Croatian ghosts emerge anew

This is a story that came out of nowhere: "Croatia has been criticised for a lack of political will in arresting Nazis for the second year in a row."

Granted, the story contains a slight misnomer, as Croatian fascists were not "Nazis" per-se (that is, members of the German National Socialists), but rather, known by their proper name of Ustashe. Their history, and of Croatia during the Second World War, is very ugly.

All the same, it is fascinating that there are still living war criminals from that bygone era that have managed to evade prosecution. It is not surprising, however, that Croatia still struggles in bringing them to justice. The Second World War in the country remains hugely contentious, and even though the historical record of just what happened can be gleaned from sources within the country and beyond, it remains heavily politicized. For those who have experienced such politicization first-hand, like myself, that word is a gross understatement.

The Ustasha movement, while totally marginalized in the interwar period, only came to power thanks to the machinations of the Axis Tripartite. They tapped, however, into the deep reserves of Croatian self-determination, which had been denied to them within the Yugoslav context.

Pegged together, this made them a noxious and dynamite-laden phenomenon. It was made worse by Croatia's nationhood in 1991, which came on the heels of a vicious war with Serbia, in which nationalists toked past history and grievances, including the Ustasha experience, thereby pegging them to an apparent long line of struggles for Croatian self-assertion.

The lingering effects of this last war are still strong throughout Croatia, as Ivo Goldstein has pointed out in his magnificent history of Croatia, and there has been a nasty underbelly of whitewashing of the Ustashe crimes that took place from 1941-1945 -- including the genocide of the country's Serbs, Jews and Roma. This peaked in the later 1990s, with waves of increased conservatism in the country.

As such, bringing it all back to this particular story at hand, it makes it easy for such war criminals (i.e. 92 year-old Milivoj Asner) to evade justice, not just on account of his advanced age, but because there is a lack of will to bring him to justice. Trying Asner, the embodiment not only of evil to objective observers, but of the forces of Croatian "liberation" and "self-defense" for supporters, jingoists and nationalists alike, would be tantamount of betrayal.

Betrayal, after all, in the Balkans is a matter over which people kill, and have been killed.