Re-visiting Croatian nationalism (B)

Comment

Comment by Ankica Kosic on October 3, 2008 at 10:08am

Dear Frank Vinko Mustac,

I think, instead of blind and narrow accusing of other's group, if people in the former Yugoslavia could accept that dynamic of conflict was complex and admit the responsibility of certain individuals in one’s own group, it would promote a more constructive dialogue in post-conflict areas. Defending at any cost own ethnic group and spreading nationalist views do not help society to heal and develop.

I hope that at least members of Peace and Collaborative Development Network would go in that direction and share with others more open and professional views, instead of black and white and not ethical picture.

Concerning the link you sent (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/18/1), by Stephen Chan. I agree that there are in Croatia (like in any society) many open-minded people and that there is a need to encourage integration of Croatia into the EU. However, his comment on “pluralistic Croatia” is unrealistic and too optimistic. I have not seen all these immigrants and mixed marriages (especially from visible groups mentioned by Stephan) neither on the streets of the capital city (for not talking about other parts of Croatia), but I hope that it is forthcoming trend and that people can start to understand the richness of multiculturalism. I can expect big cities like Zagreb to become sooner or later more multiethnic, but it is going to be difficult to reconstruct multiethnic communities in war-torn region.

I hope you are not going to be surprised if I tell you that during the war in Croatia (like in any war) everyone has lost. We might agree that the violent breakup of Yugoslavia was not inevitable and might have been avoided. Yet, a number of factors contributed to that. I am not going to talk about conspiracy theories about international influence, but most of people in Croatia (those who have been there, but I am not sure about those in diaspora) are aware about Tuđman’s public and other Croatian nationalists who nourished fear among Serbs in Croatia through the mass media and through reinstituting many powerful symbols of Croatian nationalism. Serbs recalled their memories on Croatian genocide against them occurred during WWII. That contributed largely towards Serbs becoming more persuadable by Milosevic and their own nationalists. Probably Serbian political and paramilitary leaders thought that they could had a military advantage because they were ‘well-stocked’ of weaponry from Yugoslav National Army, and supported by them, but very soon the Army disintegrated, and withdrew from Croatia. Thus, the whole ‘Army’ in Krajina consisted of paramilitary formations and of middle-aged and elderly peasants, without any professional military formation and command. These paramilitary bands behaved in a wholly unsoldierly way, and committed crimes and atrocities against Croats but also harassed civilians even among Serbs (Vasi, 1996, p. 128; Thomas, 1999, p. 99). These increased fear and hatred among Croats, who started quickly to acquire weapon, and there are evidence that their efforts were supported by funds collected among well-heeled militants in the Croatian diaspora but also by other sources. Paramilitary formations were created quickly among Croats too, who took military actions against places populated by Serbs, by performing atrocities and exterminations over them.

Ordinary people on both sides come under the vicious control of these groups. No one among normal ordinary people neither among Croats nor Serbs wanted that war! They were whipped into a frenzy by demagogues and the media, and forced to take weapons, to obey orders, and keep safe ‘borders’ created between ethnically divided places. Ordinary people of any ethnicities felt helpless and unprotected. Those who tried to oppose their co-ethnic members of paramilitary formations, were persecuted, proclaimed as betray, and as such tortured and killed.

As the war went on, ethnic hatred grew and various incidents fuelled the propaganda machines, thereby causing even more hatred. Media spreads hateful messages, thus largely contributing to the conflict. Furthermore, people who experienced brutalities of war, lost relatives or property started to hate and seek for revenge. Conflict in Croatia (and also Bosnia) shows how easily a society can become corrupted, debased, and polarised by a relatively small numbers of people who purport to represent on ethnic (religious) group or another, and how these people can force others. Minority of militants and terrorists on both sides can hold the entire society as its hostage, while the many people in between are inexorably seduced and forced into taking sides.

I hope it can help to you to understand more about the conflict that happened in the former Yu. I just want to add that what you wrote about Operation Storm is simple not true.

Regards,
Ankica

Comment by jelena grujic on October 3, 2008 at 5:11am

Message to Vinko - as a journalist, you should do know how unacceptable is to generalize, and to use false information to make the point. I am truly sorry to see such a lack of willing to understand and dealing with a recent history that is a pillar of your own country. It is nothing but sleeping with a ghosts. And most importantly, it is very unprofessional.

Comment by Jan Oberg on October 2, 2008 at 6:18am

Dear friends

Thanks for commenting on this article. I have responded individually to both Rene and Frank since I don't write to just express myself but also try to find time to respond when people show care and concern. Many thanks for making this network a lively place!

Best
Jan

Comment by Gunnar Vagerstam on September 29, 2008 at 6:36am

Another picture from 080705...talking about memorial...I did find this tombstone for the memory of Franjo Tudjman in the biggest cemetery in Zagreb.

