RESTITUTION LAW AND HISTORICAL FACTS

Press Release

11/07/2006 , HCHRS

Addressing the Jerusalem-based Council for International Relations during his official visit to Israel, Serbia's Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic said the atrocities Serbs, Jews and Roma had gone through in "Croatian Nazi concentration camps of Jasenovac and Gradiska outdistanced those of Auschwitz, Mauthasen and Treblinka" and announced that the property confiscated from Jews after World War II would be returned once the Restitution Law was adopted.

"Crimes should not be forgotten. Forgetting a crime is a crime in itself," said Draskovic.

That's true.

This is exactly what the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia wants Minister Draskovic to tell public why he did not promise his Israeli hosts that the crimes Milan Nedic's collaborative government committed against Jews in Serbia in the period 1941-44 would never be forgotten and why he failed to mention that this very government, having enshrined key ideas of national-socialism about pure "blood and race," exceeded Hitler himself in the establishment of "the new order" cleansed from Jews. At the same time, the Committee asks both Minister Draskovic and lawmakers to decide on the Restitution Law whether they will, with clear conscience, verify restoration of the property confiscated after 1945 while "forgetting" historical facts to which the Nedic government's regulations and decrees testify in black and white.

The silence about the then propaganda quoting "the interest of the international Jewry to wipe out the Serbian people" and the official policy of racial and national discrimination, expulsion from work, confiscation of all property or deprivation of all civil rights cannot but be interpreted as deliberate, orchestrated oblivion, distortion of truth and rehabilitation of crime. Is any representative of today's regime, therefore, morally entitled to underline that "forgetting a crime is a crime in itself?"

Belgrade, November 7, 2006

HCHRS