ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the longstanding ambition of the nationalist elite in Serbia to have the site of the former Nazi concentration camp Sajmište (Fairground) in Belgrade transformed into a ‘Serbian Yad Vashem’, that is, a memorial to Serbian victims of genocide in the Independent State of Croatia. By deconstructing various assumptions about the historical link between Sajmište and Jasenovac that are used to justify this initiative, the chapter draws attention to the tradition of manipulation of the history of the two camps in Serbia. It also shows that the origins of the contentious interpretation of the history of Sajmište, lie in part in the ‘memory wars’ between Serbian and Croatian nationalists who, in the 1990s, skillfully manipulated the history of both Sajmište and Jasenovac, all in the context of mutual accusations of ‘genocidal tendencies’, complicity in the Holocaust, and antisemitism. Therefore, debates about Sajmište and its links with Jasenovac should be seen as yet another example of the interdependence between Serbian and Croatian nationalist discourses, which, over the past three decades have resisted attempts to forge a historically grounded culture of remembrance of the victims of World War II in Yugoslavia.
