With the International Holocaust Remembrance Day: Hell for the Roma, without full recognition

Author: Bajram Haliti  Source: Novi magazine  Objectively the approximate number of victims of genocide has not been determined, which is a crime, and injustice towards innocent victims. The perpetrators were not called to account, justice was not served, thus leaving the possibility of renewing the crime of genocide, which was contrary to the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The victims were not compensated either.  Every January 27, Serbia and the world, mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but also the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. World Holocaust Remembrance Day was established on November 1, 2005, by a UN General Assembly resolution, as a need to reaffirm human rights, prevent and punish the crime for genocide, but also as a warning of the constant danger of racial, national, and religious hatred based on prejudice to support education, remembrance, and research of the Holocaust at the national and international level through broad public information on the Holocaust, freedom of access, research of archives and inclusion of this issue in national educational programs.  GOALS OF NAZISM: The Law on the Protection of German Blood carried out mass genocide against Serbs, Jews, and Roma. First in Germany, and then in all European countries under the occupation of the German Reich. Gas chambers, not so distant processes, decrees, provisions, persecutions, expulsions, executions without evidence, crimes for prevention and self-protection, prisons, ghettos, forbidden zones, Auschwitz gas chambers, and experimental scalpels of doctors from Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald, Jasenovac, and others torture took the lives of 6,500,000 Jews, 700,000 Serbs, and 3,500,000 Roma. The Roma went through Dante’s hell from Vitos through Lasi to Auschwitz and Jasenovac.  The goals of Nazism were set out by Adolf Hitler on February 24, 1920, in a 25-point program, five of which show the roots of future criminal and genocidal acts: -  We demand the unification of all Germans into a greater Germany, based on the right of people to self-determination; -  We demand equality for the German people in relation to other people, the annulment of the Versailles and Saint-Germain peace treaties; -  We demand land and territory to feed our people and to colonize the surplus of our population; -  Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one of German blood, regardless of religion. Therefore, no Jew can be a member of the race (anti-Semitism occupied a very prominent place in Hitler’s Nazi ideology and propaganda); -  We demand the abolition of the mercenary army and the formation of a national army. Hitler elaborated on this program in his book “Mein Kampf”, published in 1925, explaining Nazi views and goals, which is why it is considered an authentic source of Nazi doctrine.  From his program and book, and then the policy of the Reich Chancellor of January 30, 1933, it is clear that he planned and prepared the ground for waging a war of aggression against a number of other states, preparing crimes against peace and genocide against Jews, Slavs, and Roma people.  And in Pavelic’s Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which was proclaimed on April 10, 1941, under Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, and included Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, and the Srem region - an area inhabited by about 6.3 million inhabitants, of which more than a third were Serbs, there was a complete liquidation of Serbs, Jews, and Roma.  In atrocities and sadism towards Serbs, Jews, and Roma, the Ustashas almost surpassed their Nazi-fascist masters. It is one of the largest execution sites for Serbs, Jews, and Roma, and not only in the former SFRY. Ustice and Gradina are places of fear and horror. There, the Ustashas mercilessly slaughtered with knives and killed innocent Serbs, Jews, and Roma with shovels, axes, and mallets. Roma women were brutally tortured there, Roma, Serbian and Jewish children were buried alive. Men, women, and children were slaughtered with knives, axes, killed with hammers, shot and grilled, burned in crematoria, cooked alive in cauldrons and made into soap, hung and satirized by hunger, thirst, and cold.  CHILDREN IN TORTURE: The crimes of genocide against children are crimes for which there is no repentance. In the entire occupation area of ​​Europe, only in the Ustasha Independent State of Croatia, there were children’s concentration camps. During the Second World War, more than 50,000 children were killed, slaughtered, and massacred in the Independent State of Croatia, including the unborn and the newborn, more than 10,000 in the Ustasha camp Jasenovac alone. The world does not know the truth about the crimes of genocide against Serbian, Jewish, and Roma children.  The genocide of the Roma is often disputed. It was usually claimed that the Roma were an antisocial problem - which is incorrect because in the third point of “Mein Kampf” it is written that from the racial aspect, in addition to the Slavic and Jewish people, the Roma should also be exterminated.  