William Dorich - Jasenovac: Then and Now: A Conspiracy of Silence

Jasenovac

THEN AND NOW: A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

By William Dorich

The following is the speech given by William Dorich at the First
International Conference and Exhibition on the Jasenovac Concentration
CampSponsored by the Holocaust Resource Center, Kingsborough
Community College, C.U.N.Y., New York, October 30-31, 1997.

T he American lexicon of the 1940s included such repugnant words as Japs, Kikes and Pollocks. I remember those daysmy father was an immigrant coal miner, and I was automatically addressed by the bigoted wordHunky. Today, in more subtle ways, name calling still haunts modern society. In the contemporary context it has been easy for Americans to deny knowledge of the Holocaust as though Auschwitz and Jasenovac were a mere anomaly of historybut they are naive, millions have been killed since Nuremberg. Today, it is politically incorrect to attack blacks, Asians, Arabs and homosexuals, but perfectly acceptable to attack a Serba name that has become synonymous with evil. Terminology that demonizes Serbs with collective guilt thrives. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleberger said Serbs are not too smart, and Richard Holbrooke unashamedly called Serbs murderous assholes. This conference will surely expose one important realitythat Jasenovac was not a symptom, but the full-blown disease of manifest hatred.

I n this century, in which the word genocide was coined in 1944, the following chilling words were spoken in testimony by Antun Miletich, a Croatian Jasenovac survivor: There is not a pen capable of describing the horror and terror of the atmosphere at Jasenovac. It surpasses any human fantasy. Imagine Hell, the Inquisition, a terror more dreadful than any that ever before existed anywhere, run by bloodthirsty wild animals whose most hidden and disgusting instincts had come to the surface in a way never before seen in human beingsand still you have not said enough.

T oday, journalists conceal the fact that Serbia lost half of her adult male population in WWItheir losses 23 years later at Jasenovac would pain the Serb psyche for the remainder of this centurya century that witnessed the slaughter of more than 170 million victims, beginning with the first genocide in 1907, when the Germans liquidated 120,000 Tanzaniansfollowed in 1922 by the first Holocaust in Asia Minor, where Turkey massacred 3.5 million Armenians and Greeks. In my generation when never again was repeated like a mantra, 30 million Chinese and Russians were liquidated in the 1950s and 1960s with impunity, followed by 1.7 million Cambodians in the 1970s, and 2 million Sudanese and Ethiopians in the 1980s. Since Nuremberg, war criminals, dictators and genocidal maniacs have murdered hundreds of thousands of the politically incorrect, while remaining political untouchables.

But in 1990s Bosnia, the moral line in the sand has been drawn to prosecute Serbian war criminals

Many of the criminals who perpetrated these war crimes in Jasenovac have returned from exile. One such war criminal is Dinko Sakic, one of the men who ran Jasenovac. He is now the security advisor to Croatian President Tudjman. Sakic proclaimed in a Zagreb magazine: If I were offered the same duty today, I would accept it. during this current war.

Tito and Croatian apologists, aided by the Vatican, buried their crimes at Jasenovac along with their victims. It now appears that a vast international conspiracy involving Marshal Josip Broz Tito, founder of modern Yugoslavia, his ruling Yugoslav League of Communists, the United Nations, some Vatican officials, and even Jewish organizations strove to keep the Jasenovac story buried forever. The silence of Jewish organizations is less easily explained, particularly since Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal was aware of the slaughter, The only reference to Jasenovac at the Museum of Tolerance is a wall map showing the concentration camps of World War II. In spite of the fact that thousands of Jews were exterminated at Jasenovac, the tour guides at the Museum of Tolerance intolerably never mention its name.

In July of 1994, Dr. Milan Bulajic, recognized as an expert on genocide by the United Nations, visited Washington, meeting with officials of the National Holocaust Memorial Museum, to bring justice to the victims of Jasenovac and to find out why this tax-supported American institution would omit the Yugoslav Jews and Serbians who died there? He did not get a clearcut answer as to why the third most lethal camp in WWII, nicknamed by historians as The Auschwitz of the Balkans, is conspicuously missing at this museum?

In my book, The Serbian Genocide1941-45, published on the 50th anniversary of WWII, co-authored by the late David Martin, who was Jewish and the author of the 1990 book, The Web of Disinformation, and an expert on the Balkans, wrote: Initial reports claimed that 150,000 Serbs had been massacred; while arriving reports claimed 600,000 were killed. All reports were replete with details of such psychopathic fiendishness that on first reading they seemed almost absurd. The facts of the massacres would indeed be incredible if they had not been authenticated from so many different sources, including photographic evidence by Ustashi themselves, as such evidence was one sure way of receiving Pavelics approval and elevation to higher rank within the Ustasha militia. Numerous reports of entire Serbian communities being locked in their churches and burned alive and reports that the Ustashi were adorning themselves with necklaces made of Serbian eyes were so horrible that one simply cannot blame the civilized western world for initially disbelieving them. Today no one denies that the massacres did take place. It is of interest to note that in The Yugoslav Peoples Fight to Live, Tito stated: During three months of 1941, with the aid of the Ustashi, the Nazis succeeded in exterminating more than half a million Serbs in Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Vojvodina. If we are to believe todays revisionists, such a statment would imply that no Serbs were killed after 1941.

If there is any value in Simon Wiesenthals words that hope lives when people remember, then Serbs will surely find it hopeless that their bravery in saving the lives of thousands of Jews during the war in Yugoslavia has been easily erased from history. Serbs also find hopeless a new attempt to tell the story of World War II in the Balkans entitled Serbias Secret WarPropaganda and the Deceit of History by Philip Cohen. Jasenovac only appears twice in this bookon pages 91 and 125less than 90 words were used to describe Jasenovac, where, according to most scholars, more than a half million Serbs were exterminated.

A sserting that he has discovered a Secret War of the Serbs, Philip Cohen is unburdened with credentials in Balkan Studies and cannot speak in the Serbo-Croatian language, nor read the Cyrillic alphabet , which would have been necessary to comb through the thousands of documents to make this alleged secret discoveryapparently, Mr. Cohen relied on others to do his so-called meticulous and excruciatingly well-documented study, according to Stjepan G. Mestrovic, a Croatian at Texas A&M University. No respectable Croatian would dare to author such a book.

In his foreword to the same book, Jewish Professor David Riesman, Emeritus of Social Sciences at Harvard, also found it obligatory to use racism by saying: The account makes clear, there is an important cultural difference between Serbia and Croatia; it is in Serbia that illiterates could rise to leadership and even to the monarchy

Conspicuously missing from this book is any mention of Ante Starcevic (1823-1896), who contributed to two World Wars and is considered the Croatian