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| 2. THE SECOND WORLD WAR |
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| To many people not familiar with Balkan history, the
violence and bloodshed that took place in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990’s is
incomprehensible. How is it possible that such atrocities could occur in Europe on the eve
of the new millennium? The answer to this is to be found in the events that took place in
Yugoslavia during the Second World War. |
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| Following the invasion of
Yugoslavia, the country was dismembered and divided among the axis powers, Germany, Italy,
Hungary and Bulgaria. Croatia was granted independence as an axis puppet state and ruled
by Ante Pavelic, the Fascist Ustashi leader. Croatia was awarded by Hitler all of
Bosnia-Hercegovina with its large Serbian and Jewish population. |
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| Pavelic and the Ustashi
proceeded with a campaign of genocide directed against the Serbian and Jewish populations
of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. Frightful massacres took place. Ustashi gangs savagely
slaughtered tens of thousands of Serbs in Croatia, often forcing them into their Orthodox
Churches and burning them alive. Other Serbs were given the choice of conversion to Roman
Catholicism or death. Yet others were driven out of Croatia into Bosnia or Serbia. |
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| Thousands of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies were exterminated
in Croatian camps. At the most infamous of these, Jasenovac, close to 100,000 victims was
killed-and not by gas- but by the bullet, the club or knife. In Bosnia, similar massacres
of Serbs took place. The Muslims of Bosnia often assisted the Ustashi killers. Later in
the war, the Germans recruited a Muslim SS Division, which gained notoriety for its
atrocities against the Serbian civilian population. |
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 Ustashi terror |
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| After the invasion of Yugoslavia the
Italians occupied Kosovo and when Italy dropped out of the war in 1943, the Germans
entered Kosovo and promised the province independence. They raised a
SS Division from
among the Albanian population; the infamous Skenderberg Division, which set about
methodically to slaughter Serbs in Kosovo. |
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| As the war progressed Serb
guerilla bands retaliated against the perpetrators of these crimes with counter massacres
of their own. The horrors committed in Yugoslavia during the war, where over a million
people perished, were not forgotten. In Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo, there were few Serbs
who had not lost friends or relatives during the Second World War. |
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