From: draskovi@usc.edu (Zoran Draskovic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.europe
Subject: Sydney Morning Herald
Date: 20 Aug 1992 19:40:29 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: sal-sun32.usc.edu


Sydney Morning Herald 18.8.1992.
Robert Fisk

THE KILLING FIELDS OF BOSNIA
============================

Subtitle:  Seven hundred thousand people were slaughtered in a
concentration camp called Jasenovac. Most were Serbs, their oppressors
Croats and Nazis. ROBERT FISK puts events in Bosnia in historical
perspective.

Text:

Fifty years ago, the Croats took Branko Jungic from his Bosnian
village and forced him to kneel on the bare earth at a place called
Jasenovac. Then they cut off the Serb's head with a saw. They did it
openly. They even took photographs, one showing Jungic on his knees,
his left arm extended to keep his balance in the initial moments of
agony, mouth open in horror as his uniformed tormentors posed around
him, the saw already cutting into his flesh. In the neighbouring town
of Banja Luka, they still keep the saw.

They display other implements on the site of the Jasenovac
concentration camp: axes that were used to slice off the heads of women
and children, a mass gallows, arm sheaths with knives attached - a
German-made contraption - that allowed the Croation Ustasha to cut the
throats of their captives with the least physical effort.

The Croats and the few Serbs who joined their Nazi puppet State in
World War II slaughtered their victims in hundreds of thousands at
Jasenovac, Stara Gradiska, Prijedor and Banja Luka. The names are
familiar again now. A second civil war is consuming the survivors of
the earlier holocaust and their children on the same hectares that
Nazis turned into killing fields.

Shortly before Yugoslavia fell apart again, Lubomir Ivanic, director of
the Bosanske-Krajine archives in Banja Luka, let me read some of the
50,000 German and Ustasha files abandoned in 1945. Among the archives -
housed in a former Austro-Hungarian army barracks that served as a
Wehrmacht intelligence office in 1942 - I found hundreds of Croatian
military orders appropriating the homes and property of Serbs.
"Cleansing" was the word used in the files which were written by the
man who invented that dreadful expression.

It was a brutally racist phrase, which is why James Baker deliberately
adopted it this year when he condemned the Serbs and why journalists
should take more care before they repeat this Nazi epithet so
blithely.

The horrors that took place in Bosnia between 1941 and 1945 are almost
too bestial for historical comprehension. The concetration camps set up
by the Nazis and the Croatians were on a much more terrible scale that
camps now being uncovered in Bosnia. Jasenovac is not a familiar name
in the West, but its individual acts of savagery might surpass even
Auschwitz.

Jasenovac was modelled on the concentration camp system in operation in
Nazi Europe. It was the centre of a series of satellite camps alogn the
banks of the Sava and the Una as well as Viliki, Strug and Trebez
rivers, all desighed in incarcerate and destroy the enemies of Ante
Pavelic's regime.

In all, 700,000 men, women and children were slaughtered in Jasenovac,
almost all of them civilians, 70,000 of them Jews. Because the Nazis
had started a civil war in Yugoslavia - between Serbs and Croats, but
with many Muslims and left-wing Croats on the Serbian side - the
murderers of Jasenovac worked with unchecked savagery.

Hundreds of men were beheaded with saws and axes or thrown into the
Sava river in their thousands with concrete tied to their waists. Girls
were gang raped, hundreds at a time. Lieutenant Artur Hefner, of the
Wehrmacht transport corps, visited Jasenovac in February 1942, and
described it in a letter to the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin as a
camp "of the worst kind, equal to Dante's inferno". Photographs in the
camp archives show mutilated women, one with her heart cut out. Many
women were hacked to death by trained butchers.

Ladislav Grinbaum, a Jew from Osijek, was one of the few men to survive
a camp execution. "One day, 10 of us internees and 16 Ustasha guards
went to Jablanac to put up an electric cable. While we were working, we
noticed that the Ustasha had brought a lot of women and children and we
could see what was happening. The Ustasha guards who had brought them
ordered them to sit on the ground. A little later, the killers came.
With knives, iron bars and mallets they attacked that helpless crowd...
I do not know how many there might have been. Many women help their
children tightly in their arms and were killed like that. From the post
I was working on I saw with my own eyes the slaughter of my wife and
children. I would have fallen off the post with horror if I had not
been tied to it. I could not talk and I had difficulty talking later".

