VULIĆ: CRIME AGAINST SERB CHILDREN POINTS TO GENOCIDAL INTENT OF THE USTAŠE REGIME

PALE, JULY 19 /SRNA/ - Historian Georgije Vulić told SRNA that the crime against Serb children in the Independent State of Croatia /NDH/ points to deeply rooted genocidal intent of the Ustaše regime, which sought to annihilate the Serb people as a whole by killing its youngest, those who represent the nation's future.

Vulić reminded that Serb children in the NDH were separated from their parents, left to die of hunger and disease, murdered in camps, thrown into pits, and many were forcibly converted to Catholicism and given to Croatian families in an attempt to permanently erase their identity. "Jastrebarsko, Sisak, Jasenovac, Prebilovci, Drakulić, Šargovac, Motike and many other places are symbols of the Serb suffering in the NDH where Serb children were killed en masse," said Vulić, who is a senior associate at the Institute of Historical Science at the University in East Sarajevo. According to available data, around 20,000 children perished in the Jasenovac system of concentration camps alone. Vulić explained that these crimes were part of the official policy of the Ustaše authorities in the NDH, who, in line with their deadly ideology, implemented a plan to convert one-third of Serbs to Catholicism, expel another third, and liquidate the remaining third. He emphasized that this suffering left a deep mark on the collective memory of the Serb people, who, already at the beginning of the Yugoslav crisis in the 1990s, made the decision not to allow genocide to happen to them again. "From that historical experience, the very idea of Republika Srpska was born. At the very end of the twentieth century, Serb children once again became targets - this time during the civil war in BiH. Although the Serb people did not allow themselves to be taken en masse to camps and other places of suffering, even during that period, Serb children were not entirely spared," Vulić said. He stated that the ideology of hatred toward Serbs did not disappear in 1945 but continued to live on in other forms, under new political and social masks. Vulić emphasized that the memory of Serb children killed in the NDH obliges the Serb people to persevere in the fight for truth and justice, and to oppose negative historical revisionism and attempts to downplay, conceal, or forget the suffering of Serbs.