The Croatian break with the Yugoslav narrative was—besides parting from the official slogan “brotherhood and unity”—first of all a break with its anti-Fascist legacy and narrative about World War II. This article asserts that while the contents of the “politics of the past” changed completely after Croatia's independence in 1990, the manner in which a dominant historical narrative was asserted during the era of President Franjo Tuđman remained the same, thanks to the Manichean worldview on which it rested, a deficient democracy, and government oppression of the free media.
The German term for politics of the past, Vergangenheitspolitik, was developed in the mid 1990s to describe the politics of dealing with the Nazi past on the one hand and with the Communist past on the other.Footnote 1 While early studies analyzed the judicial and executive measures involved in these politics, the use of the term later came to include broader examinations of political culture and public discourse.Footnote 2 This article analyzes on three levels how the subject of World War II was approached in Croatia during the 1990s as compared to approaches taken under Communism. First, it examines the treatment of World War II at the political level in terms of the constitution, the official treatment of World War II monuments, the renaming of streets, the production of new schoolbooks, and the relative treatment of two important lieux de mémoire,Footnote 3 the concentration camp Jasenovac (1941–45), and Bleiburg, site of the so called “Croatian holocaust” in 1945. Second, the article investigates the treatment of World War II at the judicial level, focusing on the trial of concentration camp commander Dinko Šakić. Third, it examines the treatment of World War II in media discourses, focusing on both state-owned (Vjesnik) and independent (Novi list) newspapers that covered the Jasenovac commemorations from 1985–99. Both of these newspapers had existed before 1990, and neither changed owners during the 1990s, which was rare during the transition period in Croatia.Footnote 4 Finally, the article also examines changes in both official and in marginalized oppositional narratives about World War II over the decade of the 1990s. I examine both the content of the new hegemonic historical narrative during the Tuđman years, the protagonists who produced it, as well as those who were silenced, while keeping in mind the manner in which this dominant historical narrative was asserted. The theoretical starting point is the knowledge that the past is an inherent subject of politics not simply in dictatorial or authoritarian societies but in all societies. What differentiates one from the other are the particular approaches that the ruling elites use in order to try to define their own historical narrative as “the past.”Footnote 5
Between 1991 and 1999, one can say that Croatia was a “deficient democracy,”Footnote 6 given that President Tuđman's overwhelming authority, the regime's refusal to accept electoral results (as with its defeat in the Zagreb city council-election of 1995), and its repression of oppositional groups and the free media, violated democratic rules.Footnote 7 Ethnic-nationalist enthusiasm following the assertion of independent statehood went hand-in-hand with the marginalization and criminalization of alternate views—especially when it came to the struggle over the truth about World War II. Once all the daily newspapers, except for Novi List in Rijeka, had been taken over by entrepreneurs close to the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ),Footnote 8 the remaining free newspapers were subjected to repression and court trials. This was the case, for example, for the weekly Feral Tribune in 1996 after it criticized President Tuđman's plan to rededicate the Jasenovac concentration camp to “all Croatian victims,” rather than those of the Ustaša.Footnote 9 This control of the media offers a crucial context for understanding the ways in which Tuđman and his party asserted a new official politics of the past once they won the elections in spring 1990.
World War II and Its Official Historiography in Tito's Yugoslavia
In order to examine how the politics of the past changed after Croatia gained its independence, a short overview of the previous Communist narrative about World War II seems essential. As in other Communist states, the rule of the Communist Party in Yugoslavia was legitimized by the World War II Partisan struggle against the Nazis. But unlike Poland, Hungary, or Romania, Yugoslavia's partisans had actually liberated its territory with almost no foreign support. On the other hand, the partisans had also faced the task of first having to legitimize the very existence of a Yugoslav state, following a civil war that had pitted the Croatian Fascist Ustaša, Serbian royalist Četniks, and Tito's Partisans against each other. A special challenge was the question of how to deal with the mass murder committed by the Ustaša—a rare example of a collaborationist regime that had operated death camps on its own beside the Third Reich. In contrast to the situation in Romania, for example, where the collaborationist regime had established camps in Transnistria,Footnote 10 these camps—Jasenovac was the biggest—had existed within the borders of Croatia.
The Partisans had also committed mass murder at the end of the war, in a series of events known in today's Croatia as the “Bleiburg tragedy.” In May 1945, soldiers of the German Wehrmacht, Croatian Ustaša, regular army members (Domobrani) and civilians, Serbian Četniks, Slovenian “White Guards,” and others fled before Yugoslav partisans, hoping to surrender to the British Army near the Austrian town of Bleiburg. The British refused the surrender and extradited most of these people from Yugoslav areas to the Partisans. Although the number of the victims remains uncertain, one can say that during the battles with the Partisans and on the forced march back into the country, tens of thousands of Croat Ustaša, Domobrani, and also civilians were killed after 15 May, most of them in Kočevski rog and Tezno in Slovenia, but many on the so called “way of the cross” or “death marches,” as the hundreds of kilometers long marches are called in contemporary Croatia. The reputable demographer Vladimir Žerjavić presumes that during battles with the Partisans before the capitulation, as well as on the way back into the country on the marches, 45,000–55,000 Ustaša and Domobrani had been killed.Footnote 11 Any mention of those events became taboo after 1945 and they were only vaguely addressed as fights against collaborationist guerilla.
