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Masking the past

July 2018

July 2018

DOI:10.7765/9781526137258.00010

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132

Masking the past: the Second World War and

the Balkan Historikerstreit

A very considerable part of the Croatian political elite, supported by the Catholic

hierarchy and Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac himself, supported this national and

religious intolerance, and strongly supported policies of clericalism and racism,

marked by mass killings, forced conversions and the deportation of the Serbian

Orthodox population as well the slaughter of the Jews and Gypsies. (Dusˇan

Batakovic´, ‘The National Integration of the Serbs and Croats’)

An intriguing part of the propaganda campaign has been an attempt to equate the

supposed victimization of present-day Serbs with that of the Holocaust Jews. In

promoting the image of Serbian spiritual kinship with the Jews as fellow victims,

Belgrade has concealed Serb willingness to collaborate with the Nazis in the exter-

mination of Serbia’s Jews. (Philip Cohen, Serbia’s Secret War)

THROUGHOUT THE SERBIAN–CROATIAN conflict, the comparative genocide

debate was of particular importance. For both countries, the success of

nationalist regimes depended on their ability to present national history

as one of righteous struggle against persecution. For both Serbs and Croats, the

revision of the history of the Second World War provided a wealth of myths of

heroism and persecution. Continual portrayals of enemies as either C

ˇetniks or

Ustasˇa, as well as constant references to Second World War atrocities as

precursors of events in the 1990s, demonstrated the centrality of German and

Italian occupation to contemporary conceptions of national identity. The

preceding two chapters examined how pre-twentieth-century history was

important for nationalists in both countries. Nevertheless, the national expan-

sion and genocide, bloodshed and mayhem of these earlier times would pale in

comparison with those of the Second World War. This was to be the apogee of

the Serbian–Croatian conflict, four years when each side supposedly

unleashed full-scale genocidal terror against the other.

Thus descriptions of perpetrators and victims in the Second World War

became incredibly important. Links would be drawn between atrocities

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during the 1940s and those after 1990. David Campbell’s theory of the

‘deconstruction of historical teleologies’ provides a useful method of under-

standing how certain narratives, or views of history, have been created.

Campbell’s ‘deconstruction’, in the context of Yugoslavia, allows us to analyse

how hatred of the other has been the product of current generations of

academics and politicians, working to create the illusion of an inevitable

conflict, what Campbell terms ‘historical fatalism’. For Campbell, a ‘decon-

structive reading’ allows for the proposition that, ‘the conflict is constituted in

the present, and that “history” is a resource in the contemporary struggle’.1

Peter Novick has also identified this process in his understanding of ‘collective

memory’, arguing that present concerns, and not just the ‘past working its

will on the present’, determine what aspects of history will be used by histori-

ans and when.2In other words, history responds to present needs – there are

no eternal immutable laws that govern how the process operates.

Contrary to Anthony Smith’s position, however, history as a resource was

not used as a means to relive a Golden Age, but rather to revise and exagger-

ate the horrors of the past (in this case the Second World War). History could

then be placed within a teleological framework, similar to that described by

Frye, Tudor, and others. Every negative aspect of the War was re-examined,

revised and re-presented to the people, and a clear dichotomy was created

between the righteous and suffering self, who resisted Nazism and saved Jews,

and the genocidal Nazi-like enemy nation. Such a view of the Second World

War made Tito’s SFRY appear as a historical anomaly, with the 1991 war

figuring as the normal state of affairs between Serbs and Croats. Milica Bakic´-

Hayden, in her analysis of ‘nesting orientalisms’, took issue with the idea that

Serbian and Croatian antagonisms were primordial and deeply rooted in

history. As she explained:

The explanatory slogan ‘ancient hatreds’ of the South Slavic peoples . . . is but a

rhetorical screen obscuring the modernity of conflict based on contested notions

of state, nation, national identity, and sovereignty . .. all Serbs are identified with

Chetniks, all Croats with Ustashas and all Muslims with Islamic fundamentalists,

or fascist collaborators. By evoking one of the lowest aspects of their historical

association and ignoring the significance of their other interactions and integra-

tions (most notably 45 years of post World War II experience), each group

perpetuates not only disparaging rhetoric but destructive modes of association.3

Such a view was advanced by both sides, who argued that the contempo-

rary conflict was merely the latest instalment in an ongoing story of genocide

and terror, of which the Second World War was one of the most violent

episodes. Michael Ignatieff’s use of Sigmund Freud’s ‘narcissism of minor

differences’ is thus an accurate description of how each side magnified the

evils of the others in an attempt to whitewash their own crimes. As he put it:

‘Nationalist politicians on both sides have used the narcissism of minor differ-

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ences and turned it into a monstrous fable according to which their own side

appears as blameless victims, the other side as genocidal killers. All Croats

become Ustashe assassins, all Serbs become Chetnik beasts.’4

A short overview of the Second World War

The Second World War was an era of devastation for both Serbs and Croats.

The Germans invaded on 5 April 1941, supported by Italian, Hungarian and

Bulgarian forces.5The Germans and Italians and their allies took control of

the country within two weeks, soon establishing puppet states in both Serbia

and Croatia. In Serbia, the Germans launched Operation Punishment, which

razed Belgrade to the ground and resulted in 17,000 civilian deaths. Soon

after the Yugoslav government fled, General Milan Nedic´, Yugoslavia’s

former minister of war, formed a ‘Government of National Salvation’.6In

Croatia, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was formed under Ante

Pavelic´, the leader of an Italian-trained insurgency group, the Ustasˇa. While

Serbs generally remained loyal to King Aleksander and the Yugoslav govern-

ment in exile, many Croats saw the NDH as their liberation from over two

decades of Serbian control. This initial support soon dampened, as Croatia was

forced to cede most of Dalmatia to Italy, and northern Slovenia to Germany

under the Treaty of Rome. While Bosnia-Hercegovina was joined to the NDH

in compensation, many nationalists felt betrayed by a reduction in their terri-

tory.7As well, many Ustasˇa officers and soldiers were poorly trained, and

Pavelic´’s distinct lack of charisma and inability to hold mass rallies reduced

his exposure among the population. Nevertheless, the lack of credible resist-

ance was also noticeable. Both the Croatian Peasants Party and the Catholic

Church remained largely passive.8

At the same time, a degree of support for the regime existed, and large

numbers of Croats did join the Ustasˇa and the more popular Domobran. While

Croat writers have downplayed Ustasˇa crimes, the scale of the atrocities was

immense. Large numbers of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, Communists, and Croatians

hostile to the regime were interned in concentration camps, while countless

others were massacred in towns and villages. In contrast with the German

camps in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Serbia, in Croation camps the Ustasˇa

were directly involved in the administration and in the orchestration of the

killings. In addition, some 200,000 Serbs were forcibly converted to

Catholicism.9

In Serbia, the Nedic´ regime enjoyed some support. By 1942, Nedic´’s

Serbian State Guard numbered 13,400 men, who worked closely with the

3,600 men in Dimitrije Ljotic´’s fascist Zbor movement.10 More famous

however were the C

ˇetniks – Serbian royalist irregulars who pledged to restore

the monarchy. While the C

ˇetniks of General Drazˇa Mihailovic´ were committed

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to ousting the Germans, the smaller C

ˇetnik group of Kosta Pecˇanac broke

early with Mihailovic´, and openly collaborated with the Germans.11 If the

ˇetniks were officially supported by the Allies at the beginning of the war,

their reluctance to engage the Germans, for fear of reprisals, and their violent

conflicts with Communist forces eventually lost them Allied favour.

Hampered by indiscipline and acts of cruelty, which included rapes and

looting, they were eventually reviled by most non-Serbs. Alienating potential

support among Croats and Moslems, they committed massacres in Bosnia-

Hercegovina and Croatia, making them as hated as the Ustasˇa.12 Mihailovic´’s

anti-Communism, coupled with massacres carried out in his name, eventu-

ally led to his capture, show trial, and execution in 1946.

In short, the wartime records of some groups of Serbs and Croats were

dubious, which allowed later historians to cast doubt on the conduct of each

nation during the Second World War. Some groups had collaborated with the

occupiers, some had committed massacres of civilian populations. At the same

time, each side did participate in the Communist Partisan resistance move-

ment, which greatly increased in popularity as German defeat became certain.

Nevertheless, there were clear qualitative differences between the Allied-

backed C

ˇetnik monarchists and their small-scale massacres, and the

Nazi-backed Ustasˇa with their Croatian-run concentration camps. The work

of Serbian and Croatian propagandists involved rehabilitating the role of one’s

own side, while demonising the wartime activities of the other. Thus the other

was described as an enthusiastic and active collaborator with the Nazis, an

instigator of genocidal aggression against other nations, and a keen supporter

of the Holocaust against the Jews. Here, active Nazi collaborators were seen to

be as bad as the Nazis themselves, while being a victim of these two groups

made one morally equal to the Jews.

