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WW2 still the foundation of central European identities

Rewriting Balkan history

Croatia and Serbia are inventing new pasts as a foundation for very nationalist futures.

by Jean-Arnault Dérens 
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Eastern Orthodox archbishop Bartholomew I of Constantinople visits the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia in September

It’s been claimed that Winston Churchill said the Balkans ‘produce more history than they can consume’. This summer, arguments between Serbia and Croatia over their history flared up again. Serbia accused Croatia of rehabilitating the fascist Ustaše regime of 1941-4, which killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, Roma and Serbs. All the nationalist governments of the Balkans have distorted or manipulated historical facts to justify or bolster their own authority. All try to reformulate national histories to gloss over or play down the memory of the antifascist struggle that was the foundation of Yugoslavia (1945-91). A quarter of a century after the collapse of the socialist federal republic, this is getting out of control again.

In July the court of appeal in Zagreb annulled the 1946 verdict that found Cardinal Alojzije Viktor Stepinac (1898-1960) guilty of collaboration with the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), established by the Ustaše in 1941 under the protection of Nazi Germany. Stepinac, named archbishop of Zagreb in 1937, is a controversial figure. In office throughout the war, he backed the regime, though his supporters point out that he condemned its racial policies in some of his sermons, and claim that his trial was held at the instigation of the Communists to curb the Catholic Church’s influence. Imprisoned in Lepoglava, then under house arrest in his native village of Krašić, near Zagreb, where he died, he was elevated to cardinal in 1952 by Pope Pius XII and beatified in 1998 by John-Paul II. The Vatican has put his canonisation on hold so as not to compromise its dialogue with the Orthodox Churches, a priority for Pope Francis.

A belated ‘national revolution’ is under way in Croatia. At independence, and during the 1991-5 war, under the presidency of the nationalist Franjo Tuđman and his party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), Croatia made a first attempt to distance itself from the symbolic and ideological heritage of the antifascist resistance during the second world war. Some Croat combat units openly claimed allegiance to the Ustaše, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The government chose to give less emphasis to the annual commemoration of the prisoner revolt at the Jasenovac concentration camp on 22 April 1945, while making that of the Bleiburg massacres official. (In May 1945, near Bleiburg in the hills of southern Austria, Tito’s partisans surrounded fleeing civilians and soldiers of the Ustaše state, and killed several tens of thousands (1).) Every year, the celebration of these events rekindles an internal war of memories. The presence of government officials at either ceremony attracts criticism. This year Croatia’s president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović (HDZ) was ‘unable’ to travel to Jasenovac, though she attended the ceremony at Bleiburg.

Yet the Ustaše regime has never been officially recognised. The constitution adopted at independence lays claim to an ‘antifascist’ heritage. This ambivalence is partly explained by the personal position of Tuđman, a former partisan general who became a cadre in the Yugoslav regime before turning nationalist in the 1970s. Independent Croatia rejected the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Tito’s socialist Yugoslavia, but claimed the resistance as part of its own history. A further step was taken when the right returned to power after the November 2015 election. The Patriotic Coalition led by the HDZ, which brings together all Croatia’s far-right movements, was obliged to form an alliance with Most (Bridge of Independent Lists), a ‘popular movement’ whose leaders are close to the Catholic hierarchy, while the post of prime minister went to Tihomir Orešković, a Croatian-Canadian businessman with no party affiliation but strong links to Opus Dei. The partnership broke down this June, leading to a fresh election in September after months of acrimonious debate over revisionism.

Internal enemies

Croatia’s culture minister, Zlatko Hasanbegović, a popular figure in the present government, is a holocaust-denying historian and was a member of the far-right Croatian Pure Party of Rights (HČSP) before joining the HDZ. He rejects Croatia’s antifascist heritage, which he calls ‘a concept devoid of meaning’, put forward by ‘Bolshevik dictatorships’. His work attempts to play down the extermination policies of the Ustaše regime. As a Muslim from Zagreb, Hasanbegović comes from the hyper-marginal political tradition of the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who supported the Ustaše. Some joined the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of SS Handschar, in response to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini’s appeal to collaborate. Historian Tvrtko Jakovinasays: ‘The government puts collaboration and the crimes of communism on the same footing. It claims that the two forms of totalitarianism, communism and fascism, were equally bad. In practice, this allows it to stigmatise “internal enemies”, starting with “communists” and all those who are nostalgic for Yugoslavia, not to mention Serbs and other national minorities, as well as bad Catholics, feminists and members of sexual minorities.’

Croatian revisionism is part of a trend affecting all of central Europe. Under Ivo Sanader, prime minister 2003-9, the HDZ began a clear repositioning with a view to joining the European Union. After accession in July 2013, the party shifted far to the right. Milorad Pupovac, president of the Serb National Council in Croatia, said this May: ‘An [HDZ] leader told me “We achieved our first goal with independence, and our second by joining the EU; now it’s time to create a truly national state”.’Once Croatia was admitted, the EU lost most of the leverage it had during the accession process to prevent or punish deviation from acceptable ideological norms. Croatia, which secretly longs to join the very conservative Visegrád Group (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic), believes EU approval has given it the means to affirm its ‘national identity’, and even a very rightwing version of it.

