In Croatia, Alleged Criminals Thrive While Memorial Fades

The stone monument to the victims of one of World War II’s early slaughters committed by fascists stands in vandalized ruins. Its central pillar has been decapitated. Someone has carefully chiseled away the plaques bearing victims’ names. Weeds carpet the isolated site.

In the forest behind the monument, down a steep path, sits another part of the memorial, in equal neglect. It is a deep, black pit tunneled into the hillside, where the bodies of hundreds of Jews and Serbs were dumped in 1941 by Croatian Ustashe, the rulers of Croatia’s Nazi puppet state.

Fifty years later, these same hills around the tense, insular town of Gospic were used to dispose of more bodies, this time the Serbs and Croatian dissidents that a new generation of Croatian nationalists worked to eradicate.

Such gruesome recycling of history might end there, except that it now appears that some of the same officials in charge of local government during the 1991 killings were restored to power in elections three months ago. They also are probably part of the gang that destroyed the monument to Jewish and Serbian victims.

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The persistent presence of people who could qualify as war criminals contaminates most societies that emerged from the former Yugoslav federation. In Croatia, human rights activists say the government of President Franjo Tudjman--until recently the region’s closest U.S. ally--encourages impunity and cyclical violence by distorting the past and glorifying a nationalist history while overlooking the murderous side.

As it attempts to build an ethnically pure state, the government has failed to purge criminals from its ranks, and in fact rewards many.

“These people poison the atmosphere for everybody. If we want a better future for this country, we have to get rid of these kinds of people,” said Ivo Goldstein, a history professor at Zagreb University and an opposition activist.

Goldstein’s interest is as much personal as historical. His grandfather was among the Jews slain outside Gospic in 1941 and dumped into the deep, narrow pit.

The site, known as Jadovno, in the hills about nine miles west of Gospic, was the first death camp among 26 concentration camps created by Croatia’s pro-Nazi World War II regime. About 3,000 Jews and Serbs are believed to have been rounded up by Ustashe agents, transported in rail cars to the Gospic area, forced to walk through fields and then knifed to death--all during a three-month period in 1941. The bodies were thrown into the pit.

Among the victims, according to today’s tiny Croatian Jewish community, were 200 members of the Makabe Jewish Sports Club of Zagreb.

Goldstein’s grandfather, also named Ivo, was a bookshop owner in the central Croatian city of Karlovac when he was taken away. The grandmother also was arrested but released before fleeing, with two young sons, to territory controlled by anti-fascist partisan fighters.

At the better-known Jasenovac death camp in north-central Croatia, more than 200,000 Serbs, as well as Jews, Gypsies and others, were killed during World War II. Jasenovac has been the center of international focus but Jadovno languishes ignored.

The Jadovno monument, Goldstein and others believe, was destroyed as part of a campaign to eliminate traces of Ustashe atrocities when like-minded fascists began to take charge of parts of Croatia after Tudjman declared the former Yugoslav republic’s independence in 1991.

Thousands of monuments honoring both partisans, who defeated the Nazis, and the victims of fascism have been destroyed all over the country in a wave of fervent nationalism, inspired by Tudjman, that equates anti-fascists with Communists, Serbs and other enemies of the Croatian fatherland. Tudjman has fueled such attitudes by praising the Ustashe’s stated goal of independence, even if the regime was guilty, he allowed, of certain “wrongdoing.”

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One of the most notorious men who rose to power in the Gospic area in 1991 was Tihomir Oreskovic, a leader of Gospic’s “crisis committee,” formed amid the Serb-Croat war that raged at the time.

Gospic was a front-line city, a last defense against Yugoslav-backed Serbian militia fighting against Croatian secession. Always a remote, isolated place, Gospic and its Lika Valley surroundings were under siege.

In October 1991, 13 Croats were killed. In swift retaliation, between 120 and 200 Serbs, including judges and other civilians, were rounded up and murdered, according to human rights researchers. The bodies were concealed in the same hills that 50 years earlier had become the mass graves for other Serbian and Jewish victims.

