Victim and Perpetrator

There are those who would argue that one reason Israel has a right to Palestine is because of the Holocaust but then I would be at least as likely to agree with the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejdad, who argues that logically, a Jewish homeland in Austria or Germany would be more appropriate. After all the Nazis and not the Palestinians were responsible for the Holocaust. My more immediate concern, however, would be how can a people who went through the hell that was the Holocaust be willing to carry out an ethnic cleansing? Of course, the answer is that the real victims of the Holocaust were the six million who were murdered and that those victims have a great deal more in common with those who have suffered because of "Al Nakba" and those who are still suffering today, than they do with those who committed and continue to commit crimes in the name of Zionism. It was, therefore, with interest that I read today that there had been a 4th International Conferance on Jasonovac on 31st May 2007 and that it had been held in Banja Luka, the capital of the Republika Srbska.
Jasonavac was a concentration camp that was run by Ante Pavelic's fascist "Ustasa" regime in Croatia during the Second World War. Depending on whose statistics you agree with, up to 700,000 mostly Serbs, but also others, including a lot of Jews and Gypsies, were murdered there. At the conference there was a declaration urging the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the governments of the Repbulik Srbska and Serbia to bring charges against Croatia for the genocide of Jews, Roma and Serbs. Now Pavelic's independent state fo Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, NDH) was a Croatian state and it is, therefore, important that the present Croatian government admit Jasenovac's existence and express regret, remorse and apologise in the name of all Croatians for all of the crimes commted by the "Ustasa" regime. The evidence would appear to suggest that, while they appear to still want to debate the actual numbers murdered there, they have made some efforts in the right direction and in 1999 the Jasenovac commander, Dinko Sakic, was extradited from Argentina at the Croatian government's request and he was then tried and convicted to twenty years imprisonment in Croatia. He died in Zagreb on 21st July 2008.(1) More important issues, however, remain unresolved, such as, the plight of the Krajina Serbs.
Nevertheless, what makes the International Conference on Jasenovac especially interesting are the efforts in the Republikca Srpska in particular to try to bring charges against Croatia for genoicide. Remember, this is the same poliical entity that owes its existence to the ethnic cleansing masterminded by Rodovan Karadzic, to the massacres at Srebenica and elsewhere under the auspices of General Ratko Mladica, a pseudo state where almost all of the mosques and catholic churches on its territory have been destroyed.
The victims of the Holocaust, Jasonovac, "Al Nakba and Srebenica have something very real in common; the are all victims of crimes against humanity. We should not allow their tragedies to be exploited by the perpetrators of those crimes.
1 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/dinko-sakic-concentration-camp-commander-875730.html
The picture shows Ante Pavelic, Head of the fascist "Ustasa" Regime, being greeted by Hitler at the Berghof