Genocide Victims Museum expresses concernment about a range of claims pronounced by the Director of the Memorial Centre in Potočari Mr. Emir Suljagić during a conference dedicated to culture of remembrance that was held on 10 July 2023 in Srebrenica.
By uttering them, he tried to counterfeit and abuse the Holocaust and genocide, events that in the most tragic and the most dramatic ways marked the Second World War.
Namely, directing the words of apologies to the Jews for the crimes committed against them by the notorious 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (Handžar division), Mr. Suljagić has obviously very consciously, and not because of the lack of knowledge, forgotten determining historical facts.
It is completely clear to Mr. Suljagić, beyond any doubt, that the victims of the Nazi unit which mainly consisted of Bosnian Muslims, remembered by its monstrosity, brutality, and massiveness of the committed crimes, were not exclusively the Jews, but in a much larger scope and number the Serbs.
What is additionally worrying is the attempt of Mr. Suljagić to amnesty the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) for committed Holocaust. In other words, it is well known that the named 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (Handžar division) was established in spring 1943 when the Holocaust against Bosnian Jews had already been committed by his compatriots and the Croats who from April 1941 embraced the Ustasha ideology and incepted the spiral of crimes unrecorded in this region.
For the attempt of counterfeit of the past that Mr. Suljagić demonstrated to be even worse, the members of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (Handžar division) were directed to drill in occupied France and Poland not long after its establishment in spring 1943 from where they came back only a year later.
If we bare in mind the fact that the most numerous Jewish community that numbered slightly more than 8,300 members in Bosnia and Hercegovina during the Second World War was that in Sarajevo and that it was liquidated almost in its whole in Croatian death camps in Jasenovac and Đakovo in 1941 and early 1942 when the Croatian Minister of the Interior Artuković gloriously announced that the ‘Jewish’ question had been solved, it remains the feeling of appalment upon the embarrassing and inappropriate attempt of deceiving of the public under the cover of an ostensible apology by Mr. Suljagić.
What is even more dangerous in this case is that this is not the first time Mr. Suljagić utters such and similar claims as those of 10 July 2023 in Srebrenica. He has already done it before which raised open denunciation and condemnation in a part of international, especially German public.
However, the director of Memorial Centre in Potočari hasn’t stopped after several obvious and uncovered attempts of falsification of the past. In his effort to establish any link between the Holocaust and the crime committed in Srebrenica and its surroundings in July 1995, he dared to deduce that his compatriots who were murdered in that area twenty-eight years ago had the same tragic destiny just because of their ‘skin colour’ as was the case with the Jews during the Holocaust.
This claim of Mr. Suljagić, appalling in its utter incorrectness, indicates the readiness of the individuals administering responsible duties to seize for racial theories that implied racial difference of European Jews during the Second World War in relation to the rest of the population on the Old Continent, i.e. contemporary Bosniaks in relation to the Serbs and Croats.
Namely, the Director of Memorial Centre in Potočari tried to transpose Nazi racial postulates in a significantly latter and historically completely specific period and context of the wars for Yugoslav heritage. In other words, Mr. Suljagić dared to try to establish at least symbolical, if not real historical, mark of equivalence between the Holocaust and the crime committed in Srebrenica half a century after the end of the Second World War.
Expressing concernment for the positions of Mr. Suljagić that are in a complete contrast with historical facts, enfolded in a form of ostensible apologies, Genocide Victims Museum points out the danger of such non-scientific and counterfactual claims whose affirmation can bring new divisions and instabilities as well as to mobilise new hatred and violence against the innocent in the coming period before us.
Expressing the real veneration to all innocent victims of the Second World War and wars for Yugoslav heritage, Genocide Victims Museum calls all the individuals, organisations, institutions and organs of authority to restrain themselves from counterfeiting the past, especially the Holocaust and genocide committed against the Serbian people during the Second World War.