On the other hand, numerous officials of the “Independent State of Croatia” like Eugen Dido Kvaternik, who was called “the Ustaša Himmler,”Footnote 12 or Vjekoslav Maks Luburić, the commander of all Ustaša concentration camps, fled the country. In several cases, they were assisted by Vatican officials. The most famous example was the leader of the Ustaša, Ante Pavalić himself. Croatian emigrés founded Ustaša organizations like the Croatian Liberation Movement (Hrvatski oslobodilački pokret, HOP) or the Croatian People's Resistance (Hrvatski narodni otpor, HNO) first of all in Latin and North America, Australia, and Germany. They committed terrorist attacks in Yugoslavia and against Yugoslav institutions abroad and assassinated the Yugoslav ambassador in Sweden in 1976.Footnote 13 There were also a number of more moderate exile groups, but “even diaspora leaders who personally condemned the Ustasche legacy found it virtually impossible to raise the issue constructively in public.”Footnote 14 The historical revisionism concerning the “Independent State of Croatia” and the demonization of the Tito regime prevailed. In the meantime, the Yugoslav regime put on trial not only collaborators but also anti-Communists and Catholic priests. It charged obvious war criminals and mere opponents of the regime in joint cases in the late 1940s and 1950s as a means of criminalizing the anti-Communists by linking them to the crimes of the first group.Footnote 15
Although the Ustaša had operated death camps without Nazi assistance in World War II, in official narratives of the first decades after 1945, no specific nation like “the Croats” was considered to have been guilty of or responsible for collaboration or mass murder. These crimes were projected onto the marginalized non-Communist members “of all Yugoslav nations,” indicating “equal” guilt of Ustaša, Četnik, and Slovenian, as well as Bosnian Muslim collaborators. Thus, the anti-Fascist struggle and the founding myth of “brotherhood and unity” (bratstvo i jedinstvo) played a key role in the resurrection of the Yugoslav state itself. The memory of the common struggle against Fascism grew into the state's most significant founding myth, and its defamation became a punishable offense.Footnote 16 The Communist Party forbade debates about the civil war, so that only one particular fragment of the past was remembered—the heroic anti-Fascist struggle. Each Yugoslav republic celebrated the date when partisan resistance had begun in it. Each of these memorial days was determined by official historiography, and there was clear hierarchy among them: The Communist Party had started the resistance fight on 4 July 1941; Serbia followed three days later, Montenegro on 13 July, Slovenia on 22 July. Because of the Ustaša regime, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were assigned only 27 July—President Tuđman changed this date to 22 June as one of his first acts in office in 1990.Footnote 17 The cult around the military and political leader of the partisans, Tito, was the overarching narrative that bonded together all the different memories. After his death in 1980, the regime issued the parole: “And after Tito—Tito,” his pictures and busts boomed.Footnote 18
Deserving partisans were privileged in society and politics, while relatives of “traitors to the people” had a very different standing and their memories were absolutely taboo, but the Holocaust and the mass murder of Serbs and Roma by the Ustaša were also treated as minor matters, although locally based survivor groups who found themselves united in their common need to mourn the dead and to obtain official acknowledgement of their suffering created a space not only for individual but also for group remembrance.Footnote 19 Although most monuments were dedicated to the “heroic people's liberation struggle” and the “victims of Fascism” in general, some memorials on the local level mourned specific incidents motivated by ethnic hatred such as the memorial building created in memory of the Serbs murdered by the Ustaša in the orthodox church of Glina in 1941.Footnote 20
The history of the Jasenovac camp memorial demonstrates the tension between heroic and victim memory. The Ustaša had blasted away the concentration camp before the end of the war, and what traces remained had been removed for unknown reasons after May 1945. There was no memorial until the central committee of the Association of Fighters of the People's Liberation War (SUBNOR) asked architects for their proposals in the 1960s, thanks to ongoing demands from survivors and victim families. In 1966, Bogdan Bogdanović's famous and giant flower monument was inaugurated, and a memorial museum opened two years later. The abstract flower symbol that opened toward the sky stood for hope and the future. It does not accuse anyone nor does it categorize the victims ethnically. Another suggestion at the time was to install a huge black skull, but this did not fit the “brotherhood and unity” narrative. In Tito's Yugoslavia, Jasenovac on the one hand remained an ambivalent lieu de mémoire since it was taboo to assert that only Croats had committed crimes there, while Serbs, Jews, and Roma had been the largest victim groups.Footnote 21 On the other hand, it became a central site of memory for victims “of all Yugoslav nations,” a site with tourist infrastructure, souvenirs (postcards, pins, or key ring pendants), and other forms of kitsch,Footnote 22 visited by 50,000 people in 1985 on the fortieth anniversary of the inmates' attempted breakout in 1945.
In the postwar decades, the Communist Party had successfully established the narrative of “supranational” partisans from all Yugoslav nations. During the 1960s, however, controversies between Serbian and Croatian historians about each nation's “share” in the war, the victory, and in collaboration with the Germans and Italians, brought an end to the “brotherhood and unity” narrative.Footnote 23 Interestingly enough, on the Croatian side, it was the later president Franjo Tuđman himself who contributed to this radicalization, first as a World War II historian in Belgrade and later as director of the Institute for the History of the Workers' Movement in Zagreb. In his first book published in 1957, he stated that it had been the Serbian Četniks who had collaborated with the occupiers against the People's Liberation Struggle in the most obvious wayFootnote 24—without even mentioning the Ustaša regime, for which this characterization would have been more appropriate. Serbian historians on the other hand depicted the People's Liberation Struggle as a fight against Nazis, Ustaša, and Domobrani (the Croatian army), while being silent about the Serbian Četnik fight against the partisans.Footnote 25
Tuđman's next step was to oppose the official narrative of a whole-Yugoslav partisan struggle by stressing the role of the Croatian and especially the north Croatian partisans, whom he had joined, while diminishing the role of the eastern regions where Serbian partisans had been active.Footnote 26 In his next book published in 1960, he defended the Domobrani, who had been considered collaborators before, by claiming that they were mobilized by force into the Croatian army, did not want to fight against the partisans, defected, and gave them their weapons.Footnote 27 Still, he was promoted and became general-major of the Yugoslav army before he left Belgrade in the summer of 1961 to become director of the newly inaugurated Institute for the History of the People's Movement in Zagreb. In 1963, Velimir Terzić from the Institute for Military History in Belgrade fueled the conflict between Croatian and Serbian nationalists by claiming that all of the Croatian people had been on the side of the Ustaša.Footnote 28 Tuđman meanwhile continued to claim that the Domobrani had not been Fascists but rather a regular Croatian army, and he started criticizing the official numbers of 700,000 Jasenovac victims as too high. While he was correct at first that the number was too high, he later ended up asserting figures that were far too low, thus playing down Ustaša crimes. As a result, the leader of the Croatian Central Committee deprived the Institute of its financial basis in 1965, fired Tuđman in 1967, and banned him from the Communist Party. After that he increasingly became a Croatian nationalist and intensified his contacts with the radical Croatian Diaspora.
