Croat Serbian War

[Benita Vandervoort]

Thecreation of Yugoslavia as part of the reordering of Europe after the first world war made a great deal of sense. In geopolitical terms, it helped accomplish the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, removing Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Hercegovina and Vojvodina from Austrian or Hungarian control. At the same time, the creation of a Land of the South Slavs, or Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija, from jug, south, plus slavija, of Slavs) met the demands of at least some of the dominant political figures among the South Slavic peoples, particularly the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. These peoples and the Mecedonians speak closely related languages or dialects of the same languages or dialects of the same language. Serbian and Croatian are as closely related and mutually intelligible as British English and American English, while the relationships of Slovenian and Macedonian to Serbo-Croatian are about the equivalent of those of Dutch and Schweizerdeutsch, respectively, to German. The fact that Croats and Slovenes are mainly Catholic while Serbs and Macedonians are mainly Orthodox Christians did not seem to differentiate these peoples overwhelmingly. In terms of criteria of language/dialect, religion, traditional economic structures and other cultural features, there were and are probably fewer differences between Serbs and Croats than between Bavarians and Prussians. The existence of a sizable population of Serbo-Croatian speaking Muslims in Bosnia and Hercegovina was an additional complication, but many of those Muslims who identified themselves as Turks had left Bosnia for Turkey at the end of the war, and most of those remaining identified themselves as Serbs or Croats, albeit of Muslim confession. The large Albanian population of Macedonia and Kosovo was another potential problem, but was ignored under the Serbian urge to recover Kosovo, the site of the Serbs' legendary defeat by the Turks in 1389.

As an empirical matter, the South Slav peoples were so closely related that they should be able to live together as well as the speakers of the various dialects of German. As a practical matter, they were so intertwined territorially that they had to do so. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs lived in Croatia, largely as a result of migrations there during the seventeenth century, which had been encouraged by the Austro-Hungarian Empire although some Serbs had migrated to Croatia long before this time. Serbs, Croats and Muslims lived intermingled in the towns of Bosnia, and their separate villages were intermingled throughout the countryside. Vojvodina was and is a complex ethnic mosaic, with large Serb and Hungarian populations and smaller groups of Croats, Germans (until 1945), Romanians, Ruthenians, Slovaks and others. There was no way to delineate state boundaries on a national basis unless the South Slavs could be conceived of as a nation.

The call for a joint state of these closely related peoples had arisen in Croatia in the mid-19th century, and was embraced at different times and with different intensities by political figures from all of the Yogoslav peoples. However, this idea of a common Yogoslav identity competed throughout the 19th century with the separate nationalist ideologies of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and Bosnian Muslims, which were developed at the same time. These separate national ideologies identified the individual nations quite differently, and in ways that were incompatible. The creation of Yogoslavia was in part a Wilsonian response to those political figures who called for the self-determination of the South Slavs in their own Yogoslav state. This decision was supported by ethologies, notably the great Serbian scientist Jovan Cvijic, and the borders of Yogoslavia were drawn keeping in mind the linguistic and cultural characteristics of the Yogoslav peoples.

The political success of the Yugoslav ideology at the Versailles conference did not mean that the separate nationalist ideologies were overcome; rather, they drove Croat, Macedonian and Slovene nationalists into determined opposition to the Yugloslav state. From their point of view, the creation of Yugoslavia denied the right of self-determination to the separate Yugoslav peoples. Croat and Macedonian nationalists created terrorist movements, with the support of the fascit government of Italy, to attack the Yugoslav state. In 1932, these terrorists succeeded in assassinating the King of Yugoslavia while he was visiting France.

Since Yugoslavia was based on the coexistence of the speakers of Serbo-Croatian, who formed the great majority of the population, we will concentrate on the Serbian and Croatian nationalist ideologies and programs. The Serbs of Serbia had been the first people in the Balkans to attain autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, and the Serbian national ideology had its inception before the others. This Serb ideology tended to be inclusive, viewing the speakers of most dialects of Serbo-Croatian as Serbs. The Yugoslav ideology that started in Croatia in the 1840s was also all-inclusive, but recognized the diversity of most South Slavs. The Croatian ideology that developed in the 1850s, however, was exclusive, particularly in regard to Serbs. Where Serbian linguistic ideology saw most of the dialects of Serbo-Croatian as one language, the Croatian ideology took pains to distinguish them, making an article of faith out of distinguishing as separate languages Croatian and Serbian dialects that were and are mutually intelligible.

The Serbian ideology was compatible with Yugoslavism in that Serbs could consider most of the other Yugoslav peoples, excepting the Slovenes, as Serbs, and most of Yugoslavia, except Slovenia, as Serbian land. The Croatian ideology was absolutely incompatible with a Yugoslav identity, however. To distinguish the Croats from the Serbs required rejection not only of the idea of a common language, but also rejection of the idea that these peoples are interrelated. The main founder of the Croatian ideology in the mid-19th century, Ante Starcevic, was frankly racist about Serbs, viewing them as "slaves" and "the most loathsome of beasts." At the same time, and rather inconsistently, Starcevic was inclusive in regard to Muslims, regarding them as "the best Croats," and dismissed a separate Slovene identity by calling them "Mountain Croats." At this time, national identity was clearly not bound exclusively to religious confession.

The first Yugoslavia (1919-1941) was clearly dominated by the Serbs, under a Serbian royal family. The inclusive Serb ideology led to centralist government policies and a dictatorship after 1929, which provoked greater resistance from other national groups. Whether Yugoslavia would have survived the 1940s had World War Two not occurred is not known. The Serb-controlled government had granted autonomy amounting to virtual independence to the Croats in 1939, and the Yugoslav state might have split a few years later. However, he April 1941, the Axis powers bombed Belgrade and invaded Yugoslavia. The Germans proceeded to dismantle the Versailles division of territory by returning much of Vojvodina to Hungary and Macedonia to Bulgaria, while attaching Bosnia and Hercegovina to a newly proclaimed "Independent STate of Croatia," known as the NDH after its Croatian name: Nezavisna Drazava Hrvatska. This new state was put under the control of a Croatian fascist party, the Ustasa. A much reduced Serbia was occupied by the Germans.

The Ustasa government of the NDH embarked on an ambitious plan for creating the purely Croat Croatia envisioned by the exclusivist ideology. They planned to do this by eliminating "disordering elements," namely the Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. The last two groups were to be completely eliminated, according to the doctrines of the Ustasas' Nazi patrons. The Serbs, however, were treated according to the Ustasas' own ideology, which as a rather inconsistent blend of racism and political hatred. As historian Aleksa Djilas puts it, the Ustasas viewed serbs as a political enemy but described them in racist terms, and treated them in the way the Nazis treated "racially inferior" peoples. By July and August 1941, 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 1941-45 will be familiar to all who have seen the details of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia since 1992. Some concentration camps were created, but most of the slaughter took place in towns and villages. The techniques of the 1940s were like those of the 1990s: 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 1940s 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 100,000. A conservative estimate given by Aleska Djilas is that one in six of the approximately 1,900,000 Serbs in the NDH in 1941 had been killed by 1945: 125,000 in Croatia, or 17.4% of the Serb population there, and 209,000 in Bosnia and Hercegovina, or 16.7% of the Serb population there. 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 1940s 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 1941-45 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 1971 census, "Muslim" was not one of the categories listed for identification, and Serbs were the nominal majority in Bosnia and Hercegovina. In 1971, 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.

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