After the disintegration of Yugoslavia each nation de-veloped its own victim narration according to its nation-al myths. In Croatia, the number of the victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp was minimized while Ble-iburg was called site of the “Croatian Holocaust”. Presi-dent Franjo Tuđman suggested bringing the bones of the Ustaša and other Croats killed near Bleiburg and on the
“Way of the Cross” to Jasenovac in order to reconcile all Croats. The (revisionist) primate of the reconciliation of Ustaša and Partisans was superseded in 2000, but one consequence of the Tuđman era was that the Ustaša state was still broadly seen as an important step to Croatia’s independence. The orientation towards European stan-dards of remembrance was continued after the reformed HDZ won the elections in 2003, but the Croatian case shows how the “Europeanization of the Holocaust” also can promote national victim narratives. The debate about the new exhibition in Jasenovac shows that Croatia has acquired the European trend to focus on the Shoah and individual victim stories, while it seems much more diffi-cult to deal with the Serbian victims and the perpetrators.
Prime Minister Sanader furthermore identified Croats with Jews in Yad Vashem in 2005, pointing out that in
the war in the 1990s, the Croats were also victims of the same kind of evil as Nazism and Fascism, and that no one knows better than the Croats what it means to be a victim of aggression.
Key words: national reconciliation, Jasenovac, Bleiburg, Europeanization of the Holocaust
Introduction
Croatia is a post-socialist country that not only went through an economic and political transformation, but also through a nation-building process. In this process the search for national identity played a greater role for the literal and symbolic separation from the old fed-eral state of Yugoslavia, than it did in newly formed, post-socialist countries which did not secede. The subject of this chapter is the poli-tics of the past in Croatia, including not only the judicial and executive measures, but also the public discourse (Sandner, 2001: 7). Unlike other post-socialist countries, in the new states of former Yugoslavia the focus of the politics of the past has been on the Second World War rather than on the socialist regime per se. Following an overview of the ways in which the Yugoslav state sought to deal with the past of the Second World War, this paper will examine the shifting policies of approaching the past during three historical stages: following the col-lapse of Yugoslavia in 1990–1991 and President Franjo Tuđman’s rise to power; secondly, after Tuđman’s death and the regime change in 2000; and thirdly, after Tuđman’s Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) regained power in 2003 under its new leader, Ivo Sanader. Finally, I will raise the question of how the Croatian case and its victim narrative fits into the theses of the globalization (Levy and Sznaider, 2007) or the Europeanization of the Holocaust (Judt, 2005) as a shared negative European founding myth, and how Croatia adopted to this European standard of dealing with the Second World War that emerged from the
Stockholm Holocaust conference in Stockholm held on the anniver-sary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2000 (Eckel and Moisel, 2008).
An analysis of the politics of the past must also take into account that Croatia was a “deficient democracy” (Merkel, 2003) between 1991 and 1999, as democratic rules were violated in numerous sec-tors including the overwhelming authority of President Tuđman; the non-acceptance of electoral results such as the ruling party’s defeat in the Zagreb city council-election of 1995; and the repression of op-positional groups and the free media, which are of great importance for the discourse on the Second World War (Kasapović, 2001; Ramet and Matić, 2006; Jergović, 2004). Ethno-nationalist enthusiasm fol-lowing the acquisition of an independent state went hand-in-hand with the marginalization and criminalization of differing views – especially when it came to the struggle over the truth about the Second World War. Once all the daily newspapers except Novi List from Rijeka72 had been taken over by entrepreneurs close to the HDZ (Ivančić, 2003:
118), the remaining free papers were subjected to repression and court trials, as was the case for the weekly Feral Tribune after it criticized President Tuđman’s plan to rededicate the Jasenovac concentration camp to “all Croat victims” in 1996 (Pusić, 1998: 194). This context is crucial for understanding the way in which the official politics of the past was asserted by Tuđman and his party.
2. Confronting the Second World War in Yugoslavia
As in other socialist states, the rule of the Communist Party in Yu-goslavia was legitimized by the Partisan struggle against the Nazis during the Second World War. But unlike Poland, Hungary, or Roma-nia, Yugoslavia actually liberated its territory with almost no foreign support. On the other hand, it was a country that first had to legitimize
72 In Rijeka, whose citizens were mostly critical of Tuđman, the members of the editorial staff affiliated with the HDZ didn’t manage to assert themselves, so Novi list was the only newspaper that was privatized by being bought by its own editorial board according to a privatization law from the end of the 1980s (Jergović, 2004).
