‘Radni logor Jasenovac’ (‘Jasenovac Labour Camp’), the latest work by Croatian author Igor Vukic on the Croatian World War II concentration camp Jasenovac, published by Naklada Pavicic this year, seems like it is inspired by the publications of established Holocaust deniers.
Instead of studying all the available archival records, testimonies and other publications, Vukic avoids confronting the totality of known information on the Jasenovac concentration camp system, and instead cherry-picks and publishes only carefully selected data which supports his ideologically-motivated agenda – the fabrication that Jasenovac was merely a labour camp where no mass murders took place.
The argumentation and evidence cited by Vukic – who is not a history academic and has no degree or PhD in the field – is incomplete, distorted, and occasionally completely wrong.
The footnoted sources are often lacking important data which makes corroboration of his writing very difficult, if not impossible.
It is no coincidence that there are no peer reviews of Vukic’s book by established scholars as is usually the case with historical works.
However, the author goes to much trouble to give this book an appearance of a scholarly, organised and thoroughly-researched work. This is consistent with the practice of denial and distortion in the West – avoiding a scrupulous and detailed investigation, while creating an illusion of it in order to promote unsupported, dubious and often false claims.
The first clue showing that Vukic’s work is not up to the historiographical standard that any objective scholar can recognise is his inability to present the sources of quoted data in an organised and systematic fashion.
This problem obviously originates from the fact that Vukic’s recent book borrows heavily from his earlier text, ‘Sabirni i radni logor Jasenovac 1941.-1945’ (‘Jasenovac Collection and Labour Camp 1941-1945’), published on pages 55-134 of the book ‘Jasenovački logori – istraživanja’ (‘Jasenovac Camps – Research’), authored by Vladimir Horvat, Stipo Pilic, Blanka Matkovic and Vukic himself.
In 2015, when that book was published, Vukic systematically failed to quote from archival sources correctly, usually mentioning only the archival collection signature accompanied by either box or microfilm number.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
