Reduction of the genocide against Serbs in the NDH to the Jasenovac camp alone represents one of the main problems in the historical and political reception of this crime. Just as the Holocaust is not only Auschwitz, the genocide against Serbs is not confined to one place or one number. Instead of a substantive examination of structures and intent, the discourse surrounding the genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) is often reduced to Jasenovac and disputes over the number of victims. This leads to the fragmentation of memory, political misuse, and relativization of the crime. In doing so, the bearers of post-communist and neo-Ustasha narratives and agendas isolate us from proper communication with serious partners around the world and fracture our national cohesion, reducing the entire issue to debates about statistics and a single location.
This was stated in an interview by Dušan Pavlović, director of the Center for Socio-Political Research of the Republic of Srpska, commenting on the renewed revival of Ustasha ideology — one that goes so far as to claim that Jasenovac was merely a labor camp where allegedly fewer Serbs were killed than in Srebrenica. Pavlović, who is also a graduate of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, believes that a nation that loses the ability to freely and truthfully name the events that have happened to it in the past and present has no future.
He said that such a nation may survive biologically but is essentially a slave and servant to the forces that imposed their narratives and manufactured truths upon it. In that sense, he emphasized the necessity of rethinking the destruction of Serbs in the NDH in order to form a paradigm based on facts, not on post-communist and neo-Ustasha narratives.
GLAS: You also produced a study, “Genocide against the Serbs in the NDH.”
PAVLOVIĆ: Yes. Genocide is not a matter of numbers but of intent. Nazi Germany deliberately killed about two million Soviet soldiers and prisoners of war, but that is not genocide, because they were not killed on the basis of their religious or national identity. That is the essence of the United Nations Convention of 1948 — that genocide is the intentional, systematic attempt to destroy a group, in whole or in part.
It is precisely that legal framework that allows the genocide against the Serbs in the NDH to be recognized for what it is: a state-organized policy of destruction, based on laws, orders and administrative acts of a criminal state in its essence and manner of existence. The entire state apparatus and all its capacities were put into the function of the complete destruction of Serbs as well as Jews and Roma in the NDH. Serbs were the primary victims in the NDH, and that plan is known in the scholarly and professional literature as the “three thirds” — to expel one third, forcibly assimilate one third through conversion to Catholicism and Croatization, and kill one third. Through its genocidal policies and actions, this state managed to encompass between 1.1 and 1.3 million Serbs, and all of them are victims of genocide and genocidal actions. This is key to an adequate paradigm for the project of destroying the Serbs in the NDH.
I must also mention that reducing the genocide against the Serbs in the NDH solely to the Jasenovac camp represents one of the main problems in the historical and political reception of this crime. Just as the Holocaust is not only Auschwitz, the genocide against the Serbs is not limited to one place or one number. Instead of a substantive consideration of structures and intent, the discourse on the genocide of Serbs in the NDH is often reduced to Jasenovac and to disputes over the number of victims, which leads to fragmentation of memory, political abuse and relativization of the crime. In that way, the bearers of post-communist and neo-Ustasha narratives and agendas isolate us from adequate communication with serious partners in the world and tear apart our national cohesion, reducing the whole issue to a debate about statistics and a single place in the system.
GLAS: Some historians believe it is no accident that “the big story about Srebrenica” has been imposed not only in our but also in the Croatian public sphere, because Srebrenica is meant to serve to make people forget Jasenovac. How do you see all this?
PAVLOVIĆ: That is not an accident but a mechanism. Over the past three decades a political and media pattern has formed in which Srebrenica and the “Srebrenization” of the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina have become, among other things, a kind of moral and political counterweight to Serbian suffering in the twentieth century, and especially to the genocide against Serbs in the NDH. As I show in the book “The Battle for Srebrenica — a war for civilization,” a mythologized narrative has been created that functions to redefine not only the history of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina but also the moral position of the Serbian people in general, while at the same time strengthening a platform for globalist structures and for political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe.
Instead of analyzing the facts in their full complexity, the event has been reduced to a single symbolic frame — a military operation by the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in BiH, i.e. the 28th division of the so-called ARBiH, the breakout from the encirclement of Srebrenica toward Tuzla, with its losses of thousands of soldiers, and the execution of captured members of that formation being declared a local genocide. First this was done in the political and media narratives of globalist and pan-Islamist structures, and then by the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia. What happened in July 1995 was tragic, but it occurred within the framework of a military operation, not a plan of extermination.
