Abstract
This year marks 100 years since the creation of Yugoslavia. But don’t expect celebrations or parades in the nations that went by this name. We don’t talk about it, says
Croatian soldiers at the monument of former concentration camp Jasenovac during the commemoration for people killed during World War II
CREDIT: Antonio Bat//Rex
In Croatia in 2018, however, there are no visible traces of this union and no formal commemorations or anniversaries of the Yugoslavian centenary. It is as though it has been wiped from history.
The reasons for this are two-fold: first, the name “Yugoslavia” has remained strongly linked to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the communist state established in 1945 and dissolved in 1992. Second, in the Croatian national state it is not common to commemorate or celebrate anything concerning the Yugoslavian federation.
That detail marks Croatia’s uneasy relationship with its recent history, which is mostly fixated on the events of World War II (which ended with the formation of the new Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) and the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s (during which Yugoslavia was dissolved and the Republic of Croatia was established).
Both these periods are linked to the dialectics between nationalism and internationalism on the one hand and between fascism and anti-fascism on the other.
Croatia’s nationalistic historic revisionism is a symptom of the current political vacuum: the state has had five different governments in the past 10 years, but none of them managed to implement a clear and efficient policy concerning the growing economic crisis.
Without a systematic response to social and economic issues, it is much easier to revert to old historical debates and national mythologies. This revisionism resembles the policy of the 1990s and we are seeing the same signs again.
Changes to street names and attempts to adapt the school system to reflect a particular way of seeing Croatian history are still happening. The Zagreb city government recently changed the name of Marshall Tito Square to Republic of Croatia Square. And in January 2015, the Croatian government announced a much-needed reform of the education system.
However, instead of discussing methodology, the past three years have become a battlefield between politicians, educators and activists over the education content, with the subject of history being particularly significant.
“The initial idea was to introduce a modern method of teaching by encouraging pupils to solely explore historical sources and to recognise history as a part of their everyday life. However, right-wing critics claimed that this programme didn’t teach enough national history in a proper way,” said Branimir Janković, a historian and researcher of 20th century Yugoslavia.
The educational reforms are still being discussed.
In 1941, Axis powers established the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna država Hrvatska), the fascist puppet-state run by the nationalistic Ustasha regime, responsible for the killings of Serbs, Romas, Jews and political opponents.
However, from the outset, NDH was opposed by pan-Yugoslav, anti-fascist partisan guerilla groups. Eventually, partisans managed to defeat NDH, establish control over its territory and form a new Yugoslav state in 1945. Unlike other communist states in central and eastern Europe, it was not a part of the Soviet Union.
Janković explained how Yugoslavia constructed its identity using anti-fascist history: “In order to join together conflicted nations, the new regime introduced ‘brotherhood and unity’ as a key concept of the new political identity. It narrated that all Yugoslavian nations were equally leading an indisputable fight against fascism and were now joined in a solid federation. That concept included all nations, but excluded anyone not fighting on the ‘right’ side. It also prohibited any revision or criticism of the partisan movement.”
So, during the political and economic turmoil in the 1980s, historic revisionism became a prominent part of strong national uprisings that led to the Yugoslav civil war.
During the war in the 1990s, Croatian territory was under attack by the Serbian national army and the still existing Yugoslavian National Army (JNA), which fostered nationalist, anti-Serbian and anti-Yugoslavian sentiments in Croatia. In that setting, the governing right-wing party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), decided to revise World War II history. Yugoslavian history, with an emphasis on partisan battles, was not suited to the new nationalist ideology so a new (hi)story with more focus on the Croatian nation and its urge for independence was tailored.
As Janković said, “HDZ decided to promote a myth of the longed-for independent national state so there was little choice but to revert to the fascist NDH, to present it as a symbol of the historic national aspiration.” So the right-wing invoked NDH symbols and history while trying to ignore its fascist side.
The finest example is Jasenovac, the largest Ustasha concentration camp in Croatia, a national tragedy so manipulated that it has become a tragi-comedy. During communism, it was officially established that 700,000 people were killed in the camp. During the 1990s the new government claimed it was “just” a couple of thousand, with some politicians even suggesting that Jasenovac was a mere labour camp, with no casualties until communists turned it into a death camp. It was a clear example of the HDZ’s approach. President Franjo Tuđman was cautious not to openly justify fascism, but he encouraged cleansing the NDH of its bad past and putting the label of “fascism” on new enemies. The last scientifically verified research on the Jasenovac Memorial Site has established the identities of 83,145 victims, although a final death count has yet to be established and it is not likely that this issue will ever be resolved.
The other example of historical revisionism is a paramilitary unit, the Croatian Liberating Forces (Hrvatske oslobodilačke snage, HOS), which during the 1990s openly used Ustasha symbols and praised its traditions and radical ideology.
“President Tuđman knew that every soldier was needed so he tolerated this, even though HOS soldiers were acting on their own, not following army orders,” said Janković. “However, Tuđman concluded that this could harm Croatia’s international reputation so, around 1992, he integrated HOS into the Croatian Army.”