the existence of a Yugoslav state, following a civil war between the Croatian fascist Ustaša, Serbian royalist Četniks, and communist-led Partisans. During the first decades after 1945, no specific nation like
“the Croats” was considered guilty or responsible for collaboration or mass murder; the crimes were externalized to the marginalized non-communist powers “of all nations.” Thus, the antifascist struggle played a key role in the resurrection of the Yugoslav state. The mem-ory of the common struggle against fascism grew into the state’s most significant founding myth, and its defamation became a punishable offense (Höpken, 1999; Höpken 1996; Sundhaussen, 2004; Richter and Beyer, 2006). For example, the Communist Party forbade debates about the civil war, so only one particular fragment of the past was remembered, while parts of society found their memories marginal-ized. The Holocaust was treated as a minor matter, while it was impor-tant to stress that victims from every nation were killed in Jasenovac:
“Serbs, Croats, Jews, Roma, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Muslims, and other patriotic communists, no matter from which Yugoslav people they came” (Vjesnik, 22 April, 1985). During the 1960s, controversies between Serbian and Croatian historians about each nation’s “share”
in the war, the victory, and in collaboration concluded the regulated post-war consent on the “supra-national” Yugoslav partisans (Hudel-ist, 2004: 259). Many on the Serbian side were frustrated because its victims were not adequately commemorated or appreciated, while Croats resented the latent accusation of collective guilt. Therefore, the specific and different ways of remembering the war became an ele-ment of political mobilization in the late 1980s (Höpken, 1999: 224).
The question of the numbers of Jasenovac victims became a core is-sue. While the Serbian statistician Bogoljub Kočović (Kočović, 1985) and the Croatian Vladimir Žerjavić (Žerjavić, 1989) came to a quite similar result of about 70,000 to 90,000 victims, Serbian nationalists exaggerated the numbers to over a million. Meanwhile, on the Croa-tian side it was the historian Tuđman, years before he became presi-dent, who reduced the number to 30,000 to 40,000 victims (Tuđman, 1989: 316).
3. “National reconciliation” during the Tuđman era
The break-up of Yugoslavia coincided with a break with both the anti-fascist narrative and its narrow dogma concerning the Second World War. Instead of a democratic framework for historiography, each nation developed its own victim-narration according to its na-tional myths.
At this time, Croatia found itself in a different position than other post-socialist countries both because it was the only state that had committed mass murder in concentration camps not led by the Ger-mans in the Second World War, and because the new Croatian presi-dent fashioned himself a historian of the Second World War and made the politics of the past one of the most important issues on his agenda.
Although antifascism was formally anchored in the new constitution, it seemed that the idea of a Croatian state was only conceivable in combination with historical revisionism concerning the character of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH – Nezavisna Država Hrvats-ka). The Ustaša regime, whose anti-Semitism was a replica of Nazi anti-Semitism, and whose brutal mass-murder of Serbs even led to formal protests by the Germans, was depicted as one of the most im-portant phases in Croatia’s struggle for national identity. President Franjo Tuđman’s anti-Semitic book Wastelands of Historical Reality73 (Tuđman, 1989; Milentijević, 1994) equated crimes committed by the Ustaša and Partisans by minimizing the number killed in the Ustaša concentration camp Jasenovac (Mataušić, 2003),74 thus taking the first step in establishing a historical narrative for the new state. The second
73 For Tuđman, who stated in 1990 that he was lucky because his wife was neither Jewish nor Serbian, anti-Semitism is a historical constant (Tuđman, 1989: 368). He argues that Jewish “anationality” (Tuđman, 1989: 195) is the reason for their tragic fate, and equates them with their persecutors, saying that the Jews were responsible for the administration of the Jasenovac camp and that Jewish prisoners took part in the executions (Tuđman, 1989:
316-320). Furthermore, he draws a line from Nazi-Fascism to “Judeo-Fascism,” which is an anti-Semitic thesis well-known in the West, according to which the Jews are the new Nazis.
74 Serbs, Roma, Jews, and Croat fighters against the Ustaša regime were killed in and around the five camps that constituted the Jasenovac concentration camp system. As of November 2008, 75,159 victims have been identified by name. URL=http:andandwww.jusp-jasenovac.
hrandDefault.aspx?sid=6284 (9 June, 2009)
step was Tuđman’s idea to reconcile the Ustaša and Partisans, who had, in his mind, both fought for the same goal – the Croatian cause – dur-ing the Second World War, albeit in different ways (Vjesnik, 16 Janu-ary 1996; Čulić 1999:105). In connection with this idea, the Jasenovac memorial area played a great symbolic role (although the site itself remained devastated after the war in the 1990s until Tuđman’s death in 1999): following the Spanish General Francisco Franco’s example, Tuđman suggested bringing the bones of the Ustaša and other sol-diers of the NDH (Domobrani) killed near Bleiburg75 in May 1945 to a “national memorial” Jasenovac (Vjesnik, 23 April 1996; Čulić, 1999: 107; Ivančić, 2000: 132). Nevertheless, he had to change these plans76 – along with the anti-Semitic parts in the English version of his book – following international criticism (Novi list, 31 March 1996).
