This Saturday I attended a meeting and dinner of the Jasenovac Research Institute (JRI) of which I am a board member. Jasenovac was the name of the Croation fascist run complex of concentration camps in which hundreds of thousands of people were brutally mudered, the third leading death camp in Europe.
The Institute, celebrating its tenth anniversary, is dedicated to educating people through the world about the holocaust in wartime Yugoslavia, carried out both by German fascist forces in their war against Yugoslav partisans, but also by the Ustasha fascist puppet state aka "The Independant State of Croatia" created by Hitler after the German invasion of 1941.
Although tens of thousands of Jewish people, Roma people (Gypsies) and anti-fascists were murdered in Yugoslavia, the largest group of victims by far were Serbian people who were slaughtered in large numbers because they were Serbians under Ustasha control.
JRI is dedicated to telling the story of WWII Yugoslavia so as to keep alive a history that the present Croatian goverment (following a new dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 1990s) turning the Ustasha into anti-Communist nationalist "freedom fighters" and predecessors of the present Croatia.
The stories told at the dinner were moving. While I know a great deal about the horrors committed by the Croatian fascists at Jasenovac and throughout Yugoslavia, the account somehow never becomes stale as more and more evidence is gathered. While fascists everywhere are extreme national chauvinists, the fascist mentality and brutality is not limited to any nationality or ethnic group. The mission of JRI is to keep alive the study of the history of fascist genocide in Yugoslavia to prevent it from happening again and to serve as a lesson to people throughout the world about its dangers.
But who is Artukovic and what does this all have to do with bin Laden, whose execution is being hailed throughout the world today?
Andrija Artukovic was a major figure in the Ustasha fascist wartime region, serving as minister of Justice, the Interior, and Religion at times during the war (the Croatian fascists, while imitating much of Nazi racist ideology also strongly identified with Roman Catholic clerical fascism and had major backers and protectors in the Vatican).
Artukovic, given his positions, was directly implicated in the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Artukovic was able in 1948 to escape to the United States where he worked with his brother, a California businessman. When he was exposed a a major fascist war criminal in 1951 thanks to the actions of the Yugoslav government, the U.S. launched deportation proceedings against him.
Yugoslavia at the time, because of its break with the Soviet Union, was non aligned in the cold war and the only nation in the world led by Communist activists with which the U.S. government enjoyed relatively friendly relations. However, it took thirty-five years to deport Artukovic to what was then still Yugoslavia because his lawyers successfully argued in the Catch-22 tradition that since he had been involved directly in the terror and murder carried out against Yugoslav Communists (along with Serbians, Jews, Roma, and non Communist anti-fascists) he could not receive a "fair trial in Yugoslavia!
Many other war criminals from the Soviet Union and postwar Soviet aligned countries had an easier time of it, recruited for anti-Communist activities(in which under the Nazis they had become "specialists" )and assisted in gaining safe passage to fascist Spain, Latin American rightist dictatorships, and a few like Arkukovic even to the U.S.
But what does this have to do with bin Laden? Actually a great deal, since Artukovic et al were essentially the products of Hitler fascism's "holy war" against the "Judo-Bolshevik world conspiracy" (a scholar at the JRI dinner made the point that the Ustasha added the Serbians to Jewish people in their demonology).
Two years after Artukovic was deported to Yugoslavia, Al Quaida under the leadership of bin Laden, scion of a family with the largest private fortune in the arabic speaking world, was created in Afghanistan with the approval of the Pakistani ISI and its CIA backers and funders. Bin Laden had worked with the anti-Communist rightwing guerrilla fighters from the beginning of the decade, which meant that he was a major "asset" of the CIA (and before the 9/11 attacks remembered fondly by former CIA personnel).
The forces of fascism and reaction were not defeated in Afghanistan as they were Yugoslavia in WWII. With Reagan and Bush I administration funding and massive support they were successful.
The CIA had little reason to worry about their "ally's" clerical fascist villification of "Zionist Jews," "Christian Crusaders," and the "decadent West," as long as they were fighting against Afghani revolutionaries and their Soviet military supporters. After the downfall of the Soviet Union, bin laden's group turned on its former backers and began to commit against European and U.S. targets the sort of atrocities that they carried out in Afghanistan through the 1980s and 1990s.
Although they were now labeled as terrorists rather than freedom fighters, only a very tiny amount of the resources that were employed against the Afghan Communist led government in the 1980s were ever employed against them (although that government carried out no attacks on anyone's foreign soil).
Pakistan was still an "ally" of the U.S. even though the Soviet Union no longer existed (now Pakistan's value was a possible base for operations against India, China, and a route through which pipelines carrying oil and gas might go through). The new Taliban government in Afghanistan was a monstrous clerical fascist regime, condemned especially throughout the world for its attempt to use terror and murder to take away all the rights that women had won both under the previous regime and in earlier governments. But Pakistan remained its strongest backer, along with bin Laden's Saudi Arabia, in the world until the 9/11 attacks.
No one should shed any tears for bin Laden, a mass murderer and, given his creation thanks to the cold war, a perverse cold war criminal, although it would have been better to have taken him alive and put him on trial before the world.
The fact that he was captured deep in the heart of Pakistan would be comical if it were not so tragic – if anything is proof that the Pakistani government has run a kind of Ponzi scheme on the U.S. concerning Al Quaida since the 9/11 attacks, taking billions with one hand to "fight terrorism" while it harbored and used terrorists for its own purposes with the other, this certainly is.
While President Obama's speech yesterday was sober and reasonable, the death of bin Laden should open up a discussion on the whole U.S. policy of military interventionism in the name of anti-terrorism of the last decade. It should be seen as a beginning to seriously ending the U.S. military involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq instead of adding to them in Libya.
It also should be seen as a reason to begin the very long overdue re-adjustment of U.S. policy toward Pakistan, an adjustment which finally acts to oppose Pakistani attacks against India and repression of its own people on the now 60 year old fiction that the Pakistani army is somehow a "faithful ally" of the U.S.
And just as JRI seeks to tell the story of the holocaust in Yugoslavia to keep it from happening again anywhere, the Obama administration should begin to learn from the long story of the recycling of fascists into anti-Communist freedom fighters through Cold War policy and the creation of similar forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to for once and for all abandon the policies that produced such developments
In the 1930s, in response to Franklin Roosevelt's comment that a Carribean dictator, was "our son of bitch," the publisher of the Nation, Freda Kirchwey, called that dicator a "midget Hitler," who, while he posed no immediate threat to the U.S., was much closer to the big Hitler than to us.
Yesterday a miniature Hitler who did turn on his previous backers and murder nearly three thousand people in the World Trade Center attacks (along with many other crimes), was finally brought to justice for the great crimes he commanded. Now we must develop a policy which will prevent the potential bin Ladens of the future, who thanks to modern technologies can attack the U.S., from coming into existence if we are to learn anything of value from both the last ten years and the events of yesterday.