Rehabilitating the NDH: conflicting perceptions among the Croats

One of the earliest aspects of Croatian nationalism revolved around rehabili-

tating the NDH. Croatian Diaspora accounts tended to be pro-Ustasˇa, while

maintaining an ambiguous view of the German occupation. More official

accounts in the 1990s, by contrast, downplayed the importance of the NDH

and its crimes, and sought to reduce the importance of its support during the

war. It was portrayed simply as a reaction against Serbian genocidal ambi-

tions. Earlier writings, such as those of the Croatian Liberation Movement in

Argentina, exonerated the Ustasˇa regime by stressing the resistance nature of

the movement. Pavelic´ became merely the ‘founder and representative of the

revolutionary Liberation Movement of the Croatian people.’13 Such writings

favourably compared the Ustasˇa to earlier French and American revolution-

ary movements, with their main goals consisting of defending Croatia against

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Serbian aggression and against international Communism. There was no

doubt in the minds of early Croatian writers that the NDH represented the

outcome of a long historical process, and was warmly welcomed by Croats,

‘with unprecedented enthusiasm, spontaneously and unanimously’, as one

account had it.14

These early accounts also vindicated the persecution of Serbs and the

Orthodox Church, claiming that its influence had to be curbed, since it was ‘a

centre of propaganda and activity of Serbian chauvinism, Serbian imperial-

ism, and hostility against the Croatian people.’15 Ustasˇa actions emerged as

‘self-defensive’, protecting Croats and their property, even if massacres of

Serbs were the inevitable result. While this type of thinking was largely

confined to earlier accounts, among later writers Vladimir Mrkoci would also

proclaim the self-defensive nature of the Ustasˇa’s activities. He rejected the

charge that Ustasˇism could be fascistic, since ‘the fundamental requirement

for fascism’, the state, did not exist during the Ustasˇa’s formation. That

Pavelic´ and his cohorts were sponsored and equipped by Fascist Italy seemed

irrelevant to this analysis. As with earlier writers, Mrkoci operated from the

perspective that the Ustasˇa was fundamentally a defensive organisation,

‘created as a reaction to Serb terror, to fascism implemented by Serbs through

fascist organizations of Chetniks’.16

It fell to other émigré writers, such as Ivo Omercˇanin, to highlight the

differences between the Ustasˇa and the Nazis – and there were supposedly

many of these. Omercˇanin maintained that, while Croats approved of their

independent state, which gave them more autonomy and freed them from

Serbian domination, they still chafed under Nazi rule.17 Thus the author drew

a sharp distinction between support for an independent state, and support for

Nazism, two institutions that were fundamentally different. In support of this,

Omercˇanin traced the origins of a pro-Allied Croatian ‘putsch’, which was

supposed to have begun in early 1943, featuring such notable Ustasˇa officials

as Interior Minister Mladen Lorkovic´, and Ante Vokic´, Minister for Home

Defence.18

The reason it failed, Omercˇanin revealed, was because of American poli-

ticking, and a reluctance to land Allied troops in Dalmatia to support an

indigenous Croatian rebellion. However, he noted that the putsch did succeed

internally, since civil and military authorities were ready to depose the

government and work with the Allies for a democratic independent Croatia.19

Omercˇanin was clearly trying to vindicate the Ustasˇa position, using anec-

dotal evidence to prove that the leading lights of the movement were also

anti-fascist. For Omercˇanin, the former Ustasˇa chargé d’affairs in Berlin, this

putsch may have been a useful means of legitimating his role in the govern-

ment. The putsch argument was also advanced by Ante Beljo, although it is

clear from a reading of his description (although he doesn’t specifically claim

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this) that any putsch would have been largely opportunistic, since the Italians

had just surrendered, and the Ustasˇa were expecting ‘the landing of Allied

troops on the Croatian Adriatic coast’.20

Generally, early Diaspora accounts promoted the Ustasˇa as a genuine

nationalist and revolutionary movement, one that was pro-independence and

anti-Nazi. Such views became rife after 1990, when many revisionists moved

back to Croatia. The existence of émigré magazines such as NDH, edited by a

former Ustasˇa official and the son-in-law of Ante Pavelic´, was in part a result

of Tudjman’s reliance on Diaspora Croats and their financial contributions.21

NDH was notable for its continuation of Croatian Liberation Movement

themes – the ‘truth’ about the Second World War, as well as poems and arti-

cles eulogising Ante Pavelic´ and the Ustasˇa. The Partisans were often the

subject of attack, and were denounced as ‘Yugoslav criminals’ and ‘Serb and

Croat scum’.22

Such magazines accompanied a spate of revisionist books, which sought

to clear the Ustasˇa’s bad name, giving a human face to those who were inte-

grally involved in the regime. One troubling manifestation was the

publication of the memoirs of Ivo Rojnica, the former Ustasˇa administrator for

Dubrovnik, later decorated by Tudjman. Rojnica’s own skewed understand-

ing of history was obvious. He argued that 250,000 Serbs were expelled to

Serbia from Ustasˇa-controlled Croatia, and were therefore not killed, while

claiming that only 420 Serbs were forcibly converted to Catholicism.23

Another troubling memoir, by Eugen Dido Kvaternik, was reprinted in 1995

with financial support from the Croatian Ministry for Science and

Technology. Kvaternik, a founder of the Croatian death-camp system,

produced a work notable only for its descriptions of ‘courtly life’ in Pavelic´’s

inner circle, while omitting any reference to the atrocities committed by the

regime.24 The main thrust of these Diaspora accounts was that the NDH was

both a revolutionary and a popular nationalist movement that was

suppressed by the Communists. The atrocities committed by the regime were

rarely discussed, while many of the worst war criminals were whitewashed as

heroes who only wanted to create an independent homeland.

The political climate in Croatia clearly provided for the emergence of such

militant and revisionist views. Tudjman did little to discourage them, nor

could he. Most of his campaign contributions, and the money needed to

finance the war, came from Diaspora Croats, among whom such views were

not uncommon. Nevertheless, Tudjman also had Western support to consider,

and for this reason government propaganda dealing with the NDH was

markedly different from that of the CLM or NDH magazine. Officially, support

for the NDH was seen to be largely a reaction to Serbian atrocities in royalist

Yugoslavia, ‘the prison-house of nations’. As was indicated in the last chapter,

the first Yugoslavia was condemned as an instrument of Serbian domination.

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Croatian support for the NDH was therefore anti-Serbian, rather than pro-

German or pro-Italian.25 Such writings supported the self-defensive nature of

the NDH, but denied that the Ustasˇa were either revolutionary or popular.

Tudjman’s own writings, for example, advance Vladko Macˇek’s Croatian

Peasants Party as the prime focus of Croatian loyalty. This ‘middle of the road’

party, Tudjman maintained, had the advantage of being ‘[p]olitically equidis-

tant from both Pavelic´’s Ustasˇism and Tito’s revolutionary movement’.26

A similar view was taken by Philip J. Cohen in his controversial pro-

Croatian revision of Serbian history, Serbia’s Secret War. Cohen described a

level of support as low as 2 per cent for the Ustasˇa regime, which he credited

to a general dislike of their ‘notorious brutality’.27 He dismissed claims that

the Croats supported the regime positing that the 312,000-strong Croatian

Home Guard were ‘notoriously unreliable as collaborators’, possessing ‘poor

morale’ and an unwillingness to fight that eventually led them to defect to the

Partisans.28

In reviewing Croatian interpretations of the NDH, we find two conflicting

forms of propaganda. One is overtly pro-Ustasˇa, while the other is cautiously

against it, but puts more effort into minimising its importance than into

condemning it. This paradoxical strategy is best explained by the division of

loyalties under which the Tudjman regime laboured. First, it had financial

and moral obligations to the Diaspora Croats, and thus a vindication of

wartime Croatia and a denial of Ustasˇa atrocities were integral to external

support for the war effort. At the same time, Tudjman faced heavy criticism

from the international community for his revisionism. The solution lay in

downplaying the Croats’ support for the NDH, while making a clear distinc-

tion between wanting independence and being pro-Nazi. The NDH as a haven

from Serbian genocide was another popular argument. To maintain power,

Tudjman pursued a complicated balancing act, trying to please both the

Croatian people and also highly critical Western governments.

Serbian views of the Ustasˇa and C

ˇetniks

Serbian historians were also preoccupied with the Second World War. While

the demonisation of Croatians and Moslems was essential, so too was the

vindication of C

ˇetnik history. Any ambiguous alliances with the Germans or

Italians were excised from history books, leaving a picture of the C

ˇetniks as

righteous freedom fighters, engaged in a liberation struggle against the Nazis.

Novels were often a favourite means of reinterpreting history. They could be

emotive, convincing, and non-threatening at the same time. Momir

Krsmanovic´’s The Blood-Stained Hands of Islam was designed to promote a

Serbian view of The Second World War to an English-speaking audience. The

author, an eastern Bosnian, was heralded as one of the new breed of Serbian

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writers, and his previous work, The Drina Runs Red with Blood, was a best-

seller. This book promised an insider’s account of the C

ˇetniks and their

national struggle, motivated by ‘the desire to save the Serbian nation and

wage an honourable struggle for justice, truth and the right of that nation to

a place under the sun’.29 This was set against the ‘vengeful and blood-thirsty

Turks and Catholics of Croatia and Bosnia’.30

Much of this book was set predictably in the Krajina, the scene of count-

less battles between Ustasˇa and C

ˇetnik forces. Krsmanovic´ arguably aimed to

vindicate Serbia’s position in the 1990s by demonstrating how the Croatian

Serbs had spent most of the twentieth century defending themselves from the

threat of genocide. Important also was nostalgia for Royalist Yugoslavia.

Books such as this featured graphic descriptions of Ustasˇa ethnic cleansing

operations, as well as torture, rape, and other atrocities. One description of an

Ustasˇa rape of two Serbian women, followed by the cutting off of their breasts

and the slitting of their throats, was typical.31 Curiously, the Ustasˇa

commanders were given names such as Stipe and Franjo, obvious references

to contemporary Croatian politicians. Others, presumably Moslem Ustasˇa,

were called Alija and Ibrahim. Novels such as this advanced a series of pro-

Serbian myths, similar to Schöpflin’s ‘myths of redemption and suffering’, and

‘myths of powerlessness and compensation for the powerless’, where the Serbs

were primarily the victims of the Second World War, and had thus earned

their right to an autonomous republic in Bosnia.32

Novelists like Krsmanovic´ inflated the level of Croatian collaboration,

describing how 80 per cent of the Croatian and Moslem male population joined

the Ustasˇa against the Serbs – a statistic that is historically untenable.33 This

new generation of novelists also attempted to rehabilitate Milan Nedic´, casting

him as a martyr for Serbia, who collaborated with the Nazis in order to minimise

German atrocities against the Serbs. Thus his collaboration was dismissed as

‘efforts to preserve his people during the harsh enemy occupation’.34

Similar views were to be found in Slobodan Selenic´’s 1989 Timor mortis,

dealing with the Ustasˇa massacres of Serbs during the Second World War.

