CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Anatomy of a Moral Collapse: Jasenovac on the Serbian Political Market

Jasenovac prisoners. Unknown author – Public Domain

There are moments in public discourse that do not surprise by their content—because they belong to well-established ideological patterns of the darker post-Yugoslav era—but still manage to shock by the coldness with which they are delivered, as if they were stating something entirely self-evident. One such example can be found in an interview given by Andrija Hebrang Jr. to the Belgrade weekly NIN in 2009—a format that, at the very least, presumes a degree of reflection. And we are not speaking about a marginal figure from the radical fringe: Hebrang is a medical doctor by profession, a long-time senior member of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), multiple-term Minister of Health, briefly Minister of Defense, Deputy Prime Minister, a member of parliament, and even a presidential candidate. In other words, someone who has occupied nearly every key position within the Croatian political establishment.

It is precisely such a political veteran who, in that interview, chooses to present an almost literary scene from Jasenovac—the largest concentration camp in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a fascist puppet state during World War II, where tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and anti-fascists were systematically murdered—recounting it with a curious, almost familial warmth. In this scene, as he reconstructs it, his father, Andrija Hebrang Sr.—a high-ranking Croatian communist official later killed in Tito’s Stalinist purges of 1948—was leaving Jasenovac as part of a prisoner exchange, when he was seen off by Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburić, the commander of all Ustaša concentration camps, with the words: “Hebrang, you are returning to your own. Work there for the interests of the Croatian state!” To which the father, “in a resolutely Croatian manner,” replied: “As far as the Croatian state is concerned, my head will fall for it before yours.”

Already here, somewhere between dramatization and family legend, one can discern the distorted pattern associated with Franjo Tuđman—the founding president of independent Croatia in the 1990s—who promoted a controversial policy of “national reconciliation” between the descendants and ideological legacies of the Ustaša (the fascist movement that ran the wartime NDH) and the Partisans (the communist-led anti-fascist resistance). In practice, this meant reframing World War II history in a way that sought to symbolically integrate both traditions into a single national narrative. Within such a framework, figures like Luburić are no longer seen solely through the lens of their crimes—including those committed against Croatian anti-fascists—but are recast as actors driven, however misguidedly, by a notion of “Croatian state interests.” What emerges is a subtle but profound shift: from moral judgment to historical relativization, in which even perpetrators can be reinterpreted as part of a broader, ambiguously defined national project.

When the journalist then directly asks whether he believes that Luburić, too, was fighting........

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