A volume of academic articles entitled ‘Jasenovac – Manipulations, Controversies and Historical Revisionism’ is being launched at the national library in Zagreb on Friday, as the Croatian World War II concentration camp continues to be a focus for politicised disputes.
The collection is being published by the Jasenovac Memorial Site, a state institution located on the site of the former WWII concentration camp, as part of Croatia’s Festival of History.
The Croatian fascist Ustasa movement opened the camp in August 1941 and it remained in function until April 1945. Jews, Roma and Serbs were biggest victims groups of the camp, alongside anti-fascists.
Some of the topics covered by the nine academic articles in the publication are the persecution of Roma under Ustasa rule, representations of the Jasenovac camp in popular movies, the number of victims who lost their lives there, Ustasa racial laws, and an International Red Cross delegation’s visit to Jasenovac in 1944.
One of the publication’s editors, Andriana Bencic, a curator at Jasenovac Memorial Site and postdoctoral researcher at University of Amsterdam, told BIRN that its aim is to create a forum in which both Croatian and Serbian academics will approach WWII and post-WWII topics “in a responsible way”.
Bencic cited political misuse of camp’s death toll as one of the main problems.
She said that many politicians and historians in Serbia and Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina are guilty of this, while certain individuals and groups in Croatia try to minimise the death toll and downplay the horrors of the Ustasa regime.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