Those different ways of remembering World War II became an element of political mobilization in the late 1980s.Footnote 29 The question of the numbers of Jasenovac-victims became a core issue in that decade. While the Belgrade-based statistician Bogoljub Kočović and the Croatian demographer Vladimir ŽerjavićFootnote 30 each estimated about 70,000 to 90,000 victims, Serbian nationalists placed the numbers at over a million, while Tuđman reduced the number to 30,000–40,000 victims.Footnote 31
Communist newspaper coverage of the annual commemorations at Jasenovac from 1985–90 allows us to spell out the Communist narrative on World War II and to analyze the change in discourse after 1990 in the next section. The Jasenovac commemorations always took place on the Sunday closest to 22 April, the anniversary of an attempt to escape from the camp only days before its liquidation in 1945. Reports from the commemorations characterize the Ustaša regime and the concentration camp Jasenovac using symbols of darkness and bestiality. At the same time, these symbols were framed in the context of the official Yugoslav jargon of “brotherhood and unity.” This discourse stressed that members of all Yugoslav nations were found among both collaborators as well as victims. It thus omitted the fact that after the destruction of the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia there was only one so-called independent state that had committed mass murder as a matter of state policy, and mostly without German help—the Ustaša regime. It also played down the fact that Serbs, Jews, and Roma were exposed to persecution at Jasenovac far more intensively and for different reasons than were partisans. Still, the perpetrators were always characterized as “Ustaša, Četniks, and White Guards [Slovenian collaborators],”Footnote 32 while the victims defined in terms of their national or religious belonging were labeled “Serbs, Jews, Roma, Croats, Muslims, Slovenes, Montenegrins, and other peoples and ethnicities,”Footnote 33 without distinguishing between victims of racist persecution or resistance fighters.
The alleged number of the Jasenovac victims (700,000) and the importance of the camp compared to other death camps were exaggerated also during the last years of the Communist regime. Not only was the camp described as the “third largest in occupied Europe,”Footnote 34 but it was also characterized as having “excelled the abhorrence of Hitler's and Mussolini's system of racist and fascist inordinateness by its brutality and bloodthirstiness.”Footnote 35 A Manichean worldview dominated the discourse about the camp. The Yugoslav collective is called “our people” or “our peoples” (Croats, Serbs, and so on), who “live in a common house”Footnote 36 and who all mourned victims. This discourse constructed the World War II enemies, the Ustaša, and all the other collaborators, as “dark,” “evil,” “bloodthirsty,” “bestial,” and “insane.” The same pattern also worked to describe contemporary enemies of the regime as “insane,” “poisonous,” “threatening,” “egoistic” nationalists, “obsessed by the past.”
Significant for the crisis before the breakup of Yugoslavia is the role attributed to an “awakened” nationalism. Historical “darkness” is not seen as a “mere ghost anymore”Footnote 37 that can be scared away by the “light of the revolution and self administration.” At the annual Jasenovac commemorations, the highest state representatives mention “fatal mistakes,” a “poisoned youth,” new “forthcoming battalions,”Footnote 38 and the danger of a “new Jasenovac.”Footnote 39 The only difference between the ways in which the governmental newspaper Vjesnik and the more independent Novi list present this material is that the latter offers shorter quotations from the commemoration speeches and leaves out the most pessimistic passages, so that the dangerous nationalism still seems manageable.
Bleiburg was still taboo in those years. The only indirect allusion to it can be found in the speech of a Croatian politician in 1985, who alleged that on 8 May 1945 the German state had capitulated “but not on our territory. Here the German army stayed, Ustaša, Četniks, and other gangs helping them. Only after six days of bloody battles was the organized resistance of the enemies and quislings finally broken: Some smaller groups of Ustaša […] stayed on our territory, in order to account for the crimes they committed, also here in Jasenovac.”Footnote 40
This quotation stands pars pro toto for the official position when it comes to Bleiburg: It is a taboo and can only be touched by indicating that it was all about breaking the resistance of the gangs responsible for Jasenovac and not about dealing with escaping military and civilians, on whom revenge was taken without trials. Memories of surviving family members had no space in this official discourse. They persisted in private memories and in exile, thus gaining all the more influence after 1990 when numerous emigrés returned to Croatia and assumed high government offices.
Croatian Politics of the Past from 1990–99
After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Croatia found itself in a far different position from other post-Communist countries, first of all because its president himself—who had worked as a historian in the Communist era—made politics of the past an important part of his agenda. The young Franjo Tuđman had joined Tito's partisans during World War II, later becoming a Communist general in the Yugoslav army. During the sixteen years he spent in Belgrade, he turned out to be a committed Communist who even opposed liberalization efforts, e.g., by the famous dissident Milovan Đilas.Footnote 41 However, by the time he left Belgrade in 1961 he had more and more turned into a Croatian nationalist.Footnote 42 He was a secondary stakeholder of the nationalist current during the “Croatian Spring” in 1971. In 1973, he was sentenced to ten months in prison for having established contacts with nationalist-revisionist exiles in the United States with whom he had also been taped discussing the positive aspects of the Ustaša regime.Footnote 43 Later on, his Croatian exile contacts provided financing and advice for his election campaign in 1990. After the first free elections in 1990, Tuđman invited numerous exiles and second-generation Croats to “return” to Croatia and appointed them as ministers, members of the secret service, and army commanders.Footnote 44
Franjo Tuđman's anti-Semitic book Wastelands of Historical Reality (1989)Footnote 45 constituted the first step in establishing the frame of the historical narrative for the new state. In this work, he equated the crimes committed by both the Ustaša and the Partisans by minimizing the number killed in the Ustaša concentration camp Jasenovac.Footnote 46 Since Tuđman argued that Croats from both sides of World War II needed to be reconciled (“pomirba,” which will be analyzed in greater detail below), he anchored anti-Fascism formally in the new constitution of independent Croatia in 1990: “The millenarial identity of the Croatian nation and the continuity of its statehood […] manifested in […] establishing the foundations of state sovereignty during the course of the Second World War, by the decisions of the Antifascist Council of National Liberation of Croatia (1943), as opposed to the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia (1941).”Footnote 47
Still, all other elements of politics of the past indicated that the idea of a Croatian state was only conceivable in combination with historical revisionism concerning the character of that Independent State of Croatia from the period 1941–45.Footnote 48 The Ustaša-regime, whose anti-Semitism was a precise replica of Nazi anti-Semitism and whose brutal mass murder of Serbs even led to protests by the Germans, was depicted as one of the most important phases in Croatia's struggle for national identity. Contrary to the lip service Tuđman's regime paid to anti-Fascism, most street names, which had formerly commemorated the victories of the Partisan struggle and the “victims of Fascism,” were now renamed. The best-known and most disputed example was the renaming of the “Square of the Victims of Fascism,” the former location of the Ustaša-police and Gestapo headquarters in Zagreb, into the “Square of the Croatian Heroes” in 1990. After that renaming, every year on 8 May, a rally took place at the square demanding that the square be renamed again. Over the years, this annual rally grew larger and the left and liberal opposition parties started to participate, including politicians such as Stipe Mesić, Croatia's president from 2000–10, and Vesna Pusić, chief negotiator of Croatia's EU-accession.Footnote 49 The square got its old name back only after the turnabout elections in 2000, which ended the rule of the HDZ a few months after Tuđman's death in 1999. In the 1990s, seventeen streets in Croatia were named after poet Mile Budak, the Ustaša minister of education, who had been responsible for NDH's racial laws. Cafés and kindergartens but no streets were renamed for the leader of the Ustaša regime—Ante Pavelić.