Comment by Gunnar Vagerstam on September 29, 2008 at 6:30am

Comment by Rene Wadlow on September 20, 2008 at 1:25pm

Another Nationalism from the same area:
Dr. Radovan Karadzic : Death, War and Sacrifice

René Wadlow

Radovan Karadzic is a psychiatrist; his wife Ljiljan Zelem-Karadzic is a psychiatrist; their daughter Sonja is a psychiatrist. Had Yugoslavia continued united, Karadzic probably would have headed a private clinic for wealthy neurotics to whom he would have read his poems in the evening. Or he might have, as has done for the last 12 years under the name of Dragan Dabic, gone into alternative medicine, stressing the role of thinking and meditation and writing advice articles for the journal Healthy Life.

However, Karadzic has now been sent to the Hague where the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia will put him on trial for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The Tribunal was set up in 1993 while the wars in former Yugoslavia were going on but reports of war crimes had attracted world attention. Since its inception, the Tribunal has convicted 56 persons, acquitted 10; there are 27 on trial and 210 others in pretrial stage. The Serbian General Rathko Mladic has been indicted but is still at large.

Karadjic’s political career was much shorter than his 12 years of alternative medicine. He was not particularly active in politics during the Yugoslav federation. He became active in politics on the eve of the break up of Yugoslavia when the future of Bosnia was in doubt. The Serbs of Bosnia needed a vocal representative. Karadjic was known as a poet who spoke well in public (even if his poetry was difficult and not widely read.). His nationalism was of the type based on the use of myth as best developed by the French historian Georges Dumézil who developed the idea of a common Indo-European people organized in three fuctional categories 1) the sacred, represented by priests, 2) physical force represented by warriors, 3) production and reproduction, represented by herdsmen, agriculturalists and artisans. Islam represented a non-Indo-European culture that was a constant danger to European civilization, the barbarians at the gates. Memory of past Serbian glory is the last, best defense against chaos.

Bosnia was the only Yugoslav republic without a dominant nationality, having large Serb, Croat and Muslim populations, often mixed together. However ‘Muslim’ was not really a ‘nationality’ in the sense that Serb, Croat, and Macedonians were considered a ‘nationality’. ‘Muslim’ is a religious definition, regardless of what they believed as individuals. ‘Muslims’ were thought to be Croats and Serbs who had converted to Islam during the Ottoman period. Many Serbs and Croats thought that the ‘Muslims’ would revert to their Serb or Croat ‘nationality’ once they had a chance, especially as Islamic practice was low among the Bosnian Muslims. Thus the leadership in both Serbia and Croatia were willing to divide Bosnia between them and to integrate their respective sections into Serbia and Croatia. In 1991, there was an agreement between Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudman of Croatia on the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina between them.

However, the Bosnian Muslims — the Bosniaks as they called themselves — were not willing to be so divided and struggled under the leadership of Alija Izethegovic for an independent state. There were some who hoped that Bosnia would be an undivided, multi-ethnic, multi-religious republic. (1). But the forces of division were stronger than those of cooperation. In March 1992, Bosnia-Hercegovina declared its independence, and at the same time, Republika Srpska was declared under the leadership of Radovan Karadzic. A month later, in April 1992, the siege of Sarajevo began lasting until February 1994. Although the siege was continuing in an effort to prove that a multi-ethnic society could not exist, in September 1992, the Geneva Peace Conference on Bosnia began at the UN headquarters under the co-leadership of Lord Owen on behalf of the EC and Cyrus Vance, former US Secretary of State, for the UN. Vance later withdrew and was replaced by Thorvold Stoltenberg. I had been in Belgrade in 1991 at the start of the Yugoslav conflict to see if NGOs could play any role in conflict reduction. With the start of the negotiations in Geneva in 1992, I followed the discussions as closely as possible, especially as federalist ideas were being discussed as a structure for Bosnia.

Radovan Karadzic created the capital for Republika Srpska in Pale, a small ski resort above Sarajevo. The court trial will, hopefully, bring out how much control he had over the Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic. There were in addition to the regular military, a number of militias, more criminal bands than nationalist movements. It is very likely that a charge of genocide — the destruction of a people — will hold against Karadzic. Genocide does not mean killing everyone; it means the destruction of the identity of a people. There was a widely held belief among both Serbs and Croats that the ‘Muslims’ were not a ‘people’ and that by the heat of war, they would find their ‘true identity’ as Croats and Serbs who had been forced by the Ottomans to become Muslims. Karadzic put a Christian coloring on his views — how sincerely one never knows, but religion could serve as a bond among Serbs. As Karadzic said in many speeches “Our faith is present in all our thinking and decisions, and the voices of the Church is obeyed as the voice of supreme authority.” The priestly function was that which was to guide society, and he saw himself in the mythical role of priest-warrior.

By 1995, the Hague Tribunal had issued an arrest warrant for Karadzic and Mladic. Thus it was Slobodan Milosevic who negotiated both for himself and for the Bosnian Serbs when the 1995 Dayton Accords on the future of Bosnia were negotiated. The accords were signed in Paris in December 1995. Both Karadzic and Mladic resigned from their posts of Republika Srpska and went into hiding.

Karadzic seems to have had the identity papers of Dragan Dabic, a Serb killed in the fighting around Sarajevo and went to live in Belgrade to take up work in alternative medicine and healing techniques.

