OPINION:
It’s all very well for Pope Francis to recognize the Ottoman genocide of Armenians, but what about Pius XII’s silence regarding events across the Adriatic in wartime greater Croatia (“Pope recalls slaughter of Armenians in ’first genocide of the 20th century,’” Web, April 12)? Hundreds of thousands of civilian Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia were slaughtered by the Croatian Ustasha regime. Their only political ambition was to lie low given that Serbia proper was under brutal German occupation and their only crime was their national and religious identity.
Some of the Croatian clergy were accomplices of the Ustasha. There was also the shameful spectacle of the forcible conversion en masse of many of the surviving Serbs to Catholicism. Then there are unanswered questions concerning the end-of-war escape of the Ustasha leadership and collaborationist clergy to Argentina via European monasteries.
Fifty years later the Krajina Serbs balked at being railroaded as second-class citizens into a Croatian secessionist state led by Franjo Tudjman, who was unrepentant about the misdeeds of the Ustasha. The Vatican with its hurried recognition in effect godfathered Croatia, whose American-trained army went on to murderously expel the Krajina Serb nation. The Vatican, in company with most western countries, treated the cleansing as a diplomatically convenient fait accompli.
YUGO KOVACH
Dorset, England
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