Mladen Mrdalj is a Lecturer in Political Science at the College of Liberal Arts at Wenzhou-Kean University in China, having formerly held a number of research positions in politics and security studies across the Balkans, Central Asia, and the United States. You may follow him on X @mladen_mrdalj.

Most readers, I suspect, will begin by scanning this article to see whether it addresses the genocide they consider most important. I may disappoint them: this article marks the 30th anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Croatia. Still, its lessons may prove relevant.

American genocide scholar Gregory Stanton famously outlined ten stages of genocide, from “classification”—the division of society into “us” and “them”—to “extermination” and finally “denial.” He argues that the best response to denial is prosecution by international or national courts. But the reverse is also true: the most effective denial may come in the form of exoneration by those very courts.

Blocking a tribunal from acting at all can serve the same purpose. While refusing the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court regarding Israel and Palestine doesn’t silence global scrutiny, time does. New tragedies displace older ones, and memory fades. Oblivion is genocide denial’s final triumph. The most “successful” genocides are often those you’ve never heard of.

But what if the most effective form of denial isn’t silence or distortion—but celebration? What if genocide is commemorated as a national holiday, with music concerts attended by half a million people? According to the logic of “hiding in plain sight,” who would dare celebrate the “crime of all crimes”? Surely not representatives of the so-called “Judeo-Christian” civilization—members of the European Union and NATO. If it cannot be; therefore, it is not.

To understand how the genocide against Serbs in Croatia has been obscured, one must look at the 1995 ethnic cleansing not as an isolated event, but rather as the penultimate episode of a much longer story. As the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem notes, “Genocide is usually the result of a gradual development, sometimes over many years.”

Most people imagine genocide as a sudden, concentrated eruption of mass violence lasting days, perhaps years. Yet protracted, uneven violence—spanning decades or even centuries—can also constitute genocide, if each episode reflects the same intent: the destruction of a particular group. The genocides of indigenous peoples in European colonies took centuries. The Armenian and East Timorese genocides unfolded over decades.

The lives of three men illustrate the longue durée of genocidal ideology in Croatia. Ljuban Jednak, a Serb from Croatia, survived the 1941 mass slaughter inside a Serbian Orthodox church, where local Serbs had gathered hoping that conversion to Roman Catholicism might save them. Instead, the Ustaša—Croatian fascist extermination squads—massacred them and later razed the church to the ground. After the war, the church was never rebuilt. The new communist authorities replaced it with a bland memorial hall, stripping it of religious and national significance.

To describe the destruction of Serbs in the so-called Independent State of Croatia, Raphael Lemkin used a new word he coined in his 1944 landmark book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: genocide. While his book was still at the press, two prominent Ustaša leaders—Ivo Rojnica and Vinko Nikolić—were already en route to South America.

Croatian nationalism resurfaced in Jednak’s life in the mid-1960s. Despite the fact that Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz “Tito” was himself a Croat, and ethnic Croats dominated the Croatian republic within the Yugoslav federation, both communist and non-communist Croatian elites incited the public into the frenzied “Mass Movement” (Maspok), framed as a rebellion against alleged “Serb hegemony.”

While antisemitism was at that time increasingly condemned worldwide as an unacceptable—and at times criminal—form of prejudice linked to genocide, Yugoslav communists continued to legitimize anti-Serb prejudice, portraying it as a reasonable fear of alleged Serbian hegemony that warranted political concessions.

When the “Mass Movement” escalated too far, Tito dismissed the Croatian leadership. Yet he conceded to their core demands to appease the Maspok public: the de facto confederalization of Yugoslavia and the continued erosion of Serb cultural institutions in Croatia. Nevertheless, Ljuban Jednak trusted state-led processes, choosing not to flee. Meanwhile, Rojnica and Nikolić remained active in exile, continuing to support Ustaša émigré propaganda and terrorism.

In 1990, Croatia held its first multi-party elections. Franjo Tuđman and his Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) rose to power with significant backing from the Ustaša diaspora. Tuđman rewarded their loyalty: Rojnica was appointed special envoy to Argentina, and Nikolić became a member of the Croatian parliament.