This author repeated a common pattern in Serbian writing – that Croatian

aggression stretched far back into the remote past. Like those of Krsmanovic´,

his descriptions of Croatian atrocities were extremely graphic.35 Similarly,

Marjorie Radulovic´’s Rage of the Serbs, historically situated in the Second

World War, attempted to vindicate Serbian history. She praised the heroism

and righteousness of the C

ˇetniks, their love of justice, their universal support

amongst the Serbian people, and their single-minded devotion to freeing their

country from Nazism. At the same time, Tito’s Partisans were condemned as

Ustasˇa collaborators, while the Ustasˇa were dehumanised as genocidal

beasts.36

Vuk Draskovic´’s Noz also dwelt on similar themes, namely the genocide of

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Serbs by Ustasˇa, which he placed at well over one million people. His work

described the legacy of the death-camps in Croatia, how two-thirds of all

Serbian families had lost relatives to the Ustasˇa, and how many more were

sentenced to lengthy prison terms under the Communists for trying to keep

the memory of their tragedy alive. Second World War massacres become a

‘Calvary’ for the Serbian people. Draskovic´ also attacked the Croats for their

revisionism, arguing generally: ‘those who hide a crime have the intention to

commit it anew’.37

Of course, with this renewed interest in the C

ˇetniks came a glorification

and ‘performance’ of their actions as well. C

ˇetnik hats, uniforms, and flags

became popular fashion accessories, especially among paramilitary units

fighting in Croatia and Bosnia. Arkan caused a sensation when he attired

himself in full C

ˇetnik regalia during his 1995 wedding. His wife, the well-

known turbofolk singer C

ˇecˇa, was dressed as the ‘Maid of Kosovo’ (Kosovka

djevojka), the Mary Magdalen-esque figure who nursed Serbian soldiers as

they lay dying on the battlefield.38 As with Kosovo fever, C

ˇetnik kitsch was to

be found everywhere. Various journals, including Duga, Pogledi, and Srpska

Recˇ, worked actively to rehabilitate the C

ˇetniks. Warlords like Vojislav S

˘esˇelj

encouraged their followers to destroy anything bearing Tito’s name, while

calling for the re-establishment of the monarchy.39 As in Croatia, wartime

collaborators were rehabilitated. Dimitrije Ljotic´ was exonerated in a series of

articles published in Pogledi, while the Partisans and the C

ˇetniks were

condemned for inciting German wrath against the population.40 Such writ-

ings performed a similar function to those in Croatia – they stressed the

self-defensive nature of Serbian actions in the war, even presenting obvious

collaborators as protectors of the Serbs against the Germans. The Second

World War’s participants were glorified as either great heroes, liberators, or

defenders.

Croatian views of the C

ˇetniks

For Croatian historians, the ambiguous nature of C

ˇetnik history had been a

worrying phenomenon. Presented equally in historical accounts as heroes

and collaborators, the C

ˇetniks still enjoyed a better reputation than the

Ustasˇa. An important objective of Croatian propaganda was portraying the

ˇetniks as genocidal aggressors, who were every bit as evil, if not worse,

than Croatia’s Fascists.41 The basic argument was as follows: the C

ˇetniks had

little interest in liberating the country from the Germans and Italians.

Rather, the Second World War was merely a backdrop for the continuing

expansion of Greater Serbia, which was to include almost 90 per cent of

NDH territory. For this reason, C

ˇetnik goals were obvious: ‘the destruction of

the NDH and cleansing of the Croatian and Muslim population from these

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territories in order to annex them to Greater Serbia’.42

Philip Cohen’s analysis was little different, seeing ‘terror and genocide’ as

the C

ˇetniks’ main instruments in their quest for ‘the expansion of Serbia and

the assimilation or elimination of non-Serb populations’.43 As he further elab-

orated: ‘Like the Nazis, who believed that all Germans must live within one

large, ethnically pure, German state, the Chetniks believed that all Serbs must

live in one large, ethnically pure, Serbian state.’44 That the C

ˇetniks might be

seeking revenge for atrocities committed in the NDH was simply not discussed.

Rather, the C

ˇetniks were presented as genocidal fanatics, who were trying to

exterminate the Croats in order to build their super-state. For them, the war

and the occupation of their country did nothing to change their expansionist

strategies, which were timeless, and infinitely flexible, since the C

ˇetniks could

seemingly side with both the Germans and the Allies at the same time, Nedic´

‘manoeuvr[ing] politically with Berlin to secure the creation of Greater Serbia

under German patronage’, while the C

ˇetniks were preparing for the day when

they would ‘seize power after the Germans were ousted . .. by the Allies’.45

The C

ˇetniks were also accused of formulating a plan for genocide before

the establishment of the Ustasˇa death-camp system. The C

ˇetnik commander

Stevan Moljevic´’s ‘Homogeneous Serbia’, yet another essay on Greater Serbia,

was frequently cited to balance out atrocity accusations levelled at the Croats.

Drazˇa Mihailovic´’s ‘Instructions’ of December 1941 were also advanced as

proof that the C

ˇetniks were using the war as a means of creating an ‘ethnically

cleansed’ Greater Serbia. For Croatian writers, Mihailovic´ was little more than

a genocidal lunatic, and his sole ambition was to drive Croats, Moslems, and

other non-Serbians from Bosnia-Hercegovina. The C

ˇetnik claim to be staging

an uprising against the occupying powers was cited as the ‘formal reason’ for

fighting. Of course, the true reason was bringing about an ethnically cleansed

Greater Serbia, through ‘Chetnik terror and genocidal crimes’.46 The descrip-

tions of C

ˇetnik crimes were often extremely graphic, mirroring the Serbs’ use

of such imagery:

Physical destruction took the form of massacres, hangings, decapitation, burning,

throwing victims into pits and killing them with various objects. Victims were in

most cases tortured before being killed . . . rape of Muslim and Croatian women

and girls so as to nationally and religiously degrade them. There were two espe-

cially significant forms of indirect Chetnik crimes. These were robbery and forced

conversion of Catholics and Muslims into the Serbian Orthodox faith . . . The

forced conversion to the Serbian Orthodox faith aimed at further degrading the

victims and destroying that deepest of ties to the Croatian or Muslim nationality.47

Croatian writers also stressed the enormous size of the C

ˇetnik movement.

A large C

ˇetnik membership was often contrasted with a small Ustasˇa member-

ship – the implication being that Serbs were more genocidal than Croats. One

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Croatian historian claimed that some 300 C

ˇetnik organisations existed in

Bosnia, with another 200 in Croatia by 1941. These organisations were

supposedly famous for their terror and barbarity, as well as their penchant for

murdering large numbers of Croats and Muslims.48 Croat historians also

presented Mihailovic´ as a dangerous manipulator with direct communication

with all his units in the field. This was a highly contested assumption, since

many C

ˇetnik groups operated in isolation, with a great deal of decentralisation

of authority, and many were not even in radio communication with each

other. However, what was important in the context of war was to prove that

the C

ˇetniks were a unified cohesive force, all bent on the genocide of the Croats

and the Moslems. Loosely co-ordinated bands of mercenaries did not present

the same level of threat. At worst, such people could be likened to the Turks

slaughtering the Armenians, but not the Nazis and their well-oiled apparatus.

Another popular argument held that the C

ˇetniks had openly collaborated

with the Italians and Germans, in order to exterminate Croats on NDH terri-

tory. Supposedly, Italian and German forces supplied the C

ˇetniks with

weapons, food, clothing, and even local currency when they agreed to exter-

minate Croatian and Moslems on behalf of the occupiers.49 Such claims seem

to have been exaggerated by Croatian historians, who paradoxically argued

that C

ˇetnik unofficial collaboration was somehow worse than the official

highly publicised Ustasˇa variety. Tim Judah has argued that, by 1943, both

the C

ˇetniks and the Partisans had commenced dialogue with the Germans,

each seeking an alliance against the other. As was clear from wartime

accounts, the C

ˇetniks were willing to side with the Germans if it could mean

the destruction of the Partisans. While these negotiations ultimately failed,

owing to a lack of German interest, the C

ˇetniks were willing to collaborate, to

increase their strength against Partisan forces. It is also clear that in

Montenegro they did accept help from the Italians during the Italian surren-

der in 1943. However, it is highly misleading to suggest that C

ˇetniks

throughout the war collaborated with the Germans and Italians in order to

carry out the genocide of Croats and Moslems.50

For Croatian writers, the attempted genocide of Croats and Moslems justi-

fied their presence in Ustasˇa and Domobran units. These two groups were

forced to defend themselves against ‘C

ˇetnik-Communist units’, which were

formed in the forests in Bosnia-Hercegovina. In this way, they were not guilty

of collaboration, since they were merely reacting to the Serbs, who, ‘following

the example of their Vlach ancestors, began to exterminate the Croat and

Muslim population of the Bihac region in horrible and mercyless [sic]

massacres’.51 Further, Pavelic´’s crimes were excused on the basis that he was

merely countering ‘C

ˇetnik terrorists with terror of their own’, which in any

case was not as ruthless as that of the Serbs in Serbia, where ‘the persecution

of Jews was even more thorough’.52

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In sum, what emerges from a reading of Croatian perceptions of the

Second World War is the reactive nature of Croatian activities. For these

writers, the Serbian C

ˇetniks seemingly had the upper hand throughout

Bosnia-Hercegovina, and were busy instigating a genocide of Croats and

Moslems. The problem, of course, was that it was the Ustasˇa who were (offi-

cially, at the very least) in control of Bosnia-Hercegovina, not the C

ˇetniks. It

was the Ustasˇa who had the power of the state behind them, as well as Italian

and German support. Nevertheless, this view of the C

ˇetniks as unrestrained

genocidal killers seemingly rang true for the Croatian public.

