By July and August , the Ustasas began to implement their agenda for dealing with the Serbs: one-third would be killed, one-third driven from Croatia including Bosnia and Hercegovina , and one-third converted to Catholicism, a step that would remove their "national consciousness" and render them harmless politically. The techniques of the Ustasa campaign against the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia from will be familiar to all who have seen the details of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia since Some concentration camps were created, but most of the slaughter took place in towns and villages.
The techniques of the s were like those of the s: a group of armed men would descend upon a settlement of people who they defined as ethnonational enemies. Murder, rape, and burning of the structures would follow. The numbers of dead in the s slaughter have been debated with increasing intensity, with some Serbs claiming that more than a million Serbs were slaughtered, and some Croats, including the President of Croatia, claiming that the numbers were closer to , A conservative estimate given by Aleska Djilas is that one in six of the approximately 1,, Serbs in the NDH in had been killed by , in Croatia, or Many more were expelled from their homes.
In revenge, Serbs mounted terror campaigns against their enemies, especially against Muslims in Bosnia. It would be fair to characterize the s slaughter, however, as one in which the main victims were Serbs, at the hands of Croats and Muslims, in that order. The main non-nationalist force in Yugoslavia during the war years of was Tito's Communist-led army, the Partisans. By the end of the international war, the Partisans had also won the civil wars within Yugoslavia, overthrowing the Ustasa regime and the Serbian royalists, the Cetniks.
The regime set up by Tito was avowedly anti-nationalist, both for reasons of the ideology of communist internationalism and for the practical political reason that the major potential for opposition to communist rule lay in nationalist parties. A basic principle of communist Yugoslavia was the "brotherhood and unity" bratstvo - jedinstvo of the Yugoslav peoples.
Communist Yugoslavia was set up as a federation of republics, all but one of which bore the name of one of which bore the name of one of the constituent peoples of Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia.
The exception was Bosnia and Hercegovina, the Muslims were the largest group, followed by Serbs, then Croats, and others. Until the census, "Muslim" was not one of the categories listed for identification, and Serbs were the nominal majority in Bosnia and Hercegovina. In , however, Muslims could identify themselves as such on the census forms, and from then on, Muslims were the largest national group in Bosnia and Hercegovina.
The forty-five years of communist Yugoslavia did not produce "brotherhood and unity. Whatever central control existed depended on the communist party, and when that fragmented in January of , there was no central authority left in the country.
In free elections in , the message that won in all of the republics was one of nationalism, of a distinctly illiberal bent. In each instance, the winning party promised to turn the republic into the national state of the majority "nation," ethnically defined. In constitutional terms, the ethnic nation became sovereign: the Slovenes in Slovenia, the Croats in Croatia.
Minorities were thereby excluded from among the primary bearers of sovereignty. Thus the post-communist transformation was from state socialism, in which the state was dedicated to the rule of that part of the population that formed the "working class," to state chauvinism, in which the state was dedicated to rule by that part of the population that formed the majority nation, ethnically defined.
Others were excluded politically, and soon, in many cases, physically. Empirically this was nonsense, since wherever Yugoslav peoples lived intermingled they intermarried in large numbers, particularly from the s until late into the s. However, the political rhetoric of enmity and partition rapidly overcame that of brotherhood and unity. What succeeded politically within Yugoslavia was the message that joint state of Serbs, Croats and others was not in fact possible, and that the various nations had the right to "self-determination.
One difference between the demise of Yugoslavia in and its creation in was a change in the dominant patterns of serbian nationalism. Where the dominant Serb national ideology had been inclusive of all speakers of Serbo-Croatian in , by the Serbs had accepted a nationalist ideology that was an exclusive as that of the Croats. The single distinguishing criterium of Serbs, Croats and Muslims became religion, as an inherited characteristic rather than active belief. Thus Serbs did not contest the identities of Croats and Muslims as separate peoples, nor did they contest the rights of the various Yugoslav peoples to "self-determination.
From their point of view, the Croats could have their Croatia, but it could not include areas with Serb majorities. Similarly, if the Muslims wanted an independent Bosnia and Hercegovina, that was fine, but it would not include regions with large numbers of Serbs. In the case of Croatia, the Serbs' suspicion was perhaps justified. It had then immediately taken steps to ensure that the Serbs would be rendered second-class citizens in a Croatia defined constitutionally as the national state of the ethnically Croat people.
The partition of Croatia began in August , when Krajina region Serbs, who formed a strong local majority there, resisted attempts by the new nationalist Croatian government to impose upon them purely Croat state symbols, including a flag very much like that of the fascist state that had slaughtered so many Serbs in When Croatia declared independence in June , the Serbs in this region and in some other parts of Croatia announced their own desire to remain in Yugoslavia.
