Butchers Tale

Dinko Sakic, the former head of the concentration camp at Jasenovac run by the Ustasha, will most probably be delivered to Croatia next week — that is at least what Argentine authorities, which have accepted the Croatian demand for Sakic’s extradition for war crimes committed during 1942 and 1945, are claiming.  This is the result of Argentine resolve to rid itself of criminals to whom that state gave refuge half a century ago, as well as of pressures exerted by international public opinion on Croatian authorities to make the extradition demand.

It is known how Sakic was discovered: he appeared on Argentine television, and, in an interview, repeated what he’d said four years earlier for the journal Magazin, in an interview with the Croatian journalist Aleksa Crnjakovic, who at the time had been part of the Croatian President’s delegation.  In short, the concentration camp at Jasenovac was a work camp in the period from November of 1942 to October of 1944, when he was at its head, and in it, people exclusively died from natural causes, except in rare cases when someone was sentenced to death because of criminal acts: “It was a work camp in which Jews had self-rule, and we certainly did not mistreat a single prisoner”; “people simply died from natural causes or, for example, during the typhoid epidemic, but there was certainly no killing going on”; “I am not talking about what could have happened before and after, but while I was there, no one had the right to mistreat anyone,” stated Sakic on the Argentine Channel 13.  Four years earlier, in the interview with the Croatian Magazin, he went into greater depth: people who were sent to the Jasenovac concentration camp were “sent there because it was proven that they worked on destabilizing and destroying the Croatian state, or that they were a danger to public peace and security”; “Jasenovac was not a sanitarium, but neither was it a place of torture of the kind Serbs describe”; “no one came to the concentration camp because of race or religion”; “there were no mass killings”; “death was natural and normal”; “Lubric protected Jews”; “NDH was the foundation on which modern Croatia was built”, and that he is proud of his past, of everything he did in fulfilling his duty to the state, and that today — if the opportunity presented itself — he would accept to do the same job.

Contrary to Sakic’s stories about the Jasenovac “sanitarium”, the National Committee of the National Republic of Croatia for Establishing Crimes Committed by the Occupier and his Allies had already in 1947, under “the Sakic file”, accused him of the following: “murder and slaughter, systematic terror, killing of hostages, torture of civilians, holding civilians under inhumane conditions, theft.”

TALKING TO THE PRESIDENT: However, if the Argentine public had not reacted to Sakic’s TV appearance and boasting of crimes, and if Carlos Menem had not requested his arrest immediately, Sakic would still continue to enjoy his memories of his “old workplace”.  Immediately after this, Sakic disappeared from his house in the town of Santa Teresits, 320 kilometers south-east of Buenos Aires; but when he reappeared there on May 1 (“malicious people” claim that until that time he was hiding in the Croatian Embassy in Buenos Aires), he was arrested by Argentine police.  It was completely different on the occasion of the Croatian President Franjo Tudjman’s visit to Argentina in 1994.  At that time, Tudjman met with Sakic, which Sakic describes: “We spent 17 minutes together and agreed to meet again.  President Tudjman told me: I know what you are being accused of.”  Tudjman tried to protect himself with claims that the meeting with Sakic was accidental, that it took place at a reception in the Croatian Embassy for which he did not choose who would be invited, even though he did not explain why, given his role in the fight against Fascism in the Second World War, it did not occur to him to do what the Argentine President did four years later: order Sakic’s arrest.  On the contrary, at that time, the Croatian President — “in the name of the Croatian people” — expressed his gratitude to President Menem for the fact that Argentina, after the Second World War accepted “those who were not desirable anywhere else”, “who lost a homeland, a state and a war”, and “they were not war criminals, nor Fascists, but mostly patriots who fought for the creation of a Croatian state.”

And that’s not all.  Several days ago it was discovered that on January 6, 1997, Sakic personally approached the Croatian Ministry of Justice with a message sent by fax in which he requested the undertaking of an investigation and the reaching of a verdict in his case.

