Croatia’s determination to confront its fascist past will be tested this week, when the trial of a commander of the country’s largest World War II concentration camp begins.
On Thursday, Dinko Sakic, a commander at Jasenovac — known as the “Auschwitz of the Balkans” — will be indicted on charges of mistreating, killing and ordering the killing of inmates.
Sakic, 76, faces 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence under Croatian law.
There are no precise statistics for the number of people who perished in Jasenovac, which lies 70 miles southeast of the Croatian capital of Zagreb.
The camp did not maintain either the sophisticated killing machine or the systematic documentation of its counterparts in Poland. Moreover, the camp, along with many of its records, was destroyed at the end of the war.
But in just four years, from 1941 to 1945, the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust estimates that some 600,000 Jews, gypsies, Serbs and dissident Croats perished at Jasenovac, which was known for its particular brutality.
Guards there, including a Roman Catholic priest, Miroslav Filipovoc- Majstorovic, are known to have competed to see who could kill the most prisoners by any means available.
Even Nazi SS troops stationed at Jasenovac were disgusted by what they witnessed, and wrote letters of protest to Berlin.
By the time the war ended, only 100 survivors emerged from the camp.
Some Croatian historians, anxious to downplay the number of victims, put the death toll at around 35,000.
Sakic, who was extradited from Argentina in July 1998, had been living there since 1947 with his wife Nadia, who was allegedly a guard at Croatia’s Stara Gradiska camp.
Croatia recently dropped war crimes charges against Nadia Sakic, saying it did not have sufficient evidence to try her.
Although international law allows Dinko Sakic to be charged with genocide, the Croatian authorities chose a lesser offense.
“If you condemn Sakic for genocide, then you have to speak” about the Ustashe, Croatia’s wartime Nazi-puppet regime, “whose first aim was to achieve a clean ethnic state,” says Cedo Prodanovic, a former Zagreb prosecutor who is representing the family of one of Sakic’s victims at the trial.
The Ustashe “enacted race laws that were very firm and perhaps more successful than those in Nazi Germany. But a lot of people from that time, and their followers, are now very close” to those now holding power in Croatia, Prodanovic said. “Some are even members of Parliament.”
Many Croatian nationalists, including President Franjo Tudjman, are deeply ambivalent about the trial and have sought to downplay the brutality of the Ustashe regime, which they present as the legitimate forerunner of the modern Croatian state.
Indeed, Sakic claims that the president shook his hand warmly during a visit to Argentina — a claim Tudjman has denied.
With Croatia seeking to integrate itself into modern Europe, Tudjman chose to comply with international demands for the extradition and trial of Sakic.
A former partisan who rose to become a general under Yugoslavia’s Communist President Josip Broz Tito, Tudjman evolved into a staunch Croatian nationalist after Tito’s death.
He now concedes that the Ustashe ran a fascist state, but says the regime was pursuing the 1,000-year dream of Croatian independence, which he maintains that he has finally realized.
Tudjman has infuriated Serbs and Jews by glossing over the Jasenovac slaughter, suggesting that the number of deaths could be as low as 20,000.
A few years ago, he provoked an outcry by suggesting that Jasenovac become a memorial for all the “victims” of the war — a move that would have had the mostly Jewish and Serbian victims memorialized alongside their Ustashe killers.
The atrocities committed by both Croats and Serbs during the Yugoslavian civil war that ended in 1995 were in part fueled by the passions aroused by the Ustashe brutality at Jasenovac.
Croatian authorities, under intense international pressure, launched the criminal investigation that led to the extradition of Sakic and his wife after Sakic gave an interview to Argentine television in April 1998 in which he acknowledged he was the commander of Jasenovac.
In the interview, Sakic denied he had been involved in brutality: “Nothing happened in Jasenovac,” he said. “It was a work camp where the Jews managed themselves.
“We never put a hand on any of the prisoners in the camp. The people died of natural death. There was a typhus epidemic, for example, but there were no cremation ovens that killed anybody.”
Sakic has more recently suggested that wartime Croatia left its task incomplete.
“I regret that we had not done all that is imputed to us,” he told a Zagreb newspaper. “If we had done that, Croatia would not have problems today. There would not have been people to write lies.
“I am proud of all I did. If I were offered the same duty today, I would accept it.”
The trial is expected to last two months. Most observers believe that Sakic will be found guilty.
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