Tudjman himself used the concept of a genocidal C

ˇetnik movement to

generalise Serbian guilt. He suggested that ‘Macˇek’s middle-of-the-road

Croatian Peasant party was to remain the chief political force opposed to the

revolutionary NOP on Croatian soil, just as Mihailovic´’s C

ˇetnik movement was

in Serbia.’53 While these two movements were likened in terms of support,

morally they were far apart, according to Tudjman, who placed the C

ˇetniks on

a par morally and philosophically with the Ustasˇa, not the CPP. Tudjman’s

later development of this argument made his position more obvious:

Both the Ustasˇa and C

ˇetnik movements were equally the expression of mutually

opposing ideas concerning nation and state and of the programs for their imple-

mentation, both stemming from the judgement that coexistence in a common

state was impossible. This means that Dr. A. Pavelic´ and General D. Mihailovic´, in

the circumstances of the Second World War, found themselves as the forefront of

nationally exclusive and irreconcilable movements, which sought equally to

exploit those circumstances for the realization of their respective national

programs.54

Thus C

ˇetnik and Ustasˇa were paralleled, in terms of their level of atroci-

ties, their ideology, their modus operandi, and their aims during the war.55

Croatian writers ignored the fact that one was a Nazi-backed, Italian-trained

terrorist group, and the other, a Royalist, Allied-backed, anti-German and

anti-Communist resistance movement. Tudjman implied that, because most

Serbs supported a genocidal movement with an expansionist political project,

all Serbs were tarred with the C

ˇetnik legacy, and, by implication, with a legacy

of genocide. At the same time, since Croats were mainly CCP supporters, their

culpability was significantly reduced.

Anti-Semitism in Croatia: Stepinac and the people

How Jews were treated in Yugoslavia during the Second World War became

another subject of heated debate. If each side was legitimately to claim to be

the victims of genocide, of the type experienced by the Jews, then their own

relationship with the Jews was crucial. For both Serbs and Croats, Jewish

history during the war needed to be carefully revised, to highlight only the

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positive aspects of their historical relationship. Similarly, the other had to be

presented as anti-Semitic collaborators who had participated actively in the

Final Solution. Both sides eagerly embarked on this exercise, and were not

ashamed to manipulate Jewish leaders in the process.

Croatian writers pursued a dual strategy of touting their own love of Jews,

while condemning the Serbs for their complicity in the Holocaust. One aspect

of Croatian revisionism was the wholesale rehabilitation of Archbishop

Alojzije Stepinac, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia during the

war. Croats devoted a great deal of energy to proving that Stepinac was a great

friend of the Jews, and inspired most Croats to help them during the war. Of

course, Stepinac, like most of the cast of characters in the region, had some

rather dubious credentials. As Archbishop of Zagreb, Stepinac officiated at the

Te Deum that gave thanks for the foundation of the Ustasˇa state.56 At first,

Stepinac appeared to have been no different from the many Croats who had

had great expectations of the regime. However, his enthusiasm soured greatly

as the war dragged on and the atrocities of the Ustasˇa came to light. He is

generally painted as a naive and idealistic man, who, while hating the horrors

of war, saw Pavelic´ as a hero and saviour of his people.57

While he refused to denounce the regime officially, there is evidence that

Stepinac did help some Jews – aiding children to escape to Palestine, and

donating food and money to Jews in hiding.58 What emerged was the portrait

of a man sitting on the fence, symbolically supporting the NDH, and condemn-

ing Ustasˇa crimes as far as he could without incurring danger to his person,

while secretly easing his conscience with private acts of piety and kindness.

Nevertheless, while he seemingly helped some of the Jews, he expressed little

remorse over the forced conversions of an estimated 200,000 Serbs, often at

gunpoint.59 Accused of collaboration by the Partisans, Stepinac stood trial in

September 1946.60 He was subsequently sentenced to 16 years imprison-

ment, served five years, and then returned to his native village, where he died

in 1960.61

Stepinac, despite his wartime record, was completely rehabilitated by

Croatian historians. His supposed love of the Jews was cited as proof of

Croatian philosemitism during the Second World War. One writer noted how

70 Croats received ‘The Certificate of Honour’ and ‘The Medal of the

Righteous’ from Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as proof of Croatian goodwill

during the war, similarly noting how, as early as 1936, Stepinac supported

Austrian and German Jews by founding ‘Action to help refugees’ and

‘Croatian Caritas’ (1938). 62 Stepinac was also credited with saving 60

inmates of the Jewish Old People’s Home in Zagreb, preserving the private

library of the Zagreb Chief Rabbi Miroslav Shalom Freiberger at his request,

and publicly condemning the destruction of Zagreb’s main synagogue in

1941.63

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Stepinac’s usefulness as a symbol of Croatian tolerance was not lost on

Franjo Tudjman. In one lengthy defence of Stepinac, Tudjman dismissed the

accusations against him as having ‘even less of a foundation than does the

Jasenovac distortion’.64 He later emphasised that Pope John Paul II’s visit to

Croatia, and Stepinac’s beatification by the Vatican, completely exonerated

Croatia of any wrongdoing during the Second World War. Stepinac, it

seemed, had become the symbol of Croatia’s wartime relationship with the

Jews. As Tudjman’s logic impelled him to explain:

With the beatification, the Holy Father and the Vatican sided with this Croatia

and Croatian people against attempts to accuse the whole Croatian people of

genocide and fascism. The Holy Father, the Vatican, and the Catholicism, all said

that Stepinac was not a criminal, as was not the Croatian people. That is a contri-

bution to the truth about the Croatian people in WW II and the truth about the

contemporary Croatia.65

The Vatican’s support for Stepinac was extremely important, further

proving that he was a friend of the Jews, as well as a Croatian martyr against

both Nazism and Communism, and Tudjman cleverly manipulated Stepinac’s

rehabilitation to clean the Croatian wartime record. However, his portrayal of

Stepinac’s beatification is not entirely in keeping with the facts, and seems to

be more wishful thinking than anything else. Stepinac was appointed

Cardinal primarily for his resistance to Communism, and for his condemna-

tion of Partisan attacks on Catholic clergy after the war. By the end of 1945,

an estimated 273 priests had been killed by the Partisans, while countless

more had been arrested, or had gone ‘missing’. Stepinac was targeted by the

Communist authorities only after his condemnation, and he stood trial a year

later for collaboration with the NDH regime.66 Tudjman’s claim of ‘innocence’

is thus highly misleading. Generally, Croats described Stepinac as an outspo-

ken critic of the Nazis and a ‘friend of the Jews’, because of his wartime efforts

to save them. The tarring of Stepinac, one writer posited, was done solely to

deflect attention from the dishonourable conduct of the Serbian Orthodox

Church.67

Stepinac became useful as a leader who constantly stood up to the Ustasˇa,

offering passive spiritual resistance. In Croatian writings, such resistance was

often contrasted to the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church, which was

described as bent on persecuting Jews and promoting Greater Serbia, which

was condemned as a ‘racist ideology’.68 So too was Serbian literary culture

condemned. Ljubica Stefan’s From Fairy Tale to Holocaust was a typical

example of this type of thinking, tracing the ancient roots of Serbian anti-

Semitism. A large section of her work was devoted to reviewing various

anti-Semitic folk tales, assembled by Vuk Karadzic´ in 1853. One featured

work was the ‘The Yids’ (Civuti), the story of Hansel and Gretel, notable for the

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fact that the ‘wicked witch’ was a Jewish woman. In Stefan’s account of them,

these folk tales encouraged Serbs to see the Jewish people as those who ‘chased

after the gentile children with knives and forks to eat them, which presents the

Jews as cannibals.’69 Certainly as interesting as the tales themselves is Stefan’s

belief that Serbian anti-Semitism could be traced from nineteenth-century

fairy tales to the political traditions of Greater Serbia, and then into the twen-

tieth century, where Serbia was ‘the most trustworthy ally of the Third

Reich’.70

While the Serbs were under direct military occupation, with strict curfews

and a particularly brutal police force, Stefan argued that the Serbs had an

independent, autonomous state, complete with ‘a government, organised

ministries, independent governments in cities and villages, its own army

equipped by the Germans.’71 The Serbs were able to gain such autonomy,

asserted Stefan, because of their long tradition of anti-Semitism, and their

eagerness to participate in the Final Solution. She also argued that the

Orthodox Church was instrumental in the genocide of the Jews, since they

functioned as ‘a sort of a political party and even racist’, while they ‘totally

neglected pastoral and spiritual work’.72

This form of ‘counteridentification’ was crucial during the 1990s, as it

showed the continuation, once again, of an age-old Serbian hatred of all

things non-Serb, and a desire to expand the Serbian state – and destroy every-

thing in its path. Thus, for Stefan, and for many others, the Jews and the

Croats were fellow victims of Serbian aggression during the Second World

War. More often than not, Croatian claims of Serbian anti-Semitism were

exaggerated. While it was clear that the Serbian puppet government and

certain Orthodox officials such as Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic´ maintained anti-

Semitic views (in Velimirovic´’s case from the Second World War well into the

1990s),73 there is little to support the idea that the Serbs actively and enthu-

siastically aided in the Holocaust. Serbs had little autonomy within Serbia

during the war; this was a country occupied by German troops. Even Philip

Cohen, after his lengthy attack on the Serbs, was forced to admit that ‘it is

indisputable that the executioners of Serbia’s Jews were German army person-

nel or regular police. However, the role of the Serbs as active collaborators in

the destruction of the Jews has remained under-explored in Holocaust litera-

ture.’74 While their role may perhaps underexplored, Cohen was unable to

argue convincingly that anti-Semitism was an important aspect of Serbian

nationalism during the Second World War – important enough at least to

have inspired an active role in the Holocaust.

