Mislav Jezic
University of Zagreb, Croatia
PROBLEMS OF UNDERSTANDING XXTH CENTURY HISTORY
OF CROATIA
INTRODUCTION
The actual events in the war against Croatia
and Bosnia and Herzegovina, if followed carefully, show relatively
clearly that this is a war of conquest, a war for the pretended
'Lebensraum' for the Serbian state. This is partly concealed
under the old name of Yugoslavia, now usurped by Serbia and
Montenegro, the annexation of the latter reminding one very
much of the Anschluss of Austria. The abolition of
autonomy in the provinces of Kosovo and Voivodina by the regime
of Milosevic
and the inclusion of Montenegro in the common state were only
the first steps towards the creation of the Greater Serbia
on the ruins of the ex-Yugoslavia, which were achieved by
terror alone, without a war. Other pretended regions had to
be gained by war.
Serbia, as it was, had only 66% of Serbs
among its citizens. The percentage of Serbs in the neighbouring
states is much lower. In Bosnia they are approximately one
third of the population, in Croatia some 11% of citizens.
However, in the name of the Serbs in these states the Serbian
army has occupied over two thirds of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
in Croatia almost one third of the country. Even worse, the
majority of the Serbs in Croatia are living in great cities
outside the occupied territory which was not occupied in the
name of those 11%, but only of the Serbs from the occupied
regions, who represent altogether 3% of citizens of Croatia,
ie. less than a 30th part of the population. The numbers speak
for themselves.
They imply obvious questions. What to do
with the rest of population, the Croats, Moslems and others
living in the occupied regions, who might lower the percentage
of Serbs in the whole territory from 66% in Serbia itself,
which is not very favourable, to 55%, 44%, 33% etc., according
to the extent of conquest? The answer, which no person of
sound mind was able to imagine in advance, was, however, thoughtfully
prepared by the war strategy of the Serbian regime: it was
- mass killing, mass torture, mass rape, mass destruction
of cultural monuments, of religious buildings, or even of
natural preconditions of life, like water-supply, energy-supply,
etc., ie. ethnic cleansing and genocide on the occupied territories
in order to radically change the population in the regions.
The proportions of population and territory mentioned above
explain the mass proportions of the Serbian war crimes in
this war. They are not an accidental, but an inevitable strategic
feature of this war. Those proportions equally show how unjustified
the claims of the Serbian politics are, as well as any tendency
in international diplomacy to, even partly, accept them.
This war against Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina,
to grasp their territories, is no civil war. It started as
a war of a heavily armed ex-Yugoslav, actually Serbian, army
against the unarmed civilian non-Serbian population. It was,
on the contrary, an anti-civilian war.
It is no ethnic war. If it was such a war,
it would have started in the regions with the greatest ethnic
complexity, ie in the provinces of Voivodina and Kosovo. As
real war, it started, however, in the most ethnically coherent
republics, first, for a short time, in Slovenia with some
90% of Slovenes, and then, very dramatically and for a long
period, in Croatia with some 80% of Croats, in both cases
it was war of the ex--Yugoslav army against the majority of
the population.
Finally, it is no religious war. The mass
destruction of Catholic and Muslim religious monuments and
buildings does not prove the religious character of this war,
because of the fact that over 80% of Serbs were never even
baptized. They are considered Orthodox Christians exclusively
because of the national character of the Serbian Orthodox
Church. It started, moreover, obviously as an anti-religious
war waged by non-believers and led largely by former communists.
If it was a religious war, one would expect
that it started as a war between Christians and Muslims, but
it did not. For a year and a half the war was waged in Bosnia
and Herzegovina before the first clashes between Muslims and
Catholic Croats took place, after both of them, who together
make up two-thirds of the population in the state, were reduced
to one third of the territory by Serbian conquests, which
were not impeded by any military force of the international
community, which would be able to stop the aggressor.