Associates of Oreskovic emerged in recent weeks to describe in Croatian newspapers the slayings and general reign of terror that swept through Gospic in 1991. Officials and military police conspired to draw up lists of Serbs who were taken away, according to these accounts.

“No one tried to stop the executions,” Milan Levar, one of Oreskovic’s former colleagues, told the Croatian weekly Feral Tribune. “It was easy to control desperate, frightened people.”

So egregious were the abuses that the Croatian central government took the unusual step of arresting Oreskovic in December 1991. But he was quickly released.

Exactly what he has been up to in recent years is unclear. But in local elections in April, Oreskovic appeared on the ruling coalition’s list of candidates and was voted in as mayor of Perusic, a town about 10 miles north of Gospic.

“The problem is that this story will never stop,” said Ivan Cicak, head of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights.

Goldstein, Cicak and others argue that leaving such figures in positions of power blocks the development of the rule of law and a civilized, democratic society in Croatia. Of all the former Yugoslav republics, Croatia, along with Slovenia, most aspires to becoming an accepted part of Western Europe and attracting the investment and privilege that such status suggests.

Gospic is only one example of rewarding those whose behavior is suspect. Among others:

* A Bosnian Croat general who went on trial last month at the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague was bestowed with Croatia’s highest military honors after his indictment on charges of leading the murder of hundreds of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

* Ante Gudelj, a member of Tudjman’s nationalist party convicted in the 1991 murder of a moderate police chief who tried to stop the war in northeastern Croatia, was released last month by a court stacked with Tudjman appointees. In addition, his record was expunged. The Tudjman cronies who are believed to have given him the orders to kill are still in command of the northeastern region.

The failure to address past crimes only allows more to occur, human rights advocates say.

“Violence will not stop until the government says no to terrorism, regardless of who commits it,” said Petar Mrkalj, a research associate with the Helsinki committee.

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Indeed, Gospic and the Lika Valley, even today, are described as a frightening twilight zone that is unsafe for outsiders. Human rights activists say it remains the one area in Croatia too dangerous to work in. No international organization has a presence.

During a recent visit, the town was ominously full of state security officers. It was heavily damaged during the war, and many repairs were in evidence. Fresh paint covered many buildings and homes, and satellite dishes poked out of windows. Several BMWs cruised the streets.

“You have a kingdom of terror there,” Mrkalj said. “There are still people in positions of authority who are direct war criminals. They keep all ordinary people under pressure. It is a town with many ghosts.”

Ivo Goldstein’s father, Slavko, a prominent political commentator and publisher of the opposition magazine Tjednik, visited Jadovno in July 1992 and found the monument already in ruins. From conversations he had with police, he figured the damage had been done the previous year, during Oreskovic’s first term in power.

“No one would say who had done it, but it was obvious that the monument had been destroyed deliberately by an explosion,” Slavko Goldstein said.

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For the Goldsteins, the neglect of the monument symbolizes a reckless disregard for and deliberate distortion of history in today’s nationalist Croatia. Tudjman gave the capital’s central Victims of Fascism Square a new moniker: Heroes of Croatia Square.

The 75-year-old president--a former partisan fighter himself, then Communist general and now nationalist crusader--outraged many by attempting to equate the value of Ustashe and partisans.

“This is the attitude of the Croatian regime toward Croatian history,” said Ivo Goldstein. “The destiny of Serbs and Jews is being hidden, part of a reinterpretation of history. And what that leads to, at least for us Jews, is a very sensitive question. The attitude toward the past affects the present. If you are a Jew, if you are a Serb, you keep a low profile.”

The Goldsteins wrote Croatian Prime Minister Zlatko Matesa to denounce the “sad and disgraceful” condition of the Jadovno memorial and demand it be repaired. In response, an official of Lika Valley county said the government understood the importance of repairing the monument and had already begun upgrading the road. However, a visit there showed no signs of any roadwork.

“I don’t know what to believe,” Slavko Goldstein said. “Some members of the government want to save the face of Croatia. Some will lie and tell you something and delay the whole thing. At least the letter is a sign they are aware this matter harms Croatia.”