At the same time, the ethnic cleansing of the Serbian civilian population across an area of more than 800 square kilometers and the destruction of everything Serbian in that territory — five municipalities of central Podrinje — is systematically denied and kept silent in the Bosnian Muslim part of Sarajevo as well as in the wider world, including Croatia. In my book I document in detail that an armed and command-organized formation left Srebrenica and broke through the front toward Tuzla, while civilians were evacuated at the request of the UN and with mediation by the Army of the Republika Srpska. That is the key fact that Western media and some domestic structures persistently conceal, because it undermines the construction of a “one-sided crime.”
Thus a matrix was created in which the massacre of captured members of the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Srebrenica — which lasted about three days — is used as a moral mirror to collectively label the Serbian people as a “people-as-perpetrator,” while at the same time suppressing memory of the state-organized genocide against Serbs carried out by Nazi Germany and the NDH. This is not merely historical revisionism — it is a form of civilizational engineering and a preparation for the repetition of genocide.
GLAS: There is a pattern, still often present today, claiming that Serbs have a plan to create some kind of “Greater Serbia.” Those who promoted that idea even referred to alleged SANU memoranda and accused Serbs of supposed ethnic cleansing. But if we look at the situation today, there are hardly any Serbs left in Croatia. There are none in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and especially not in Sarajevo. They are practically a statistical error in Kosovo.
PAVLOVIĆ: When you look at the numbers, everything becomes clear — there is no “Greater Serbia.” What exists is a dramatic shrinking of Serbian space. Our adversaries see Serbs as a single whole, no matter where they live. That is why they break us into smaller parts in order to achieve their long-term goals, and why it was important for them that we, in our own minds, accept as reality the administrative and religious borders imposed on us since 1878. Within the borders of the former NDH, there were around two million Serbs, about 31 percent of the population in that area. Today, if we add up all the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, we get just over one million, of which about 95 percent are in the Republic of Srpska. This means that, after 80 years, there should have been at least four to five million Serbs living in these areas. In Croatia today, Serbs make up about three percent of the population, and in the Federation of BiH around two percent. The only place where the continuation and completion of the destruction of Serbs did not succeed is the Republic of Srpska, which was created and defended precisely because of the collective memory of that genocide in the NDH. Looking over a longer period, we can see a repeating pattern. In Kosovo and Metohija, before World War I, Serbs made up more than 50 percent of the population; before World War II, between 30 and 35 percent; and today, they make up less than three percent in the area that is the historical and spiritual core of Serbian statehood and cultural identity.
GLAS: That decline is not spontaneous demography.
PAVLOVIĆ: Of course not. It is the result of a long-term strategy. Already in the Austro-Hungarian period, as shown by documents from Vienna and Berlin, there was a clear geopolitical line — to reduce the Serbian ethnic and spiritual space to a narrow Serbia without access to the sea, without Bosnia, and without the southern provinces. Serbs were viewed as a “geopolitical flaw in the construction of Central Europe.” Therefore, the policy of Vienna, and later of Germany, was always twofold — to tolerate the Serbian state as a necessity, but to fragment, disintegrate, and keep the Serbian people under constant demographic and political pressure. Later imperial formations continued that same logic. In both world wars, Serbs were the target of the German and Croatian state policies of destruction: in the First World War as a “disruptive factor,” and in the Second as a “re-educated race.” In the wars of the 1990s, the same pattern was merely modernized — destruction through military and legal means, accompanied by propaganda about “Greater Serbian aggression.” The result is the same: the disappearance of Serbs from entire regions of their historical lands. When you place all this in historical continuity, it becomes clear that the Serbian people have not been expanding their borders but defending them while they have steadily narrowed. The myth of “Greater Serbia” is a propaganda product of the very forces that, for centuries, have worked to shrink it geopolitically. That is not an ideological claim but a scientific and existential fact.
GLAS: Why do Western countries have a problem with the Serbian factor?
PAVLOVIĆ: From the Berlin Congress of 1878 to today, the attitude toward the Serbs has never been about sympathy but about geopolitical necessity. In European strategic calculations, Serbs have been viewed as an unreliable factor at the crossroads of civilizations — a people who combine Orthodox, Slavic, and Balkan heritage, and who therefore do not easily fit into the Western model of hierarchy. Since the time of Austria-Hungary, the plan has been clear: the Serbian ethnic and spiritual space must be reduced, isolated, and controlled. As early as 1906, Austro-Hungarian military circles adopted an operational plan for an attack across the Drina, whose goal was not only military but also demographic and political — the expulsion of the Serbian population from Podrinje and the prevention of any continuity of Serbian uprisings in Bosnia.
