Croatia Ex-President Shown Downplaying WWII Crimes

Far-right news site Maxportal and local TV show Bujica on Monday evening made public two videos from 1992 in which former Croatian President Stjepan Mesic controversially questions the death toll at the Jasenovac concentration camp during World War II.

In the first video, Mesic claimed that Jasenovac, which was run by the Croatian WWII fascist Ustasa movement, was just “a labour camp” – a theory advocated by Croatia’s far right and revisionist historians.

He said that people died from diseases like typhus and dysentery at the camp but were not executed “because who would work [in the camp’s labour facilities] the following day?”

“People were killed, but [only] before coming to Jasenovac. When someone came to Jasenovac, he was already practically saved, as a worker,” added Mesic, who was Croatia’s president between 2000 and 2010.

Mesic’s secretary told BIRN on Tuesday that the former Croatian president “won’t comment on the issue at the moment”.

According to research by the Jasenovac Memorial Site, 83,145 people – 47,627 Serbs, 16,173 Roma, 13,116 Jews and the others anti-fascists – have been identified on a name-by-name basis as having died at the concentration camp during the war, a figure which is not yet final. 20,101 of them were children.

In the video, Mesic said that 25,000 people died at Jasenovac. “Sometimes 15 days or a month passed without anyone being killed or dying,” he said.

The issue of Jasenovac remains highly controversial in Croatia, where hardline right-wingers have made continued attempts to downplay its brutality in attempts to rehabilitate the Ustasa.

Mesic also said that Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito knew that the death toll at Jasenovac was inflated and insisted that the camp – which closed in 1945 – actually continued to work under the Yugoslav Communist regime “until 1947” to detain captured Croats who were enemies of the new regime.

“On the camp site, there are Croats buried deep [underground],” he said.

A highly controversial Croatian far-right NGO called Threefold Jasenovac, made up of historians, journalists and writers, has similarly claimed that the Ustasa ran a labour camp at Jasenovac for enemies of the regime, but the real death camp for Croats, run by the Communists, imprisoned Ustasa members and regular Home Guard army troops until 1948, then alleged Stalinists until 1951.

No documents exist that prove the NGO’s claims.

In the second video published on Monday, Mesic spoke in a positive tone about Ustasa interior minister Andrija Artukovic, who signed the regime’s racial laws in 1941. Artukovic was extradited from the US in 1986 and sentenced to death, but died in 1988 before the sentence was carried out.

Although Mesic is the honorary president of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists, a similar video emerged in 2006, when Croatian news website Index discovered footage filmed in Australia in 1992 in which he praised the Ustasa regime.

“We don’t have any reason to apologise to anyone … This what is asked of the Croats: ‘Go and kneel at Jasenovac, go and kneel there…’ We don’t have a reason to kneel in front of anyone,” he said.

After the video was published, Mesic said he could not confirm or deny it was genuine – but also said the comments could have been a “tactical” attempt to mobilise Croats against the Serbs during the early 1990s war.

The latest videos to be made public were filmed in 1992 in the central Croatian town of Novska during a small meeting of the local branch of the centre-right Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, of which Mesic was a member at the time.