According to the “Association of anti-Fascist fighters” (SAB), from the time Croatia became independent in 1991 until 2000, 2,964 memorials commemorating the anti-Fascist struggle and victims of World War II were removed, destroyed, or vandalized without anyone being punished for it.Footnote 50 Often it was community or regional authoritiesFootnote 51 that ordered these measures and military units that enforced them. In Gradec, for example, military trucks destroyed a huge memorial, made by the famous sculptor Antun Augustinčić, in honor of the 1942 partisan capture of an Italian ship.Footnote 52 In a few cases, the red star was simply removed or painted over.Footnote 53 Sometimes it was replaced with a cross and the Croatian national emblem.Footnote 54 In other cases, the sentence “Fallen for the People's Liberation Struggle” (“Narodnooslobodilačka borba”—NOB) was reformulated as “Fallen for Croatia.”Footnote 55 Yet another strategy was to add the names of Bleiburg victims or of those who fell in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s to the names of the “victims of Fascism.”Footnote 56 All transformation and destruction strategies aimed at removing as many references to Yugoslavia as possible and at constructing a teleological idea of Croatian statehood, even if this meant erecting memorials to Ustaša criminals. In 1993, a memorial plaque commemorating the “Ustaša fallen for the NDH” was placed on the building housing the Croatian army in Sinj.Footnote 57 In 1999, a memorial to the Ustaša-criminal Jure Francetić, the founder of the “Black Legion,” was erected in Slunj.Footnote 58
History schoolbooks of the 1990s also reflected the revisionist approach. In Yugoslavia schoolbooks for the eighth grade had discussed World War II in almost half of the text, but this history of World War II had mostly encompassed the Partisan struggle.Footnote 59 After Croatian independence, World War II was covered in only one fifth of the new schoolbooks for the eighth grade. Furthermore, a “de-Yugoslavization” took place: The partisan struggle was cut by half,Footnote 60 and the focus changed from Yugoslav military history to “Croatian” political moments like the founding of the National Anti-Fascist Council of the People's Liberation of Croatia (ZAVNOH) and the decision to create a Croatian state within Yugoslavia.Footnote 61 The “Independent State of Croatia” was discussed primarily as a crucial part of Croatian history in a Croat-teleological manner.Footnote 62
Until 1998 there was only one history textbook for all eighth grade students (in several editions), which described the “achievement” of a Croatian “independent” state in 1941, along with the cultural progress and the geographical structure of the state, without mentioning its atrocities. While positive characteristics were ascribed to the “Independent State of Croatia,” any atrocities were attributed specifically to the Ustaša-regime described on half a pageFootnote 63—a division comparable to a distinction between the Third Reich and the Nazis. Jasenovac was mentioned only in two lines, and the term Holocaust was not mentioned at all, while the crimes of the Četniks were described extensively, including pictures that were supposed to cause abhorrence. The crimes against non-Croats are mentioned only in one place and justified at the same time: “Following the Nazi example, the Ustaša terrorized Jews and Roma, but also Serbs, first of all because of their earlier hegemonic politics and because of the appearance of Četniks and their atrocities in Croatia.”Footnote 64 In comparison to this short mention, the persecution of Croats by the Ustaša regime is discussed at length and fits the attempt to depict Ustaša camps largely as prisons for political opponents of the regime. In the chapter about war crimes during World War II, there is a picture of an English concentration camp from the Boer War (which is not the topic of the chapter), but no picture of a Nazi death camp. On the other hand, Bleiburg is discussed extensively, and the editions from 1992–95 mention “50,000–300,000 victims,”Footnote 65 while in later editions from 1998 and 1999, Ivo Perić writes about “several tens of thousands Croats.”Footnote 66
In 1995, new lesson plans for elementary and high schools were introduced, which adopted the textbooks' narrow nationalist perspective.Footnote 67 The high school lesson plan stipulated that one lesson on the interwar period should deal with “Croatia under the Weight of Centralism and Great Serbian Hegemony,” including “the cruelty of the regime” and “economic neglect and exploitation.”Footnote 68 The partisan movement is not addressed as a Yugoslav one, but as “Resistance of Anti-Fascist Croatia” and “part of worldwide anti-Fascism.” The plan erases the fact that the Ustaša committed mass murder; teachers are instructed to refer to the “dictatorship of the Ustaša regime”—a very neutral term—on the one hand, but to “Četnik organizations and their terror” as well as to “Partisan crimes” on the other. Finally, Croatia is depicted as “chained up in the Second Yugoslavia.”Footnote 69 Thus, both the lesson plans and the schoolbooks in Croatia presented as one-sided a picture as had those in the former Yugoslavia, although the perspective they presented was totally different.