Even if the actual international press seems
more concerned with blaming the victims, almost as much as
the aggressor, for this war, and with justifying the inefficiency
of the principal agents in the international community, however,
everybody sincerely wishing to understand the reasons of this
war on the ruins of the former Yugoslavia still can grasp
a clear picture about the actual events and understand that
it is a clear case of aggression.
That is why the justifiers of the Serbian
claims do not use actuality but history, especially the history
of the 20th century, in order to prove the rights of the actual
Serbian politics. They count upon the survival of the Yugoslav
national ideological myths about the negative role of the
Croats in the World Wars, especially in World War II, carefully
elaborated and divulged by the Serb-controlled Yugoslav propaganda
in the last fifty to seventy years.
Therefore this paper shall be devoted to
a critical survey of the main facts of recent Croatian history
with no intention of justifying any abuses or crimes committed
by Croats in the past, but only with the wish to put historical
events in real contexts and proportions.
BASIC HISTORICAL FACTS ABOUT CROATIA IN
THE 20TH CENTURY
Some Presuppositions to Understanding
the Recent History of Croatia
The Croats came to their present homeland
in the 7th century. Croatia has documents testifying to its
statehood since the 9th century. Since the beginning of the
10th century it has been a kingdom. The style of the state
documents is close to the prose of the Carolingian renaissance.
The language is Latin, but the names of courtiers are Croatian:
vinotoc ubrusar, posteljnik,
volar, stitonosa tepcija, zupan,
ban itd. This means that the language of international
communication was Latin, just as the legal context of the
documents was European, and that the language of internal
communication at the court was Croatian.
After the extinction of the national Croat
dynasty of Trpimirovics, the Croatian
Parliament (Sabor) started electing various European dynasties
for Croatian kings: the Hungarian Arpad dynasty (12th-13th
century), the French Anjous (14th century), the Luxemburg
dynasty, Matthias Corvinus and the Lithuanian-Polish Jagiellons
(15th - early 16th century) and finally, at the time of the
enormous threat by the Ottoman empire, the mightiest contemporary
dynasty in Europe - the Habsburgs (16th-20th century). Under
all these foreign kings Croatia preserved the functions of
a viceroy (ban), who was normally a Croat (sometimes there
were two), of its Parliament (Sabor) and of regional administrators
(zupans). It means that Croatia
did not lose the essential attributes of a state, of a kingdom,
until this century.
CREATION OF THE FIRST YUGOSLAVIA
At the end of World War I all the Slav peoples
wanted to leave the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the form the
Habsburg Empire took during its last half a century of existence)
because of its dualistic character which excluded Slavs from
political influence and from equality. Croatia, moreover,
was divided by the Austro-Hungarians into Dalmatia and the
rest of the country, against the wishes of the populations
who wished to live in a unified Croatia. The South Slavic
part of the Habsburg empire broke off all links with the empire
in October 1918. Croatia, as the only legal state subject,
together with the Slovene provinces, with Voivodina and with
Bosnia and Herzegovina (where besides Croats, Slovenes, Serbs
and Muslims lived) formed the State of Slovenes, Croats and
Serbs (SHS), with a government in Zagreb called the National
Council (29th October 1918). The Slovene Dr. Anton Korosec
was elected president of the National Council, the Croat Dr.
Ante Pavelic (not identical with
the later head of the WW2 Croatian state) and the Serb Svetozar
Pribicevic the vice-presidents.
While the president Korosec was
negotiating in Geneva with the representatives of the Serbian
government (Nikola Pasic) and
the so-called Yugoslav Committee including predominantly Croats
from coastal regions, the vice-president Pribicevic
(without the knowledge of the president) and Momcilo
Nincic, a minister from Belgrade,
urged the Central Committee of the National Council in Zagreb
to send a delegation to Belgrade immediately. The Centra1
Committee yielded to their insistence, but deprived the delegation
of the authority to decide about the unification of the state
of SHS and the Kingdom of Serbia without the decision of the
whole National Council, or about the organization of the common
state after the unification (republic or monarchy) without
disclosing it in a common assembly which would prepare the
constitution on the basis of the will of the qualified majority
of two thirds of deputies (24th November 1918).
