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ZAGREB, Croatia -- Croatia faced up to its fascist past last week after a court in Zagreb sentenced Dinko Sakic, the last known living commander of a World War II concentration camp, to a maximum of 20 years in prison for war crimes against civilians.
Sakic, 78, who was extradited from Argentina last year, smiled and gave a quiet round of ironic applause when the seven judges found him guilty of personal responsibility for the deaths of 2,000 people.
There was uproar in the public gallery after the verdict -- relief from the families of the victims, Jewish groups and human rights organizations, and anger from extremist Croat nationalists, one of whom attacked a human rights worker.
Sakic commanded the Jasenovac camp, dubbed the ``Auschwitz of the Balkans,'' between April and November 1944, near the end of Croatia's short but dark history as a Nazi puppet state between 1941 and 1945.
The government of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman bowed to international pressure to extradite Sakic from Argentina, where he had lived under his own name for 50 years, to try to improve the Balkan state's troubled ties with the European Union.
But Tudjman and members of the ruling elite revere Croatia's World War II past, seeing it as the first real step to Croatian independence, eventually won in 1991.
The number of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Croat anti-fascists slaughtered in the archipelago of camps along the banks of the Sava River is still subject to emotionally charged debate. Serb and Jewish groups claim hundreds of thousands were killed there, while officials like Tudjman say ``only'' 70,000-80,000 died at Jasenovac.
The court's chief judge, Drazen Tripalo, said Sakic had been found guilty of all charges, and had personally ``maltreated, tortured and killed inmates'' or did nothing to prevent his subordinates from doing the same.
The judge added: ``We hope the sentence, 55 years after the events, will be a warning that all those who committed crimes in the near or distant past will not escape justice.''
Jewish groups, which had pushed the Croatian authorities to hold the trial, said they were satisfied, even though Sakic was not tried on more-serious genocide charges.
``Croatia has found the courage to face up to its past,'' said Tommy Baer, an observer from the Jewish group B'nai B'rith International.
The testimony from 50 witnesses during the trial was harrowing. Killing at Jasenovac was not carried out in the orderly fashion of an Auschwitz or Treblinka, but in barbarous chaos -- one witness recalled how guards bludgeoned prisoners to death with sledgehammers.
Jovan Stjepanovic, a Serb survivor, said Sakic ordered all the prisoners to line up to witness a mass hanging of 21 prisoners accused of organizing a rebellion. There was not enough room on the gallows, so some of them were hung on meat hooks. A Montenegrin doctor refused to go to the gallows. Four witnesses said they saw Sakic shoot the doctor in the forehead.
Sakic mocked the testimony during the trial, dismissing it as anti-Croat propaganda.
``I have no guilty conscience whatsoever,'' he said in his concluding statement last week. He said he was following orders that were ``in accordance with my understanding of national interests and the preservation and biological survival of the nation.''
Ivo Goldstein, professor of history at the University of Zagreb, said: ``This is the best outcome for Croatia's need to build ties with Europe. If our public doesn't see that Sakic is a criminal, there is no way we can integrate with Europe.''
But the attitude of Tudjman's government toward Sakic is ambivalent at best. Last year, Nedjelko Mihanovic, a former speaker of the Croatian parliament, said: ``It (Jasenovac) couldn't have been such an awful place. I know for sure that the prisoners there even performed an operetta.''
Mihanovic is now Tudjman's adviser on ethical issues.
The past bears heavily on the present, with Croatia now at odds with the international war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, the Netherlands, over its refusal to extradite Mladen Naletilic, accused of ``ethnically cleansing'' the Bosnian city of Mostar of its Muslim inhabitants.