The two most prominent sites of memory, Jasenovac and Bleiburg, were equated by calling Bleiburg the site of the “Croatian holocaust,”Footnote 70 as the president of the parliament did in 1995.Footnote 71 Annual Bleiburg commemorations under the patronage of the Croatian parliament always attracted more visitors and were broadcast live on television—despite the Ustaša-insignia present throughout the siteFootnote 72—while the Jasenovac commemorations have only been broadcast regularly since Tuđman's death. The Catholic Church regularly dispatched priests to the much better frequented commemorations in Bleiburg, while only once during the 1990s did a local Catholic priest attend a commemoration in Jasenovac.Footnote 73 The only Croatian politicians Tuđman sent to attend the commemorations in Jasenovac had—like himself—been Partisans in their youth, although this was unnoticeable from their speeches at the site, and since they instrumentalized the commemorations in order to underscore the narrative of Croatian victimhood.
In terms of the judicial politics of the past, Croatia was in fact the first post-Communist county to ask for the extradition of an alleged World War II criminal from Argentina in 1998 and to convict him in October 1999, giving him the highest possible prison sentence of twenty years.Footnote 74 What at first might sound like an exemplar for other post-Communist countries, at second glance, however, appears to be more in accordance with the revisionist mainstream thinking of the Tuđman era. Dinko Šakić, who had worked at the Jasenovac concentration camp in 1942 and had become its commandant in 1944, was put on trial for crimes against civilians and not for genocide, despite commanding a camp in which mostly Serbs, Jews, and Roma had been killed. Šakić had been a wanted war criminal since 1945 before the Simon Wiesenthal Center found him in Argentina in April 1998, made him confess in a video interview that he had been the commander of Jasenovac, and demanded that Croatia put him on trial.Footnote 75 Croatia had the first right to ask for Šakić's extradition, since the Jasenovac concentration camp had been on its territory, but critics stressed that it only made use of this right after rump Yugoslavia had laid charges against him. The Croatian government understood the international attention and media coverage as “renewed international pressure on Croatia.”Footnote 76 It obviously preferred to “accept the trial”Footnote 77—as Andrija Hebrang, a leading HDZ official put it—dealing with the largest Ustaša camp in order to make it take place in Zagreb rather than in Belgrade or Jerusalem. The United States State Department demonstratively welcomed Croatia's preparations for an extradition request and stressed that although several other countries could put Šakić on trial, they believed that it was Croatia who should do it.Footnote 78 Thus, external factors prevailed as motivation for the extradition, but unlike the case of several alleged Nazi war criminals, Croatia at least did not declare Šakić unfit to stand trial.Footnote 79
At the trial, the defense strategy consisted of questioning the characterization of Jasenovac as a death camp and questioning the number of victims. The defense even suggested inviting a nutritionist to testify that food supplies had been sufficient.Footnote 80 Both the state attorney and the judge responsible for the preliminary investigation revised the World War II past. They made a distinction between Nazi racial laws against “Jews and Roma” (thereby attributing responsibility for the Ustaša's version of the Nazi laws to the Third Reich) and the laws against political enemies of the “Independent State of Croatia,” subsuming “unwanted Serbs, Croats, and others.”Footnote 81 In doing so, they denied any racial motivation for mass murder of Serbs and instead depicted the victims as political enemies. This goes along with the fact that forty-three out of forty-six former inmates interrogated during the preliminary investigation were ethnic Croats, which did not represent the demographic make-up of the camp inmates. Again this kind of policy was meant to suggest that political enemies had been the largest victim group at Jasenovac.Footnote 82 On the other hand, a lawyer representing the family of a victim Šakić had killed on his own was not allowed to ask why prisoners had been brought to Jasenovac in the first place.Footnote 83
Furthermore, the state attorney cited not only the respectable demographer Vladimir Žerjavić as an expert on the question of the number of victims, but also the director of the Croatian State Archive, Josip Kolanović, known for repeating president Tuđman's low estimate of 40,000 for Jasenovac victims.Footnote 84 Although Žerjavić spoke about 85,000 victims,Footnote 85 the prosecution only included the number of 49,000 in the charge.Footnote 86 Finally, the state attorney stressed that Šakić could not be tried for genocide since he had not decided who would be held in the camp. He then claimed that: “Mostly ill and inmates unable to work were liquidated regardless of their national or religious affiliation. Others were chosen for liquidation because of their membership in a certain working- or another group.”Footnote 87 In fact, most Roma had been killed immediately after arriving in the camp, especially in summer 1942; the same was true for Serbs after the German-Ustaša offensive on Kozara Mountain in 1942. Despite the double role played by the public prosecutor, obviously also acting as an awkward defender of Croatia's good name, several murders were attributed to Šakić, so he was sentenced and died in prison in 2008. His wife, Nada Šakić, a guard in the women's department of the Stara Gradiška camp, was also extradited to Croatia from Argentina but was set free again, supposedly because of a lack of evidence.