Another survivor was Vladimir Cvija from Zagreb. "The most terrible
scene I witnessed was when Ustasha took a group of internees from Camp
IIIc. They looked more like skeletons in a state of almost total
collapse, with swollen legs, complete physical and psychological wrecks
after life behind barbed wire, under the open sky, in mud, with no food
or water. They had been told they were going to pick plums. They passed
before us with smiles on their faces, in which pity for us could be
seen, because there would be plums where they were going, and that
meant food. Evening came and the gentle southern breeze brought
desperate screams. The killers had started 'picking plums'".

In 1942 the Wehrmacht mounted a campaign around the Kozara mountain -
across terrain which is the scene of massacre and "ethnic cleansing"
today - to smash Tito's guerill army. More than 70,000 troops form the
Wehrmacht's Army Group E rounded up every man, woman and child and
transported them to Jasenovac and its satellite camps.

Most of these civilians were Serbs. Thousands of young men were hanged
from gallows erected at the roadside between Banja Luka and Prijedor.
Photographs taken by the Germans and Ustasha - for the latter
administered most of the roadside executions - show corpses hangig like
trushes from wooden gallows. Thousands of men, women and children were
herded into the brickyards at Jasenovac and beaten to death with clubs
and axes. Croatian Ustasha girls mercilessly beat many of the women. A
photograph exists of two pretty women, Nada Tanic-Luburic and Maja
Slomic-Buzdon, in Ustasha uniforms with the Croatina crest on their
hats, posing for a photographer during their reign of terror at Stara
Gradiska camp.

The partisans, mostly Serbs in this district, fought back. Politicians
and soldiers contemplating operations against Serbs might do well to
read this account by Kurt Neher, a Wehrmacht officer, of the 1942
guerilla attacks on the German army. "Then came the most haunting part
of all that made everyone's blood curdle. A woman started screaming
hard and long and hundreds took up her call. Then women and children
threw themselves with animal-like intensity against our lines. It
seemed to us as if we were present at the instant of forming of a
primeval human horde with men running at us in human waves, intent on
their own destruction and mindless of fear".

In the Kozara campaign, the toll of those killed in action, executed or
deported reached 60,000. Most tragis of all the tales of horror must be
that of the children of Kozara. They were separated from their parents
and marched to railheads by Ustasha: 23,000 children in all, 11,000 of
whom were to be murdered. In July 1942, hundreds of children died in
railway cattle wagons between Stara Gradiska and Zagreb. The rail
journey took 24 hours and older survivors recalled how the Croatian
footplate crews wept for the infants dying of typhoid in the wagons.

To remember these horrors is not to exuse the cruelty of Serb or Croat
today. But it provides a framework to see the civil war in a historical
context. When Germany supported the new Croatian State in December last
year, was it any surprise that Serbs remembered German support for an
earlier Croatian State? Can the Croats, after losing so much territory
to the Serbs, forget how Tito's partisans, made up mainly of Serbs,
massacred their Croatian prisoners at the end of WWII?

It is tempting to suggest that the UN does have one important
historical source at its disposal, a man who was an expert on the
1941-45 Yugoslav civil war and who saw it from the side opposed to the
Serbs. He was a German intelligence officer attached to Army Group E,
based in Banja Luka - billeted in the building that houses the Bosanske
Krajine archives - and worked in an office 30 kilometers from
Jasenovac. He witnessed the Kozara campaign and was decorated by Ante
Pavelic with the Silver Medal of the Crown of King Zvonimir with Oak
Leaves. This man referred in his Wehrmacht reports on Bosnia to
"cleansing", although, four years ago, he called the operation
"humanitarian resettlement". He was once the UN Secretary General. His
name is Kurt Waldheim. But that is another story.

Taken form Independent.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.europe