In Belgrade Dr. Pavelic
was not permitted to read these instructions of the National
Council, but only to greet the regent Alexander, who answered
his toast to the "unified Yugoslavia" with the proclamation
of the unified "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes",
thus unilaterally prejudging the organisation of the common
state (lst December 1918). Thereafter Pribicevic
and Pavelic, without the knowledge
of the president Korosec, without
asking the National Council or the Croatian Parliament, ie.
completely illegitimately, without any authority to do it,
accepted the abolition of the sovereignty of the State of
Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (3 December 1918). This state was
acknowledged as sovereign by Serbia on December 8, solely
in order to give an illusion of legality to the act of unification
of Croatia and other South Slavic countries, dissociated from
the Austro-Hungarian state, only to be combined with the Kingdom
of Serbia immediately thereafter.
The documents of this unification were ratified
only by the Serbian assembly, but never by any political body
in Croatia or the State of SHS. The first victims fell on
the streets of Zagreb during demonstrations on the 5th December
1918. The new regime took care to dissolve all Croatian armed
forces and to occupy Croatia and other parts of the short-lived
State of SHS by troops under Serbian command. This was the
task of a Serbian military mission led by Colonel Milan Pribicevic,
brother of Svetozar who became Minister of Internal Affairs.
Soon, Ante Trumbic, head of the
Yugoslav Committee and the first Minister of Foreign Affairs
of the new Kingdom, had to admit that a military hegemony
of the Turkish type was imposed on Croatia against its will.
The deputies of the National Assembly were
never elected. Their list was selected by the Belgrade government.
On 28th November 1920 (Orthodox St. Vitus' Day), at the moment
of the formation of the Constitutional Assembly, the regent
Alexander permitted himself to dissolve the Croatian Parliament
for the first time in its one thousand years history.
The candidates for the Constitutional Assembly
had to take an oath of loyalty to the king (1920) before they
could begin their work of deciding about the form of government
of the future state (republic or monarchy). Moreover, the
deputies from Croatia and Slovenia and the representatives
of national minorities left the Assembly at the moment of
voting for the constitution. Narrowly, 53.2% deputies voted
positively for the constitution, among them not more than
10 Croats. The qualified majority was not thought of any more.
Thus unification looked like a coup
in Croatia and other parts of the western state which was
swallowed up by its eastern neighbour through a series of
illegitimate procedures. This creation of the Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes was finally sanctioned in Saint-Germain-en-Laye
and Trianon in 1919 and 1920.
THE PERIOD BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS
While the Croatian Parliament was suspended
between 1920 and 1939, real political opposition to the regime
was represented by the Croatian Peasant Party led by Stjepan
Radic. He rejected any use of
arms or violence in the fight for his national and social
programme against Belgrade militarism and centralism. His
heroes were Tolstoi and Gandhi, and the American or British
papers of his time indeed called him the Gandhi of the
Balkans. It was he who warned the National Council in
a brilliant speech on 24th November 1918 against sending the
delegation to Belgrade. His Croatian Peasant Party (CPP) gathered
the support of large majority of the Croats and it became
hard for the Greater-Serbian centralists to suppress this
opposition and to exclude the party from any share of political
power. Thus on 20th June 1928 the royal court and the Serbian
government organized the assassination of the leaders of the
CPP Stjepan Radic, Pavle Radic
and Duro Basaricek (two other
Croatian deputies were wounded) in the midst of the National
Assembly in Belgrade.
Thereafter King Alexander introduced his
personal dictatorship on 6 January 1929, assuming for the
first time the name "Kingdom of Yugoslavia" for
his state. Persecutions of Croats, abuses of the Serbian gendarmerie
against Croatian peasants and the terror of Serbian militant
groups called Chetniks against the unarmed Croat population
produced many emigrants from Croatia, some of whom were ready
to strike back with violence. The suppression of probably
the most powerful non-violent pacifist movement in Europe
between the two wars opened the door for the creation of the
extremist Ustasha organisation under the leadership of another
Ante Pavelic, who got support
from Mussolini's Italy. The Croatian and Macedonian emigrants
organized a successful attempt on Alexander's life in Marseille
1934.
