Usable History?: Representations of Yugoslavia's Difficult Past from 1945 to 2002 8771241078, 9788771241075

Table of contents :
Usable History?
Contents
Preface
1 Introduction: Thematization, historical culture and genocide
Thematization and cardinal theme
Historical culture and use of history
The importance of context
Genocide, term and theme
The term and theme of genocide in Yugoslavia
Sources
2 The Second World War in Yugoslavia
Disintegration and war regimes
Massacres and war crimes
3 Establishing an official narrative, 1945‑1948
The communist reconstruction of Yugoslavia
The first official accounts
The official report on Jasenovac
Settling accounts
Tito’s 1948 report of the war
4 Massacres in memoirs and fiction, 1945‑1952
The bloody cloth of Krajina – massacres in memoir literature
Jasenovac
The war and its massacres in songs and poetry
Partisan novels
5 Titoist institutional historiography, 1945.1960
Breaking with Stalinism
Historiography and society
Education
Titoist historiography of the massacres
6 New perspectives on wartime history, 1960‑1980
Yugoslav politics
Professionalized historiography
Republican and national research environments
New perspectives on Second World War history
Genocide becomes an issue
7 Public commemorations and popular culture, 1960‑1980
The memorial area of Jasenovac
Partisan poetry
War films
History schoolbooks
8 The breakdown of communist history and the theme of genocide, 1980‑1986
Politics of crisis
Fractured historical culture
The breakdown of communist history
Thematization of wartime massacres in literature
Wartime history and the concept of genocide in public debate
9 Genocide as a cardinal theme, 1984‑1989
Politics and national tensions
The development of genocide historiography
Croatian reactions and genocide discussions in the press
10 National conflicts and national historical cultures, 1990‑2002
The establishment of the Croatian national state
The Bleiburg tragedy and the thematization of genocide in Croatia
Towards a Croatian national history
The lack of transition in Serbia
The theme of genocide in Serbia
Teaching Serbian war history
The Bosnian war
Bosnian historical culture and the theme of genocide
Towards a Bosniak national history
Conclusion
Literature

Citation preview

Tea

Sindbæk

Usable History? Representations of Yugoslavia’s difficult past from 1945 to 2002

Usable History?

Usable History?

Representations of Yugoslavia’s difficult past from 1945 to 2002

Tea Sindbæk

Aarhus University Press  |  a

Usable History? © the author and Aarhus University Press Typeset by Grafisk SIGNS Cover design by Grafisk SIGNS Cover illustration Pavle Ilić and Vladimir Dedijer in the Montenegrin mountains during the Partisan War. Photo by Savo Orović Ebook production: Narayana Press ISBN 978 87 7124 107 5 Aarhus University Press Aarhus Langelandsgade 177 DK – 8200 Aarhus N Copenhagen Tuborgvej 164 DK – 2400 Copenhagen NV www.unipress.dk Published with the financial support of Landsdommer V. Gieses Legat and The Aarhus University Research Foundation INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTORS: Gazelle Book Services Ltd. White Cross Mills Hightown, Lancaster, LA1 4XS United Kingdom www.gazellebookservices.co.uk ISD 70 Enterprise Drive Bristol, CT 06010 USA www.isdistribution.com

Contents

Preface

7

1

Introduction: Thematization, historical culture and genocide

9

2

The Second World War in Yugoslavia

25

3

Establishing an official narrative, 1945‑1948

39

4

Massacres in memoirs and fiction, 1945‑1952

57

5

Titoist institutional historiography, 1945‑1960

71

6

New perspectives on wartime history, 1960‑1980

91

Thematization and cardinal theme Historical culture and use of history The importance of context Genocide, term and theme The term and theme of genocide in Yugoslavia Sources Disintegration and war regimes Massacres and war crimes

The communist reconstruction of Yugoslavia The first official accounts The official report on Jasenovac Settling accounts Tito’s 1948 report of the war

The bloody cloth of Krajina – massacres in memoir literature Jasenovac The war and its massacres in songs and poetry Partisan novels Breaking with Stalinism Historiography and society Education Titoist historiography of the massacres

Yugoslav politics Professionalized historiography Republican and national research environments New perspectives on Second World War history Genocide becomes an issue

7

Public commemorations and popular culture, 1960‑1980

113

8

The breakdown of communist history and the theme of genocide, 1980‑1986

139

9

Genocide as a cardinal theme, 1984‑1989

161

10

National conflicts and national historical cultures, 1990‑2002 189

The memorial area of Jasenovac Partisan poetry War films History schoolbooks

Politics of crisis Fractured historical culture The breakdown of communist history Thematization of wartime massacres in literature Wartime history and the concept of genocide in public debate Politics and national tensions The development of genocide historiography Croatian reactions and genocide discussions in the press The establishment of the Croatian national state The Bleiburg tragedy and the thematization of genocide in Croatia Towards a Croatian national history The lack of transition in Serbia The theme of genocide in Serbia Teaching Serbian war history The Bosnian war Bosnian historical culture and the theme of genocide Towards a Bosniak national history

