Aqui está o artigo:
Croatia is nearing the finish line of a multiyear race to join the European Union. Its accession has been pushed along by traditional ally Germany, and by the United States, which has encouraged the EU’s southwest expansion to include all of the Balkans and even Turkey.
Croatia has complied with most of the formal entry requirements and is expected to join in 2012.
However, there is another – moral – requirement Croatia should have to meet for its own sake before being admitted.
It should fully and publicly acknowledge its role in World War II as a loyal ally of the Nazi cause, and its ardent participation in genocide against its Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy (Roma) populations. The scattered, vague, and half-hearted denials masking as apologies that Croatia has used to improve its image in recent years don’t count. The country should come to grips with its genocidal role in the same way Germany has come to grips with its Nazi past.
Just this week, the Serbian parliament apologized for its role in the infamous Srebrenica massacre of 1995 that killed some 7,000 Bosnian Muslims. Such an apology was considered unthinkable even a few years ago, yet the pressures of joining the EU helped nudge that nation to account for this war crime.
It’s time Croatia did the same. Croatia has more than its share of apologies to make for crimes it committed during the Balkans conflict of the 1990s, but it can start with the massive killings it unleashed during World War II.
Although estimates vary, between 300,000 and 700,000 victims were murdered by Croatian fascists during the war.
When Hitler’s forces invaded Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941, Croatian right-wing extremists, under the leadership of Ante Pavelic and his fascist “Ustashi” movement, were given control of Croatia. Pavelic aligned the country enthusiastically to the Nazi cause and immediately launched a horrific onslaught against the Serbian minority. The official policy was popularly expressed as: Kill one-third of the Serbs, convert another third to Roman Catholicism, and expel the remaining third from Croatia.
The Roman Catholic Church insists it condemned the atrocities, but the record suggests a mix of official responses, ranging from weak condemnations to tacit support. While the killing was under way, the Croatian archbishop, Aloysius Stepanic, blessed the new regime and Pavelic was granted an audience with Pope Pius XII. A number of Franciscan monks participated in the killing. After the war ended, the Vatican helped Ustashi criminals evade capture and flee to South America.
During the war, Serbian Orthodox churches were burned and many Serbian communities wiped out. Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies were interned in concentration camps, where thousands of victims were slaughtered like animals.
The nature of the carnage was so horrific that senior ranking German officers in Croatia, including SS-Obergruppenführer Artur Phleps, sickened by the slaughter and worried that it was driving Serbians and anti-Ustashi Croats into the ranks of resistance groups, urged Berlin to demand a stop to the slaughter. These protests were in vain and the genocide continued. Senior Italian officers also were appalled at the killing and are on record as not only complaining but frequently offering protection to fleeing victims.
When the war ended and Josip Broz Tito’s communists took command of Yugoslavia, they had no desire to renounce these dreadful events. Yugoslavia’s slogan was “Brotherhood and Unity.” Every effort was made to bury the past and, because Yugoslavia did not align itself with the Soviet Union, Western democracies had little interest in exposing the genocide.
Unlike Germans, who recognized the moral obligation to acknowledge their crimes committed under the Nazi regime, citizens of Tito’s Yugoslavia and the Croat state felt no such obligation. Consequently, the slaughtered victims and their surviving family members still await justice.
Even today, Pavelic is looked upon by many Croatians as a national hero, as are some of the most vicious Ustashi criminals.
In 2001, Croatian President Stepjan Mesic apologized to Jews in an address delivered at the Israeli Knesset. In 2003, he joined Serbia’s president in a mutual apology for “all the evils” each side had brought during the Balkan conflict.
Such carefully worded official apologies are a step in the right direction, but authentic repudiation of the past should be demonstrated by Croatians themselves.
Evidence suggests they still have a long way to go. Crowds at Croatian soccer games and concerts flout Ustashi and Nazi symbols and sing old fascist chants and songs. Croatians indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia are also hailed as defenders of the nation.
Croatia needs to purge itself of its dark past. Its prolonged denial of outrageous crimes committed in the 20th century has created what the Croatian exiled writer Dubravka Ugresic has described as a “culture of lies.” Until Croatia can learn to tell the truth about its history, there should be no place for it in the European Union.
E aqui estão algumas das coisas mais inteligentes que eu li nos últimos tempos:
1:
One of the startling things during the Balkan Conflict of the 1990's was the incredibly biased press coverage here in America. The Serbs were demonized like Nazis and the total unfairness and irony of that bias was lost on the American public. The Croatian government's actions in the past pretty much set the stage for the extremes that followed on both sides. The "history" of the most recent conflict needs to reflect reality and the world needs to hear what was done to the Serbian nation by it's neighbors who, to this point, have had the luxury of pretending to be the victims of unsolicited aggression.
2:
When does the US make amends for the genicide of the American Indian? Hold everyone else accountable for their actions, but let the US slide. Every country in the world has done wrong at one time or another. Clean up your own back yard before insisting others clean up their's. Then maybe we can all learn from the past and learn to get along. The US needs to stay out of other countries and worry about what is going on here. We were all created equal, no race is better than another and we need to learn from past mistakes and stop repeating them.
