THE NEW GENERATION-"Hrvatski vjesnik-English edition 22 December 2006

A commentary on the new film by Jakov Sedlar, "HERO" ('Croatia, my love'),
which is being suppressed by the Croatian government.

How Gotovina Saved Croatia & BiH from the Serbs and was Betrayed by Croatian
Politicians

By Dr. Jerry Blaskovich

A recent New York Times article serves as a well circulated reminder of how
important it is to Croats that the truth be told about Ante Gotovina, and
Operation Storm. On December 6, two days after the worldwide news media
reported the discovery, near Zvornik BiH, of yet another mass grave of
Bosnian civilians horribly murdered by the Serbs, the NYT ran a rather one
sided and inflammatory story recalling the horrors of WWII Ustasha
Jasenovac. The NYT noted that although Tito and the communists always told
the world that as many as 700,000 people-mostly Serbs-- were killed during
the war years, the actual number of victims is somewhere between
80-97,000.That was good of them. However, in this very long story about WWII
horrors, failed to say a single word about the 200,000 Croats and Slovenes
murdered by communists with the help of the British at the Bleiburg massacre
in the month of May, 1945. Why is that?

If you guessed that NYT reporting has always had a pro-British and possibly
a pro-Serb bias, you could probably be proven correct. But that is only part
of the story. What the NYT obviously tried to accomplish by trotting out
WWII a few days after the world was reminded of the Serb's mass murders
during the 1990s, was to balance the scale. Yes, the Serbs may have done it
recently but remember what the Croats did to the Serbs at Jasenovac.

The US State Department calls this sort of historical dishonesty a practice
of "political equities" and the UN refers to it as "moral equivalency." Both
terms have the same intent and that is to make the victims as guilty as the
murderers and never mind the time frame or the numbers or who else might
really have been involved.

Historical dishonesty in the cause of political equities and moral
equivalencies are the reason that Ante Gotovina is at The Hague. At Bleiburg
the US State Department ignored US policy and knowingly allowed the British
to disarm the victims and deliver them to the communists. During the 90-95
war the EU and the UN allowed the Serbs to get away with mass murder for
years. When the US finally ended the Serb's genocide project, Ante Gotovina
and the Croatian Army were the primary instruments. The US knows that
Gotovina committed no war crimes, but in the interests of political equities
and moral equivalencies the intelligence that could prove his innocence will
likely never be produced in the UN trial. This is what Jakov Sadlar's HERO
is all about.

Sedlar begins by reminding all of us of the desperation that inhabited
Croats in 1991. Some of the opening film footage takes us back to the time
when Chetnik militias backed by the Yugoslav National Army began removing
Croats from parts of Croatia. The removal involved both physical elimination
by murder and capture and mass expulsion inspired by torture and other
bloody practices.

I was there at the time and saw it. I was in Zagreb when the Yugoslav air
force was bombarding the city. I saw the victims of Seselj's White Eagles in
Vocin. I was the first to meet those who had escaped death when the Serbs
murdered patients and medical staff at the Vukovar hospital. It was a very
desperate time when one of Europe's largest armies and its murderous
auxiliaries were terrorizing Croatia.

I even remember Franjo Tudjman wondering out loud when the American Navy in
the Adriatic would intervene to stop the killing-just like they always did
in the Hollywood movies. But that was in 1991 and America didn't do much
until public opinion forced them to beginning in early 1995.
In between the summer of 1991 and the summer of 1995 Croatia had to depend
for its very survival on money and material from the diaspora and more than
anything else upon the bravery and enterprise of heroic individuals like
Ante Gotovina and upon collectively brave villages like Bjelovar, Sisak,
Osijek and many others. Croats used shotguns and dynamite to try to oppose
an overwhelming JNA superiority in soldiers, MiGs, tanks and helicopter
gunships. It was a desperate time when the JNA laid siege to towns and
villages and Serb militiamen in Chetnik costume moved in to murder old
people with axes and used chain saws to dismember captured Croat soldiers at
places like Vocin.
When America finally broke with the British and began taking action to end
the Serbian genocide project, they picked Ante Gotovina to lead the ground
war against the Serbs in both Croatia and BiH.

Later, when the British were trying to defend their support of Serbian
genocide they used the UN's moral equivalency idea to insist that since
Tudjman, Gojko Susak, and Mate Boban were all dead, another high ranking
Croat had to stand at the dock as the moral equivalent of Milosevic, Mladic
and Karadzic. American intelligence and defense officials know that Ante
Gotovina committed no war crimes. But in order to defend him they would have
to disclose the extent of U.S. involvement as well as get into a position
where the declassified truth might very well embarrass the British cousins.

As "HERO" shows, the British knew what they were up to. The British Foreign
Office told Croatia that innocent or not, there would be no European Union
candidacy until Ante Gotovina was turned over. Furthermore the Brits
demanded and got MI 6 access to Croat government archives ostensibly to help
hunt for Ante Gotovina. One can only wonder if during that search they may
have sanitized the Croat Bleiburg documents.

Anyway, it seems that despite the betrayal of Ante Gotovina, Croatia
probably won't get into the EU until after Turkey. And that is certainly
embarrassing.

Perhaps that is why showings of "HERO" have been suppressed by the current
government. The government prevented its scheduled debut in Knin at the
anniversary celebrating Ante Gotovina's recapture of that town. Instead, the
film had its first showing in Osijek. Since that time it has been shown
secretly to small groups of people but full distribution has not been
allowed by the Croatian government.

It seems a bit more than ironic that in the New York Times story on
Jasenovac, Croat Prime Minister Ivo Sanadar is quoted as saying: "Today's
Croatia does not want to stay silent about the dark pages of its past."