Once more, however, the Croatian Peasant
Party revived under the leadership of Vladko Macek,
won the elections in 1939 and took part in the coalition government
of Serbs and Croats under Cvetkovic
and Macek. An autonomous Croatian
Banate (banovina) was created and the Croatian Parliament
reinstated.
The internal Serbian conflicts finally tore
Yugoslavia to pieces and it capitulated to the Axis forces
in April 1941 after ten days of war.
THE WAR PERIOD
In Croatia, in the war period, two mutually
exclusive states were created.
One state was created under the tutorship
of the occupation forces where Ustashas and their head Ante
Pavelic countered the Chetnik
terrorists with terror of their own and applied nazi methods
not only against Jews and the Gypsies, as the German authorities
required, but equally against Serbs and Croat rebels who opposed
the regime. Similar massacres were performed by the pro-nazi
regime of Milan Nedic in Serbia,
where the persecution of Jews was even more thorough. In Croatia,
the violence and the racist nazi ideology was opposed by the
Catholic church and the ardent sermons of Cardinal Stepinac
in the Zagreb cathedral in defence of the rights of the Jews,
Serbs and men of all races (the collection of sermons with
their dates is preserved). The Serbian Orthodox Church unfortunately
blessed the persecutions of the Jews, because the greater-Serbian
ideology is traditionally in itself a racist ideology (cf.
the eulogies to the "Dinarid" race in the works
of the most famous Serbian anthropogeographer Jovan Cvijic).
The other state arose out of the first rebellion
in Europe against the nazi and fascist occupation led by the
Croat rebels who formed the first partisan military unit on
22 June 1941 near Sisak (Croatia). This state had a government
and a parliament called the State Antifascist Council of
the National Liberation of Croatia (ZAVNOH), where most
prominent roles were played by the great poet Vladimir Nazor
and the democratically oriented communist leader Andrija Hebrang.
This antifascist Croatian government usually controlled even
a larger liberated territory during the war than the Antifascist
Council of the National Liberation of Yugoslavia itself
(AVNOJ) under the leadership of the Secretary-General of the
Communist Party of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito, with whom it
collaborated.
How difficult it was in those days to make
an appropriate choice between two extremes without a moderate
middle variant; between an existing Croatian state, but under
the tutorship of the Axis forces, and a partisan resistance
to the nazism and fascism from which another Croatian state
was emerging; but most probably as a member of a future Yugoslav
federation and under the control of the communists. This may
be shown by the fate of the democratic leader of the CPP Vladko
Macek who had to spend the war
as a helpless passive spectator in internment.
It can be illustrated even more paradoxically
by the fate of the three most prominent Croatian writers or
poets of those times. Vladimir Nazor, a poet of national,
patriotic and religious poems and works, did not take sides
with the nationalist regime, as could be expected, but, as
already mentioned, with the partisans. The famous writer of
great novels about peasant life in which no trace of nationalism
or even political engagement is to be found, Mile Budak, did
not follow Vladko Macek and his
CPP, but joined the Ustasha movement and even became minister
of culture. Finally, Miroslav Krleza,
a highly appreciated and very productive writer, poet and
dramatist, but also the man who inspired almost the whole
leftist and communist Croat and Yugoslav intellectual public
with his revolutionary ideas, did not join communists or partisans;
on the contrary, they threatened him for their sectarian reasons,
and he had to stay inactive and silent in Zagreb during the
year. How to judge the actors in the most paradoxical roles
on the Croatian deeply divided stage in the World War II?
The above mentioned AVNOJ laid the foundations
of the future second Yugoslavia at its session on 29 November
1943 in Jajce in Bosnia. There it was decided that Yugoslavia
would not any more be a unitary but a federal state, where
all nations and republics would be equal and would unite on
the basis of their inalienable right to self-determination,
since the first Yugoslavia failed to solve the national problem.
