The Croatian government on Thursday appointed a panel to offer ways of dealing with the country’s pro-Nazi, pro-Muslim and then Communist regimes in the 20th century. Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said he would like the commission to recommend how to educate children about human rights violations under totalitarian regimes and how to approach issues like naming streets and public places after past fascist heroes.
The idea for the commission followed an incident in November near the site of the Jasenovac WW2 concentration camp in central Croatia. Rightwing veterans of Croatia’s secession war of 1991-95 raised a plaque there in memory of comrades killed in Croatia’s struggle for independence from Serbian-led Yugoslavia. The plaque included the salutation Za Dom Spremni (Ready for the Homeland), which was used by the Ustaša movement which ruled Croatia under Nazi Germany.
Ustaša, the Croatian Revolutionary Movement, a fascist, ultra-nationalist and terrorist organization, was active between 1929 and 1945. Its members murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma, as well as political dissidents in Yugoslavia during World War II. The Ustaše supported the creation of a Greater Croatia, and emphasized the need for a racially “pure” Croatia. The Ustaše declared Catholicism and Islam as the religions of the Croatian people. They claimed the Islam of the Bosniaks was a religion which “keeps true the blood of Croats.”
In April 1941, the Ustaše were given a part of Axis-occupied Yugoslavia to rule as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a puppet state of Nazi Germany.
Croatian public opinion has been split over how to treat both its totalitarian Nazi and communist past.
PM Plenkovic, a conservative, said that appointing the panel may resolve the issues surrounding his country’s past. Croatia is the European Union’s newest member state, and as such ” is still facing the consequences of the heritage of the non-democratic regimes,” Plenkovic said. “There are different interpretations of the past, which are not always based on scientific research and expert discussions.”
Plenkovic noted that “in the public there are visibly different interpretations of the past, and the current legal practice regarding the reappearance of symbols of totalitarian regimes varies.”