That a large number of Serbs joined the Partisans and the C

ˇetniks does

indicate that there was little support for the Nedic´ regime. Futhermore, it

seems that there was little love lost between Germans and Serbs. Germans

considered the Serbs to be treacherous and dangerous, remembering the

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heavy losses they sustained at Serbian hands during the First World War.75

Christopher Browning’s analysis of the German occupation of Serbia suggests

that support for the Nedic´ regime was much lower than the level alleged by

the Croats.76 While the Serbian Orthodox Church promoted anti-Semitism to

some extent, this did not translate into overt support for the genocide of

Yugoslavia’s Jews.

Serbian views of collaboration and anti-Semitism

For the Serbs, connections between the suffering of Serbs and Jews during the

Second World War were extremely important – anti-Semitism and

Serbophobia were continually compared, as proof that the Serbs were also the

victims of genocide. For many Serbs, the Second World War was a time when

Serbia was close to being wiped out, as Germans ‘committed wide scale

murders, burning of entire villages, raided and bombed cities’.77 Jews and

Serbs would be symbolically linked, as one writer revealed, for espousing the

same values: ‘The Jewish-Serbian-Capitalist-Democratic front had to disap-

pear forever from the world . . . Jews and Serbs were struck with the same

dagger.’78 Dobrica C

´osic´ went so far as to assert that the genocide of the Serbs

was worse than that of the Jews, in terms of its methods and bestiality.79

Exaggeration aside, the Serbs did indeed suffer heavy losses during the Second

World War, although it was never on the level suggested by contemporary

historians.

As with the Croats, the myth of philosemitism was extremely important

for the Serbs, who saw themselves, along with the Jews, as fellow victims of

Nazi aggression. Laza Kostic´’s The Serbs and the Jews (1988) advanced the view

that Serbia was one of the few countries that was free of anti-Semitism during

the war. Describing himself as ‘a fanatical friend of the Jews in general and of

the Serbian ones in particular’, Kostic´ claimed that Serbs were always the best

friends of the Jews throughout history:

The Serbs are one of the rare peoples in the world who have lived with the Jews in

peace and love throughout the whole history of their settlement in our lands . . .

The Serbs never persecuted the Jews, never carried out any demonstrations

against them. Not one anti-Semitic text has ever appeared in the press, and hatred

against them was not spread orally either . . . There was no more tolerant country

towards the Jews. Considerably later, many other countries copied the so-called

‘emancipation of the Jews’ from the Serbs.80

This general view was important in vindicating the Serbian role in the

Second World War. Kostic´ even made the suggestion that Nedic´ had in no

way collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust of the Jews. While the Nedic´

regime worked under the Nazis, they refused to ‘contemplate participation in

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[any] aspect of the extermination of the Jews by the Germans’ – so Kostic´

claimed.81

Of course, with daily accusations from the Croatian side that the Serbs

were the worst anti-Semites the world had ever seen, the Serbs countered

with invective of their own. Mirroring Croatian arguments, Serbian writers

alleged that Croatia was neck-deep in anti-Semitism. In Serbian eyes, one of

the worst offenders was Alojzije Stepinac, who was presented as an active

collaborator and figurehead for Catholic complicity in the genocide of the

Serbs and the Jews. Certainly the most vocal critic of Stepinac’s rehabilita-

tion was Milan Bulajic´, who denounced Stepinac as an enthusiastic NDH

supporter.82 His voluntary loyalty oath to Ante Pavelic´ and his position as

Ustasˇa army chaplain made him ‘the spiritual father of the Ustasˇi

Independent State of Croatia’ – a crucial moral prop for the regime.83 His

support of the NDH and denouncing of Yugoslavia also proved that he was

a ‘fanatical opponent’ of the ‘Masonic-Jewish state’ – a rather strange

moniker for Serbia.84

Many of Bulajic´’s efforts were directed towards debunking the myth of

Stepinac’s philosemitism. He argued that while Stepinac saved individual

Jews, these were Jews in mixed marriages with Catholics, or those who had

converted to Catholicism to escape death. He argued that Stepinac was only

against the racialisation of anti-Semitism. Those Jews who converted to

Catholicism could be saved, whereas those who did not could still be

condemned to death.85 The claim that Stepinac saved 200 Jewish orphans

was rebutted by the fact that as soon as Stepinac petitioned the Vatican to save

them, the Ustasˇa rounded them up and sent them to Jasenovac. ‘This’, Bulajic´

argued, was ‘the historical truth of this “humanitarian action”.’86 The case of

Miroslav Shalom Freiberger’s library was also seen as cancelled out by the fact

that Freiberger was later captured by the Ustasˇa secret police and sent to a

German death-camp.

At the same time, Bulajic´ denounced Stepinac for exercising a double

standard: if converting Jews were saved, converting Gypsies were not. ‘The

Catholic Church in Croatia didn’t care too much about them’, was his conclu-

sion.87 Bulajic´ argued generally that while Stepinac made a show of his

philosemitism after the war, his wartime actions came to nothing, since most

of the people he supposedly tried to save were eventually killed, implying that

these demonstrations of philosemitism were merely for show, concealing the

ugly truth of his own anti-Semitism.

Alongside Stepinac, the Catholic Church was often portrayed as a genoci-

dal collaborator with the Nazis. Historians such as Dusˇan Batakovic´ derided

the Church for ‘their own brand of religious exclusionism, intolerance, and a

militant proselytizing’, which formed part of a Church-driven policy to bring

about a religiously and racially pure Croatia.88 ‘A very considerable part of

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the Croatian political elite,’ Batakovic´ concluded, ‘supported by the Catholic

hierarchy and Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac himself, supported this national

and religious intolerance, and strongly supported policies of clericalism and

racism, marked by mass killings, forced conversions and the deportation of the

Serbian Orthodox population as well the slaughter of the Jews and Gypsies.’89

For Batakovic´, Church leaders were queuing up to commit genocide against

the Serbian and Jewish populations in Croatia.

Other historians would use similar imagery, describing how the Ustasˇa

state was ‘soundly and joyously received by the majority of the Croatian

people’, and how the Catholic Church, and Stepinac in particular, were ‘the

most loyal [of] Hitler’s collaborator[s]’.90 Other writers were in no doubt that

the Vatican had been a keen advocate of genocide, with Church officials incit-

ing Croats from their pulpits to wage ‘“holy” war for the cause of a pure and

independent Croatia’.91 Serbs commonly portrayed Stepinac as the spiritual

leader of an enthusiastic gang of genocidal clergy, only too eager to swear alle-

giance to Pavelic´’s regime, in order to begin killing Serbs, Jews, and

Communists. If Stepinac’s goodness allowed Tudjman to portray the Croatian

nation as righteous and good, Stepinac’s collaboration tarred all Croats as

genocidal killers. Nevertheless, while there was evidence that some priests

had participated in atrocities, Stepinac’s record seems clear, in so far as he

never sanctioned violence or racial hatred. Those Catholic priests who actu-

ally helped the Serbs were never mentioned, nor were the many Serbian

Orthodox priests who lent their support to the C

ˇetnik massacres during the

Second World War.

Serbian sources maintained that over 80 per cent of Croatia’s Jews were

killed during the Ustasˇa period, only a few surviving by ‘sheer accident’. The

killing of Jews was ascribed to a uniquely Ustasˇi approach, spearheaded by

Andrija Artukovic´, the NDH Minister of the Interior, who devastated the

14,000-strong Jewish community in Bosnia-Hercegovina, leaving only 2,000

survivors. Artukovic´’s hatred of the Jews was often linked with a fear of

International Communism and capitalism, both of which threatened to

swamp Croatia, and the Croatian nation.92 According to other Serbian

sources, the Ustasˇa regime killed 30,000 of Croatia’s Jews during the war, as

well as a majority of the Gypsy community, estimated before the war to have

comprised between 40,000 and 100,000 people.93 The divergence between

these figures is striking. It seems that no one was certain exactly how many

Jews there were in Croatia – either before the war, or after.

Throughout the 1990s, the use of graphic, lugubrious imagery was an

important prerequisite of Serbian propaganda. The more graphic the details,

the more horrific the crimes of the Croats would appear to be, and by exten-

sion, the more important it would be to stop another Croatian genocide.

Among the favoured themes was the slaughter of innocent children, proof

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that the Croats were truly depraved. One description from Never Again was

typical of Serbian fare:

Infants were shot in their cribs, babies were foisted on bayonettes, slaughtered

with knives, razors and axes, burned in their homes, in brickyards and in the

Jasenovac crematorium, boiled in soap melting cauldrons, bound together and

thrown into rivers and wells, thrown alive into caves and grottoes, asphyxiated in

cyanide and poisoned with caustic soda, killed through hunger, thirst and expo-

sure . ..94

This typical account conveyed the savagery of the Ustasˇa, trying to

destroy the future of the Serbian nation. ‘The foundations of the Ustasˇi state,’

the authors of this work concluded, ‘were laid on the slaughter of children.’95

Graphic portrayals of a war on children highlighted the depravity of the

Ustasˇa, but also demonstrated the extreme suffering of the Serbs, who had

been robbed of the future of their nation.

Constantly mentioned in Serbian literature was the famous encounter

between the journalist Curzio Malaparte and Ante Pavelic´, during which

Malaparte was proudly shown a basket containing what he believed to be

Dalmatian oysters, only to be told by a triumphant Pavelic´ that these were

forty pounds of Serbian eyeballs – a gift from ‘loyal Ustasˇas’. This account,

described in Malaparte’s Kaputt (1946), was one of the favourite pieces of

imagism used by the Serbs to describe the irrationality and brutality of the

NDH. The only intrinsic value possessed by a Serb, it seemed, was his eyes.96

Such descriptions of Ustasˇa terror aimed at completely dehumanising the

Croats, imparting the idea that they were nothing more than sadistic, blood-

thirsty killers. While a certain percentage of Serbs and Croats did run wild

during four years of war, these few psychopaths did not reflect the motivations

and actions of the vast majority of the population. At the same time, it was

curious that the Serbs sought to invent a variety of anti-Vatican, anti-

Stepinac, anti-Ustasˇa stories, when there were many documented facts about

the Second World War that were far more damning. Take for example Mark

Aarons and John Loftus’s Ratlines, which factually analysed the role of the

Vatican in helping escaping Nazi war criminals. Through the Intermarium,

the Vatican controlled the largest Nazi-smuggling organisation of its kind in

Europe after the war, run in part by the Croatian priest Krunoslav Stefano

Draganovic´.97 The Intermarium even helped Pavelic´ to escape to Italy, where

the Vatican allowed him to live in one of the Pope’s summer homes, safe from

the British and the Yugoslavs.98 While this in no way validates the Serbian

position, it is curious that Serbs chose to invent and distort history, when

using well-established facts would have served their cause more effectively.