The tension between the two lieux de mémoire,77 Jasenovac and Bleiburg, which were equalized by calling Bleiburg the site of the
“Croatian Holocaust” (Prcela and Živić, 2001), as the president of the parliament did in 1995 (Vjesnik, 15 May 1995), gives an accurate pic-ture of the national victimhood narrative and the denial of responsibil-ity for the Ustaša crimes during the Tuđman era. The Bleiburg com-memorations, organized under the patronage of the Croatian parlia-ment, always had many more visitors and were broadcast live on
tele-75 In May 1945, soldiers of the Wehrmacht, Croatian Ustaša, Domobrani, and civilians, Serbian Četniks, Slovenian “White Guards,” and others fled in front of the Yugoslav Partisans and wanted to surrender to the British Army in Austria, which the British refused, so most people from Yugoslav areas were extradited to the Partisans. Although the number of the victims is still uncertain, one can say that on their way back into the country tens of thousands of Croatian Ustaša, Domobrani, as well as civilians were killed after 15 May, most of them in Kočevski rog and Tezno in Slovenia, but also on the so-called “Way of the Cross” or “death marches,” as the marches hundreds of kilometers long were called. Žerjavić presumes that during the fights with the Partisans before the capitulation, as well as on the way back into the country and on the marches 45,000-55,000 Ustaša and Domobrani weer killed (Žerjavić 1997: 94).
76 A common burial place for ten Ustaša, one hundred Domobrani, and two alleged Partisans was created on a smaller scale in 1996 in Omiš, under the patronage of the (parliamentary)
“Commission for the Detection of War and Post-war Victims” – presenting the worst ex-ample of institutional revisionism (Feral Tribune, 4 January 1996; and 10 March 1997).
77 In contrast to Nora (1990) and François and Schulze (2001), in this chapter the national lieux de mémoire are not described in an affirmative manner that contributes to the canonization of national memory, but are analyzed as mythical sites of “imagined communities.”
vision – despite the Ustaša insignia present throughout the site (Novi list, 12 March 2003) – while the Jasenovac commemorations have only been broadcast since 2003 (Novi list, 15 May 2006). The Catho-lic Church regularly dispatched priests to the much better attended commemorations in Bleiburg, while only once a local Catholic priest attended a commemoration in Jasenovac during the 1990s (Novi list, 19 April 2002). The only Croatian politicians Tuđman sent to attend the commemorations in Jasenovac had been Partisans in their youth, although this was unnoticeable in their speeches at the site, since they instrumentalized the commemorations to underscore the narrative of Croatian victimhood (Novi list, 29 April 2002). For example, in 1999 General Janko Bobetko spoke about the crimes in Kosovo without even mentioning Jasenovac, followed by the second representative of the President, Slobodan Lang, who spoke about Kosovo and the Homeland War, while the representative of the Parliament, Milivoj Kujundžić, spoke about “the black and red totalitarianism.” Addition-ally, the Minister of Justice, Zvonimir Šeparović, mentioned “the vic-tims of all crimes, no matter who had committed them” (Novi list, 26 April 1999). No one mentioned the perpetrators in Jasenovac, while most of the speeches focused on Serbian crimes.
Contrary to the prior lip service paid to antifascism, most street names, which formerly commemorated the victories of the Partisan struggle and the victims of the Second World War, were renamed.
The best-known and most disputed example was the renaming of the
“Square of the Victims of Fascism,” the square where the Ustaša po-lice had its headquarters in Zagreb, to the “Square of the Croatian Heroes” in 1990. Seventeen streets throughout Croatia were named after Mile Budak, a “poet” and Ustaša Minister of Education who was responsible for the NDH’s racial laws. “Only” cafés and kindergartens were named after the leader of the Ustaša – Ante Pavelić. According to the Association of Antifascist Fighters (SAB), from the time Croatia became independent in 1991 until 1998, 2,966 memorials commemo-rating “victims of fascism” or the antifascist struggle were removed or destroyed, without anyone being punished for it (Hrženjak, 2002;
Ivančić, 2000: 67). In 1993, a memorial plaque commemorating the
“Ustaša fallen for the NDH” was placed on the building housing the Croatian army in Sinj (Slobodna Dalmacija, 16 September 2004). In 1999, a memorial for the Ustaša criminal Jure Francetić, the founder of the “Black Legion,” was erected in Slunj (Čulić, 1999: 106).