In the 12 years spent in his new identity, he may have had time to return to a ‘father’ of psychiatric thought, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in particular his Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) and his Why War? (1933) a short exchange of letters with Albert Einstein for the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. By the time Why War? Was published, the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany had made the question one of tragic timeliness. In both works, Freud analyses civilization in terms of two basic types of man’s instinctual life, on the one hand, man’s instinct to love and cooperate, and on the other, man has an impulse to attack and destroy. The first impulse is called by Freud (as by Plato in his Symposium ) Eros, of which sexual love is only one manifestation. The purpose of the erotic impulse is to tie together, to establish ever greater unities, whereas the purpose of the second, the death instinct, is to attack, dissolve, destroy and finally, to reduce living things to an inorganic death. Freud maintains that civilization owes its existence to the possibility of extending love for one’s family into wider friendship and loyalty to the group, society and the world.

Yet the very act of this wider expansion of the circle of those loved creates tensions and frustrations that strengthen the aggressive drive of the person. Thus, the progress of civilization and the establishment of peace is a constant struggle between the cooperative and destructive impulses.

Norman O. Brown made this duality the basis for an effort to reshape psychoanalysis into a wider general theory of human rapture, culture and history in his Life against Death. (2)


Karadzic has shown that the impulse of death can be stronger than that of life. It is reported that, following the pattern of Slobodan Milmosevic, he wishes to defend himself alone at the Hague Tribunal. We will have to see if his years from political action provided him with insights into the dual impulses of eros and death. For the moment, his life is a clear example of the triumph of the will to death over the will to life.


(1) See Rusmir Mahmutcehajic.The Denial of Bosnia (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000, 156 pp.)

(2) Norman O. Brown. Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959, 366 pp.)

René Wadlow, Representative to the United Nations, Geneva, Association of World Citizens and editor of the online journal of world politics, www.transnational-perspectives.org

Comment by Erle Frayne Argonza on September 20, 2008 at 4:24am

Nice photos and reflections. Croatian nationalism is ethno-based, and this is one nationalism that goes hay-wire. Agreed, this is one nationalism that Europe must reject. Not only Europe, but here in Asia it should be the same, like the ethnic-religious nationalism of the Bangsamoro (Muslims) represented by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. ...By the way, in Filipino the term for TIE is KURBATA. The affinity to Croatian KRAWATTE is obviously direct.

Comment by Frank Vinko Mustac on September 19, 2008 at 7:13pm

First of all, I recommend reading a recent article on the same subject published in The Guardian. The comments are also insightful.

Here is the link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/18/1

Secondly, a piece of critical information missing from the Jan Oberg blog piece, and also missing from the many I’ve read about, or partly about, Croatia’s 1995 Operation Storm, is that from 1991-1995, prior to the storm operation, ethnic Serbs in Croatia, with hefty assistance from both paramilitary units from Serbia proper and the Milosevic-controlled Yugoslav Army (JNA), killed at least 10,000 Croatians and forcibly displaced, “cleansed,” some 220,000 Croats with family roots in Croatia that go back 1,300 years from about one-third of Croatian territory.

There is also evidence that Serbian military authorities in the so-called Srpska Krajina ordered the evacuation of the entire Serb population there. Serbs left the area some days before Operation Storm started.

Unlike the poorly armed Croats defending the city of Vukovar, which fell after a three-month siege in 1992 and resulted in thousands of Croatian refugees leaving the city on foot with only the clothes on their backs, the much better armed Serbs in Krajina in 1995 chose to retreat and the population was evacuated in cars, trucks and on tractors, which were also filled with possessions—further evidence, circumstantial perhaps, that the evacuation was planned ahead of time.

It should also be noted that Operation Storm also spared about 150,000 Muslims in the Bihac area of Bosnia, who were being threatened by Serb forces in the wake of the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995.

It is estimated that at least 1,000 Serbs suspected of committing major war crimes against Croats from 1991-1995 left with the Serb evacuees and most probably escaped prosecution forever.

Many of the Serbs from Krajina will not return to Croatia because they know that if they do, Croatian authorities are obligated to arrest and prosecute them.

One important reason, that has not been well publicized, for a refugee return rate that is slower than what the international community would like to see is this fear of prosecution.

Although perhaps grudgingly, Croatia has fulfilled its obligation to the ICTY and and continues to prosecute Croatian citizens suspected of war crimes.

There is also a deep frustration among many Croatian citizens that Serb refugees are being repatriated to Croatia while major Serb war crimes suspects like Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic still remain at large as fugitives from the law, and the Serbs who escaped prosecution when they left Krajina in 1995 will probably never be brought to justice.

Comment by Ankica Kosic on September 19, 2008 at 9:38am

Hi Jan,

I live abroad but originally I am from Croatia I can confirm your observations. People continue to be nourshied by the nationalism, and I am sorry for them. I still feel hopeless in searching for the ways to change something in better at least for the youth.

Comment by Andrea Blanch on September 19, 2008 at 8:40am

Thanks for sharing. The pictures are beautiful and the situation disturbing. What role are you playing there? Are you doing research or peacework or journalism? I'm interested to know if the nationalism you describe is pervasive or if there are subgroups of Croat citizens who are working for coexistence. Best regards, Andy