Tito was elected head of the government (National Committee
of the Liberation of Yugoslavia) and Marshal of the partisan
army. At that session AVNOJ confirmed the decision of the
Croatian ZAVNOH to include the Croatian coastal territories
(Istria, Rijeka, Zadar, Croatian islands) snatched away by
the fascist Italy from Pavelic's
Croatia, in the Republic of Croatia.
The war left great numbers of victims on
all sides: in the fascist and Ustasha concentration camps,
like the ill-famed Jasenovac, where many tens of thousands
Jews, Gypsies, Serbs and Croats were executed, and in the
pits and caves where Chetnik terrorists used to throw the
massacred Croatian peasants from the villages they burnt and
ravaged. Partisan resistance was not milder either, especially
after the fall of fascist Italy when many Chetniks, who collaborated
with the fascists terrorising the Croatian population, joined
the partisans but continued in a less obvious manner following
their bloody greater-Serbian ideology. Therefore, at the end
of the war, some four hundred thousand soldiers (not only
Ustashas, but largely domobrans, ie. involuntary recruits,
too) and civilians fled from Croatia to the Austrian border
out of fear of the greater-Serbian and communist terror. It
was not without reason: when British forces disarmed and extradited
them at Bleiburg to the partisan units persecuting them on
the 15th May 1945, great numbers were killed at the spot and
the majority of captives were sent on death marches to different
concentration camps.
THE POST WAR PERIOD
After the war the Croatian Parliament formally
continued the work of the ZAVNOH and of the previous Parliament
of the Croatian Banate (banovina).
Although President Tito was a Croat, he was
a convinced Yugoslav, like many Croat politicians before him.
However, most assistants who surrounded him, like the Minister
of the Interior (Federal Police Minister) Aleksandar Rankovic,
feared all non-Serbian peoples in Yugoslavia, were Serbs
and often followed the greater Serbian ideology more or less
openly.
Thus Andrija Hebrang, who dared criticize
the greater Serbian expansionism and changes of borders (eg.
in Srijem), was arrested and killed in a jail in Belgrade
in 1948. Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac was accused and
sentenced as a "collaborator with the occupator during
the war" to a long term in jail. Numerous Jews and Serbs
who wanted to bear witness at the court that the cardinal
helped in saving them and their families by using all his
influence and authority to save human lives in those gloomy
days, were rebuffed and even threatened by the public prosecutor
Blazevic as "covert Ustashas".
The post-war persecutions and genocide against
the Croats lasted in some areas for several years. Even the
purges against the Stalinists at the moment of the break with
Stalin and the Inform-bureau, were used to liquidate many
Croats undesirable for quite different reasons.
The war history was officially stylized by
the omnipotent Belgrade bureaucracy, which as a body partly
survived all changes of regimes since the Kingdom of Serbia:
the facts were turned upside-down. Although neither Ustashas
nor Chetniks won the war, but the partisans where the Croats
played a role second to none, the official version for domestic
and international consumption stressed the participation of
the Croats in Ustasha ranks on one hand and the participation
of the Serbs in partisan ranks on the other hand, suggesting,
contrary to facts and rational arguments, that the anti-fascist
Serbs won the war against the fascist Croats. This victory
of the Serbs over the Croats was not decided on the battlefield,
but in the offices of the Belgrade bureaucracy, and by the
redistribution of roles of fascist supporters.
The short period at the end of the 60s, the
so-called "Croatian spring", was marked by the appearance
of the first, still communist, leadership of the Party and
the state in Croatia (Savka Dabcevic-Kucar,
Mika Tripalo, Pero Pirker etc.), which offered resistance
to the Belgrade exploitation of this Republic. They started
introducing democracy and elements of market economy, thereby
securing the spontaneous support of the people, but were rudely
interrupted by an urgent session of the Yugoslav leadership
on the nefarious date of the 1st December 1971 in Kara|or|evo
in Voivodina (under the pressure of the army and possibly
of the USSR). The decisions of that session inaugurated another
wave of purges and imprisonment, another twenty years of economic
exploitation of Croatia, of persecution of Croatian cultural
institutions like the venerable Matica hrvatska, of
contesting even the existence of the Croatian literary or
standard language etc. However, Tito succeeded in securing
at least a formal confirmation of the rights of the peoples
of Yugoslavia to self-determination and the rights of the
six republics and the two autonomous provinces to their primary
sovereignty from which derived the secondary sovereignty of
Yugoslavia in the 1974 constitution of the SFR of Yugoslavia.