Conclusion

219

Literature

227

Preface

When in April 1941 Yugoslavia was invaded and split into pieces by NaziGermany and its allies, what followed was to become as much a Yugoslav civil war as a war of occupation and liberation. Groups of Yugoslavs, divided along political, ethnic and regional lines, not only fought with or against the Axis forces, but they also fought each other. During the warfare from 1941 to 1945, several hundred thousand Yugoslav civilians were killed by other Yugoslavs in large-scale massacres or concentration camps. After the Second World War, Yugoslavia was re-established as a socialist multinational federation. The new communist regime built a large part of its self-representation and legitimacy upon the victories of the communist-led Partisans in the war. Yet the war had also left a difficult, painful and potentially divisive historical legacy to Yugoslav society; the history of these massacres could easily invoke national enmity or reawaken the political divisions of wartime Yugoslavia. In building their new ideal multiethnic state, how were the Yugoslav communists to deal with the history of massive internal Yugoslav war crimes and massacres? How would Yugoslav society and its historians represent and explain these internal massacres, and how would societal needs and political demands influence their representations? In this book I investigate how the history of Yugoslavia’s internal Second World War massacres was presented and used in politics, historiography and popular representations of history in Yugoslavia between 1945 and 2002. The book shows how this history was drawn upon for political, ideological and other purposes, and how historical representations were influenced by political developments. Though I frequently refer to the concept of genocide and to the massacres committed during the Second World War, this is not a book about those massacres, and it does not seek to determine whether or not the massacres committed during the war constitute genocide; this question is outside the scope of the study, and answering it would demand a completely different approach. Rather, this book is about the role of history in society; about the ways in which painful and potentially divisive history may be present in society and how such history can be drawn upon for a number of purposes.

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Most of the material presented here was part of my doctoral research, which I thank the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Aarhus for financing, and my supervisors, Henning Mørk and the late Niels Kayser Nielsen for kindly overseeing. Friends and colleagues in Aarhus and elsewhere commented on parts of the manuscript, and I am very grateful to each of them. I especially want to thank Wendy Bracewell, Carol Lilly and Peter Bugge for their insightful and generous reading of the final thesis. My gratitude also goes to the Aarhus University Research Foundation and Landsdommer Gieses Legat for support‑ ing the publication of this revised version. And finally, I thank friends and colleagues in Zagreb, Belgrade and Sarajevo, especially Petar Bagarić, Srđan Milošević, Ivo Goldstein, Dubravka Stojanović, Predrag Marković and Hus‑ nija Kamberović, who kindly illuminated me in my ignorance and patiently accepted my intrusion into a history that they know so much better than I. My hope is that I, as an outsider, may approach the subject with different presumptions and perhaps detect new patterns. All errors and mistakes remain, of course, my own. Aarhus, August 2012 Tea Sindbæk

Introduction: Thematization, historical culture and genocide

Remake, a Bosnian/French film from 2002, relates the life of Tarik, a young writer from Sarajevo in the first half of the 1990s.1 As the Bosnian conflict un‑ folds, he and his friends find themselves on different sides of a war they cannot support. Together with other Muslim men, Tarik is imprisoned and tortured in a camp held by Serbian nationalist forces during the siege of Sarajevo. Remake shows the brutal maltreatment of prisoners in the camp and the Serbian guards parading nationalist symbols associated with the Second World War Serbian Chetnik forces, who had committed numerous war crimes in Bosnia. Tarik has recently finished a film manuscript about his father, who sur‑ vived imprisonment and torture by the Croatian Fascist Ustasha movement that held power in Croatia and Bosnia during the Second World War. Tarik’s father was sent to the infamous Ustasha concentration camp, Jasenovac, and Remake pictures him standing in a queue of naked prisoners on their way to be executed. Ustasha guards, swinging heavy wooden mallets, crush the skulls of the prisoners and throw the bodies in the river Sava. Fortunately, Tarik’s father is saved by chance and returns to Sarajevo. Remake shifts between the two wars and the parallel stories of individual suffering within frameworks of ethnic conflict and massacres. As the title sug‑ gests, the two stories could be seen as essentially the same. The story about Tarik’s father is filled with easily recognisable references to elements of Yugoslav historiography of the Second World War and its massacres, for example the heavy wooden mallets used by the killers at Jasenovac. The fact that the part of the film depicting the father’s experiences turns out to be an enactment of the son’s manuscript underlines Remake’s own re-enactment of history, reflecting chains of presentations and representations of the past. The example of Remake illustrates several points: it demonstrates some of the ways in which history is drawn upon and referred to outside the academic and educational subject. It also shows how a historical culture, in this case that of Yugoslavia, holds an archive of historical stock-references that are connected to certain understandings of the past. Moreover, it shows how these references can be re-contextualised in order to suggest other meanings. While Remake’s references to the Second World War draws on the communist historiography