History school books also reflected the revisionist approach typi-cal of the 1990s. In Yugoslavia, school books for the eighth grade of junior high school discussed the Second World War in almost half of the text, but this history only encompassed the Partisan struggle for liberation. After Croatia became independent, the Second World War was covered in only one fifth of the new schoolbooks for the eighth grade, and the NDH became the center of attention. The NDH was treated as a key moment of Croatian history: the Croatian wish for an independent state was described, as was the structure of the regime, but its atrocities were hardly mentioned. Jasenovac was mentioned in only two lines and the term Holocaust was not mentioned at all, while Bleiburg and the crimes of the Četniks were described extensively and illustrated with gruesome pictures. Thus, the schoolbooks in Croatia presented an equally one-sided picture as those in former Yugoslavia (Perić, 1992; Matković, 1998).
The intensity of the discussions about the character of the Ustaša regime and Jasenovac peaked during the 1998 and 1999 investigation and trial against Dinko Šakić, a former commander of the concentra-tion camp Jasenovac (Vjesnik, 17 December 1998). In the Croatian media, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem was harshly criti-cized for “organizing” international pressure against Croatia. In the public discourse, Šakić’s extradition was mostly seen as necessary not because he had committed crimes, but rather to prevent harm to Croa-tia’s international image (Vjesnik, 3 February 1999; and 4 February 1999). The few independent newspapers condemned the decision not to try Šakić for genocide, but for atrocities against civilians, thereby not allowing the fundamental character of the Ustaša regime to be part of the prosecutor’s agenda (Feral Tribune, 15 March 1999; and 10 April 1999). Also, most of the witnesses during the investigation were
Croats, which suggested that the victims were Croatian enemies of the regime, not Serbs, Jews, and Roma murdered for racist reasons (Feral Tribune, 6 July 1998; and 17 July 1999). The media allowed Šakić plenty of room to prove that he was still devoted to Ustaša ideals and to anti-Semitism, while there were many media reports that expressed concern about the condition of his health and the quality of the prison food (Jutarnji list, 6 June 1998; and Vjesnik, 5 March 1999). Despite political and media support, in October 1999 Šakić was sentenced to twenty years in prison, which was the maximum possible sentence for the crimes he was tried for (Vjesnik, 5 October 1999).
To sum it up, what happened after Croatia gained its independence was not a “pluralization” of memory, but a total change of contents from the “memory” of the Partisans to a “memory” dominated by re-turning Ustaša, while the narrative of the past remained Manichean and full of hatred towards “Serbs,” “Croatian traitors” and the “anti-Croatian foreign circles.” Furthermore, the commitment to antifascism in the constitution remained mere lip service (Hockenos, 2003), and the violation of democratic standards corresponded with the domina-tion of a revisionist historical narrative.
4. After the Tuđman era: Shift in the politics of the past
With Tuđman’s death in 1999, a decade of HDZ administration ended and a coalition under the leadership of the Social Democratic Prime Minister Ivica Račan, a reformed communist, won the elections, while Stipe Mesić, also a former communist official who first joined the HDZ, but then left it in 1994, was elected president. The authority of the presidential office was diminished soon thereafter. During the process of democratization, the manner in which the past was dealt with in Croatia also changed.
In 2000, a new school book already appeared in which the Holo-caust was mentioned, and the number of the victims at the Jasenovac concentration camp was given. The book claimed that 80,000 people
had perished there, which is probably quite an accurate, or slightly low, figure. Furthermore, Jasenovac was truthfully described as an ex-termination camp. However, since the author of this book was Hrvoje Matković, who also wrote the prior school book in 1998, the tone did not change in general (Matković, 2000). In 2003, a much more ac-curate school book that discussed the Holocaust and the Nazi death camps was published, but it was not widely accepted and only a few
had perished there, which is probably quite an accurate, or slightly low, figure. Furthermore, Jasenovac was truthfully described as an ex-termination camp. However, since the author of this book was Hrvoje Matković, who also wrote the prior school book in 1998, the tone did not change in general (Matković, 2000). In 2003, a much more ac-curate school book that discussed the Holocaust and the Nazi death camps was published, but it was not widely accepted and only a few