Therefore, after Tito's death that constitution
became the first target for the attacks of the greater-Serbian
academic and political circles, especially after the coup
in the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Serbia
at its famous "8th session" (1988), which brought
Slobodan Milosevic to its
top. It was followed by the putchist changes of province
leaderships in Kosovo and Voivodina, the introduction of the
state of emergency in Kosovo, the practical abolition of the
autonomous status of provinces as constituents of the federation
in the new constitution of Serbia (1990), and the launching
of unofficial (terrorist groups) and official (army) military
actions against Slovenia and especially Croatia, obviously
flagging their intention of occupying encircled Bosnia and
Herzegovina.
THE DEMOCRATIC CHANGE IN CROATIA IN 1990
AND 1991
Pressure from the greater-Serbian onslaught
in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia brought about its splitting
into republic parties. The Slovenian and Croatian communist
parties then proclaimed their decision to permit the multi-party
system of democracy in their republics, rightly judging that
Serbian communists threatened their activities and even their
personal freedom far more drastically than any national or
anti-communist movements or parties in their republics. Thus
the first free elections in this century were organized in
Slovenia, Croatia and thereafter in other republics. The result
was very symptomatic: the communist victory in Serbia and
Montenegro and the communist defeat in all other republics
proved whose interests the previous regime served and whom
it exploited.
The following period was characterised by
the efforts of the representatives of Serbia to stop democratic
changes in Croatia and other republics by force. A tremendous
propaganda campaign of hate against anything Croatian or Catholic
was launched, but also against the Slovenes, Albanians and
others. This was followed by the formation of a zone of "rebellion"
around Knin which was gradually widened, by the insistence
of the previous president of the Yugoslav Presidency Borislav
Jovic on introducing a state of
emergency in Yugoslavia and authorising the army to abolish
the democratic gains of the other republics. Then there was
the appearance of an unconstitutional "Main Staff of
the Supreme Command", of unknown membership which started
openly backing the propositions of Jovic
and imposing ultimatums against the will of the representatives
of the non-Serbian republics (which was the real beginning
of the military coup in Yugoslavia). Then blocking
the confirmation of the Croatian representative Stipe Mesic,
as incumbent of the Presidency. Finally, military action in
supplying an abundance of arms to Serbian terrorists in Croatia,
in order to cause great damage in Croatia and to overthrow
any rebellious democratic authorities in the republic on the
one hand and to direct the military actions of the Yugoslav
army against Croatia and its citizens, its villages and towns
on the other.
The next move was the grotesque attempt of
the representatives of Serbia and Montenegro in the ex-Yugoslav
Presidency (who are illegitimate because Serbia was over-represented
and the representative of Kosovo was never elected in Kosovo)
to usurp the authority of the Presidency and thus to provide
the Army with the Supreme Command, which as such already tried
to reject the validity of General Kadijevic's
obligations assumed in The Hague on 10 October 1991 concerning
the withdrawal of the Army from Croatia.
Croatia reacted with a series of democratic
changes with the intention of defending itself against the
growing threats from Serbia. First came the great electoral
victory of the Croatian Democratic Union with Dr Franjo Tu|man
at its head, and the success of other opposition parties in
May; next, the proclamation of the new constitution of the
Republic of Croatia in December 1990. Then the almost unanimous
choice (over 94%) of the citizens of Croatia at the referendum
in May 1991 to live in a sovereign state of Croatia. This
was followed by proclamation of sovereignty and independence
on 30 June - after all institutions of Yugoslavia failed or
stopped working. And finally, on 8 October 1991, the acknowledgment
of the expiry of the moratorium imposed on the decisions of
Croatian and Slovenian parliaments by the European Community.
