Restitution
Law and Historical Facts
Press Release
Belgrade, November 7, 2006
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?"
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