CROATIA'S IDENTITY BUILT ON DENYING SERB RIGHTS AND HISTORY

BELGRADE, NOVEMBER 5 /SRNA/ – Historian Čedomir Antić stated for SRNA that Croatia has chosen to build its identity issue by denying all rights to Serbs and is now attempting to completely erase the Serb people and their culture.

Antić said that, unfortunately, incidents such as the recent one in Split—where a Serbian cultural event was prevented from taking place amid the Ustasha slogan "For the Homeland, Ready" — are not isolated in Croatia. He noted that Croatia, now a member of the EU and NATO, has in effect been rewarded for everything its "current and former inhabitants" did against the interests of the Serbian people during both World Wars. According to Antić, in both Yugoslav states the Croats only benefited, as those were countries in which the Serbian people were victims and were expected to reconcile with their executioners. Antić pointed out that Croatians had a choice after 1918, 1945, and 1990, but each time they chose to deal with their identity issue by denying the rights of Serbs and by attempting, in various ways, to erase the Serbian people and their culture. "It is evident that Croatia’s attitude toward Serbia is primarily an identity issue. As long as Serbia and Serbs exist, the framework of Croatian national and state identity will never be fully complete," Antić emphasized. Asked to comment on how Croatia can prevent a Serbian cultural manifestation that was to include a folklore performance from Novi Sad, while welcoming participants in protests in Serbia and expressing condolences over the deaths in the Novi Sad awning collapse, Antić said that Croatian policy is concerned only with seeing Serbia weakened as much as possible. He added that NATO and the EU also play a role in this, as does the global conflict currently engulfing much of the world. Antić observed that one foreign media outlet operating in Serbia regularly uses the phrase "Croatian sea" during the holiday season, even though other countries also share the Adriatic coast, while, for that outlet’s journalists, "nothing in Serbia is Serbian." "After many years, huge efforts, and enormous sums of money, we now have a segment of the population, unfortunately disproportionately educated and wealthy, that has abandoned its Serbian identity or affirmed a minority identity within Serbia by expressing hatred toward Serbs," Antić says. He added that this group has “defined itself by class,” and that among this segment of Serbian society there has long been a tendency to see Serbs as uncivilized, and to label all opponents as such. "These people are ready to portray the entire Serbian history as a chain of crimes, as a cultural defect of the Serbian nation, while seeing themselves as exceptions — who, when alone and ideally in power, could easily fraternize not with Croats, Bosniaks, Montenegrins, or Macedonians, but with Ustashas, Islamic terrorists, Montenegrin fascists, and Albanian Ballists," Antić pointed out. He stressed that none of this would have happened without the toxic influence of certain circles in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. "The fact that this hysteria has now peaked is not the result of the actions of Serbia’s government, but of the world war that is taking place at this very moment," Antić says. He explained that, in the context of the Balkans, this global conflict means denying Serbia the right to independence and neutrality, despite the fact that “an absolute majority of MPs in the National Assembly voted for neutrality” nearly twenty years ago.