During the trial, the intensity of the discussions about the character of the Ustaša-regime and Jasenovac peaked, so we will now cross the line of using newspaper articles as information sources (due to the lack of other literature on this subject) and attempt a media analysis of the case. The media allowed Šakić plenty of room to prove that he was still devoted to Ustaša-ideals and to anti-Semitism. Many media reports also expressed concern about the condition of his health and the quality of his food in prison.Footnote 88 The state-owned Vjesnik, together with other media close to the government, harshly criticized the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem and its director, Efraim Zuroff, (often using anti-Semitic language) for having organized the “international pressure” on Croatia. Vjesnik published several classical anti-Semitic tropes, starting with comments about Jewish internationalism and Jewish international media-influence. The chief editor himself claimed that the intervention of the Wiesenthal Center in Šakić's arrest had led to “almost planetary media attention and that next to him [Šakić] now Croatia is also put in a negative context and almost in the dock.”Footnote 89
The state newspapers combined these references to international pressure with what is known as secondary anti-Semitism. Secondary anti-Semitism is a modified form of modern anti-Semitism developed after the Shoa and which was diagnosed by Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School.Footnote 90 This type of anti-Semitism is motivated by a deflection of guilt and is often summed up in the following way: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” In the Šakić case, the old image of the revengeful Jew after 1945 was modified to conform to the image of Simon Wiesenthal as Nazi (and Ustaša) “haunter”: The president of the Croatian victimological society, Zvonimir Šeparović, speaks of an “unpleasant dossier,” opened reportedly by Simon Wiesenthal, the “most successful and intractable haunter” himself, which “perfectly fits into the international scenario of demonizing Croatia and the Croatian people.”Footnote 91 Anti-Zionist depictions also characterized by a perpetrator-victim-inversion could be observed: The right wing Pure Party of Right is “disgusted” by Zuroffs statements: “Before he teaches Croatia lessons on trials, we recommend that he ask himself, if one should not also bring many of his fellow-countrymen to trial because of their treatment of Palestinian Arabs.”Footnote 92 Furthermore, a specific element of Croatian anti-Semitic discourse appears to be an imagined set of Serbian-Jewish anti-Croat intrigues. These were first of all employed by Šakić himself, who showed himself disappointed by Croatian jurisdiction toward the end of the trial, claiming that the prosecutors had received their marching orders “from Belgrade and other Centers,”Footnote 93 alluding to the Wiesenthal Center. Already at the beginning of the affair, another representative of the far right had claimed that demands to extradite Šakić from Argentina “come from Belgrade and from Jewish circles.”Footnote 94
During the trial, however, some changes could be observed in the Vjesnik coverage: First, during the debate about the extradition, its coverage was characterized by anti-Semitic and anti-Serb conspiracy theories. Moreover, during the preliminary investigation, which was closed to the public, the newspaper had based its reports on what its journalists had learned from the defense; their reports lacked any empathy for the survivors and they reported testimonies as if they confirmed Šakić's innocence. This included headlines such as: “The witness […] has never heard of Šakić.”Footnote 95 Only later, during the trial itself did the journalists slowly start to change their coverage, quoting in detail from the testimonies, writing about brutal killings with wooden hammers,Footnote 96 acknowledging the fact that Roma had been killed immediately upon their arrivalFootnote 97 and that women and children had also been among the victims.Footnote 98 Thus, it seems that at the very least the trial did enforce an acknowledgment of the Ustaša crimes in the mainstream media discourse.
The case also produced a noticeable rise in anti-Semitism, however, which the local Jewish community and Tommy Bear from B'nai B‘rith, who was attending the trial, addressed.Footnote 99 The president of the Jewish Community in Zagreb reported at a press conference the day before the trial began about “speculations about the [real] numbers of Jewish victims.” Additionally he noted the rising quantity of anonymous letters and phone calls both the official community and private persons had received. In the same article, another representative of the Jewish Community mentioned that a priest had recently “glorified Ante Pavelić [the Ustaša leader, L.R.] from the altar of the Catholic church in the center of Zagreb.”Footnote 100
On the other hand, the only free daily newspaper, Novi list, not only lacks anti-Semitic depictions, but it also analyzed them accurately and critically as “Croatian propaganda, which makes anti-Croat Serbian and Zionist circles responsible for opening the Šakić case.”Footnote 101 Its journalists expressed “the wish to free Croatia from such ugly mortgages,” but stressed that “such mortgages can only be removed by reckoning with those who created and ran Jasenovac.”Footnote 102 Comments in this paper stressed that the Croatian government itself was responsible for negative media coverage about Croatia because it had not taken measures to bring Šakić to trial before external institutions had demanded it. Moreover, Šakić had received Croatian citizenship during a visit to Croatia in 1995, and Tuđman had met him in Argentina at a reception.Footnote 103 While Vjesnik contextualized the articles about the Šakić trial by demanding that there also be trials of Serbian perpetrators from Bleiburg or from the war in the 1990s or by stressing the good Croatian-Israeli relationship, Novi list reported testimonies from Jasenovac survivors and used unknown archival pictures, as well as records from the Nurnberg and Eichmann trials, as context.
In Communist times, a trial that opposed the dominant narrative could never have taken place, so at first glance this trial turns out to constitute a major difference between the two regimes. However, an analysis of the arguments made during the trial and of the media coverage shows that the Croatian government felt forced to demand the extradition and forced to put Šakić on trial. This in turn tells us more about emerging European standards of dealing with World War II histories after 1989.
How was Jasenovac dealt with discursively during the Tuđman era? Because Jasenovac was in Serb-occupied Krajina between 1991 and 1995, there had been no media coverage about commemorations in this period. From 1995 to 1999, however, representatives of the government, emissaries of the president and the parliament all spoke there, as did spokesmen from anti-Fascist organizations and survivors groups. Sometimes in reports from these commemorations, it seems to have been more important to name the official representatives who had attended than to mention a word of what they had actually said there.Footnote 104 When both state officials and survivors or the president of the Jewish community were quoted in the press account, the fact that their messages often contradicted each other was both obvious and unmentioned.Footnote 105 Representatives of victim groups, like the president of the Jewish community, would stress the need to “preserve the truth and the memory of the victims and to avert the manipulation of historical facts,”Footnote 106 but they never named the “powers” that they held responsible for this manipulative revisionism. State officials, on the other hand, made the crimes of Nazis, Fascists, and collaborators equivalent to those of the Communists and contemporary “Serbian aggression.” Referring to recent events as a “new genocide of Croats,”Footnote 107 state officials implied that Croats had in fact constituted the largest victim group in Jasenovac before 1945.
As with the Communist discourse about Jasenovac and World War II before 1990, accusations and images of insanity and barbarism prevailed. Now, however, they were not used to characterize the Ustaša but to characterize “the Serbs” or “Yugo-communists.”Footnote 108 The roles had changed, but the “others” were still considered “mentally stunted” and “red totalitarians,”Footnote 109 “monsters,”Footnote 110 or simply enemies of Croatian independence. This argumentation peaked in a perpetrator-victim-inversion that referred to Serbs as the “new Fascists”Footnote 111 of the war in the 1990s, precisely in commemorations that were supposed to memorialize the victims of Jasenovac—most of whom had been Serbs.
