Re-visiting Croatian nationalism (A)

Or, how nationalist can a country be that wants to join the European Union?


I'm checking in at the reception of a hotel in Slavonia, Croatia. On the desk is a brochure about the local zoo with a tiger on the front. The receptionist, a kind man around 30, tells me what else to see in town and I ask him with a smile whether the name of that tiger could be Tudjman , after the late President of Croatia. “I mean, Tudjman fought for the Croatian nation as a tiger for its babies”. He looks surprised and then raises his index finger: “Oh not at all, sir, President Tudjman is not a tiger for us. He is our god.”

In August I drove 3 200 kilometres around Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. I wanted to see the places where TFF teams and I worked in the early 1990s in Eastern Slavonia, Western Slavonia and Krajina. I wanted memories, names and incidents to come alive in the places that, at the time, were called UN Protected Areas, UNPAs.

I wanted to re-visit the villages, houses, churches, cafés, towns and the places where we negotiated our way through checkpoints, were arrested, shot at, did seminars, met crying old people and international peace-keepers during those mad years in the war zones.

And of course I was curious to experience how Croatia and Bosnia have managed to re-build themselves and develop after more than 10 years of relative peace.

It wasn’t one of these 5-10 interviews-per-day mission. It wasn’t meant to be. The experiment was to go to places and see how, by being there, stopping the car, walking around, taking pictures, it would come alive again – all that I may simply have forgotten, deliberately stored away and unconsciously repressed. And of course, driving through the mind-boggling natural, or “scenic,” beauty of major parts of these countries.




Landscape in Krka, Croatia
From a national park near the Adriatic, close to where a lot of fighting took place in the war years. Cruelty and beauty combines in former Yugoslavia (August 2008).
© Jan Oberg 2008


After Denmark where I was born and Sweden where I have lived more than half of my life, I’ve considered former Yugoslavia my third country ever since I enrolled for my first course at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik in 1974 – the director of which was Johan Galtung.

Let me now proceed and deal with the question raised above – just how strong should nationalism be – or be allowed to be – in today’s Europe? The young receptionist must have been about 10 years old when the wars broke out, and I was amazed to learn from him that he would consider Tudjman god.

Let me state – admittedly in no diplomatic terms - that I find Croatia’s visible nationalism rampant, ill-considered and quite disgusting. The collective psychological reservoir from where it comes, combining the aggressive and the infantile in one, should be a cause for concern to anyone around. Had Serbia or Russia displayed anything the like in 2008, they would have been even more isolated and talked down to by the West.

Having said that, I do respect that Croat citizens feel happy that they got out of Yugoslavia and that they see it as a war of liberation. I do understand that they have been filled with so much wartime propaganda that they honestly believe that everything bad in those days were caused exclusively by the Serbs, Milosevic in particular, and they were the innocent victims who won the moral and military victory at last.





Ruin of Catholic church in Medari, Croatia
Medari is a village in Western Slavonia with many houses and buildings still standing as ruins. This one, destroyed by uncivilized Serbs, still stands as a monument to the absurdity of all wars (August 2008).
© Jan Oberg 2008


But even so, it is simply too much. The visitor is bombarded all the time and everywhere with Croatian nationalism – even now this many years after the war and the independence. Let me give you quite many examples of how it imposes itself on you.

First, there are municipal, regional and national emblems and flags everywhere. Everywhere! Public buildings, private houses, flats and shops. People wear sporting gear, t-shirts, socks and caps with the national red-and-white checkerboard pattern which is hardly distinguishable from that of the Ustasha fascist regime of Ante Pavelic during World War II.

Well, let us not even mention the surreal kitschy objects in tourist kiosks; there is none on which that checkerboard has not been fixed. When you travel on a Croatian Airlines flight, you are likely to get a little dry brown biscuit with a message that this is a special Croatian favourite dating back to the thousand year old culture (cf. also some of the Croatian commercials on CNN International). Well, that is if you get to the airport in time.

Croatia has been working on a new language and refuse the term "Serbo-Croatic" language. So they have “Croatized” a lot of words to separate themselves from what they spoke before. So to get to the airport is not that easy because the signs don’t tell you “airport” or “aerodrom” as they used to; now the Croatian word for that is “zracna luka”.

Before you continue to Part B, enjoy the simple beauty of this farm house.





Typical farm house in Eastern Slavonia
There is an amazing beauty in the villages and landscapes of Croatia. This one is from Dalj near Vukovar. (August 2008).
© Jan Oberg 2008


Continue to Part B.

See also "The Serb minority's situation in Croatia 17 years after t...


JO # 1224