The government puts collaboration and the crimes of communism on the same footing. It claims that communism and fascism were equally bad Tvrtko Jakovina

Revisionism flourishes in Serbia too. In 2004 the parliament enacted a law giving the same pension rights to former partisans and former Chetniks. The new legislation had been proposed by Vojislav Mihailović, an MP representing the monarchist Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO). He is the grandson of Dragoljub ‘Draža’ Mihailović (1893-1946), head of the Yugoslav army in Serbia, which during the second world war included irregular units known as Chetniks. This movement, loyal to the government in exile in London, initially fought the occupying armies (Nazi, Bulgarian, Italian), their Serbian collaborators in the puppet Government of National Salvation, and the Ustaše regime. Later, some units chose to collaborate, preferring to fight Tito’s Communist resistance, whose growing influence earned them the support of the UK from 1943 (2). Hunted through the mountains of eastern Bosnia, Draža was arrested in 1946, tried in Belgrade and shot. After a retrial that started in 2006, he was rehabilitated in May 2015. Though historians recognise the ambivalence of the nationalist Chetnik movement, which was a genuine resistance movement before turning partially to collaboration, this rehabilitation raises other issues: if Draža was innocent, then his execution was a crime by Yugoslavia’s Communist regime.

Serbia took a further step with the opening, in May 2015, of the rehabilitation trial of General Milan Nedić (1878-1946). Nedić served as chief of staff of the Yugoslav army 1934-5 and was appointed army and navy minister in 1939. He was forced to resign a year later by the prince regent, Paul, because of his declared sympathies with Nazi Germany. Nedić is considered responsible for the collapse of the Yugoslav defence against the Axis invasion of April 1941. In August 1941 he became head of the puppet Government of National Salvation. Under the direction of the German military governor, Nedić’s troops were involved in the arrest, deportation and murder of thousands of Jews and resistance fighters. Historian Bojan Dimitrijević, an ardent advocate of Nedić’s rehabilitation and a member of the leadership of the Democratic Party (DS), affiliated with the Socialist International, said at the trial: ‘Collaboration is not a crime. It is merely a form of cooperation with the occupier.’

An obscured debate

Before Dimitrijević, the Serbian Liberal Party (SLS), a small organisation that ceased to exist in 2010, had also pressed for Nedić’s rehabilitation. This enthusiasm did not stem from support for Nazi ideology, but from a rejection of Yugoslav Communism so violent that it legitimated all the party’s adversaries. The SLS rejected Tito’s regime both as a social system and as a federal and multinational project that had stifled the Serbian people. It claimed that Serbia, a constitutional monarchy from the mid-19th century and therefore one of the oldest democracies in Europe, had been prevented by Tito from following its natural evolutionary path. Serbian revisionists see themselves as fighting the monolithic vision of history imposed by the Communist regime; they denounce the ‘myth’ of the fraternity and unity of the Yugoslav peoples, a central doctrine of the Tito regime. This debate was obscured under Slobodan Milošević (1989-2000), who excelled at playing both sides. As former head of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in Serbia, Milošević presented himself as defender of the Yugoslav heritage, undermined by the secession of the other federal republics; at the same time, he rehabilitated Serbian nationalism in its most conservative and orthodox forms.

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1941: members of Croatia’s nationalist Ustaše militia take down the Serbian street sign in King Peter I Square, Zagreb
Ilse Steinhoff / Ullstein Bild / Getty

Since 2014 Serbia has been governed by the liberal conservative Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Rooted in the nationalist far right, the SNS radically updated its image in 2008, and since then has claimed to be firmly pro-European. Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, who as an ambitious young member of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) in the 1990s famously called for the killing of Muslims, is trying to cultivate the image of a smooth technocrat. He is pursuing a programme of ultraliberal reforms while encouraging the unbridled personality cult around him, and is careful not to talk too much about the past. He glorifies a ‘Serbia of the future’ that will break with its ghosts and settle its historical accounts — especially Kosovo, whose independence, declared in 2008, Serbia is tacitly coming to recognise.

To the West, the history of the Balkans seems complicated and confused. Its complexity is used as an excuse to avoid any attempt to make it intelligible, and is part of an ideological package that Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova (3) calls Balkanism, close to Edward W Said’s Orientalism.

The prospect of joining the EU after war in the 1990s was supposed to offer Balkan states a way to avoid a repetition of their tragic past. Accession would give them a way out of history, a process inherent to Europeanisation. The example of Croatia shows the futility of such claims. But now that EU enlargement is no longer the order of the day, many European diplomats are comfortable with Vučić’s de-ideologised discourse, since he seems able to guarantee Serbia’s stability. His nationalist excesses are forgotten, forgiven as sins of youth. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has failed to prevent the former dogs of war from remaining centre-stage in politics. The supposed equality between Ustaše and partisans in Croatia, and the Serbian authorities’ professed historical neutrality have the common goal of erasing the memory of and denigrating the Yugoslav resistance, which combined a socialist vision with a will to coexist peacefully and a promise of equality.

In Macedonia, erasing memory takes a stranger form. Since 2011 the impressive Museum of the Macedonian Struggle for Sovereignty and Independence in Skopje has told the story of Macedonian nationalist fighters hunted by the Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians, and finally Yugoslav Communists. This allows Macedonia, finally ‘reconciled’ (4) under the leadership of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE), to forget its historical wounds and divisions, though its birth as a state stems from the antifascist resistance. It is this moment that must be erased. Coloured fountains replace historical analysis; Nazi collaborators and resistance fighters become no more than characters in a pageant.

Jean-Arnault Dérens

Jean-Arnault Dérens is editor of Le Courrier des Balkans.
Translated by Charles Goulden

(1Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration, Stanford University Press, 2002.

(2See the memoirs of Churchill’s envoy to Tito, Fitzroy McLean, Eastern Approaches, Penguin Global, 2004.

(3Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans,Oxford University Press, New York, 2009.

(4See Jean-Arnault Dérens and Laurent Geslin, ‘A challenge to Macedonia’s establishment’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, June 2016.

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