It may be legally noteworthy that independent
Croatia is not quite a "new European state". It
is heir to the Republic of Croatia of the Yugoslav period
and all Yugoslav international relations, rights and obligations
concerning Croatia. It inherits thereby the ZAVNOH Croatia
of the war period, the Croatian Banate (banovina) of the pre-war
period and the millenary state of Croatia from previous periods.
At the same time, if it inherits the ZAVNOH Croatia, it cannot
inherit any legal rights or obligations of the Pavelic's
Croatia (they were mutually exclusive), which is obvious from
the territory it occupies and claims, from the personal composition
of its leadership (which includes several members of anti-fascist
resistance from the war period, like President Tu|man
himself), and from the new constitution of Croatia.
THE WAR SINCE 1991
At the moment of the proclamation of sovereignty
and independence by the parliaments of Croatia and Slovenia,
and of the Yugoslav army attack in Slovenia, the European
Community started assuming a more active role in Yugoslav
affairs: the delegation of the three foreign ministers from
the EC came to Brioni (Croatia) and tried to stop the war.
However, continued talks about some future Yugoslavia and
reluctance to acknowledge the sovereignty of Croatia and Slovenia
contributed far more to inflame the war than to stop it. It
encouraged the aggressor against Croatia and fed his hope
of attaining his goals of a Greater Serbia or a centralised
Yugoslavia. It failed to deprive the aggression of the prospect
of success and thus encouraged it. Such a misreading of the
situation caused thousands of deaths during the moratorium,
several times more wounded, some three hundred thousand refugees
from the ravaged regions of Croatia, dozens of burnt villages,
more than a dozen bombed and devastated cities, more than
two hundred damaged cultural and historical monuments in that
first period of war, a number of them of the highest category,
immense losses in industrial plant and economic potential,
large areas of burnt forests, damaged national parks and great
damage to the natural environment. The war crimes and crimes
against humanity, committed by the Army and the terrorists
armed by it on the soil of the ravaged Croatia called in vain
for the most urgent action on the part of the democratic world.
The actions of the international community,
however, were far from efficient. The EC sent its monitors,
the UNO sent peacekeeping forces, but there was no military
intervention to help the victims of the war. The war spread,
as could easily be foreseen, to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and
has taken hundreds of thousands of lives since. The international
community restricted itself to sending humanitarian help,
rather like feeding cattle soon to be slaughtered. The only
measure gradually introduced against the aggressor is an international
embargo that indeed aggravates the economic situation in Serbia,
which is difficult, however, first of all due to the costs
of the war investments into the future Great Serbia.
In the meantime, waves of recognition of
Croatia and Slovenia took place after 15 January 1992, first
by the Baltic states and Iceland, then the Vatican, Sweden
and members of the European Community, and thereafter by many
other countries, Australia being among the first outside Europe.
In May 1992 Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina were
recognized by the U.S.A. and soon thereafter became members
of the United Nations.
In this moment Croatia has to solve the problem
of its occupied territories. Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina
is even harder to reach, as progressive military operations
distance the reality more and more from any possible just
solution. Serbian military force has changed the direction
of the Muslim military actions: they do not attempt any more
to defend their eastern borders from the Serbian invasion,
but try to find some compensation by moving westwards towards
Croatian regions, especially in central Bosnia, and in occupying
them.
Great numbers of Bosnian refugees, especially
Muslims and Croats, are still pouring into Croatia and are
given shelter and food here. Smaller numbers of them are later
transported to other countries willing to accept them and
help them.
Croatia tries to recover even in these war
times, to save its economy, to develop culture and science,
to create a democratic society and a state of law. It applied
for membership in the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, and
asks for the participation in a number of international programmes,
like the PHARE-programme, to be able to achieve those goals.