“PROOF” OF HUMANITARIANISM: “I, the undersigned Dinko Sakic, born on September 8, in the year 1921, in Studenci, near Kotar Imotski, a citizen of Croatia and former officer in the Croatian Armed Forces in NDH, am addressing the Ministry with the greatest respect with the request that it take up the case which I am submitting and to pass a fair sentence,” writes Sakic at the beginning of the letter; he goes on to say regarding Artukovic’s trial and the case of Jasenovac, that it is all just “Serbian propaganda and pamphlets”.  What follows is an explanation of how, when and by whom he was appointed to his duties in the Jasenovac concentration camp, going on to say: “In performing my duty, I did many good deeds for prisoners, regardless of their nationality, religion or race.  Everything I did, I did out of human compassion, without any ulterior motives for eventually winning their confidence or better treatment if the fate of the war did not go our way.  Ph.D. Mile Boskovic once said: Comrades, if any of us survive, we should stand behind Sakic so that his punishment will be lessened, because he was better than the others. (...) while I was at the concentration camp in Jasenovac, from November 2, 1942, to October 14, 1944, there was never any physical or psychological mistreatment of prisoners or any kind of mass killing, as is being parroted, under enemy pressure in Croatia and the world, by former intelligence men and other traitors of the Croatian people.  We treated prisoners like human beings in every sense, and the proof of that is that many Croatian communists left the concentration camp for freedom, headed by Ph.D. Andrija Hegrang and Ph.D. Anto Cilig — who wrote about it after the war — along with many Croatian partisans.

At that time I was young and inexperienced, and I could not understand the humane treatment of Jews and Croatian communists at the hands of General Lubiric, until he did not enlighten me in response to my question.  He answered me approximately in the following words: ‘Dinko, after the fall of Satlingrad, it is clear that Germany will lose the war, and we along with them, because circumstances are such that we are allied with Germany in the fight against communism.  We must rescue Croatian communists and partisans, because they will be in a position after the war to protect Croatian interests.  Many of them are idealists and believe that they are fighting for the Croatian state.  Serbs will open their eyes and will disabuse them, so that their children and our Ustasha sons will renew the victory of April 10, 1941.’”

In the end, Sakic hopes the court will proclaim him innocent: “I am convinced that the court will examine my case and will proclaim worthless and insignificant all such and similar sentences passed by the former National Republic of Croatia or Yugoslavia,” referring to the sentencing of the Ustasha Minister of Domestic Affairs, Andrija Artukovic.
CONFRONTING THE PAST: The occurrence of the “Sakic case” in Croatia at this moment is evidence of pressures exerted by the international community on the Croatian Government, and not of justice which has arrived with a delay of 50 years.  The Government’s attitude is best reflected in the statement made by the Croatian Minister of Health, Ph.D. Andrija Hebrang, in an interview in which his answer to the question of whether he would permit the return to Croatia of the former head of Jasenovac, Dinko Sakic, was: “Of course I would!  Is he more of a bad guy than Blazevic?  And he is living among us, he was even invited two years ago to the commemoration of anti-fascism, which is why I refused to attend.”

However, Hebrang is merely repeating what is being attempted in Croatia for years now in the process of rewriting the not so distant past: lessening the number of atrocities in the Jasenovac concentration camp (in his book Aimlessness of Historical Fact, Franjo Tudjman reduced the number of killed to merely 20,000) by constantly inflating the number of killed in Blaiburg.  The proof of this is the very frequent use of Ustasha iconography in Croatia, for which no one has answered yet, just as no one in the Government has yet reacted to statements such as the one recently made by Tomislav Mercep — “that he is sorry because he did not kill all Serbs in Croatia” — along with the fact that there were no comments on the original documents from the Third Rich which America sent to Croatia last week, in which it is stated that until 1943, 120,000 people were killed in Jasenovac, while in Stara Gradiska (where Sakic also served as an aid to the Ustasha Commander, Milo Orskovic, from March 20, 1942, until leaving for Jasenovac) 20,000 were killed.

With the occurrence of the “Sakic case”, attempts at “striking a balance” are evident in the parallel statements made by Government representatives that they will demand extradition of the Chetnik Duke Djujic to Croatia.  However in this, Croatia and FR Yugoslavia are the same: both want to try “the other’s” “foreign” criminal, as has been seen in the past years: neither of these states has been able to deal with those who committed atrocities in the recent war.

In any case, Sakic will very soon appear before the Croatian courts.  Already there are people appearing who, just like in the trial of Andrija Artukovic, think that Sakic should be tried for genocide, but the question is whether the prosecutor will dare to put such a category in the indictment.

However, the fact that, regardless of the category used, the Croatian public will be confronted in the upcoming trial with a reassessment of the character of NDH — was it really a mere expression “of Croatians striving for their own state”, or does it represent four dark years in the past which must be unconditionally confronted in order for any sort of future to be made.