It's 22 April, the day on which Serbia commemorates the victims of the Holocaust and genocide. There have been quite a few articles and reports today about Jasenovac, its history and the memory culture it has produced over the decades and I have some things to say. THREAD.

22 April is, of course, the anniversary of the day on which prisoners tried to break out of Jasenovac camp, one of the few examples of a mass prisoner break out from a concentration camp. Of the 600 who broke out, only 100 survived. So, let's start with the camp itself.

Jasenovac was an extermination camp; it was not a labour camp anymore than Auschwitz was because it had workshops. Concentration camps needed their own internal economy to be sustainable since it wasn't possible to kill all inmates in "the waiting room of death" all at once.

Nor were the victims there because, by and large, they were ideological enemies of the state. They were sent there to be killed not because of anything they had done but because of their national, religious or ethnic identity by fellow Slavs, not Nazis.

In fact, Jasenovac was the only camp in occupied Europe solely administered and run by a native fascist regime with no Nazi involvement. One of the ten largest concentration camps, it had a higher per capita death rate than Dachau. And in many ways it was more brutal.

Because there was never really an honest or cathartic discussion about what had happened in the 1940s, due to the framework the Partisans used to deal with this history, in the 1990s it was easy for nationalist extremists to exploit this trauma for their own uses.

In doing the research for my new book, I've been amazed how much socialist Yugoslavia sought to control remembrance of the war among ordinary people and how prevalent the fear was that acts of reburial of victims, for example, could turn into nationalist manifestations.

I'll never forget the photographs I saw of the corpses of dead children from Stara Gradiska or Diana Budsavljevic's registry of deceased babies and infants. They stay with you for a lifetime as do the adverts from desperate parents searching for their missing children.

Many of the photos were taken secretly by Kamilo Bresler, an ally of Diana. They were later used in the Pavelic-Artukovic indictment. Bresler's elderly mother adopted one of the surviving infants as her own. I think about the inherent moral dilemmas these actions involved a lot.

Given the role the trauma from the 1940s played in the wars of the 1990s, maybe one day someone will establish an institute where scholars from across the region can come together and work together on these difficult issues in a spirit of dialogue, reconciliation and openness.

Until that time, this day is an occasion to remember the victims of the Ustasha regime, in particular - Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croats and Muslims - an act of remembrance which should inspire not national hatred but a feeling of common humanity and solidarity. #sfsn