X-VMS-To: MIDEUR
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mideur-l
Date:         Wed, 19 Aug 1992 23:32:55 -0500
From:         "Velibor M. Marenovic" <VMARENOVIC@MACALSTR.EDU>
Subject:      An article...
X-To:         mideur-l%ubvm.bitnet@ksuvm.ksu.edu

>
> Sydney Morning Herald-u 8.18.1992
>
> 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.
>
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU