'Numbers Games' and 'Holocausts' at Jasenovac and Bleiburg
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2441Chapter6 16/10/02 8:05 am Page 160 6 Comparing genocides: ‘numbers games’ and ‘holocausts’ at Jasenovac and Bleiburg What will our children say about us when they read about the Balkan Holocaust in their history books? (Stjepan Mesˇtrovic´ et al., The Road from Paradise) Chapter 5 outlined some of the principal myths of victimisation and perse- cution stemming from the wartime activities of the Serbs and Croats. By invoking images of historic genocide and persecution, both sides portrayed their actions in the 1990s as defensive only – a reaction to either ‘Serbophobia’ or ‘Greater Serbia’. This chapter reviews two of the most important persecution myths emerging from the Second World War. Revising the history of the Ustasˇa-run death-camp at Jasenovac was a useful means of casting Serbs as the victims of a ‘Holocaust’ by Croats. On the Croatian side, the massacre at Bleiburg (Austria) by Communist forces (or Serb-led Communists, as the case might be) in 1945 was also likened to the Holocaust. In both cases, the other side was accused of committing genocide, using either the mask of Nazi or Communist domination to justify their atrocities. Of central importance was a ‘game of numbers’, or Ronnie Landau’s ‘grotesque competition in suffering’.1 Like the works of Stannard, Dadrian, Hancock, and others reviewed in the comparative genocide debate, Serbs and Croats used the Jews as the litmus test for historical suffering, while also trading genocide stories with each other. By inflating their own numbers of dead, and reducing the numbers of enemy dead, they conducted their own comparative genocide debate within Yugoslavia. Both Jasenovac and Bleiburg became emblematic of national suffering and Fall during the Second World War. Following a victim-centred strategy, both sides advanced negative myths of identification, arguing that they alone had suffered a ‘Holocaust’ during the war, which was repeating itself in the 1990s. 160 David Bruce MacDonald - 9781526137258 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 09:53:26AM via free access 2441Chapter6 16/10/02 8:05 am Page 161 Comparing genocides: ‘holocausts’ at Jasenovac and Bleiburg The ‘numbers game’ at Jasenovac During the Communist era and afterwards, the Ustasˇa death-camp at Jasenovac became the most potent twentieth-century symbol of the victimisa- tion of Serbs. It figured as the scene of an attempt at their genocide – some would even refer to it as a Serbian Holocaust. Certainly this former brick- factory was the locus of many horrible massacres, and many thousands lost their lives at the hands of the Ustasˇa. The controversial issue was not the exis- tence of the camp, but rather, how many Serbs actually died there. The major problem of Jasenovac history lies in fixing the number of dead. This continues to be politically charged. Claiming that 50,000 died puts one on the Croatian side, while claiming a larger number (one million or more) is more in line with Serbian thinking. Sadly, there is little consensus on the total number of dead, or, indeed, what percentage of the victims were Serbs. Historians, using a variety of statistics, often arrived at startling different figures: Denitch less than 100,000; Vulliamy around 600,000; Sˇtitkovac ‘hundreds of thousands’; Dragnich: total in NDH 500,000–700,000; Hall 750,000; Glenny 200,000; Ridley 330,000; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (300,000–400,000).2 This extreme range of estimates may have resulted from a confusion between the number of dead at Jasenovac and the total number of Serbs killed in Yugoslavia as a whole. Dragnich, Hall, and Vulliamy’s numbers, for example, could either be interpretations of Serbian-based totals for Jasenovac, or Croatian-based totals for all Serbs killed in the NDH. Serbian and Croatian writers would later provoke much of this confu- sion. However, the original statistics were themselves confusing, as they stemmed from the Yugoslav Communists’ own manipulation of war-casualty figures. The figure of 1,706,000 was presented at the International Reparations Commission in 1946 without any documentation to prove its veracity. In 1947, a second-year mathematics student named Vledeta Vucˇkovic´ was ordered to ‘compute “a significant number” of war victims’, and duly arrived at a figure of 1.7 million victims. This included not only war-related deaths, but also projected future demographic losses as a result of the war – including unborn children.3 The motives behind such a strategy were clear – the Yugoslav Communists wanted to gain the maximum possi- ble value of war reparations from Germany after their long and bloody conflict. While this financial motive was significant, a symbolic motive was also important. Communist Yugoslavia would rely on a series of myths of ‘anti-Fascist liberation’ to buttress its legitimacy. A high number of deaths allowed the Partisans to cast themselves as martyrs to Fascism, while creat- ing an axiomatic link between nationalism and genocide. Nationalism would be an evil associated with racism, extermination, and death-camps, while 161 David Bruce MacDonald - 9781526137258 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 09:53:26AM via free access 2441Chapter6 16/10/02 8:05 am Page 162 Balkan holocausts? the future would lie in a multiethnic, peaceful Communist society. Early attempts to assess the number of dead impartially after the first post- war census in 1951 yielded new statistical results. The Americans Paul Myers and Arthur Campbell fixed the total numbers of dead in Yugoslavia (for all nations) at 1.067 million people, a number significantly lower than the offi- cial estimate.4 Later analyses in the 1980s by the Montenegrin Serb Bogoljub Kocˇovic´, and the Croat Vladimir Zˇerjavic´ arrived at similar totals – 1.014 million and 1.027 million respectively. Within this number, Kocˇovic´ posited a Serbian total of 487,000 deaths, while Zˇerjavic´ published a slightly higher number (530,000).5 With regard to the numbers of Serbs killed at Jasenovac, both Kocˇovic´ and Zˇerjavic´ arrived at a figure of 83,000 deaths – each using different statistical methods. While Zˇerjavic´ seems to have been drawn into the Croatian propaganda war against the Serbs, his numbers appeared to be reasonably impartial, with incredibly detailed descriptions of the number of ‘skeletons per square meter’ calculated over the total surface area of mass graves.6 The figure of 83,000 can, of course, never be proved conclusively, and a belief in any estimate requires a great deal of trust in the researcher, and in his or her motives. This explains the huge variance in estimates between impartial historians, who simply do not know whom to believe, and have no means of verifying any conclusions. As the wars in Croatia, and then in Bosnia-Hercegovina, esca- lated more and more statistical surveys from each side made the Jasenovac total even more difficult to determine. Jasenovac and the Serbian ‘holocaust’ For many Serbs, maintaining a high number of Jasenovac deaths was absolutely central to their national self-identity. A high number proved that they had suffered from a Croat-inspired genocide during the Second World War. Jasenovac attested to the genocidal possibilities of the Croatian nation, proving their willingness to annihilate the Serbs in the past and in the present. A high number also made the Serbs one of the primary victims of the Second World War, rather than an aggressor. The Serbian Unity Congress, for example, claimed Jasenovac as ‘the third largest concentration camp of the WW II occupied Europe’, a common theme in Serbian writing, which advanced a clear case for a Serbian ‘holocaust’.7 The Serbian Ministry of Information also saw Jasenovac as a Serbian ‘holocaust’ – a holocaust that acted as a precursor to Croatian and Bosnian Moslem aggression fifty years later.8 Predictably, the Serbian Orthodox Church also took a leading role in propagating the Jasenovac myth, denouncing the Croats for their part in the genocide of the Serbs. As Patriarch Paul asserted at the beginning of the war: 162 David Bruce MacDonald - 9781526137258 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 09:53:26AM via free access 2441Chapter6 16/10/02 8:05 am Page 163 Comparing genocides: ‘holocausts’ at Jasenovac and Bleiburg Nothing can be worse than Jasenovac, where during four years of war, 700,000 people were killed . Jasenovac is the scene of the most important horrors committed against the Serbs, the place of . their annihilation, their extermina- tion, their execution, their torture, where they suffered under a blood lust, the like of which could not be paralleled by the antichrist himself . This is the new cruci- fixion of Christ. This is the sin of sins.9 Such imagery of a violent, annihilatory Croatian other proved central in motivating the Serbs to ‘defend’ the Serbian minorities who were seen to be victims of a renewed Croatian aggression in 1991. It was not only Jasenovac, but also the covering up of the genocide after 1945 that captured the imagi- nation of Serbian writers. Slobodan Kljakic´’s Conspiracy of Silence, for example, traced a Communist conspiracy to lower the number of Serbian dead in the Second World War, a project propelled by the Vatican and the Croats. He blamed Croatian authorities for bulldozing Jasenovac to the ground in the 1950s, supposedly ‘on orders from authorities in Zagreb’.10 Croatian Communist leaders, such as Stevo Krajacˇic´ and Andrija Hebrang, received the lion’s share of the blame for trying to resurrect Croatian nationalism by suppressing negative aspects of Croatian history.11 As well as being an outspoken critic of Stepinac, Milan Bulajic´ became famous during the 1990s for his Goldhagen-esque theorising on the Jasenovac camps. He blamed everyone in Croatia, from the ‘paramilitary formations of the Croat Peasant Party’ – the so-called ‘Guardians’ – to the Catholic Church, which supposedly wanted to establish a Catholic state in the Balkans.