CROATIA - FASCIST ENOUGH FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION

While Germany and Austria have just blocked Serbia's entry into the European Union Croatia was admitted "to the joining process" in a ceremony at which David Cameron shook the hand of Croat leaders, whose country by any historic, democratic or moral standards is a disgrace. In 2004 according to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, death threats were sent to its investigators in Croatia including Zoran Pusic, president of the Civic Committee for Human Rights, Croatian Justice Minister Vesna Skare Ozbolt, and other public figures. A Croatian organization called the Anti-Jewish Movement (is there any other country which would tolerate such an organisation?) warned that if any Croat was arrested, jailed, or harmed as a result of the Operation, the group would "begin murdering Croatian Jews."

Serbia and the former Yugoslavia, in an exact reprise of the fascist 1940s, have been systematically attacked and dismembered by Germany and Austria since the 1980s. Germany, without the support of other countries, the EU or the UN, joined the Vatican in illegally recognising Croatia in 1991 which led to that State effectively declaring war on Yugoslavia (of which it was a constitutional part) and on Serbs in Croatia. Reuters reported the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal as saying "The first refugees in the Yugoslav conflict were the 40,000 Serbs who fled Croatia after a constitutional amendment defined them as an alien minority." In this the Croats had the full support of Germany and the Vatican - whose funds, liberally deployed among American PR firms helped to spread pro-Croatia propaganda - so avidly absorbed by, among others, the BBC.

The forthcoming trial of the French arms dealer Jacques Monsieur has brought to light an important and hitherto denied fact - that Croat fascist secessionism was assisted by NATO from the very beginning of the war. The arms embargo imposed on all post-Yugoslav states was being broken regularly on behalf of the Croats with the knowledge and support of NATO (1). French officers were involving in the clandestine training programme of Croat Special Forces (2) and Roman Catholic charities such as the Medjugorje Appeal (found fraudulent and de-registered in the UK) were involved in financing arms to the Croats.

This was followed by the 1995 murder of thousands and ethnic cleansing of 300,000 Serbs from the so-called "Krajina" by the Croats while NATO troops looked on. Today Serbia has been forced to hand over most of its historic Christian orthodox territory of Kosovo and Metohija to Albanian Muslims and 1 million Serb refugees from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo have sought refuge inside Serbia.

When Alice Mahon the Labour MP visited former Serb villages in the Krajina in 1999 she said: "I can only conclude that the Croatian government is aiming for an ethnically pure state. The international community is tolerating these openly racist policies." She should also have added "religious policies".

This Serb suffering is not enough for Germany which has managed to achieve precisely what Nazis and Fascists achieved in the 1940s - the break up of Yugoslavia and the promotion of Croatia - then and now the most blatantly fascist state in Europe. German Nazis helped to arm and train Croat fascist gangs in the 1990s. In the book Fuehrer Ex by Ingo Hasselbach reference is made to a modern Nazi: "Nero Reisz, the barking anti-Semite from Hesse, was particularly pleased. The problem for him was that there weren't enough Jews being killed. But Serbs would do."

In December 2011 memorial masses were conducted in Zagreb and Split (and perhaps elsewhere as well) to mark the 51st anniversary of the death of Ante Pavelic, the Fascist Head of the infamous Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945. The German Nazis and the Italian Fascist regimes created a puppet State run by the local fascist movement, the Ustashe, headed by Pavelic. He died in Franco's Spain (where else!) in 1959 having fled Croatia through the Vatican "rat lines" at the end of the war.

The Ustashe established a vast system of concentration camps all over Croatia including Jasenovac, where hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in a variety of brutal ways, which earned the camp the nickname of the "Auschwitz of the Balkans." Even the Nazis were apparently shocked by the brutality!

The tradition of honouring Pavelic began in the 1990s following Germany's recognition of Croatia as an independent State. In the wake of the conviction in Zagreb of Jasenovac commandant Dinko Sakic and in response to protests by the Wiesenthal Centre, the mass was stopped and the priest responsible, Vjekoslav Lasic, left Croatia but returned a few years ago and renewed his neo-fascist activity with impunity.

Two Croat Generals recently convicted at the Hague Tribunal of the most hideous crimes during the mass ethnic cleansing of Serbs in the Krajina have been declared innocent by the Croatian Roman Catholic Church and the Croat Government has mobilised its political and diplomatic forces in their defence. This should come as no surprise since it was the former rabidly Roman Catholic President of Croatia (whose indictments for war crimes were so delayed as to allow him a death without prosecution) wrote in his 1989 book "Genocide is a natural phenomenon ordered by the Almighty in defence of the only true faith".

Nor must we forget the grotesque and frequent fascist demonstrations by the Croat people. At a Croatia Italy football match in Livorno, Italy the Croat fans formed a Swastika on the terraces. The UEFA representative at the match later warned:

"We have had many problems with this in Eastern Europe before and Croatia have been among the worst offenders. Because of the problems we have encountered with Croatian teams in the past, they have been warned future sanctions will be much heavier than any which have been imposed for previous incidents."