Twenty-three out of sixty-one Vjesnik articles about commemorations in Jasenovac also mentioned Bleiburg in ways that made those two lieux de mémoire appear somehow naturally equivalent to each other. The news agency Hina reported, for example, that a parliamentary delegation had “laid a wreath for all victims fallen for the Croatian homeland in the crypt of the Jasenovac monument on the occasion of fiftieth anniversary of the Bleiburg victims” in 1995.Footnote 112 In a “report” from a visit to the small town of Jasenovac after the commemoration at the camp site a few kilometers away, a journalist in 1996 wrote about a destroyed Catholic church, where an empty frame of a picture showed one station on Jesus's Way of the Cross. “This coincidence brings me back into the past. We also remember the commemoration for the Bleiburg Way of the Cross. The burned walls behind the empty frame seem to sufficiently light up the different moods that unify the victims of Fascism, Communism, and the Homeland War [of the 1990s].”Footnote 113 Those apparently free floating associations always turn out to follow the discursive rules of the dominant narrative: Jasenovac equals Bleiburg. Those who did not agree were considered enemies of the nation.
In rare cases, reader's letters comparing the two sites conclude that the murder of “youth” in Bleiburg was worse than events in Jasenovac.Footnote 114 But usually the two crimes were treated as equivalents, since both constituted “terrible crimes, crying out to the sky,”Footnote 115 and one has to mourn the victims of both sides since “numerous mothers (no matter on what side)” had cried for their beloved.Footnote 116 One cannot “remain indifferent when it comes to the murder of innocents, whether in Jasenovac […] or in Bleiburg.”Footnote 117 This rhetorical equalization of the two sites contradicts the preferred focus on Bleiburg in practical policy: Except when explicitly discussing Tuđman's rededication plans for Jasenovac, the site is neglected by media, parliament, and churchFootnote 118—a fact not broached by Vjesnik.
The media characterization of the “Independent State of Croatia” rested on a Tuđman quotation from 1990 that he repeated in a 1996 interview: “The NDH was, as I have already said at the first HDZ congress to the distaste of many, not only a quisling entity, but also the expression of the Croatian people's wish for independence and their own state.”Footnote 119 The dominant discourse sees the main problem as the fact that Croats were divided in World War II since some had fought for the Ustaša state, while others became partisans.Footnote 120 The president himself offered a solution to this division by creating the idea of a “national reconciliation” of all Croats by equalizing the victims of Jasenovac and Bleiburg as victims of “Fascism” and “Communism.” According to this version of history, Ustaša and partisans both fought in their own ways for the Croatian cause. In 1996, Tuđman tried to implement this idea by rededicating Jasenovac as a “national memorial” and by inventing the idea that Jasenovac had also served as a Communist-run camp after 1945. In one interview in April 1996, he alleged that:
According to my research concerning this question, not more than 40,000 people were killed in Jasenovac during the NDH. […] But this was also a camp for those coming back from Bleiburg and for others locked away by the Communist government. […] The others have suffered just as well, not in a smaller degree. […] Thus, Jasenovac can become a place for all war victims reminding the Croatian people that the nation was divided in the past, brought into a state of conflict, which must not be repeated. We can reconcile the dead just as we reconcile the living.”Footnote 121
Here we see an example of the specific politics of the past in the Tuđman era, where the president first names himself as the historiographical authority. He then invokes his own research that produced victim numbers far lower than those generally agreed upon by Croatian and Serbian scholars. His lack of empathy for victims of the Ustaša and his assertion that the NDH was not “so” criminal and that “we” “Croats” suffered “just as much” is what stands behind his assertion that there were “not more than” 40,000 victims. Moreover, when Tuđman speaks only about the Croatian victims of Jasenovac, he again implies that it was mostly Croats who were imprisoned there between 1941 and 1945. In the next step, he invents the idea of a Communist camp there after 1945, a point never mentioned in testimonies of the victims of the partisansFootnote 122 and a point that is today treated as mere myth. This assertion of a Communist camp, however, was adopted into the dominant discourse of the Tuđman-era.Footnote 123 Finally, Tuđman constructs the “unnatural” division of Croats in the past as their greatest problem. He frames this as a problem of the past because he asserts that today's Croats have been reconciled with each other.
This narrative offers a particular Croatian politics of the past that peaked in 1996. That frame, however, triggered a counter-narrative among the marginalized leftist and liberal opposition. This development does not show up in the Vjesnik articles, in which few marginalized protagonists representing oppositional narratives actually make an appearance. Those are the Jewish community, the Association of the anti-Fascist fighters and the Association of Serbian organizations in Croatia. Those particular institutions are—if at all mentioned in Vjesnik—quoted vaguely as demanding “historical truth.” But Vjesnik does not reproduce any quotations in which those marginalized institutions name Tuđman and the HDZ as somehow responsible for a dominant revisionism. In order to locate any changes in media discourse in the course of the 1990s, it is necessary to look at the only free daily newspaper, the Novi List.
In Novi list most articles around the Jasenovac commemoration originate from 1996 as a consequence of Tuđman's plans for rededicating Jasenovac into a site of “national reconciliation” of Croats. The coverage here adopts the exact opposite approach of the Vjesnik articles, although both cite statements by the same politicians. Novi list refers to the World War II state as the “so-called Independent State of Croatia,” a “tributary and brutal satellite of the axis powers.”Footnote 124 The newspaper refers to the racially based reasons that made Jasenovac a death camp, and it does not question the internationally agreed upon number of victims. Furthermore, the newspaper rejects the claim that Jasenovac had become a Communist camp after 1945.Footnote 125
Novi List also disputed Tuđman's claim that a reconciliation had taken place among all Croats. Croatia needed “no reconciliation, but democracy, which will allow the conciliation of all its citizens,”Footnote 126 says a representative of a small Social Democratic opposition party (SDU). The president of the Association of Serbian organizations in Croatia also campaigns for a “reconciliation of all people in Croatia, no matter their religion or nationality.”Footnote 127 The newspaper also argues that “one has to build up a civic, democratic society, because we need a conciliation of people on a democratic basis.”Footnote 128 Obviously, the analysis of this independent newspaper opens up completely new fields of discourse, especially with regard to the relationship between Tuđman's revisionist politics of the past and the question of contemporary democratization.
