The event was opened by Acting Chairman of the RIO Board Ruslan Gagkuev, who recently visited Bosnia and Herzegovina. He underlined the will to develop cooperation with the historical community of Republika Srpska, in particular the University of East Sarajevo (UVS). He reported on the preparation for an international conference devoted to the problems of the Second World War and the increasing attempts to revise its results, scheduled for November this year. He said that a manual on the history of World War II has already been published, aimed at our compatriots living abroad and foreign citizens. “Given the importance of cooperation with the Serbs for us, we will prepare a publication in the Serbian language, presenting it separately when it is released,” Gagkuev said.
Participants in the discussion recalled those who were killed and died in the dungeons of the camps of the puppet Independent State of Croatia – NGH (1941-1945), the most terrible of which was Jasenovac, where the scale of the crimes committed is correlated by historians with the atrocities of the Nazis at Auschwitz and Treblinka.
The Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at UVS, Professor Draga Mastilovic, explained that under Hitler’s auspices and as his staunchest allies, the Ustashi Croats were doing everything possible to carry out the project of Western ideologues of the 19th century: its aim was to prevent the penetration of Russia and Orthodoxy into the warm seas beyond by the annihilation of nearly two million Serbs.
“Among the sad examples of the mass extermination of the Serbian people in the NGH during World War II is the Jasenovac concentration camp, which is an eclectic example that bears witness to the scale of the crimes, inhumanity and sadism killers, as well as the presence of a genocidal plan against the Serbs, – he said: “The head of the NGH, Ante Pavelić, and the Minister of Education, the writer Mile Budak, wanted to radically solve the Serbian question: destroying a third, forcibly transforming a third into Catholics and deporting a third to Serbia. The slogan Budak invented was: “Serbs – on willows.” The report of the State Commission of the Republic Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia on the Establishment of the Crimes of the Occupiers and their Accomplices (1945), among others, state: “The achievement of the NGH was that history received a new idea of ​​ferocity and outpouring of blood. The whole history of mass criminal murders is a pale picture in the face of unprecedented terror in Croatia (NCH). While for three centuries the Spanish Inquisition claimed about 30,000 victims, the Independent State of Croatia, with a population of less than 6 million, destroyed 500-700,000 people in a few months. “These crimes left even German and Italian officers speechless. Thus, Hitler’s representative in the NGH, General Edmund Gleise von Horstenau, called the actions of the Ustashi “the frenzy of inhuman sadists”.
The professor pointed out that the number of victims of the Ustaše Jasenovac camp would never be known and would be approximately determined. “The Territorial Commission of Croatia for establishing the crimes of the occupiers and their accomplices, which was the first to carry out an investigation in Jasenovac, concluded that during the existence of the camp (August 19, 1941 – April 23, 1945), from 500 to 600 thousand people were killed there, the majority of them – Serbs”, explained the dean.
Mastilovich added that “out of respect for these victims and all other victims of Nazism and Fascism, attempts to revise history, distort historical facts, substitute theses, relativize the crimes of the Nazis and their loyal allies should not be allowed”. “At the same time, attempts at historical falsification aimed at declaring the victims of Nazism as Nazis and Fascists, and Nazis, Fascists and their loyal allies as anti-Fascists, must be particularly carefully suppressed,” he concluded.
Meanwhile, in an interview with RG, the representative of Republika Srpska in Russia, Dusko Perovic, said that the Serbian people have always chosen and continue to choose the right side of history. “In Banja Luka, on May 9, a solemn march of the Immortal Regiment took place, led this year personally by the President of the RS, Milorad Dodik. The leadership of the Republic of Srpska will support any initiative to expand cooperation between our scientists with RIO, RAS and the Russian scientific community”.
Recall that the discussion at the House of RIO was organized by the youth club of the Russian Historical Society (RIO) in collaboration with the Republican Center for the Study of War, War Crimes and the Search for Missing Persons of the government of the Republika Srpska.
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