Israeli historian Efraim Zuroff stated for Tanjug that what occurred in Srebrenica in 1995 was not genocide, but a war crime, and that the United States and the EU fabricated the genocide narrative for political reasons—to appease the Muslims, as he put it.
“First of all, you must understand that every country that experiences a tragedy wants to claim that their tragedy qualifies as genocide, because that’s the gold standard of tragedy. But in the case of Srebrenica, it’s a joke—a bad joke,” said Zuroff, who is also the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem.
He pointed out that there were 33,000 people in Srebrenica, and 28,000 of them went home.
“They weren’t harmed. The Serb army let all the children, all the women, all the elderly who weren’t soldiers return home in peace, without any harm… That is not genocide. That’s ridiculous. So this is just to calm the Muslims down,” Zuroff emphasized.
Zuroff stressed that what happened in Srebrenica is defined as a war crime, because several thousand fighters were killed.
“It’s a tragedy, and it is a war crime. But it is certainly not genocide. Such claims are ridiculous. But it’s all politics—you have to understand that—and it has nothing to do with the truth,” Zuroff said when asked about the motivation behind the genocide narrative and the adoption of the Srebrenica resolution at the UN General Assembly a little over a year ago.
He added that this is one of the problems related to the Holocaust—specifically, the truthfulness of the narrative surrounding what happened during the Holocaust.
“So if a country like Lithuania, where 96.4% of Jews were killed—90% of them by Lithuanians—can’t accept any level of responsibility for the murder of Jews, then what are we talking about? And the same is true for Latvia, Estonia, and of course, Croatia,” Zuroff noted.
When asked how he views Croatia’s attitude toward the crimes committed at Jasenovac, where hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma were killed, and whether Zagreb is willing to confront the crimes of the NDH (Independent State of Croatia), Zuroff reminded that Jasenovac concentration camp commander and Ustaše war criminal Dinko Šakić was extradited to Zagreb and not to Belgrade.
“Because they knew—my assumption is that they knew—that if Šakić were tried in Belgrade, he would have been hanged five minutes after the guilty verdict under the tallest tree in the city,” Zuroff said.
He recalled that Croatia also tried former NDH Minister of Justice Andrija Artuković, adding that the only reason he was not executed was that he was too ill to be executed.
Asked to comment on the fact that around half a million people—many of them young—attended a recent concert in Zagreb by Marko Perković Thompson, known for performing Ustaše songs, and the lack of EU reaction, Zuroff said it is a tragic shame that the majority of that crowd doesn’t know history.
He explained that this historical ignorance stems from Josip Broz Tito, who, as Zuroff stated, “refused to expose all crimes on all sides after the war because he feared so much ethnic hatred between different nationalities that he wouldn’t be able to govern the country”—fearing it could end in civil war.
“That’s why all Ustaše crimes were hidden. And people don’t understand that when Thompson says ‘For the homeland – ready,’ it’s the equivalent of the Nazi ‘Sieg Heil.’ It refers to people who were terrorists, who were mass murderers. They killed more than 100,000 people at Jasenovac and many more in other concentration camps, and they did so in the most horrific, cruel ways imaginable—like sadistic monsters. And very little has been done to bring these people to justice,” Zuroff concluded.
Source: RTRS
