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July 2, 2007
Zagreb Journal
Fascist Overtones From Blithely Oblivious Rock Fans
By NICHOLAS WOOD
ZAGREB, Croatia, June 30 - On a hot Sunday evening in June, thousands
of fans in a packed stadium here in the Croatian capital gave a Nazi
salute as the rock star Marko Perkovic shouted a well-known slogan
from World War II.
Some of the fans were wearing the black caps of Croatia's infamous
Nazi puppet Ustashe government, which was responsible for sending tens
of thousands of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews to their deaths in
concentration camps.
The exchange with the audience is a routine part of Mr. Perkovic's
act, and the gesture seemed to lack any conscious political overtones.
The audience - most of whom appeared to be in their teens and early
20s - just seemed to be having a good time. But Mr. Perkovic's recent
success among a new generation - many of them apparently oblivious to
the history of the Holocaust - has prompted concern and condemnation
from Jewish groups abroad and minority groups in Croatia.
[Despite those objections, the concert - his biggest ever, with an
estimated 40,000 fans in the soccer stadium - was shown in prime time
on Sunday night on state-owned television, prompting further protests
from Jewish and Serbian groups.]
"We don't want to pay for something that strikes fear into my
children, or distances them from their friends or neighbors," said
Milorad Pupovac, leader of the largest Serbian political party in
Croatia, referring to the plan for the broadcast.
What has shocked those groups more, though, is that in the ensuing
debate, many senior politicians and journalists have said that they
see no problem with the imagery or salutes.
"They just don't seem to get it," said Efraim Zuroff, the Jerusalem
director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who has urged President Stipe
Mesic to ban future concerts and help outlaw the use of extremist
symbols and slogans.
The Croatian government has been trying to improve its image so it can
join the European Union, and it did issue a statement after the
concert criticizing the open display of Ustashe memorabilia and
slogans. But much of Croatia's political establishment cannot
understand what all the fuss is about.
"You can't see any anti-Semitism here," Dragan Primorac, Croatia's
education minister, said in an interview. He said he had planned to
attend the concert, before rain caused it to be postponed by a day.
Others who did get there, though, included a former foreign minister
and two Croatian basketball stars.
"At most, you could blame four to five people," Dr. Primorac said, for
wearing Ustashe regalia, or giving the Nazi salute during the concert.
He emphasized, too, that Croatia was a good friend of Israel and
pointed to a photograph on his mantelpiece of himself with the Israeli
elder statesman ****mon Peres as evidence.
Over the last three years the conservative prime minister, Ivo
Sanader, has to some extent managed to shed the country's image as a
nationalist state that once harbored war criminals. The effort has
been successful enough that Croatia is a favorite to join the European
Union. What was seen for much of 1990s as a war-torn nation is now
widely perceived as a prime tourist destination, with 10 million
tourists a year and visitors flocking to its Adriatic coast.
Photographs and memorabilia from the Ustashe period are no longer sold
openly in Zagreb's city center. Restaurants no longer display
photographs of Ustashe units on their wall. But souvenir shops do
still sell key rings and baseball caps with the Ustashe U, as well as
the slogan used in Mr. Perkovic's concerts, "Za Dom: Spremni!" or,
"For the Homeland: Ready!"
And many Croats still display an insensitivity to Holocaust issues.
Mr. Perkovic's public affairs manager, Albino Ursic, has a large
poster that he designed in 1994 on the wall of his office with the
words "final solution." The poster shows a package of cigarettes
marked with a large Swastika and labeled "Adolf Filters," poking out
of a black leather jacket. "It's an antismoking picture," he said.
"It won an award in Lisbon," he added, emphasizing that he viewed
himself as left of center. As for Mr. Perkovic's performance, Mr.
Ursic said, the fascist salute is made by soccer hooligans across
Europe who have little understanding of it. "It is just teenage
rebellion," he said.
Mr. Perkovic's patriotic - and sometimes violently nationalistic -
songs first became popular here during the Balkan wars, when he fought
in the Croatian Army. Most Croats know him better by his stage name,
Thompson, given to him during the war, when he carried the British-
made submachine gun of the same name. He, too, has recently sought to
distance himself from the Ustashe association. In an interview, the
soft-spoken singer said he had never raised his own arm to make a
fascist salute. Nor, he said, did he encourage people to wear Ustashe
uniforms. As for the Ustashe slogan he uses, he claims it is a
traditional Croatian salute that predates World War II.
Others are unapologetic. Vedran Rudan, a columnist with the Croatian
center-right daily Nacional, accused Mr. Zuroff of "extreme arrogance"
for writing a letter to the president of Croatia asking the government
to bar future Thompson concerts.
She also accused him of branding Croatian youths fascists while
ignoring the activities of a well-known ultranationalist member of
Parliament, who has close ties with Israel.
"Why do Jews forgive him everything, and the beardless youth and
Thompson do not have right to mercy?" Ms. Rudan wrote.
But rights groups here say there is a fundamental problem. While
Croatia is now seeking to move away from the nationalist period of the
1990s, the current generation of young people has largely been
schooled to believe that the Ustashe government's actions were no
worse than those of Communist leaders in Yugoslavia during the same
period.
"They want to put them on an equal footing," said Danijel Ivin, the
president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights. "The
education about the recent history of Croatia is not adequate."
Dr. Primorac said that was slowly beginning to change and pointed out
that since 2004, Croatian schools had dedicated a day each year to
studying the Holocaust.
Others do not think it is changing quickly enough. "It is an issue,"
said Tomislav Jakic, an adviser to President Mesic. "It is far from
Ustashe nostalgia that was 15 years ago, when the ghost was first let
out of the bottle. But the ghost is still here and it will be for
years to come."
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