Croatia's most popular pop star Marko Perkovic calls himself Thompson (after the machine gun used to murder Serbs in the 1990s) and his fans give mass Nazi salutes. A 2007 Zagreb concert featuring "Thompson" was attended by the Croatian Education Minister, Dragan Primorac. Nor should we ignore the disgraceful attempt by the Croatian political establishment today to minimise or even deny the fact that hundreds of thousands of Jews, gypsies and Serbs were exterminated at the Jasenovac camp during the Second World War.

In 2007 Croatian TV broadcast a video of a speech made 10 years before by Stjepan Mesic, who had become Croatia's president. Mr. Mesic is seen saying, "This thing they're asking Croats to do: go kneel in [1940s Croatian extermination camp] Jasenovac ... we have no reason to kneel anywhere. We Croats have won twice in World War II, while all the others did it only once. We won on April 10, when the Axis powers recognized Croatia's independence, and we won after the war since we once again found ourselves with the victors."

It is no myth that in 1997 Croatians greeted German troops with their right arms raised in a Nazi salute as they chanted "Heil Hitler," as reported in The Washington Times at the time. Around the same time Newsweek reported that when German tanks passed through Croatia as part of the NATO deployment to the Balkans, "Croatians greeted the Germans with the straight-armed fascist salute," an expression of solidarity dating back to the 1940s (and as we know from the book "Fuehrer Ex" the 1990s) alliance between Croat fascists and German Nazis.

Croatia is once again flying the same fascist checkerboard flag that it flew in 1941, when Hitler recognized Croatia as an independent nation for being his loyal ally. The map of the Balkans drawn by the Nazis in 1942 is almost identical to today's map of the Balkans created by NATO. As A.M. Rosenthal wrote in "Back From the Grave" in the New York Times on April 15, 1997: (And chronicled in detail in the history of that period by the late Avro Manhattan) "In World War II, Nazi Germany had no executioner more willing, no ally more passionate, than the Fascists of Croatia. They are returning, 50 years later, from what should have been their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Western allies who dug that grave with the bodies of their servicemen have the power to stop them, but do not."

In modern Croatia many streets bear the names of 1940s fascists and there are vicious attacks on Serbs and non-Catholics. In April 2006 two reporters for a Serbian newspaper were beaten up in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Their Serbian accent was picked up while they were speaking to each other. They said they were lucky to be alive. In 2000 The Washington Post reported the following graffiti in Croatia: "We Croats do not drink wine, we drink the blood of Serbs from Knin".

Even Croats have been persecuted if they had a history of anti- fascism. In the Guardian of 14th July 2003 Julia Pascal reported: "I meet J, a 76-year-old Croatian who, at 15, ran to the partisans. This war heroine fought Ustashe, Italians and Germans and still has a body full of shrapnel fragments. President Franjo Tudjman withdrew the partisans' pensions for six months during the 199l war and her husband, once Tito's bodyguard, starved to death." In 2008 a well known Croat journalist Ivo Pukanic was murdered by a car bomb. He joined the ranks of other journalists who had been murdered or beaten up for investigating the murky links between Croat criminals, politicians and businessmen.

"German Europe", which (having destroyed the democratic nationhood of 26 other countries in the European Union is now economically strangling to death the nations in the Euro-zone) sees all this as natural and normal. Indeed it usually is on the Continent when the German State dominates it.

2012 Corrupt Croat EU Referendum

In the January 2012 Croat referendum on EU membership, according to Marjan Bošnjak of the Only Croatia Party, the same historically intervening powers (Germany, the Vatican, the EU) were involved in the grossest manipulations.

At the first-ever referendum held in Croatia in 1991, the turnout had been 83.5%, of which 94% voted in favour of independence. Changing the Croatian Constitution prior to the January 2012 EU referendum to eliminate the 50% participation rule the Government mobilised the Roman Catholic Church, German and Austrian owned media and EU propaganda to get a 66% majority for EU membership. But the 43% participation rate meant that only 28% of the Croatian people voted to surrender their democratic sovereignty.

The Government gave huge amounts of public funds to the YES campaign, whilst denying any funding to the NO campaign. State Television, Croatia Post and the City of Zagreb provided free or low cost EU advertising to the Yes side. Just days before the referendum, Foreign minister Vesna Pusic shamelessly threatened Croatia's 1.2 million pensioners that they would lose their pensions if they voted against EU membership.

So now Croatia, the most overt representative of that 1940s fascism, which it has extended by its recent behaviour into the 21st century, is welcomed ceremoniously as a member of the European Union while Serbia, whose people have suffered grievously and with a history of anti-fascism and as an ally of Britain and the USA, is rejected. If the British political class still does not understand what they have done then they are guilty not just of gross incompetence but of a crime of historical dimensions for which a terrible price is being paid.

(1) http://www.paxamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/PROFILING-THE-FOX-A-Counterintelligence-Profile-on-Arms-Trafficker-Jacques-Monsieur-PAI-EDITION2.pdf

(2) "Breaking the Arms Embargo". Documentary shown on Press TV on 7th January 2012 contains admissions of high-ranking French secret service officers that France was actively involved in assisting Croatian separatists.

Rodney Atkinson, January 2012