Not About Bicycling

While my previous blogs involve history in relationship to a particular bicycling event, this blog features history as the main and only character.  This blog addresses one horrible event that occurred in 1941 in my home town of Glina, Croatia, and its horrible administrative epilogue that occurred in October 2014.  In my 2007 blog below, titled “My Tour of Banija”, I wrote: “One other infamous event occurred in Glina in August 1941. The Ustashi corralled about 1450 local Serbs, locked them in a local Orthodox Christian Church, and killed them one by one by knives. Only one person, Ljuban Jednak, survived the massacre by playing dead.”

To commemorate the 1941 massacre, the authorities built the Memorial Home at the church massacre site in the late 1960’.  Following the era of relative peace and prosperity, a new war came to town in 1991.  This time the Serbs occupied Glina leveling the local Catholic Church in the process.  After reintegration of Glina into Croatia in 1995, the authorities change the name of the Memorial Home to "Croatian Home"; removing the plaque listing the names of the 1941 victims.  Afterwards, commemorating the massacre evidently became a Serb-only event as no town officials ever bothered to participate. 

   

On October 21, 2014, the town of Glina authorities issued an ordinance specifying the sites where commemorations are allowed to be held.  The 1941 church massacre site is not one of them.  This effectively means that Glina authorities are using an administrative procedure to prohibit any future commemorations of the massacre at the location at which the massacre actually occurred.  The ordinance offers two other locations as alternative commemoration places: local cemeteries and the leveled Catholic Church, under the cross.

Considering that the Ustashi (the Nazi very loyal collaborators), the perpetrators of the barbaric massacre, prided themselves with their (quasi)Catholicism, in the name of which they slaughtered the Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and disloyal Croats, the present day Glina authorities’ offering the Catholic Church and its cross to the Orthodox Serbs as the alternative commemoration site, is profoundly cynical, to say the least.  The bottom line message seems to be:  "There could be no Serb victims in Croatia, ever".

With the local authorities evidently under the sway of the ideas defeated in WWII, the central government in Zagreb apparently too weak to intervene, the EU looking the other way, and the media yawning, the question is: why is fascism allowed to become normality under our watch?  

Making the World a better place is our collective responsibility.  Turning a blind eye on the crawling reappearance of the evil defeated 70 years ago invading the public space in the formally anti-fascist EU is hardly consistent with us carrying out our responsibility.  

“Spomen Dom” (Memorial Home) in Glina, Croatia 1984; “Hrvatski Dom” (Croatian Home) since 1995; 

according to Glina authorities, nothing happened here in 1941 worth of commemorating today