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Between oblivion and recognition: the commemorating Roma suffering in Croatia during the Second World War

At the end of the Second World War, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was established under the leadership of a communist government. The process of integration of six socialist republics (the Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Serbia), pushed the socialist political elites of the new emerging state to promote the principles of brotherhood and unity among all ethnic groups. While a unitary/ideological process was set into motion, shameful aspect of national history were either concealed or forgotten. Due to the needs of political unification, a collective condemnation of the crimes of fascist occupiers and their local collaborators has thus been missing. In particular, the genocidal suffering of the Romani people during the war that was completely pushed out of the social and public space of the new unified state. Roma suffering was reduced to an incidental footnote in marginal historiographic papers or limited to a couple of sentences in the memoires of the participants of the war. This paper focuses on the Republic of Croatia, one of the political entity which were created after the dissolution of former Yugoslavia. While building the new democratic state, the Croatian authorities were aiming to balance the post-war ideological discourse of the socialist “Partisans” with that of the pro-fascist Ustaše of the wartime period. Yet, during process of reconciliation between the “Partisans” and “Ustaše”, Romani victims remained on the margins of public and social discourse. It is only in concomitance with the process of Croatia’s admittance to the European Union, and in the wake of increasingly better organized Romani movement, that the process of recognition of the Romani genocide received institutional and broader public support for the first time. The thesis of my study is the marginalisation of the public recognition of Roma suffering in the Second World War, which has only recently become one of the topics related to Croatia facing the remnants of its shameful past, as a consequence of political and other circumstances.

Romani peoples, Croatia, commemorating, marginalization

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