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The myth of Partisan participation

Another important aspect of Second World War revisionism was the myth of

Partisan membership. Each side tried to prove that their nation initiated anti-

fascist resistance, and was therefore on the winning side. This was of central

importance, because it proved that no one actually collaborated with the

Nazis and their puppet states. Each side now became an innocent victim of

fascism, instead of collaborators with it. Each side could also claim to have

created and founded Tito’s Yugoslavia, only to be later betrayed for their

national sacrifices – becoming martyrs when they were ‘discriminated’

against in the SFRY.

The Serbs certainly took Partisan membership seriously. The historian

Velimir Ivetic´’s lengthy monograph examined the annual ratio of Serbs and

Croats in each Partisan detachment in Croatia, arguing that the Serbs were

the most important resistance force in the region. A summary of his findings

included the following: ‘that the participation of the Serbs from Croatia in the

common struggle against the occupier and his lackeys was enormous’; ‘that

the Serbs had the “role of initiator” of the uprising’; and, ‘that the Serbs helped

the rising up of the Croatian people against the occupier’.99 The Croats only

constituted a majority, Ivetic´ claimed, when defeat was certain. While the

Croats were represented as cynical opportunists, Serbs were credited with

extending a hand of brotherly friendship to their erstwhile enemies at the

war’s end. Ever able to forgive and forget, the Serbs supposedly helped their

killers join the Partisans.100

Similar arguments have been raised by other Serbian writers, one arguing

that: ‘persecuted Serbs swelled the ranks of Drazˇa Mihailovic´’s C

ˇetniks but

even more so of Tito’s Partisans’.101 Others concluded: ‘The Serbian and

Montenegrin people are today among those freedom-loving peoples which

share the feeling of pride with the world because of their undeniable contribu-

tion to the defeat of the greatest evil of this century.’102 The Ministry of

Information similarly claimed that the Serbs were ‘freedom loving, democratic

and antifascist . .. [by their struggles against] the Croatian genocidal govern-

ment and the Nazi disintegration of Yugoslavia’.103 Still others described how

Tito was forced to move his headquarters to Belgrade from Zagreb, after the

‘enthusiasm with which the German occupiers were greeted in Zagreb in

1941’. Here, the ‘rebellious energies’ of the Serbs in Serbia, Montenegro and

in other Serbian areas were not only ‘a primary source of the anti-Fascist

struggle, but also a condition for CPY survival’.104

It was crucially important to present Serbs as the liberators of Yugoslavia,

and the greatest opponents of Fascism. While Partisan participation in the

Second World War enhanced Serbian claims to be anti-genocidal in the

contemporary conflict, a high Partisan membership also tied in with the

Serbian theme of sacrifice. Serbs had supposedly given their all to create

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Yugoslavia, and had a legitimate claim to be the inheritors of what remained

of the country – rump-Yugoslavia. Such claims also countered Tudjman’s

assertions that every Serb had been a C

ˇetnik. While few Serbs were willing to

admit that the C

ˇetniks had committed any atrocities during the war, it was a

much better strategy to focus on membership of the Partisans – a less morally

ambiguous movement.

The Croats advanced similar arguments, positing that they were both the

first and the largest ethnic group in the Partisan resistance. While this ran

counter to Tudjman’s thesis that most Croats supported the CPP, it accom-

plished the same objective – proving that Croats were not wholesale

collaborators. Croatian writers argued that the majority of the Croatian popu-

lation both ‘supported and actively participated’ in Tito’s Partisan

movement.105 Others described how the ‘the first rebellion in Europe against

the [N]azi and fascist occupation’ was led by the Croats, who formed the first

Partisan unit near Sisak in June 1941. Included in one account was a list of

Croatian notables such as the poet Vladimir Nazor and ‘the democratically

oriented’ Communist leader Andrija Hebrang, as well as descriptions of how

the Croatian-based Partisans (ZAVNOH) held more liberated territory than

Tito’s pan-Yugoslav council (AVNOJ).106

Others, while admitting that Serbs at some points formed the majority in

the Partisans, dismissed their commitment to the cause, since ‘the Serbs were

primarily escaping from persecution, while the Croats chose the antifascist

side because of their personal beliefs and with the idea of preserving the iden-

tity of their state through a war of liberation’.107 Ironically, while some Serbs

may have been opportunistic in trying to save their lives, they were certainly

morally superior to those Croats who were killing them. Cohen (in an inter-

view with a Croatian newspaper) similarly posited that the Serbs were the

main collaborators in the Second World War, claiming that 70 per cent of

Croats but only 11 per cent of Serbs were antifascist. Further, any C

ˇetniks who

converted to the Partisan cause supposedly did so only to transform the

Communists into a ‘new tool for “Greater Serbia”’.108

Relatively unbiased historians have described the predominance of Serbs

among the members of the NDH who joined the Partisans, largely in reaction

to the Ustasˇa atrocities; and thus there is some truth to the Serbian claim of

numerical dominance.109 This does not, however, negate the strong partici-

pation of Croats in the Partisans, nor does it detract from the massacres

committed by Serbian C

ˇetniks during this time. For both sides, it became clear

that high Partisan numbers were but one more aspect of a growing revision-

ist conflict, with each side arguing the opposite of the other. Both sides

claimed to have been the key to the anti-fascist liberation of the country,

allowing both similarly to claim that their people had been against the C

˘etniks

and Ustasˇa all along.

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Conclusions

In general, Serb and Croat arguments apropos the Second World War were

almost identical. Each argued in favour of their own philosemitism, victimisa-

tion, and heroism, while denouncing the others for their treachery,

anti-Semitism, collaboration, and genocide. The recent revisions of history

from both sides suggest uneasiness about the legacies of the past. They also

suggest a need to vindicate one’s own history, excising any negative historical

patterns that one might find, while at the same time continuing to identify a

coherent pattern of genocidal hatred and destruction on the part of one’s

perceived enemy.

What emerged was a blurring of the lines between acting and being, as

well as a blurring of the concepts of self and other. In both cases, each side

could rightly claim victims who were killed in the style of the C

ˇetniks or

Ustasˇa, but each side was also guilty of having adopted the symbols and trap-

pings of this earlier period. Resurrected C

ˇetnik and Ustasˇa units battled each

other once again, proving for many that the war was very much cast as a

continuation of an earlier conflict. Why Arkan wore full C

ˇetnik regalia to

marry his ‘maid of Kosovo’ was as difficult to understand as why Dobroslav

Paraga’s renewed Party of Rights and the HOS regiments in Bosnia-

Hercegovina sported Ustasˇa insignia and used the old Nazi salute. In the cities,

Serbs in Belgrade could easily purchase C

ˇetnik hats and T-shirts, while in

Zagreb, the Poglavnik’s portrait was prominently displayed over swimming

pools and in restaurants.

However, the complexity of events can be broken down fairly simply –

each side attempted to revise and excuse the atrocities their side had commit-

ted, and part of that process involved donning their former nationalist dress,

and adopting old symbols to prove that they were not ashamed of their past

history. Demonisation of the other required the inflation of the other side’s

atrocities, and a denunciation of the enemy side’s parallel process of rehabili-

tating their own past. Thus, the work of neither side should be studied in

isolation, as has been done by both Serbs and Croats, but rather, events should

be seen as a series of related actions in an escalating crisis.

The concept of ‘performativity’ is thus extremely important here. What

began as groups ‘playing’ Ustasˇa and C

ˇetnik soon evolved into neo-Ustasˇa and

neo-C

ˇetnik units, complete with traditional weaponry, uniforms, salutes, and

styles of killing. What began as a vindication of one’s own national past

became first a blurring, and then a desecration of it. Paradoxically, each side,

in the name of historical revisionism, set out to burn, loot, shell, and commit

the same barbarous acts, acts that they refused to admit their predecessors

had done. By re-enacting the past crimes of which their grandfathers stood

accused, they ironically tarnished their own national past. Curiously, while

each side blamed the other, there is no doubt that the escalation could not

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have begun if only one side had chosen to adopt a historic role. Each side

advanced almost identical arguments, countering each other fact by fact,

point by point. Without the participation of historians, politicians and jour-

nalists from both sides, no debate would have been possible.

NOTES

1 David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice In Bosnia

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) p. 84. (Italics his.)

2 Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (New York:

Bloomsbury, 1999) pp. 3–4.

3 Milica Bakic´-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic

Review (Winter 1995) p. 8.

4 Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (Toronto:

Viking Books, 1993) p. 14.

5 Marcus Tanner, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

1997) p. 141.

6 Biljana Vankovska, ‘Civil–Military Relations in the Third Yugoslavia’, COPRI Working

Papers (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, 2000) pp. 20–1.

7 Jasper Ridley, Tito (London: Constable, 1994) p. 164.

8 Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans Volume II (London: Cambridge University Press,

1993) p. 264.

9 Ridley, Tito, p. 164.

10 Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 1997) p. 117.

11 Christopher Browning, Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution

(London: Holmes & Meier, 1991) p. 46.

12 Tanner, Croatia, p. 160.

13 See Stjepan Hefer, Croatian Struggle for Freedom and Statehood (Argentina: Croatian

Information Service/Croatian Liberation Movement, 1979), pp. 10; 13–14; 110.