In modern times, Western countries have continued to use the same pattern under new terms such as “Euro-Atlantic integration,” “regional stability,” and “the fight against Russian influence.” In every one of these formulas, the central point remains the same — to limit the political independence of the Serbian factor and reduce its role in regional processes. It is therefore no surprise that anything connected to Serbian national interests is immediately labeled as a “Greater Serbian project.” That is the language of geopolitics, not of morality. The Serbs have survived two imperial doctrines — the Viennese and the Berlin — and today they live under a third, the globalist one. The essence remains the same.
GLAS: Germany and the United Kingdom are the most active players in all this.
PAVLOVIĆ: Germany and the United Kingdom have not been newcomers to the Balkans. Their interests have deep historical roots, even though their forms change with each era. Since the mid-19th century, Germany has pursued what in geopolitical theory is known as the Drang nach Osten — the “drive to the East.” It is a continental concept of domination: creating a Central European belt of states economically and regulatorily tied to Berlin. Today that process carries a different name — the “Berlin Process” — but the essence remains the same. This model directly opposes the American strategy of balance. While Washington, especially under President Trump, sought to prevent the emergence of any continental hegemony in Europe, Berlin has been trying, under the guise of EU integration, to consolidate its own sphere of influence from the Baltic to the Adriatic. That is not harmless. Germany undermines American influence both economically and industrially. The Trump administration understood this very well. German projects, cloaked in green transition rhetoric and European standards, objectively harm U.S. interests.
British policy in recent years has returned to the old principle of Balkan balancing — constantly stirring tensions in order to remain an indispensable mediator. This is evident in their diplomatic support for the false image of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state where the “Serbian factor is a threat to peace” and in attempts to use the Srebrenica issue as a moral instrument of pressure. Paradoxically, both Germany and Britain thereby harm not only the Serbs but also the United States and President Trump’s efforts. Their actions weaken American influence in Europe by creating a zone of continental mistrust that pushes the EU into a self-imperial posture opposed to Washington’s policy. It is therefore crucial to understand that the difference between the American and the German-British approaches is not merely stylistic but civilizational. America under Trump sees the world as an arena of free nations, while Germany sees Europe as a regulatory space where power hides behind procedure. That is the essence of the conflict that will also shape the future of the Balkans.
GLAS: Recently, two NATO meetings concluded that the Western Balkans represents a strategic bridge to the Mediterranean and Central Asia, and that it must be secured by linking the region to the West through accelerated accession of new members. Do you expect increased pressure on us regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entry into NATO?
PAVLOVIĆ: When NATO today speaks of “the Western Balkans as a strategic bridge to the Mediterranean and Central Asia,” it is essentially not talking about security but about control of territory. The term “bridge” reveals the true nature of current policy toward the region — the Balkans are not seen as a subject but as a corridor through which foreign interests pass. The latest NATO summits show that the Alliance is increasingly turning into an instrument of European globalism. Germany uses it as a framework for building European military autonomy, Britain as a means of maintaining influence, while America — particularly in Donald Trump’s vision — insists that NATO must be an alliance of sovereign states, not an ideological cult. Here lies the deep divide within the West — between the European globalist and American sovereigntist views of the world.
For that reason, pressure on the Republic of Srpska and Serbia will intensify. Not because they pose a security threat, but because their very existence disrupts the concept of a unitary, ideologically uniform Europe that will continue to strengthen in the coming years. The position of military neutrality is not a mere political declaration; it has legal and institutional foundations. Serbia adopted a Resolution on Military Neutrality in 2007, committing itself not to join any military alliance without a national referendum. The Republic of Srpska did the same in 2017. That is an institutional stance, not a temporary political choice. Neutrality must be defended with knowledge and composure. It is not isolation, but the ability to understand at any moment how those who want us in their systems think.
The Republic of Srpska must preserve precisely that intellectual distance: not to enter such alliances as a blind pawn, but to understand that even those alliances are internally divided. In a world split between globalist uniformity and sovereigntist realism, the greatest strength of a small nation lies in preserving memory, balance, and the right to its own judgment — to name processes and events as they truly are. Neutrality is not the absence of choice; it is the choice to remain true to oneself at a time when others march in step with foreign interests.
