Criminals classified as victims – Society

This week, the tender expires and the selected contractor should begin to build the controversial monument to the “innocent victims of 1944/45”, which has been shaking the public in Novi Sad for several years.

Photo: BETAPHOTO / DRAGAN GOJIC

The Serbian Radical Party demands the progressive city government, as they say, to abandon the shameful idea of ​​erecting a monument in Novi Sad, supposedly to innocent victims, who were executed after the liberation of Novi Sad in 1944 and 1945.

“This decision is a very perfidious review of historical facts by convicted and convicted executioners and executioners, during the occupation of Novi Sad during World War II, real victims,” ​​said the chairman of the Committee of Radicals in the Assembly of the city of Novi Sad, Djuradj Jaksic.

Radicals point out that the scandalous decision to inflict innocent victims on innocent victims and members of the Nazi occupation army is a mockery of the anti-fascist and libertarian tradition of Novi Sad and a mockery of thousands of Serbian Jews and Roma, who were liquidated in the manner most monstrous in the infamous Novi Sad raid. 1942.

Jaksic says that this is the last moment to avoid an unusual scandal, because the City Council allocated more than 1.5 million dinars for the construction of this monument.

There is no doubt that after the liberation of Novi Sad, as in other parts of the country, the authorities at the time organized trials or executions of war criminals and collaborators of the occupiers, and that among them there were innocent victims, mainly those tried by ideological motives and that they were members of large companies.

“However, classifying the associates of the occupiers, the lower and higher officers of the Hungarian Nazi army, those who carried out liquidations during the occupation as innocent victims, is a rewriting of history and a scandal that Novi Sad does not remember.” Jaksic pointed out.

The list of “innocent” victims is said to also include the name of Janos Tot, who brutally killed five Jovandic brothers with three other Hungarian Honveds, in front of their mother Jelena.

“The suffering of the Jovandić brothers and the suffering of their mother is one of the symbols of the suffering in the Novi Sad raid. Novi Sad must not allow the revision of irrefutable historical facts, the ultimate aim of which is to make the executioner a victim.” The Serbian Radical Party demands that the progressive authorities of the city immediately suspend the construction of this monument, because that is the only way to avoid the rewriting of history and preserve the face of the libertarian and anti-fascist tradition of Novi Sad “, Jaksic concluded.

The erection of the monument, as it was called, to the “innocent victims of 1944/45” has been provoking backlash from the Novi Sad public for years.

Two years ago, the City Assembly, opposed by the opposition, voted in favor of erecting a controversial monument at the initiative of the municipal organization of the Hungarian Vojvodina Alliance, and with the support of the SNS and the Movement for Renewal of the Kingdom of Serbia.

On the white marble monument, in the form of a praptic on a pedestal, in Serbian, Hungarian and German, it will be written: “In memory of all the innocent victims.”

It is indisputable that after the liberation of Novi Sad, there were mass shootings, mainly under the label “war criminals and collaborators of the occupiers”, but also people who were targeted because of their ethnic origin – Hungarians and Germans, and those who they were labeled as “opponents of the popular government.” “.

About 1,300 names were on the list of victims. According to the previous words of the chairman of the commission for the erection of the monument, Đula Kiša (SVM), the list is an integral part of the decision on the erection of the monument.

– The joint board of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts determined the names of the innocent victims who were killed and shot by the advancing partisan army in 1944 and 1945. These are official data, Kish said in that occasion.

However, members of the opposition in the last convocation of the assembly, among 1,300 victims, found in Novi Sad several people who were convicted of crimes of the Second World War, as members of fascist forces or as collaborators.

Democrats were the first to point to Janos Tot.

– It is enough that one of those people is among those who erect a monument, for the monument to render it meaningless, eh? drugo We must not allow that, warned the chairman of the DS Provincial Committee for Vojvodina, Nebojsa Novakovic, back in January this year, with a request to withdraw the decision to erect the monument, and erased the difference between criminals and victims, between fascists and anti-fascists. or review the list of victims.

The Deputy Mayor of Novi Sad, Milan Đurić, told Danas that the Ministry of Labor, Veterans Affairs and Social Affairs gave its consent for the construction of the monument and that everything is going according to plan.

– There are no problems, the value of the construction of the monument has been estimated, a tender is underway and we are waiting for all the work to be carried out, Đurić told our newspaper. It was unable to answer Danas’ question whether the list of victims had been revised after various indications that it included the names and people who had been executed for participating in crimes or for cooperating with the fascist occupation authorities.

Rezultat

During this or next week, it will be announced who requested the construction of the disputed monument, for which a little more than a million and a half dinars has been planned in the city budget. If all goes according to plan, as the deputy mayor claims, the monument could soon be placed in the area between the Novi Sad settlements of Liman IV and Telep.

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