Serbia to block construction at former concentration camps

Serbia’s parliament will block plans for construction, including those for a shopping mall, on the grounds of former concentration camps, the country’s president said.

President Aleksandar Vucic told Efraim Zuroff, the Eastern Europe director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, on Thursday in Belgrade that a bill that would make the plans impossible would be passed this year, Zuroff told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The law would also create a memorial center in Belgrade for tens of thousands of Jews, Serbs and Roma killed by Nazis in World War II.

Originally a 1937 trade fair complex built in the then capital of Yugoslavia, one of the former camps, Staro Sajmiste, became a death camp when Nazis invaded the country in 1941. Some 30,000 died there, including 7,000 Jews.

After the fall of Communism, Staro Sajmiste and another site of a Nazi-era camp in Belgrade, Topovske Supe, were partly sold off by the state, but have been spared large-scale redevelopment, Bloomberg noted in a report Thursday.

After the war, parts of Staro Sajmiste were used as art studios, a kindergarten, a nightclub, and a restaurant. It even housed a local office of Vucic’s ruling Serbian Progressive Party. The land of Topovske Supe is slated for building a $220 million shopping mall by the closely held company Delta Holding. That may be prevented through mandatory expropriation, according to the draft bill.

Government promises to build a Holocaust memorial at Staro Sajmiste have gone unfulfilled for decades, according to The Guardian. Last month, the organized Serbian Jewish community protested development plans at the site. The former camp “was a place of misery and suffering, and that can’t be allowed to be forgotten,” said Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia President Robert Sabadoš.