3:
Now if we can get Japan to admit all the atrocities they committed in WWII. Japan engaged in genocide against the Chinese and committed many, many hideous atrocities during the war that they've never apologized for. They cover up their actions in WWII in textbooks and teach lies in their schools.
4:
The first country that has to apologize for massacres is RUSSIA.Since the bolchevicks and then communists took over Russia over 50 million people,50 MILLION people,were killed.Not to talk about the millions that were uprooted at the whim of Lenin and Stalin.Today nobody asks Russia to apologize for its past.Today Russia is still killing innocent people in Chechnia,Inguhstia,Dagestan and a bunch of other places but nobody in the USA or in Europe asks Russia to apologize for its atrocities.Why?.Because Europe needs russian natural gas...
5:
The Catholic church is unrepentant in it's involvement in the genocide. Catholic clergy had direct involvement in the concentration camps in Croatia during ww2. At the end of the war Croatian Ustasa dressed in British uniforms transported 10 truck loads of gold and other valuables taken from concentration camp victims to a Catholic pontifical college. It might of been part of a deal struck for Catholic Church officials to provide papers for Ante Pavolic (Ustasa leader) and thousands of other Ustasa to escape to Argentina. There is currently a lawsuit in the US, Alperin vrs. Vatican Bank. to recover the wealth estimated at 200 million dollars in behalf of the relatives of the victims. The Catholic Church has refused to return the money and I did not see anything in the online court documents that they deny having it. Their case has been based on such things as challenging the jurisdiction of the court and statues of limitations.
6:
Maybe but I dont think its up to the Canadian ambassador to set EU entry conditions for Croatia anymore than its the US governments job to aggressively lobby for Turket to be allowed to join EU. These are not matters to which you are entitled to comment
7:
This is Serbian propaganda at its best. The same propaganda the serbs have been using since world war two. The same propaganda they used during the 90's conflict to justify the destruction of 1/3 of Croatia and the killing of thousands of people. The same propaganda that they used to keep the civilized world from intervening when the Serbs were destroying Vukovar and Sarajevo. The same group who did all the killing during the 90's conflict was also the same group doing the killing during WWII and thats the Serbs. For all those Serbs which they claim to have been killed is demographically impossible and has never been supported by actual data. The census conducted after the war shows a completely different story of the population of Croats dramatically reduced compared to the increase in Serbs. All this is documented and archived but is never publicized as we all know that the winners of the wars write the history books and the Serbs just happend to be on the right side.
8:
"Why can you people just let it go." Ahh, the "They got away with it, why bother" syndrome strikes again. When a people ignore the lessons of history, it's more likely they'll repeat it. When soccer fans regularly use Ustashi and Nazi symbolism and people consider the fascist heroes, guess what, those born after 1940 are complicit with what their ancestors did. Only when the nation admits what happened and makes changes to intentionally minimize the chance of it happening again will their apology be real.
O mais importante de todos
9:
This article is an extremely offensive, biased and one sided presentation of the events of the second half of the 20th century in the Balkans. In fact, Bissett could be easily accused of plagiarism, because his arguments are taken entirely from Serb and former Yugoslav sources which for decades systematically distorted the facts regarding Croatia and the events of World War II. I thought that such biased journalism only existed in the Balkans and that it was part of the Serbo-Yugoslav communist/fascist/nationalist/ you name it, machinery that for decades churned out accusations, half-truths and outright lies in order to accuse Croatia and its people of all sorts of evils, thereby hiding their own crimes and avoiding all responsibility for them.
Croatia has since recognized and apologized for the crimes committed by the fascist regime during WWII and those perpetrated by a few of its soldiers in the recent war of independance, yet it awaits the same gesture from Serbia, who has yet to recognize its own crimes against Croatia and Croats. The recent apology by the Serb parliament is a typical product of the same machinery. While in itself a very noble and necessary gesture towards the victims of the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, it still doesn't completely fulfill the requirements of the Muslim victims who rightfully insist that this indeed was an attempted genocide. Yet for Bissett this is downgraded to a massacre, while the crimes of Croats are upgraded to genocide in every circumstance. I wonder in which category would Bissett place the slaughter of over 300,000 unarmed Croat soldiers and civilians in Bleiburg, Austria, at the hands of Tito's partisans in May of 1945, after the war had ended? All this witnessed by the British troops in comand at that time (See Nikolai Tolstoy's work: The Minister and the Massacres, Century Hutchinson, 1986).
Bissett has fallen victim to Serb propaganda and its unfortunate that he as a former Canadian ambassador in the region has taken sides on the unresolved issues of the past. He should have been better informed or at least attempted at studying in depth all sides of the arguments instead of copying from propaganda brochures. The process of reconciliation can and hopefully will come about. The sooner the better for all the Balkan nations. Perhaps one of the best comments made from a political figure in the region in the recent past was Haris Silajdzic's remark that: "There will never be true peace nor justice in the Balkans until the Serbs recognize the crimes they committed in the past and taken full responsibility for them instead of accusing others and depicting themselves as victims".
Agora decida o leitor.
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