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Croatia treads softly in face of WW II revisionism

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By Igor Ilic and Matt Robinson — An international exhibition about Anne Frank had already toured over 20 schools across Croatia when it ran into trouble last month in the coastal city of Sibenik, spotlighting the nation’s struggle to resolve its dark World War Two past. The story of the Holocaust diarist and her death at age 15 in a German concentration camp had been well received in a country that during the war was run by a Nazi puppet regime. So the exhibition coordinator, Maja Nenadovic, was “flabbergasted” when the headmaster of Sibenik’s Technical School decided to remove six of the exhibition panels that focused on Croatia’s former fascist Ustashe era.


“He had a problem with the Ustashe being painted negatively,” said Nenadovic. “It kind of left me speechless.”


Historians say the Ustashe systematically persecuted and murdered Jews, Serbs and Roma. But the Sibenik headmaster objected that the six panels had nothing to do with Anne Frank and ignored killings of Croats by wartime anti-Nazi Partisans.


The organisers packed up the entire installation and moved it out of Sibenik, which sits in an historically conservative of Croatia, to another school in the eastern town of Nasice.


The response of Croatia’s conservative government was muted. It played down the matter, reflecting what critics say is a growing tolerance in the European Union’s newest member state for those who would try to sanitise its World War II record.


Concerns about the risks of revisionism have risen since the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), which led Croatia to independence from Yugoslavia through a 1991-95 war, took power again in 2015 on pledges to revive its flagging economy and promote conservative values based on family and faith.


Critics say the phenomenon is disturbing for hopes of lasting stability and development in the Balkan region, and reflective of a revival of nationalist sentiment across Europe.


“The HDZ is pursuing a two-faced policy,” Ivo Josipovic, the Social Democratic president of Croatia from 2010 to 2015, told the Serbian daily Politika this month.


In Croatia, the incident with the Anne Frank exhibition followed a dispute in December over a plaque placed near the site of the Ustashe concentration camp in the central town of Jasenovac, where a memorial centre bears the names of more than 83,000 Serb, Jewish, Roma and anti-fascist Croat victims.


The plaque, erected by a group of veterans of the 1991-95 war in remembrance of 11 fallen comrades, included the salute Za Dom — Spremni (For the Homeland — Ready), one that was used by the Ustashe and dusted off by Croatian nationalists in the 1990s as they fought to forge a new independent Croatia.


It can still be heard chanted from the stands of Croatian soccer stadiums.


Answering complaints about the plaque, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic called it a “delicate” issue and said he would form a commission to look at how the state should regulate all symbols and slogans of totalitarian regimes — fascist or communist.


“I want to firmly reject all insinuations about the ‘re-fascistisation’ of the Croatian people. That’s not the case,” said Plenkovic.


But the small Jewish community was outraged by what they saw as the government’s inaction and boycotted the state event marking international Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27.


Analysts said the HDZ reticence evinced a reluctance to alienate a vocal part of its support base.


Zarko Puhovski, a political philosophy professor in Zagreb, said that to change the atmosphere in Croatia, what was needed was a clear condemnation of crimes committed by communists and a greater awareness that the Ustashe “brought no good”.


“When all that becomes part of public awareness, when the leftists also realise they must acknowledge communist crimes after World War Two, then we will have a situation that would allow for a rational discussion. I’m afraid we are still pretty far from that,” he said.


Moreover, he said, it is “tragicomic” that the prime minister had cast the dispute over the plaque as “delicate”.— Reuters


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