In a case that forced Croats to confront their wartime past, a Croatian court has found the commander of a World War II concentration camp guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.
Dinko Sakic, 78, was convicted Monday of responsibility in the killings of about 2,000 people while he ran the Jasenovac concentration camp in 1944.
The Croatian judge, Drazen Tripalo, speaking for a seven-judge panel, told a packed courtroom in Zagreb, that Sakic “maltreated, tortured and killed inmates and did nothing to prevent his subordinates from doing the same.”
He also said Sakic personally killed four prisoners and that “the obvious mass suffering of inmates” and Sakic’s “lack of remorse,” were aggravating circumstances.
“We hope that the sentence — made 55 years after the events — will be a warning that all those who committed crimes in the near or distant past will not escape justice,” Tripalo said. “We also hope that the verdict will be a warning for the future.”
During World War II, an estimated 500,000 people were tortured and killed at Jasenovac, known as the “Auschwitz of the Balkans.”
The great majority killed at the camp, which unlike most camps was not run by Germans but by Croatian fascists, were Serbs, but victims also included Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats.
The Sakic case had a searing effect on public opinion in Croatia, where over the past decade President Franjo Tudjman has used a calculated ambivalence toward the wartime independent Croatia to foster Croatian nationalism.
It opened the door to a painful re-examination of Croatia’s past, both in light of its World War II history, when Croatia was a Nazi puppet state ruled by homegrown fascists known as the Ustashe, and in light of the nationalist passions fanned over the past decade with the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia.
“Croatia is to be praised for becoming the first country in formerly communist Central and Eastern Europe to convict one of its nationals for World War II-era crimes against humanity,” Tommy Baer, former president of B’nai B’rith International and George Spectre, the associate director of the B’nai B’rith Center for Public Policy told a news conference in Zagreb after the verdict.
“An honest future cannot be built on lies,” they said. “In the Sakic case, Croatia showed it understands this. It placed its past on trial as a lesson for future generations. This is a lesson that must not be forgotten, here or elsewhere.
B’nai B’rith played a key role in finding Sakic, pressing for his arrest, extradition and trial, and finding witnesses. At the request of the Croatian government, representatives of the group attended the trial as official international observers.
Sakic, 78, was arrested in early 1998 in Argentina — where he had lived for half a century — after he reminisced on Argentine television about his time as commander of Jasenovac.
Charges against his wife, who was also extradited from Argentina to face trial for war crimes, were dropped earlier this year.
Throughout the trial, Sakic expressed no remorse and belittled or even mocked the testimony of more than 30 camp survivors who graphically recounted killings, starvation and untreated diseases.
He claimed instead that “no harm was done” to inmates and that some of the testimonies were “fantasies” or anti-Croat propaganda.
“I have no guilty conscience whatsoever,” he said last week in his final remarks to the court.
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