The Yugoslav army, rapidly transforming into a Serbian army, supported the Serbs. In the course of the fighting, from August until January , the Serbs took control of about one-third of the territory of Croatia.
Some of these regions had a Serbian majority before the war began, but others had not. The pattern of the war in Croatia was the de facto partition of the regions of the republic that had been most mixed ethnically. In effect, in these six months of war, the mixed areas of Croatia were divided, and the populations forced to divide themselves, rather like the Hindu and Muslim populations of India and Pakistan in , though on a much smaller scale.
The effects of the population transfers have been to render hundreds of thousands of people homeless, refugees, while homogenizing the populations. An index of this homogenization is that by March of , only about , Serbs remained in parts of Croatia under government control, of the more than , in those regions before the war began.
The others had fled to Serb-controlled areas of Croatia and Bosnia, or to Serbia itself. The Bosnian situation was more complicated. I faced many pressures and threats not to finish this investigation. This agreement harmed Croats and Bosniaks, who lived intermixed with Serbs in the region for centuries. Although this was reported by foreign media such as the BBC and has been cited by historians , this crucial piece of history has never reached the Slovenian public. It was a forbidden topic.
But later it was discovered that tens of millions of dollars of war profits in cash disappeared from the Ministry of Defense and never reached the state budget. Slovenia's official explanation has always been that the arms shipments were given away to Croatia and Bosnia as assistance. In reality, it was a profitable business. This initiated a major scandal in this tiny Alpine nation, which has continued for the last 20 years.
More than 21 civil servants and others have been charged in Slovenia for arms smuggling, but none has been convicted. If you ask around in the northwest, in the resort town of Bled, you learn that for many, especially the elderly, the desire for firm leadership remains strong. The abandoned Kalin Inn, however, is something of a loophole.
Located right on the fence, it has exits on both sides of the border. Jasenovac was the Balkan version of the extermination frenzy of the time.
Historian Ivo Goldstein reconstructed the horrors in a page book. Goldstein says things have been going downhill since Croatia joined the EU in In the referendum, only 29 percent of all eligible Croatians voted in favor of accession.
Now, there is even increasing disillusionment. Aside from its dreamy Adriatic beaches, Croatia is also a country with almost entirely unpopulated stretches of land, in eastern Slavonia or Baranja, and industrial ruins near Zagreb. The statistics are also dismal.
Massive emigration and brain drain is worsening the skills shortages and the crisis in the social welfare systems. Those who have witnessed what Croats have suffered, on the one hand, and committed, on the other, in their country and in neighboring Herzegovina and on the battlefields of Krajina, in Vukovar or Mostar in the early s, tend to draw the conclusion that peaceful neighborliness is not yet one of the primary goals of the EU's youngest member state.
Passing the Stone Flower, the memorial on the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp, the journey continues over to Bosnia — from EU headquarters, so to speak, to the waiting room. The promise of the EU summit in Thessaloniki was that "the future of the Balkan states lies in the European Union. Croatia, for instance, is entitled to 22 billion euros of EU reconstruction funds, whereas Bosnia is only receiving a token amount of COVID vaccine doses. The proposal to allow non-EU states in the Balkans to participate in the multibillion-euro Cohesion Fund without granting them voting rights has found little support.
The EU is preoccupied with itself right now. Those who want to enter Bosnia and Herzegovina from Croatia end up in the Republika Srpska, the half of the country that is been primarily populated by ethnic Serbs. Since the Dayton Peace Agreement, Bosnia as a whole has been an over-bureaucratized moderately functional republic in which formerly warring enemies — Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks — have grown only a tad closer to one another.
After the three-year war of independence that started in , , people in Bosnia were dead and millions displaced. The mutual distrust and the unspoken — the memory of the slaughter of the s — still weighs heavily on towns like Prijedor, where the first Serbian war criminals to return from The Hague have long since become regulars in the local coffee houses again. Around 1, bodies are still missing today. He waited for nightfall amidst the corpses and eventually fled through the woods.
I met the rail-thin father shortly after his escape in July , when he was behind rolls of barbed wire in a camp at Tuzla airport. He has the insignia of the 28th Division of the Bosnian Army tattooed on his upper arm. The division was the first group in the death march out of Srebrenica. The village he now calls home used to be populated by Serbs. And what will become of Sarajevo, the Jerusalem of the Balkans, the fateful site of the assassination that triggered World War I and the target of a 1,day siege by Serbian troops starting in April ?
He orders a rice dish to break his Ramadan fast. When we first met, on a freezing cold day in November , he sat half-frozen and angry inside the presidential palace as grenades detonated and shots rang outside.
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