Efraim Zurof, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, stated that anyone who calls the crime in Srebrenica in July 1995 a genocide is playing politics and using the term to score political points, reiterating that it was not a genocide.
Commenting on the upcoming commemoration of 29 years since the Srebrenica massacre, the first after the adoption of the resolution in the UN General Assembly, Zurof said that the resolution on Srebrenica has changed absolutely nothing, except to show the political background of the UN decisions, evaluating that the UN is an absolutely corrupt and useless organization.
“They made another mistake by allowing the initiative for the resolution to pass and create new lies. People who voted in the UN General Assembly are not historians; they don’t know history. It’s all actually politics,” Zurof said to Kosovo Online.
When asked if he fears being punished for denying the term “genocide” for the events in Srebrenica, Zurof said that it was not a genocide.
“Am I afraid? Of whom? Listen, if there were 33,000 people from Srebrenica and 8,000 were killed. Everyone was allowed to leave unharmed – young boys, children, women, and the elderly. That is not genocide. And anyone who calls it genocide is playing with politics. They are using politics to try to score political points. It’s worthless,” Zurof emphasized.
Regarding Pristina’s initiative to turn the house of Nazi collaborator Džafer Deva into a “New Regional Cultural Center,” Zurof assessed that the authorities in Pristina show that for them, fascists can be national heroes.
“Deva is their hero. And that tells you exactly what kind of people are in the government in Pristina. These are people who think that fascists can be national heroes,” Zurof added.
He stressed that such an initiative is unacceptable.
“I don’t think Deva’s house should be renovated and turned into a cultural center unless people in Kosovo think that fascism is culture,” Zurof said.
He highlighted that there is clear evidence that Deva was a Nazi collaborator and one of the founders of the “SS” Skanderbeg Albanian Division, which fought for the Nazis, and that on February 4, 1944, 68 people were killed because they were suspected of being anti-fascists.
“This data is not a secret, nor is the fact that he was a CIA agent. The CIA recruited him. America was not prevented from using such people,” Zurof concluded.
Source: RTRS
