Jasenovac camp survivors sue Croatia for war crimes damages in US

SRNA news agency, Bijeljina, in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, 29 Apr 05

Belgrade: The survivors of the Ustasha [WWII] concentration camp of Jasenovac have filed a lawsuit against Croatia at a US court in California, asking for war crimes damages, Danko Vasovic, advisor of the New York-based Jasenovac Research Institute, has said.

Vasovic told a news conference in Belgrade that the lawsuit had been filed on the basis of evidence stemming from a document belonging to the US secret intelligence service OSS, the CIA's predecessor, which related to 21 October 1946.

He said he had obtained a copy of the document from Ilan Steinberg, the executive director of the World Jewish Congress [WJC].

The document states that "the Croatian Ustasha organization led by Ante Pavelic took 350m Swiss francs in gold coins with them out of Yugoslavia".

According to the document, the money originated in the Independent Croatian State [NDH, Croatian WWII fascist state], where Jews and Serbs had been robbed in order to support the Ustasha organization abroad.

During an attempt to smuggle out the money, 150m were confiscated by the British authorities at the Austrian-Swiss border while, according to the investigation, the remaining money, around 200m, was taken to The Vatican.

"It is claimed that the money was kept for the needs of the Ustasha movements in Spain and Argentina, but it is suspected that it actually remained in The Vatican," the document says.

Vasovic said that this was sufficient basis for the camp survivors, who are represented by US lawyer Jonathan Levy, to win their lawsuit against Croatia, as the Americans trust their own documents.