After the war, both HOS and the Croatian Army were uncritically praised, with an uncanny resemblance of the prior communist regime’s reluctance to openly discuss the crimes committed by partisans.
Thus, in the 1990s, this revision of history was made official and implemented in schools, media, public spheres and spaces. Serbian and Yugoslavian public personas were banished from school textbooks and street names were changed with more “suitable” people taking their place. For example, the Nobel-winning Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić disappeared from the literature curriculum and the Ustasha writer Mile Budak appeared instead.
Fewer history textbook pages were devoted to the anti-fascist resistance and more pages were devoted to NDH, with scarce reference to its fascist allies. Modernist and brutalist monuments and skyscrapers built during socialism were either destroyed or left to rot. The intention of this process was to eradicate the non-nationalist legacy of the prior 50 years and to erase the collective memory.
On the other side, with Croatia entering negotiations to become a member of the European Union in 2000, all ruling political parties consensually stopped flirting with the legacy of the fascist NDH in order to present Croatia as a modern, civic and moderate state. So, while Croatia was on its transition “upwards” (from socialism to capitalism, from Balkans to EU), mainstream historic revisionism of any kind became far less common.
A map of Yugoslavia
CREDIT: Antiqua Print Gallery/Alamy
That changed in 2013 for several reasons: Croatia entered the EU, so external controlling mechanisms had disappeared; the transition was completed, with no other specific political goal taking its place; and the economic crisis grew stronger, which quickly showed that entering the EU couldn’t solve social issues. In 2013, the right-wing HDZ, which became more moderate during the 2000s, leaned back to the right. The party president, Tomislav Karamarko, introduced a new political programme with an emphasis on fighting against the Yugoslavian “totalitarian” legacy. He became first deputy prime minister in January 2016 and then started a process that bore striking similarities to the one from the 1990s.
Tamara Opačić, journalist, researcher and author of the report Historic Revisionism, Hate Speech and Violence against Serbs in 2016, explains measures introduced during Karamarko’s mandate.
“He started using ideas and authoritarian methods common in 1990s, directly intervened in public media content, planned to change the education system and gave bigger powers to war veterans organisations, which were assigned for ‘dirty jobs’ of public obstruction. Although in 2013 Croatia passed a law prohibiting public denial, belittlement or condoning of genocide crimes, the law was never enforced in such cases.”
Karamarko’s government also cut budgets for financing NGOs and non-profit media. Even though he stood down after only five months, he managed to revive and normalise the extreme nationalistic historic revisionism, deemed archaic since 2000.
And the exact same issues have become prominent again. In 2016, the right-wing filmmaker Jakov Sedlar directed a documentary film, Jasenovac – The Truth, using falsified documents to claim that Jasenovac wasn’t a concentration camp until partisans arrived. The film was heavily criticised by historians, human rights organisations and domestic and European media (such as Frankfurter Rundschau), but Sedlar was awarded the Zagreb City Award for his film. In 2017, HOS veterans erected a memorial board in Jasenovac, causing an outrage among human rights organisations. Karamarko’s successor, Andrej Plenković, a more moderate right-wing politician, failed to tackle this issue. He negotiated with veterans and tried to persuade them into taking the board down. Plenković’s final resolution was to move the board to the nearby village, Novska, and establish the Committee for Confrontation with Consequences of Undemocratic Regimes. Opačić called this committee “a travesty”, noting that they did absolutely nothing, while adding that “it is maybe even better that way because most post-communist countries used these committees solely to equalise fascism and communism”.
Finally, there is an ever-present glorification of the 1990s, with the International Criminal Court’s guilty verdict of six Croatian generals, followed by General Slobodan Praljak’s shocking suicide in the Hague courtroom last November, adding more fuel to the fire. In the irrational aftermath of these dramatic events, Plenković became the first head of an EU government to support convicted war criminals, telling the Croatian news agency Hina that the ICC’s verdict was “a deep moral injustice towards six Croats from Bosnia and the Croatian people”.
While the historic revisionism during the 1990s could be understood as a construction of the new national state mythology, it is less clear why an almost identical revisionism is repeating itself now.
Croatia has its own independent state, there are no more Serbian and communist foes, so “heroic tales” of the past seem redundant.
However, the social crisis grows and the political stalemate continues as none of the political parties seems to have an answer to striking economical issues. Without a clear policy or anyone to directly blame, this sort of revisionism seems like a nostalgia for times when enemies could be easily identified, confronted and defeated.
And we don’t need to read dystopian novels or thoroughly study history books to know that such a high demand for enemies is usually followed very quickly with a supply. So, to prevent dreadful consequences of this historic revisionism, it is necessary to immediately revise the status quo politics.
Opačić’s report shows that historic revisionism is followed by growing violence against minorities: the number of cases of hate speech and violence against Serbs in 2016 is higher than in 2013, with the situation allegedly even worse in 2017.
If there is one thing we can definitely learn from our recent history, it is a fact that historic revisionism doesn’t reveal much about history but strongly warns us about our future.