14 Croats against the regime were also to be few and far between, or, as Hefer puts it: ‘The

Croatian people unanimously chose the way which led to the re-establishment of

national freedom and state . . .’ (ibid. pp. 129–30). Such comparisons between the

Ustasˇa and other liberation movements are also found in more contemporary analysis.

Vladimir Mrkoci argues that the Ustasˇa were little different from other supposed

freedom fighters of the world. For him, the ‘Ustashe were a national revolutionary

organization similar to Young Europe from the past century, as a belated echo of

romanticism. They are similar to all other national revolutionary movements such as

the Irish IRA, ETA in Spain and others. They are most similar to the Jewish Irgun Zwai

Leumi’: Vladimir Mrkoci, ‘Historical Guilt of Alain Finkelkraut’, Hrvatski Obzor (17

August 1996 [translated on 5 October 2001]) http://free.freespeech.org/ex-

yupress/hrobzor/hrobzor12.html (accessed 10 January 2002). This article is in

essence a defence of the Ustasˇa after Alain Finkielkraut’s earlier denunciation of the

regime in the French media.

15 Hefer, Croatian Struggle for Freedom and Statehood, p. 135.

16 See Mrkoci, ‘Historical Guilt of Alain Finkelkraut’.

17 Ivo Omercˇanin, The Pro-Allied Putsch in Croatia in 1944 and the Massacre of Croatians by

Tito’s Communists in 1945 (Philadelphia, PA: Dorrance & Company, 1975) p. 18.

18 Ibid. pp. 19; 31.

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19 Ibid. p. 36.

20 Ante Beljo also argues that the government tried to negotiate changing sides in 1943,

after Italian surrender, and quotes a memorandum sent to Field Marshal Harold

Alexander in May 1945. He also states that Lorkovic´ and Vokic´ were executed for their

plans after being arrested in August, 1944, and that they had a ‘large number of gener-

als and officers’ ‘planning the disarming of the German army and the shift to the side of

the Allies’. The issue of the memorandum is quite interesting for Beljo, as the ‘last

significant document of the Croatian government during the war’. Beljo seems to

impute a conspiracy to the fact that the Allies never acknowledged its receipt, leading

to a false impression about the Croats’ intentions. One also gets the impression that

such a memorandum should have been taken seriously, even though it was issued so

late in the game as to be obviously opportunistic. Such a memorandum in 1943, by

contrast, might actually have achieved some result: Ante Beljo, Genocide in Yugoslavia:

A Documentary Analysis (Sudbury, ON: Northern Tribune Publishing, 1985) pp. 83–5.

21 Vlado Vurusic´, ‘After 35 Years, We Have Moved Our Ustashe Newspaper “Independent

State Croatia” from Toronto to Zagreb’, Globus (1 December 1995) www.cdsp.neu.edu/

info/students/marko/globus2.html (accessed 18 June 1998).

22 Velimir Bujanec´, ‘Reply to Partisan Ivan Fumic´’, reprinted from Vjesnik in Nezavisna

Drzava Hrvatska (March 1996) www.cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/ndh/

ndh1.html (accessed 18 June 1998).

23 ‘Review of Ivo Rojnica, Meetings and Experiences (Zagreb: DoNeHa, 1994)’, Feral

Tribune (29 December 1997).

www.cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/feral/feral53.html (accessed 12 March

1998).

24 ‘Review of Eugen Dido Kvaternik, Memories and Observations 1925-1945 (Zagreb:

Nakladnicko Drustvo Starcevic, 1995)’, Feral Tribune (29 December 1997). Available

at: www.cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/feral/feral53.html (accessed 12 March

1998).

25 Josip S

ˇentija, ‘Croatia from 1941 to 1991’ (Zagreb: University of Zagreb/Matica

Hrvatska Iseljenika, 1994) p. 1.

26 Franjo Tudjman, Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy – Revised Edition,

translated by Katarina Mijatovic´ (New York: M. Evans and Company, 1996) p. 349.

27 Philip J. Cohen, Serbia’s Secret War: Propaganda annd the Deceit of History (College

Station TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1996) p. 93.

28 Ibid. p. 99.

29 Momir Krsmanovic´, The Blood-Stained Hands of Islam (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1994) p. 8.

30 Ibid. p. 16.

31 Ibid. pp. 141–2.

32 Ibid. pp. 29–30.

33 Ibid. p. 35.

34 Ibid. p. 125.

35 Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural

Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) pp. 219; 222.

36 Marjorie Radulovic´, Rage of the Serbs (Lewes, E. Sussex: The Book Guild, 1998) pp.

192–6; 446–7.

37 Vuk Draskovic´, Le Couteau (Paris: J. C Lattes, 1993) pp. 5–6 (my translation).

38 Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (London:

University of California Press, 1996) pp. 51; 82.

39 Nobojsˇa Popov, ‘La populisme serbe’ (suite), Les Temps Modernes (May 1994) pp. 58–9.

40 Ibid. pp. 60–1.

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41 One historian summarised this theme well: ‘The Chetniks not only intended to perform

genocide, they carried out several forms of genocidal crimes against Croatians and

Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatians in Croatia during World War II’. See

Zdravko Dizdar, ‘Chetnik Genocidal Crimes Against Croatians and Muslims in Bosnia

and Herzegovina and Against Croatians in Croatia During World War II (1941-1945)’,

in Aleksander Ravlic´ (ed.), Southeastern Europe 1918–1995 (Zagreb: Croatian Heritage

Foundation/Croatian Information Center, 1998): www.hic.hr/books/seeurope/

index-e.htm top (accessed 5 February 2000).

42 Ibid.

43 Philip J. Cohen, The World War II and Contemporary Chetniks: Their historic-political

continuity and implications for stability in the Balkans (Zagreb: CERES, 1997) p. 26.

44 Ibid. p. 32.

45 Ibid. p. 32.

46 Dizdar, ‘Chetnik Genocidal Crimes Against Croatians and Muslims in Bosnia and

Herzegovina and Against Croatians in Croatia During World War II’.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid. Beljo made the same argument. He accused the Italians of wanted to ‘exterminate’

the Croats, but since they ‘could not resort to such primitive and beastly crimes, there-

fore they left it up to the Chetniks’. See Beljo, Genocide in Yugoslavia, p. 51.

50 This complicated situation is discussed in Judah, The Serbs, pp. 118–19. I consider his

account to be factually accurate, and relatively free of bias.

51 Antun Abramovic´, ‘Excerpts from: “Bihac, a Bulwark of Croatian Glory and Suffering”,

Hrvatsko Slovo (9 August 1995) www.cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/hrslovo/

hrslovo3.html (accessed 18 June 1998).

52 Mislav Jezic´, ‘Problems of Understanding XXth Century History of Croatia’ (Zagreb:

University of Zagreb) www.dalmatia.net/croatia/history/jezic.htm (accessed 18 June

1998).

53 Tudjman, Horrors of War, p. 349.

54 Ibid. p. 394.

55 Cohen follows a similar argument to that of Tudjman, seeing both the Ustasˇa and the

ˇetniks as ‘quintessentially genocidal’. The C

ˇetniks he charges with ‘systematic geno-

cide against Muslims’, giving a range of Moslem deaths from between 86,000 to

103,000, most of whom, he claims, were killed by Serbs. See Philip J. Cohen,

‘Holocaust History Misappropriated’, MIDSTREAM: A Monthly Jewish Review, 39:8

(November 1992) http://teletubbie.het.net.je/~sjaak/domovina/domovina/archive/

1992/english/holocaust.html (accessed 10 June 2000).

56 Ridley, Tito, p. 165.

57 Tanner, Croatia, pp. 155–6.

58 Ibid. p. 156.

59 Brian Hall, The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia

(Boston: David Godine Publishers, 1994) p. 43.

60 Ridley, Tito, pp. 277–8.

61 Hall, The Impossible Country, p. 43.

62 Darko Zubrinic´, ‘Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac and Saving the Jews in Croatia During the

WW 2’ (Zagreb: Croatian Information Center, 1996) www.hr/darko/etf/jews.html

(accessed 18 June 1998).

63 Ibid. pp. 4–5.

64 Tudjman, Horrors of War, pp. 292–4.

65 Quoted in: Darko Duretak, and Mladenka Saric´, ‘HDZ Will Regain Support of Voters

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with Clear Policies, not Cheap Tricks: Dr. Franjo Tudman’s Speech: We Must not Allow

Sheep and Geese to Lead Us into Fog!’, Vecernji List (8 December 1998)

http://www.cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/vecernji/vecernji12.html (accessed

18 June 1998).

66 The issue is well discussed in Tanner, Croatia, pp. 179–81.

67 Josip Pecˇaric´, ‘Serbian Myth about Jasenovac: Author’s Summary of his Book Srpski

mit o Jasenovcu (Zagreb: Dom i svijet, 1998)’ www.hr/darko/etf/pec.html (accessed 18

June 1998) p. 7.

68 Jezic´, ‘Problems of Understanding XXth Century History of Croatia’.

69 Ljubica Stefan, From Fairy Tale to Holocaust: Serbia: Quisling Collaboration with the

Occupier During the Period of the Third Reich with Reference to Genocide Against the Jewish

People (Zagreb: Hrvatska Matica Iseljenika, 1993) p. 23.

70 Ibid. p. 15.

71 Ibid. p. 21.

72 Ibid. pp. 12–13.

73 Cohen, Serbia’s Secret War, pp. 130–2.

74 Ibid. p. 64.

75 Browning, Fateful Months, p. 46. Here, Browning quotes a speech by the German

commander General Fritz Boehme, who describes the German mission in Serbia as one

of mercilessly avenging German deaths in the First World War.

76 Ibid. p. 45. The Serbs later became more efficient and began to serve their authorities

better.

77 Smilja Avramov, Genocide Against the Serbs (Belgrade: Museum of Modern Art, 1992)

p. 32.