Until 1995, those responsible for revisionism were not actually named here, but all this changed in the course of the critical debate of Tuđman's rededication plans for Jasenovac, when Novi list addressed Tuđman's and the HDZ government directly. A frequent commentator asserted that:
People in the Croatian parliament claim that “there had never been a Fascist movement or Fascist fighters, only fighters for a Croatian state.” At the same time [the Ustaša leader] Pavelić is returning to Croatia on a grand scale—his books are being published, and not as critical editions, which would be understandable, but as a hagiography or as indispensable literary works, which are supposed to help educate the youth. […] Rededicating Jasenovac could perhaps at most reconcile Tuđman to Tuđman, the former [partisan and Communist] with today's.Footnote 129
Numerous readers’ letters and protesting comments in Novi List resulted in an initiative that mobilized several oppositional parties, anti-Fascist organizations, and the Jewish community against the rededication. But their critique brought consequences upon the press in a deficient democracy such as Croatia in the 1990s. Journalists were still subjected to repression in 1996 when it came to Tuđman's plans for Jasenovac. Two editors of the weekly Feral Tribune were tried for criticizing Tuđman's plans for a “bone mix” in Jasenovac. Only in 1999 did both public views about the government and the Novi list depiction of the regime change significantly. In the press, we can read that state officials were subjected to catcalls during their commemoration speeches that focused on Serbian crimes instead of on what actually had happened in Jasenovac. Furthermore, for the first time, the officials' behavior was described in the Novi list as “laughable.”Footnote 130
Conclusion
The official politics of the past in Croatia changed from a Partisan- to an Ustaša-dominated narrative in all of the discursive spheres analyzed here, but in different ways and in different degrees. On the political level, the anti-Fascism anchored in the constitution remained an object of lip service at best, as illustrated in the destruction of memorials, the renaming of streets, and the revision of school books. In the courts, the formal process of prosecuting an alleged World War II criminal was carried out correctly, even as the explanatory statements of the state attorney denied the racist character of Jasenovac and minimized the number of victims who had died there. Media discourse during this period constructed a rhetorical equivalence between Jasenovac and Bleiburg, with Bleiburg playing a far greater role in the coverage. This greater weight was justified by claims that the subject had been taboo for such a long time, while the importance of Jasenovac had long been overemphasized.Footnote 131 The comparison between media coverage during the last five years of the Communist era and the first years of independent Croatia shows that there was a radical change in content after 1990, when “the Serbs,” “Yugo-Communists,” or Serbs as “new Fascists” became the new enemy.
Still, the way that those “enemies” were depicted in official discourse did not change. Oppositional views were again hardly mentioned in state media except occasionally in the reports from the annual commemorations. The dominance of Franjo Tuđman's revisionist narrative was enforced through the censorship of oppositional media, as the trial against the two Feral Tribune editors showed. All those facts allow us to conclude that the specific ways in which the dominant version of the past was asserted did not change significantly after 1990, thanks to the Manichean worldview on which they rested, to a deficient democracy, and to the oppression of free media. Black turned into white, the “Serbo-Communists” became the new “monsters” instead of the “Ustaša hangmen,” but pluralistic debate on World War II was still not acceptable. The “Politics of the Past” was still imposed and did not develop from an open public discourse.
Although in the state-owned Vjesnik it was also not possible to spot any transformation in the treatment of the politics of the past, Novi list, however, clearly showed changes in the marginalized counter-discourse: While those responsible for the revisionism were not named during the first years of the Tuđman era, at the peak of World War II debates in 1996 opposition raised its voice and called Tuđman and the HDZ responsible but was still repressed. This changed distinctly in 1999, when government positions became “laughable” only a few months before Tuđman's death at the end of 1999 and the turnabout election at the beginning of 2000.
Although the ruling party's and the president's politics of the past showed no modification during the 1990s, and change was brought about only slowly by the opposition, there is a new development in independent Croatia, which would not have been imaginable in Communist Yugoslavia. A Communist regime would never have started a trial that undermined its dominant historical narrative. Croatia in the 1990s, however, felt forced to do so. This has something to do with slowly emerging “European memory standards”Footnote 132 when it comes to World War II. It is also significant that Tuđman's plans to rebury the Bleiburg victims, some of them criminal Ustaša, at the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp were stopped because of an outcry from abroad. Despite Croatia's political isolation in the second half of the 1990s, one could already observe the first results of a process that is today called “Europeanization”Footnote 133 or “Universalization of the Holocaust.”Footnote 134 During the Tuđman era, those results were constructed as conspiracies by “foreign powers” and “anti-Croatian circles.” Later, during the rapprochement with the European Union, international memory standards were followed, thanks to Croatia's own initiative. The best example of this is the controversial new exhibition that opened at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in 2006 and that explicitly referred to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Anne-Frank-House as its role models.Footnote 135
Tuđman's historical revisionism and “Croat democracy” of the 1990s, which were undoubtedly successful in consolidating a Croat national community, had proven to be a heavy burden for the consolidation of democracy and the fight against radical nationalism. Of course, Croatia of the 1990s was not the only former Yugoslav successor-state that still had not faced its “negative heritage” in an appropriate way; in Serbia and the Serbian part of Bosnia, Holocaust meant only the historical events in the Ustaša-State. While Jasenovac has officially become the site of a Jewish and Serbian Holocaust,Footnote 136 the largest site of the Shoa in Serbia, Staro Sajmište in northern Belgrade, has still not become a memorial despite intensive debate.Footnote 137 The collaboration of the Nedić-government with the Nazis in Serbia has still not been reappraised.Footnote 138 Bosnian Muslims consider themselves to be victims of Serbian and Croatian Nazis and Fascists in the war of 1992–95, while their factual collaboration with German Nazis and Italian Fascists, for example, in the “Handschar”-division of the SS, is played down.Footnote 139 In Slovenia, the myth of “functional collaboration” with the Nazis in order to escape from “godless Communism” is widespread, while the Holocaust of the Slovenian Jews deported from the Hungarian occupation zone is not accepted as part of their own history.Footnote 140 Because of the interlinking between the victim-narratives of the successor-states of former Yugoslavia, a comparative analysis of conflicting memories is indispensable, but it still does not seem feasible in Zagreb, Belgrade, or Sarajevo.