Seventy-five years have passed since the end of World War II, and there are still debates about whether the Roma were victims of the Holocaust. There are almost no works in the world that deal with this topic. The authors, for the most part, only incidentally mention the crimes committed against Roma, Serbs, and Jews. That is exactly the reason and the basic goal of my address “Holocaust against Serbs, Jews and Roma in the hell of Jasenovac”.  The genocide of Serbs, Jews, and Roma was not only erased from world history but until recently it was also erased from national history. In our textbooks, this phenomenon is simply omitted, there is no place for it even in the footnotes. However, it should be said that the lack of scientifically based discussions on genocide in the former Yugoslavia is a much more complex problem than it might seem at first glance. Scientists remained silent in the face of the delicacy of the situation they faced in a skillfully directed revolutionary time.  The Roma experienced genocide in the Second World War, as did the Jews and Serbs, but to this day a part of the world’s scientific and intellectual public disputes that. This is due to the fact that the genocide against the Roma was not in the focus of the legal processes that were conducted after the capitulation of Germany and its war allies, and the disappearance of the so-called NDH, etc., precisely because of the undefined constitutional status of the Roma and the sociological degradation to which they have been exposed throughout history.  ETERNAL WARNINGS: Based on established facts, eyewitnesses, witnesses, historical and legal documents, during the Second World War, the crime of genocide was committed against Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and Roma of all faiths except Islamic.  The objectively approximate number of victims of genocide has not been determined, which is a crime, and injustice towards innocent victims. The perpetrators were not called to account, justice was not served, thus leaving the possibility of renewing the crime of genocide, which is contrary to the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.  The victims of the genocide were not compensated. No one has calculated how many  Serbs, Jews, and Roma there are today as a result of the crime of genocide. Of the approximately 75,400 Jews who lived in Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II, only about 16,000 survived. Of the 10,500 Jews who found themselves in Sarajevo at the beginning of the war, about 9,000 were taken to Ustasha camps, from where about forty returned. Almost all Jews in Zagreb were killed, their property was looted. Ustasha leaders Budak and Artuković boasted in 1942 in the Ustasha Parliament of the Independent State of Croatia that they had solved the “Jewish question” most radically. After emigrating to Israel, it is estimated that about 6,000 Jews live in the former Yugoslavia today.  Jasenovac, eternal warning. You need to write, talk about it, make movies about it. Not to intimidate people, but to not forget Nazism and to warn of the danger that threatens the world from the growing neo-Nazism. All those who want to rehabilitate the time of Nazism today should be brought to that museum, those who claim that there was no camp or extermination, those who in 1978 in some countries run a bookstore called “Rudolf Hess” with Nazi literature and flag, those who tolerate neo-Nazi organizations and their provocative practices in the West. Of course, those who made it possible for thousands of Nazi criminals to live and develop their criminal activity in the world today.  Fascism and Nazism have done too much harm to humanity to be easily and quickly forgotten. Those evils must not be forgotten! Remembering them, as the darkest part of the new human history, is in the interest of all peoples and societies of the world. This is in the interest of the people and countries on whose soil fascism emerged as an ideology and a form of government. Not because they would carry a mortgage and a complex of guilt, which, after all, cannot be attributed to the work of contemporaries of fascism, let alone future generations, but because they would fight in solidarity with other nations for the complete eradication of old and every new fascism and neo-Nazism as a common enemy. This is all the more so because the ideology of fascism and Nazism is not only far from being suppressed from the consciousness of individuals, groups, and entire strata as their ideological and political orientation, but it has long since found its life in the organization and activities of its old and new supporters.  According to some estimates, the genocide against the Roma took about three and a half million victims in Europe. Historians forget those three and a half million Roma who disappeared in the smoke of crematoria or bonfires erected by the Nazis. However, that is a fact: in most of the works that deal with the world of concentration camps, there is not a single line, not even a phrase. Silence; oblivion; Gypsies; unknown!  I hope that this author’s text will make a significant contribution to the spread of knowledge and teaching about destruction and that it will be a starting point for discussions between parents and children about morals, ethics, and human values, not only today but also in the future. But this author’s text cannot, for the one who is interested, be anything other than just the beginning.  The author is an academic, prof. Dr. H.c. and a doctoral student at the Faculty of Business Studies and Law