In a desperate attempt to prevent further ethnic polarization, Serbs in Ljuban Jednak’s region voted for reformed Croatian communists. Serbs across Croatia opposed unilateral violent secession that would take them out of Yugoslavia. Those who could count on outside support took up arms. After the subsequent outbreak of civil war, Croatian authorities further legitimized and even institutionalized Ustaša symbolism. A military unit named after Ustaša commander Rafael Boban was integrated into the official Croatian Army. Its slogan: “Za dom spremni” („For Homeland Ready“)—the Ustaša equivalent of “Sieg Heil.”

Rojnica and Nikolić lived to witness the Croatian Army crush Serb resistance during “Operation Storm“ on August 5th, 1995. Ljuban Jednak was among the 200,000 Serbs who fled to Serbia, while nearly 2,000 were subsequently killed, the vast majority of them civilians. Jednak passed away as a refugee in Serbia in 1997, two months before Nikolić’s death in his Croatian hometown. Rojnica died a decade later in Buenos Aires—presumably content that his lifelong cause had largely prevailed.

All three men could have heard Tuđman’s 1995 victory speech, in which he referred to Serbs as a “cancer that had been destroying the Croatian national being.” Tuđman had planned the offensive with one goal in mind: “…to give [Serbs] a road, while ostensibly guaranteeing them civil rights.”

While then Serbian President Slobodan Milošević was indicted for war crimes in Kosovo even before that war ended in 1999, Franjo Tuđman, who had presided over the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Croatia, died in 1999 without ever being indicted. Two Croatian commanders were later acquitted before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in a highly controversial trial: after a unanimous 3:0 first-instance conviction, the appeals chamber reversed the verdict in a narrow 3:2 ruling.

In 2013, Danish judge Frederik Harhoff sent a confidential email expressing concern that American and Israeli officials had exerted pressure on Theodor Meron, the ICTY’s presiding judge, to avoid setting what was perceived as a dangerous precedent: “courts in practice were getting too close to the military commanders.”

This was not an isolated concern. Former Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte alleged that the Vatican assisted one of the Croatian generals in evading capture, and that the United States interfered in trials related to both Kosovo and Rwanda. A guilty verdict in the Croatian case, moreover, could have implicated the Clinton administration through MPRI, Inc., a U.S.-based military contractor that had trained Croatian forces prior to the 1995 offensive.

With its generals exonerated by an international tribunal, Croatia entered NATO (2009) and the European Union (2013), thereby eliminating external pressure to respect the core EU norms such as the rule of law or holding human rights in high regard. In 2018, the Croatian government indirectly legalized the Ustaša slogan “Za dom spremni.” Its use would be limited to commemorating the “just and legitimate Homeland War” of the 1990s. This conditional legalization sent ambiguous signals that ultimately helped normalize and popularize the Ustaša motto “For Homeland Ready.”

Just a month ago, far-right singer Marko Perković Thompson led half a million fans in chanting the slogan at a concert. Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, along with his family, made a public gesture by visiting Thompson, further signaling the show of respect for the singer’s views and the mainstreaming of symbols tied to fascist wartime ideology.

The erasure of Serbian identity in Croatia continues in multiple ways. Despite constitutional protections and a ruling by the Constitutional Court, Serbian Cyrillic script was not permitted in Vukovar. The Croatian government also repurposed the memorial hall dedicated to the 1941 Glina Serb Orthodox church massacre into a “Croatian Home,” despite protests from the local Serbian community.

Today, two-thirds of Serbs in Croatia report Croatian as their native language, a sign of deep assimilation. A recent study highlights how “ethnic mimicry” has further diminished visible Serbian presence. From nearly 17 percent of Croatia’s population in 1931, Serbs now make up just 3.2 percent.

In this context, the elaborate celebration of “Operation Storm”—complete with military parades and the participation of foreign civilian and military officials—is not merely a commemoration of a battlefield success. This ceremony confers legitimacy. It implies pride and even righteousness. Thus, to an uninformed Western audience, it would seem inconceivable that an EU and NATO member state could openly celebrate an episode of ethnic cleansing—let alone in connection to a slogan rooted in a genocidal World War II ideology.

However, this is exactly what is happening—the last stage of genocide hidden in plain sight.

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