78 Ibid. p. 32.

79 Dobrica C

´osic´, L’éffondrement de la Yougoslavie: positions d’un résistant (Paris: Age

d’Homme, 1994) p. 24. (Italics mine.)

80 Quoted in Cohen, Serbia’s Secret War, pp. 117–18.

81 Ibid. p. 118.

82 Milan Bulajic´, The Role of the Vatican in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Serbian

Ministry of Information, 1993) p. 23.

83 Ibid. p. 84.

84 Ibid. p. 67.

85 Ibid. pp. 130–1.

86 Ibid. pp. 133–4.

87 Ibid. pp. 136–7.

88 Dusˇan T. Batakovic´, ‘Frustrated Nationalism in Yugoslavia: From Liberal to

Communist Solution’, Serbian Studies, 11:2 (1997) www.bglink.com/personal/

batakovic/boston.html (accessed 18 June 1998).

89 Ibid.

90 Jovan Ilic´, ‘The Serbs in the Former SR of Croatia’, in Dusˇanka Hadzˇi-Jovancˇic´ (ed.),

The Serbian Question in the Balkans: Geographical and Historical Aspects (Belgrade:

University of Belgrade Faculty of Geography, 1995) p. 330.

91 See Avramov, Genocide Against the Serbs, p. 197. Petar Makarov also writes of Stepinac,

that he ‘approved and frequently inspired all the Ustasˇas’ deeds’ (p. 1). Makarov draws

direct links between Starcˇevic´’s writings and the NDH persecution of Serbs, ‘Starcˇevic´’s

statements that the Serbs were a race of slaves and that, for this reason, they should be

axed was put into practice in the Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945.’ See

Petar Makarov, ‘The Embodied Devils: Who Was Who in NDH?’,

http://cypress.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~eesrdan/ndh/ndh-kojeko.html (accessed 18 June

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1998). Makarov equally writes of how Stepinac was made Pavelic´’s head military

chaplain: ‘His Grace Stepinac not only showed his warlike attitude when he was with

the military Ustasˇi in the barracks, but also when he was with the intellectuals taking

charge of the mobilization of the Croats for the cause of the Fascist Croatian satellite

state, where he helped to encourage and boost their drooping morale’ (p. 4). He also

writes of how nearly half the 22 death camps in the NDH were run by Catholic clergy:

Petar Makarov, ‘Croatian Cardinal Stepinac Was Pavelic´’s Head Military Chaplain’,

http://cypress.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~eesrdan/ndh/ndh-kojeko.html (accessed 18 June

1998). Others would write of the ‘aggressive, intolerant, non-democratic and non-

Christian’ actions of the Catholic Church, as well as the ‘total demonization of our

people’, which led to ‘pogroms over the Serbs in the late nineteenth and early twenti-

eth centuries, [culminating] in the brutal Ustasˇi raids during World War II . . .’. See Ilic´,

‘The Serbs in the Former SR of Croatia’, p. 328.

92 Serbian National Defense Council of America, Genocide in Croatia 1941–1945

(Chicago, IL: 1993) pp. 28–30. For another account of the Serbian perspective on the

Second World War, see Radislav Petrovic´, The Extermination of Serbs on the Territory of

the Independent State of Croatia (Belgrade: Serbian Ministry of Information, 1991).

93 Milan Bulajic´, Antun Miletic´ and Dragoje Lukic´, Never Again: Ustashi Genocide in the

Independent State of Croatia (NDH) From 1941–1945 (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1991) p. 2.

94 Ibid. p. 55.

95 Ibid. p. 63.

96 Ibid. p. 1; see also Petrovic´, The Extermination of Serbs on the Territory of the Independent

State of Croatia, p. 43; Jean François Furnémont in his Le Vatican et l’ex Yougoslavie

(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996) also throws this myth in at the beginning for no apparent

reason.

97 Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Ratlines: How the Vatican’s Nazi Networks Betrayed Western

Intelligence to the Soviets (London: Heinemann, 1991) pp. 24; 26–8; 37. For a discussion of

Draganovic´ and his activities, largely at the behest of the American CIC, see Ladislas de

Hoyos, Klaus Barbie: The Untold Story(London: W. H. Allen, 1985) pp. 166–7.

98 Ibid. pp. 74–6.

99 Velimir Ivetic´, ‘The Serbs in The Anti-fascist Struggle in The Territory of The

Independent State of Croatia’ (Belgrade: Serbian Ministry of Information)

http://cypress.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~eesrdan/ndh/ndh-sastav_partizana_u_ndh.html

(accessed 18 June 1998).

100 Ibid.

101 Vera Vratusa-Zunjic´, ‘The Intrinsic Connection Between Endogenous and Exogenous

Factors of Social (Dis)integration: A Sketch of the Yugoslav Case’, Dialogue, 22–23

(June–September 1997) www.bglink.com/business/dialogue/vratusa.html (accessed

18 June 1998).

102 Radoje Kontic´, ‘Great Jubilee of World and Our Own History: Victory Over Fascism the

Most Important Event of the XX Century’, Review of International Affairs, 46 (15 May

1995) pp. 1–3.

103 Serbian Ministry of Information, ‘Facts About The Republic of Serbia’ (Helsinki:

Embassy of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, February 1996) p. 26.

104 Mirko Mirkovic´, ‘Fourth Phase: 1945–1990’, in Bozˇidar Zecˇevic´ (ed.), The Uprooting: A

Dossier of the Croatian Genocide Policy Against the Serbs (Belgrade: Velauto International,

1992) p. 109.

105 Zeljko Jack Lupic´, ‘History of Croatia: Povijest Hrv atske (200 B.C. – 1998 A.D.)’

(Zagreb: Croatian Information Center, 21 February 1999) http://www.dalmatia.net/

croatia/history/index.htm (accessed 18 June 1998).

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106 Jezic´, ‘Problems of Understanding XXth Century History of Croatia’.

107 Bozˇe C

´ovic´, Roots of Serbian Aggression: Debates, Documents, Cartographic Reviews

(Zagreb: Centar za Strane Jezike/AGM, 1993) p. 34.

108 Marinko Bobanovic´, ‘Interview with Philip J. Cohen: The International Community is

Meddling in Croatia’s Internal Affairs’, Vjesnik (27 April 1998) www.cdsp.neu.edu/

info/students/marko/vjesnik/vjesnik27.html (accessed 18 June 1999).

109 Hall, The Impossible Country, p. 109.

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THE INTRINSIC CONNECTION BETWEEN ENDOGENOUS AND EXOGENOUS FACTORS OF SOCIAL (DIS)INTEGRATION: A SKETCH OF THE YUGOSLAV CASE (Part I,II)

Article

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Jan 1998

Vera Anton Vratuša-Žunjić

Many recent journalistic and scientific attempts to better understand, if not to explain, the phenomena of the simultaneous process of integration in Western Europe and disintegration in Eastern Europe in general, as well as the ethnically and religiously tinged civil war in former Yugoslavia in particular, are characterized by a mechanical separation between endogenous and exogenous factors. In order to interpret current developments, however, it is indispensable to analyze how these factors have interacted in the past and continue to do so in the present. We must keep in mind both the influences of internal social differentiation on the nature of inclusion in the international division of labor and power, and the effects of international social power relations on the changes of such relations internally. Only such comprehensive historical and structural analysis can bring us nearer to the truth about the war in former Yugoslavia and away from the one-sided interpretation which has been disseminated in the most powerful world media. The main finding of this paper is that the breaking up of the Second Yugoslavia into dependent mini-states governed by local rulers belonging to majority ethnic/confessional groups in their respective former Republics, is the result once again of the alliance of domestic and foreign ruling classes in the old neocolonial "game" of redistributing spheres of influence.

Croatia: A Nation Forged in War.

Article

Oct 1997

Nesting Orientalism; The Case of Former Yugoslavia

Article

Jan 1995
SLAVIC REV

Milica Bakic-Hayden

This paper introduces the notion of “nesting orientalisms” to investigate some of the complexity of the east/west dichotomy which has underlain scholarship on “Orientalism” since the publication of Said's classic polemic, a discourse in which “East,” like “West,” is much more of a project than a place. While geographical boundaries of the “Orient“ shifted throughout history, the concept of “Orient” as “other” has remained more or less unchanged. Moreover, cultures and ideologies tacitly presuppose the valorized dichotomy between east and west, and have incorporated various “essences” into the patterns of representation used to describe them. Implied by this essentialism is that humans and their social or cultural institutions are “governed by determinate natures that inhere in them in the same way that they are supposed to inhere in the entities of the natural world.” Thus, eastern Europe has been commonly associated with “backwardness,” the Balkans with “violence,” India with “idealism” or “mysticism,” while the west has identified itself consistently with the “civilized world.“

The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia

Article

Jan 1997

Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia

Article

Apr 1999
SLAVIC REV

Introduction 1. The rise of the Yugoslav national idea 2. Creating a synthetic Yugoslav culture 3. Supranational Yugoslav culture: brotherhood and unity 4. The precipitous rise and calamitous fall of multinational Yugoslavia Conclusion Notes Index.

Never again : Ustashi Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) from 1941-1945 /

Article

Civil-Military Relations in the Third Yugoslavia

Jan 2000
20-21

Biljana Vankovska

Biljana Vankovska, 'Civil-Military Relations in the Third Yugoslavia', COPRI Working Papers (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, 2000) pp. 20-1.

Jan 1993
264

Barbara Jelavich

Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans Volume II (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p. 264.

Croatian Struggle for Freedom and Statehood (Argentina: Croatian Information Service/Croatian Liberation Movement, 1979)

13-14

See Stjepan Hefer

See Stjepan Hefer, Croatian Struggle for Freedom and Statehood (Argentina: Croatian Information Service/Croatian Liberation Movement, 1979), pp. 10; 13-14; 110.

Croatian Struggle for Freedom and Statehood