ZAGREB, Jan 29 (Hina) - The Croatian Institute OF History has published an expansive scholarly work entitled "Chetnik Atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1941-1945" by Zdravko Dizdar. The work is a research of the history of World War II
in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
ZAGREB, Jan 29 (Hina) - The Croatian Institute OF History has
published an expansive scholarly work entitled "Chetnik Atrocities
in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1941-1945" by Zdravko Dizdar. The work is a
research of the history of World War II in Croatia and Bosnia-
Herzegovina. #L#
Available documents, the author says, confirm that Chetnik
atrocities against Croats and Muslims, other national minorities
and members of the Anti-Fascist Movement - Partisans in Bosnia, had
genocidal features.
The documents indicated that about 100,000 Croats and more than
200,000 Muslims managed to escape Chetnik oppression and mass
murder in Bosnia in World War II. The Chetniks murdered about 45,000
Croats and Muslims. The Chetniks looted, burnt and destroyed
several dozen thousands of homes and completely annihilated about
300 villages and smaller towns as well as a large number of Catholic
churches and Muslim mosques.
The Chetnik movement was inspired by the most brutal form of
'Greater Serbian' nationalism and had all the characteristics of a
Fascist movement, Dizdar pointed out, adding that the movement
supported the idea of an ethnically clean Greater Serbia within
Bosnia and the largest part of Croatia.
Since its founding (1902), it virtually exclusively served as a
mean for Serb nationalist and expansionist politics. Up until the
end of World War I the aim of the movement was to expand Serbia into
the southeast Balkans (Macedonia and Albania). After Yugoslavia
was formed (1918), the movement was a semi-military organisation
directed towards the west (Bosnia and Croatia), Dizdar claims in
his book.
(Hina) sp it sb