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Open Letter to Serbian Organizations and to the Serbian
community,
Ref: "Documenting a Death Camp in Nazi Croatia," New York Times, 14
November 2001
To whom it may concern:
This is in reference to an interview conducted by Mike Wallace
of 60 Minutes with former Bosnian President,
Radovan Karadzic in September of 1995.
At the interview, the former president spoke of the genocide of
Serbs, Jews and Gypsies by the fascist Croatian Ustashi, allied with
Hitler in World War II, to which Mr. Wallace, with an incredulous look
on his face, replied, "But Sir, that was over 50
years ago!"
President Karadzic also brought up the brutality of Muslim soldiers
[Mujahedin] which included roasting of Serb prisoners, to which Mr.
Wallace again replied, negatively, "I never saw those photos," as though
this were proof that the atrocities never happened. In a letter sent to
Mr. Wallace from Professor Peter Maher, dated 19 September 1995,
Professor Maher offered to send the photos and videos of the roasted
prisoners. However, it was obvious by Mr. Wallace's demeanor that the
story of the roasted Serb prisoners had to be false and that the
president was lying.
In further response to Mr. Wallace's insensitive concerns of the
genocide of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, I personally wrote a letter to Mr.
Wallace, dated 19 September 1995, as did Bill Dorich, in a letter dated November
3, 1996.
Mr. Wallace never responded to any of our letters.
During the interview, Mike Wallace was both rude to President Karadzic and
displayed insensitivity to the suffering of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies during
WWII and discarded any possibility of Bosnian Muslim force
atrocities, such as the roasting of Serb prisoners. His obvious
willingness to accept that all atrocities occurring in Bosnia were being
committed by Serbian forces helped to demonize the Serbs in the eyes of the
American people.
Therefore, it would behoove all Serb
organizations to write Mr. Wallace in view of the recent discovery of documents
regarding the genocide of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies at
Jasenovac and ask for an apology from Mr. Wallace for his
lack of sensitivity and for his rudeness towards former President
Bosnian President Radovan Karadzic. His rudeness and his negative
attitude towards the former Bosnian Serbian President was obvious from the
beginning of the interview and help to solidify the permanent demonizing of
the Serbs.
I would also go even further and ask 60 minutes to do a
program on the discovery of these documents and repudiate the September 1995
interview by Mr. Wallace.
Sincerely submitted,
Stella L. Jatras
************************************
New York Times November 14,
2001 Documenting a Death Camp in Nazi Croatia By NEIL A. LEWIS WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 - Officials of the United States Holocaust Museum said today that they had discovered and preserved a cache of decaying documents and artifacts from one of the lesser-known but most brutal concentration camps of World War II. The camp, known as Jasenovac, was operated in Croatia by the Ustasha, the Nazi puppet government. The artifacts were found deteriorating in a building in Banja Luka in the Serbian part of Bosnia last year, officials said. Peter Black, the museum's chief historian, told reporters today that Jasenovac was crude in comparison to the industrialized Nazi extermination camps like Auschwitz. Mr. Black said there were no gas chambers or crematories, so prisoners were murdered one by one with axes, guns, knives or prolonged torture. Bodies were buried or thrown into the adjacent Sava River. Jasenovac (pronounced ya-SEN- oh-vatz), actually a complex of five camps about 60 miles from the Croatian capital, Zagreb, has been little studied in the West, but the history has long resonated in the modern Balkans, where analysts and historians have debated about how much of the region's violence may be traced to historic ethnic enmities. Mr. Black estimated that nearly 100,000 people had been killed in Jasenovac, the largest number being Serbs, followed by Jews and Gypsies. The camp was established by the Republic of Croatia to eliminate anyone who was not an ethnic Croatian. Mr. Black said a combination of factors, including the reluctance of officials to agree on what happened, had led to its history's remaining largely hidden from scholars until now. The collection includes 2,000 photographs, many of atrocities; tens of thousands of papers; and thousands of artifacts, like inmate crafts. Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust Museum, said the project to save the documents and artifacts was especially significant because of the cooperation of the government of Croatia, whose history is cast in a poor light, as well as the governments of Serbia and Bosnia. Ms. Bloomfield said the governments had cooperated despite "the continuing sensitivity of all sides to this collection." That sensitivity was on display moments after the museum's presentation today when a diplomat from Croatia, Mate Maras, objected to the assertion by museum officials that more than 300,000 Serbs had died at the hands of the Ustasha throughout Croatia in World War II. Mr. Maras complained to Ms. Bloomfield and Mr. Black that the number was misleading because it included what he said were combatants throughout Croatia and thus was comparable to the hundreds of thousands of Croats killed in the war. Mr. Maras said that while he thought the assertions of the museum's personnel about Serb casualties were misleading, he agreed it was "a good day for Croatia to open up these sad pages of our history." Copies of the collection have been made and will be maintained at the Holocaust Museum and in Israel, officials said. The original collection will be returned to a museum in Croatia, where it will be put on display at the site of the Jasenovic complex, officials said. |
Title: Message