Sometimes it is not met with understanding, but with difficulties
and prejudices. Some of them have roots in the deformed image
of Croatia created by the ex-Yugoslav and the actual Serbian
propaganda. Therefore, we hope that the better knowledge and
clearer ideas about its past might help to the present and
future in Croatia and in the neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina.
SELECTED WORKS ON THE RECENT HISTORY OF
CROATIA -
UNIVERSITY OF ZAGREB
Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia,
Ithaca-London 1984; transl. into Croatian: Nacionalno
pitanje u Jugoslaviji, Zagreb, 1988
Rudolf Bicanic,
Ekonomska podloga hrvatskoga pitanja, Zagreb 1938
Dusan Bilandzic,
Historija SFRJ, 2nd ed.
Dusan Bilandzic,
Ideje i praksa drustvenog razvoja
Jugoslavije 1945-1973, Beograd 1973
Ljubo Boban, Kontroverze iz povijesti
Jugoslavije, I-III, Zagreb 1987 and 1989- 1990
Ljubo Boban, Hrvatske granice 1918-1993,
Zagreb, 3rd ed. 1993
Croatia between War and Independence,
ed. B. Covic,
Zagreb 1991
Eduard Calic,
Europska trilogija: Smrtni udar Europi, Anatomija Versaillesa,
Propast treceg Reicha, NZMH,
Zagreb 1993.
Dokumenti o postanku Kraljevine Srba,
Hrvata i Slovenaca 1914 - 1919, sabrao ih Ferdo Sisic,
Zagreb 1920
Christophe Dolbeau, Le panserbisme cancer
yougoslave, Zagreb 1992
Historija naroda Jugoslavije, I-ll, Zagreb
1953 and 1959
Veceslav Holjevac,
Hrvati izvan domovine, Zagreb, 2nd ed. 1968
Istorija Jugoslavije (I. Bozic,
S. ]irkovic, M. Ekmecic,
V. Dedijer), Beograd 1972
Izvori velikosrpske agresije, ed.
B. Covic,
Zagreb 1991
Slavko Jezic,
Hrvatska knjizevnost od pocetka
do danas (1100-1941), Zagreb 1944
Anto Knezevic,
An Analysis of Serbian Propaganda, Zagreb 1992
Miroslav Krleza,
Deset krvavih godina I drugi politicki
eseji, Zagreb 1970
Zvonimir Kulundzic,
Atentat na Stjepana Radica, Zagreb 1967
Michael McAdams, Croatia Myth and Reality,
Arcadia, California 1992
Trpimir Macan, Povijest hrvatskoga naroda,
2nd ed. Zagreb 1992
Trpimir Macan - Josip Sentija,
A Short History of Croatia, Zagreb 1992
Dominikus Mandic,
Hrvati i Srbi dva stara razlicita
naroda.
Hrvatska revija, Munchen- Barcelona
1971: Kroaten und Serben - zwei alte vershiedene Volker,
Ubersetzung and Einleitung von Josef Hauk, Heiligenhof
-Bad Kissengen 1989
Ivan Muzic, Stjepan
Radic u Kraljevini Srba, Hrvata
i Slovenaca, 3rd ed. Zagreb 1988
Nasa domovina,
zbornik (sv.1: Hrvatska zemlja - Hrvatski narod
Hrvatska poviest - Hrvatska znanost: sv.
2: Hrvatska kultura - Politicka
poviest Hrvata), Zagreb 1943
George Prpic,
The South Slavs, repr. from The Immigrants Influence on
Wilson's Peace Policies, Univ. of Kentucky Press 1967
Ivan Supek, Krivovjernik na Ijevici, Bristol,
1980.
Johann Georg Reissmuller, Der Krieg vor
unserer Haustur, Stuttgart 1992
L. v. Sudland (Two Pilar), Die sudslawische
Frage und der Weltkrieg, Wien 1918
Franjo Tu|man,
Velike ideje i mali narodi, Zagreb 1969
Franjo Tu|man,
Hrvatska u monarhistickoj Jugoslaviji,
I-ll, Zagreb 1993.
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