Croatia’s right wing government apparently refuses to host a workshop about the Holocaust in Croatia by the local Shoa Academy. One of the historians is deemed too critical of Croatia’s fascist past in WW II. The farce around the workshop is all too typical of revisionist tendencies in the country.

Right next to Zagreb’s main train station a stele and an installation remind travellers that 800 Jews were deported from this spot to Auschwitz during WW II.

The monument, largely ignored by passers-by, is explicitely dedicated to the victims of Fascim and the Ustaša regime. It was erected last year, and that makes the inscription itself a positive surprise.

But then again, no mention is made of the fact the Ustaše killed by far most of Croatia’s and Bosnia’s Jews themselves, alongside hundreds of thousands of Serbs and tens of thousands of Roma.

The new monument is as though by confessing to the Lesser Sin, helping to round up Jews to be deported to Auschwitz, Croatian society avoided talking about the genocides its fascist regime committed in WW II.

In that, the installation seems characteristic of the state of affairs in Croatia ever since the country broke away from Yugoslavia in the war in the early 1990’s.

(There is a lot more to be said about this monument, which will feature here in a few weeks.)

Shutting out an Internationally Recognized Expert

Something very similar seems to be playing out on a higher level these weeks.

The Croatian government apparently refuses to hold a workshop about the Holocaust in Croatia by the local Šoa Akademija in cooperation with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – an international association the Croatian government chairs this year and the next.

Šoa Akademija repeatedly offered the workshop for government members, members of the Croatian parliament and civil servants, and has received no reply so far, according to the portal net.hr.

While no official reason is given for not hosting the workshop, inofficially the portal learned that the Croatian government, formed by the clerico-nationalist party HDZ, particularly objects to one historian scheduled to participate: Hrvoje Klasić.

Internationally, Hrvoje is considered one of the leading experts on the history of WW II in Yugoslavia.

A few years back, in a somewhat different political climate, he produced a documentary series about the Ustaša government for Croatia’s public television HRT – that it ever aired still surprises many all too familiar with how strong historical revisionism is in Croatian society.

Currently he produces a documentary series about the Partisans who liberated Yugoslavia in WW II. This series has been commissioned by Al Jazeera Balkans. For HRT, it is apparently too hot a topic to handle.

Revisionism as Official Policy

Croatian society is deeply divided on how to view WW II and the role of the Ustaša regime – a fascist puppet government of the Third Reich ruling most of modern day Croatia, Bosnia and a small part of modern day Serbia, the so called Independent State of Croatia (NDH).

Croat nationalists see them as – at best – somewhat misguided Croatian patriots fighting for a noble cause, albeit with somewhat questionable means. But in the end, it wasn’t really their fault, so let’s not talk about it too much, and not everything was bad…

This is the stance of HDZ, the right wing party that has held power for most of the time since independence from Yugoslavia.

Further on the right, and even within HDZ itself, there are people who outright glorify Europe’s most murderous regime of WW II right after the Nazis.

In the past 30 years, a sizeable number of historians has emerged in Croatia ready to cater to the needs of this revisionist faction, and willing to ignore all scientific standards of the profession – much like in Serbia, where nationalist governments have established an outright cult around Draža Mihailović, leader of the Četniks in WW II.

Among other things, the Četniks largely cooperated with the Nazis, and while offering some occasional token resistance, mainly fought the Partisans under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito. They also massacred thousands of mainly Bosnian Muslim civilians.

Official Serbian historiography has made them into „antifascist resistance fighters“. Again, opportunistic historians rushed in to rubberstamp this counterfactual assertion.

Croatia’s Antifascists Stand Their Ground

Then there is large parts of Croatian society for whom the scientific consensus among international historians isn’t merely a recommendation but the most solid and trustworthy approximation to the historical truth.

There are antifascist societies all over Croatia, serious historians, liberal, centrist and leftwing political parties who oppose the encroachment of revisionist historiography in street names, school books and official events and the outright display of Ustaša symbols and sometimes even uniforms – much of which can be seen all over the country.

Also, former Yugoslavia’s biggest antifascist online platform is located in Zagreb: Antifašistički Vjesnik.

Just recently, they succeeded in pressuring the – progressive – municipal government of Zagreb to rename several streets named after Ustaša members and sympathizers.

And at least in Zagreb, Ustaša symbols seem to be somewhat less ubiquitous than they used to be. It would be an exaggeration to say that there are none, however.

Also, souvenir vendors seem to carry less merchandise with the Ustaša coat of arms, the reverse Šahovnica, even though it can still be found.

What Croatia’s antifascists are largely powerless against is that Croatian nationalists and neofascists destroy Partisan monuments and graveyards.

Croatia’s HDZ led government seems to want to do nothing about it.

This is even worse in those parts of Bosnia where Croat nationalism has grown deep roots, such as in Western Mostar, whose Partisan cemetery was devastated by neofascists last year.

Incidentally, Mostar now has a city government led by the Bosnian offspring of HDZ, HDZ BiH.

As problematic as historical revisionism is in Croatia and in Serbia, it would be wrong to limit it to only these two successor states of Yugoslavia.

Just the weekend before last, antifascists from all over former Yugoslavia commemorated the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Sutjeska, considered a key moment for the eventual Partisan victory in WW II.

Many had donned reenactment uniforms, wore partisan hats with red stars, or other garment showing their sympathies for and gratitude to the Partisan fighters of WW II.

As one keen observer noted, one thing was conspicuously absent on the stage: The Yugoslav flag.

Instead, the organizers had hoisted the modern flag of Bosnia, and what appears to be regimental colors.

This is certainly more subtle than refusing to hold a workshop about the Holocaust because one doesn’t want to be confronted with sound scholarship – but it appears revisionist, nevertheless.

Needless to say that such an event would meet much more resistance in today’s Croatia than it did in Bosnia. But, to end on a positive note: While they may be in the minority, Croatian antifascists are not known to be easily intimated.

They are not likely to take kindly to their government trying to evade the historical truth.