist supremacy. bian churches. Croatian state leader Franjo Tudjman had
certain sympathies for the Ustasha and played the number
The Ustasha set up a number of concentration camps of victims in Jasenovac down to 30,000 resembling a Ne-
were they imprisoned their victims and forced them to onazi denying the Auschwitz gassing. He proclaimed that
work day and night until they died of starvation. The he was happy that he had no Jews and Serbs as relatives
Ustasha called Jasenovac only a "working camp", but in and glorified the Ustasha regime as a root of Croatia’s in-
reality it was an extermination camp with the main goal dependence. 9
to kill all inmates.
The Serbian Genocide
The return of the Ustasha
The mass murdering of the Serbs by the Ustasha in WWII
Ethnic cleansing by Croatian fascists was not a matter of was a genocide in the pure legal meaning of the word
distant past: in the 1990s, Neo-Ustashas devastated Serbi- like the Armenian Genocide, the Jewish Genocide, the
10
an churches, attacked the Serbs in the Krajina and forced Gypsie Genocide and the Rwandan Genocide. A geno-
them again in an ethnical cleansing to leave the country. cide means that a regular government (not marauders out
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EXPOTIME!, issue August/September 2017