Clockwise from top left: March 23, 2017 event at Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC hosted by James Carafano and Nile Gardiner featuring Ivo Stier, representing an anti-Semitic and corruption-ridden HDZ government in Croatia (Mr. Ivo Stier was a youth leader of Nazi Ustasha movement); Ustasha POSTER; Croatian Jew Teodore Grunfeld is forced to take off his ring on his arrival at the Jasenovac concentration death camp by members of the Ustasha; sick and emaciated children suffering at the Jasenovac death camp.
The Washington Post in a piece titled “Trump can Cause the ‘Death of Think Tanks as We Know Them’” recently quoted Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies, “There are lots of customers for think tanks that are beyond the West Wing and the Oval Office.”
The Heritage Foundation and James Carafano, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies, ignored the Open Letter, co-signed by conservative leaders and Evangelical Christian pastors, strongly urging the Washington, DC, think tank, to cancel the event with Croatia’s HDZ politician Ivo Stier, representing an anti-Semitic and corruption-ridden government in the Balkans.
The Heritage Foundation proceeded by providing a platform to Ivo Stier, the grandson of a WWII pro-Nazi Ustasha regime colonel and the right-hand man of the commander of Croatia’s death camp Jasenovac, in which Jews, Serbs, Romas, Croatians and other marginalized groups were murdered.
Eighty percent of Croatia’s Jews were exterminated during WWII.
According to published reports, Mr. Ivo Stier actively advocated for the pro-Nazi Ustasha group while growing up in Argentina.
On March 23, 2017, Heritage’s James Carafano and Nile Gardiner, director, Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, hosted Ivo Stier, Croatia’s government minister in Washington. On that very same day, Tom Yazdgerdi, the U.S. State Department’s Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues, met with Croatia’s government officials in Zagreb.
Mr. Yazdgerdi relayed that the main reason of his visit to Croatia was to press for the restitution of property to the Holocaust survivors. Private property owned by Jews was confiscated by Croatia’s Ustasha Nazi regime more than 70 years ago.
Mr. Yazdgerdi said, “Our main message: we would like the [Croatian] government to speed up the process. Why? Because survivors [of the Holocaust] are dying every day.” According to Croatia’s media agency HINA, Mr. Yazdgerdi also warned about the plaque with pro-Ustasha symbols placed near the concentration camp memorial, which is offensive to holocaust survivors and their family members.
On February 27, 2017, the US Embassy in Zagreb immediately repudiated the neo-Nazi march of far-right nationalists, who waved an American flag, chanting WWII pro-Nazi Croatia‘s Ustasha regime slogans, saluting President Donald Trump and pledging to chase out enemies of Croatia:
“The U.S. Embassy rejects, in the strongest terms, neo-Nazi and pro-Ustasha views expressed during the demonstration of a few people in Zagreb on Sunday. We condemn any attempt to link the United States to this hateful ideology. Such a suggestion is an affront to the memories of the 186,000 U.S. soldiers who died in Europe fighting Nazi Germany and the many millions of innocent victims killed during World War II.”
Heritage’s senior fellows carried out their agenda to getting Croatia into NATO at any cost. James Dean, manager of international and diplomatic programs at Heritage Foundation, attended the Croatia Summit in Dubrovnik, hosted by Croatia’s government mired in corruption. Dean’s brief biography states that he “was active in numerous international initiatives, including the entry of Croatia and Albania into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation approved Heritage’s pieces about Croatia’s readiness to join NATO, while independent studies, Croatia’s journalists and even the UK’s foreign office raised concerns about the Balkan nation’s very weak rule of law and blocked judicial reforms. Finally, Croatia’s corrupt government officials got away by not fulfilling the main requirements for NATO accession, including the “restitution to rightful owners property confiscated by the Nazis 1933-45, and by the subsequent communist governments.”
Croatia became an unqualified NATO member in 2009, without establishing the rule of law and fully protecting property rights. Croatia’s illicit financial outflows via crime, corruption and tax evasion amounted to a staggering $35 billion during the period 2004-2013, which was 60% of the 2014 GDP.
Croatia’s taxpayers are still paying pensions to members of “Croatia’s homeland war 1941-1945.” As reported by Croatia’s daily Jutarnji List in 2013, according to the state-run Croatia pension institute, there were 13,011 remaining members of various Ustasha units, and part of the Ustasha NDH-government security forces, or their family members, receiving HRK348 million ($58 million) in pensions for 2013. They had been regularly receiving pensions since the early 90s.
The intricacy of Heritage’s clientelism which supersedes morality, goes much further here.
Croatia’s Honorary Consul to Austria, Franz Wohlfahrt, whose supervisor would be Ivo Stier, Croatia’s foreign minister and speaker at Heritage, was a fellow board member with Ed Feulner, Heritage Foundation’s board member and former president, at the Vienna-based think tank F.A. Hayek.
Franz Wohlfart, then-CEO of Austria-based world’s largest gaming and casino company Novomatic, became Croatia’s honorary consul in 2013, while reports of bribery, tax evasion, illegal software manipulation and money laundering by Novomatic’s companies in Croatia had been ignored by Croatia’s authorities. According to published reports, Wohlfart is under a bribery investigation connected to Austria’s former finance minister Karl-Heinz Grasser. Bloomberg reported on November 5, 2011, “Casinos in Paraguay, Peru and South Africa, countries where Novomatic operates, were tagged by the U.S. as money-laundering conduits for criminal bosses and drug barons.”
The Washington Post in a piece titled “Trump can Cause the ‘Death of Think Tanks as We Know Them’” quoted Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies, “There are lots of customers for think tanks that are beyond the West Wing and the Oval Office.”
Apparently, the Jews of Croatia facing threats, survivors of the Holocaust, Croatia’s citizens seeking justice, and the American public are not among The Heritage Foundation’s clients.
Jewish girl, Jasenovac concentration camp, Croatia.