From: chetnik@infopls.chi.il.us (Andre Popov)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia
Subject: Plights of the Serbs
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 92 00:11:52 CST
Organization: INFOPLUS support, Wheeling, IL

 
 
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      *  *  *        |         012The Serbian Defender210          |
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Article Contributed by Chris Murphy
 
Imagine what it would be like if Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and
New England were suddenly given to Canada, and California, Arizona,
New Mexico, and Texas were just as suddenly given to Mexico.  And
suppose that the remaining Southern States were encouraged to
become an autonomous region.  Most Americans would find that kind
of division intolerable, wouldn't they?  Then it is not surprising
that the Serbians in Yugoslavia have felt the same way about the
hacking up of their country, Serbia, by its neighbors.
 
In 1981, Yugoslavia contained a Serbian population of about 8.2
million.  Of that total Serbian population only 4.9 million lived
in what has been called "inner Serbia" while another 2 million
lived as minorities in the other Yugoslav republics, according to
the way the revised boundaries of the republics had been drawn. 
Another 1.3 million lived in "autonomous provinces" of Serbia. 
This was the result of decades of fragmenting of the Serbian State
into little manageable pieces, a strategy started by the Germans
(and continued by the communists during the post-World War II era). 
 
Why did the Germans encourage this fragmentation?  Adolph Hitler
saw the Serbians as disturbers of his new European order, and the
Slavs were considered to be on an equal footing with the Jews in
Nazi racial theory.  So, the Germans calculatingly divided
Yugoslavia up into zones of influence.  Yugoslavia was controlled
by Italy (which took part of the Dalmatian coast and maintained
Albania as its client state), the Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska (NDH)--
a Croatian puppet regime under the radical Ustasha terrorists, led
by Ante Pavelic (the same group responsible for the assassination
of Yugoslav King Alexander in 1934), and, finally, the Germans,
themselves.  The territorial definition of the Croatian puppet
state not only infringed on Serbian territories but also included
distortions of the historic boundaries of Bosnia and Hercegovinia. 
 
The Germans were ruthlessly anti-Serbian, but they were gentle in
comparison to the hostility of the Ustashas.  The Nazi "Final
Solution" offered the Croatian radicals an effective means of
guaranteeing that the dominance of Croatia over Serbia would become
an irreversible fact.  Systematically, the Serbs were subjected to
genocide.  Ironically, it was the Italians who felt compelled on
several occasions to intervene and prevent attacks by the Croatian
fanatics.  Not even Catholic Italy could stomach the atrocities of
"Catholic" Croatia against Orthodox Serbia!  (Yes, religion has
played a part in this conflict, too.)
 
Hard information concerning the losses of Serbian lives in
Yugoslavia during World War II is not easy to come by.  After the
war, the numbers of the World War II dead tended to be exaggerated
because they were used as the basis for war reparations.  The    
death toll for Yugoslavia was estimated at 1,706,000, including all
victims.  Two retired wartime generals, the Croatian Tudjman and
the Serb Terzic, published histories with conflicting mortality
estimates.  Tudjman's figures were unbelievably low, and Terzic's
calculations were implausibly high.  In 1985, however, following
the publication of a new book on the subject of the wartime
mortality rates by statistician Bogoljub Kocovic, who had pain-
stakingly pieced together census returns and other extant
demographic data and run them through computer analysis, the
Academy of Sciences in Belgrade revised its estimate of wartime
deaths to between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000.  The chilling reality is
that the actual number of Serbians who were exterminated--like so
many other victims of "the Final Solution"--may never be known. 
That is the post-war monument to Croatian efficiency.
 
Next:  A Look at General Mihailovic, Marshal Tito, and the Allies
   
 
      
 
 
 
 
 
 

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chetnik@infopls.chi.il.us (Andre Popov)
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