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of ‘the people against the fascists’, these references can be seen to imply an ear‑ lier instance of repetitive interethnic violence in Bosnia as well. Thus, Remake also illustrates a particular way of representing recent history in the former Yugoslav areas during and after the wars of the 1990s: the idea that these wars were somehow a resumption of the internal Yugoslav fighting of the Second World War, and that interethnic conflicts and violence were thus repeating themselves. Remake is but one example of a wider cultural interest, which had continued for several decades, in the massacres and war crimes of the Second World War. The history of the inter-Yugoslav massacres of the Second World War was a prominent theme within historiography and popular history in Yugoslavia from the mid 1980s. The question of how to write the history of these massacres was rather delicate throughout most of the existence of Socialist Yugoslavia. In a mul‑ tiethnic state, such as Yugoslavia, ethnic violence and massacres are complex and sensitive questions. Soon after the end of the Second World War, the history of these massacres was subordinated to a state-bearing myth of united patriotic Yugoslav resistance and revolutionary struggle, and the history of internal Yugoslav violence was made to fit into that narrative. The myth of united resistance remained officially unchallenged until the 1980s, when history was revised, not least from national perspectives, and the history of Yugoslav war crimes was ascribed a new, much more national meaning. While Second World War history did not become less embedded in politics with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and with the wars and the establishment of nation states, the relationship between history and politics certainly became more varied and many-sided. In the 1990s and the early 21st century, wartime massacres were crucial elements of the new national histories being written in the post-Yugoslav republics. Thus, the inter-Yugoslav massacres of the Second World War constitute a central problem of what we may call the ‘historical culture’, that is, historiography and popular representations of history in Yu‑ goslavia from the establishment of the socialist federation from 1945 to 2002, when it was finally decided to abandon Yugoslavia as a federal state. This book investigates how the inter-Yugoslav massacres committed during the Second World War have been represented and explained in Yugoslavia in the period from 1945 to 2002, and how these representations interact with political and cultural developments. By analysing representations of massacres and the ways in which they changed, the book shows how the events of the Second World War, through a process of thematisation, were emphasised and integrated within the ‘theme of genocide’. The aim is to demonstrate how the

chapter 1

history of the massacres was used in different ways for different purposes, and point out some of the consequences of these various uses. The ways in which Yugoslav society and its historians attempted to come to terms with – and use – the painful and problematic history of the interYugoslav Second World War massacres illuminate some of the problems and processes at stake when societies are to grasp the many terrible histories of the twentieth century. What are the roles of history and historians in post-conflict societies? How do we represent the past in a way that enables us to contain the “terror of history”, as Dirk Moses has phrased it, or, to paraphrase Charles Maier’s study of Germany’s struggles over Second World War historiography, how do we cope with our “unmasterable pasts”?2 The investigation in this book draws on a handful of concepts that illumi‑ nate different aspects of the problem. They are the concepts of thematization, historical culture and use of history, all introduced below. Particular emphasis is laid on the relationships between historical culture and society. Furthermore, parallels are identified between Yugoslav genocide historiography and tenden‑ cies within wider international developments of genocide studies.

Thematization and cardinal theme The word theme has, in addition to its more general sense of ‘subject’ or ‘topic’ a specific linguistic meaning. The theme is the part of the sentence that is in focus, the point of departure; in essence it is what is being talked about.3 In English the theme is normally assigned the first position in the sentence, but it may also be emphasized in other ways, for example by predication. It may be marked; if the theme of the sentence is not constituted by the grammati‑ cal subject, but by, for example, the object or a prepositional phrase, it will obviously be highlighted. Marking the theme in this way can be described as foregrounding.4 Thematization denotes the organization of sentences into theme and nontheme. While some linguistic constructions are obviously more common or natural than others, there is always a certain degree of deliberate selection in the thematization of a sentence. The choice of theme reflects the starting point of the writer or speaker. According to Norman Fairclough, an unmarked theme represents what is assumed as given or established. On the other hand, a marked theme shows which bit of information needs to be emphasized. Thus, the thematization of texts says something about general assumptions as well as rhetorical strategies.5

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The concepts of theme and thematization of text and discourse are ap‑ plicable at levels other than that of the sentence.6 The decision to introduce a particular issue in the title of a book instead of in its penultimate chapter is an act of theme selection, of foregrounding. I will suggest that within his‑ toriography and historical culture, theme and thematization can be used in an even broader sense as a widespread phenomenon, reflecting a perspective shared or discussed by many individuals. Thus, I will argue that in the late 1980s genocide was the thematized element of Second World War historiog‑ raphy in Serbia. At other times, in the 1950s and 1960s for example, the same events and developments were described with different choices of themes and thematization. The particularly privileged position that the theme of genocide held in Serbian historical culture of the 1980s, and later also in a wider Yugoslav context, requires a concept that captures both this very specific status and brings out the resemblance with similar conceptual ‘trumps’ in other debates. I will suggest that this type of dominant and strongly symbolically invested issue be referred to as a cardinal theme. By this term I wish to specify those particular issues of themes that at certain times, in certain cultural contexts, obtain a special discursive power that tends to subdue other issues or perspec‑ tives within their field. Other examples of issues privileged as cardinal themes could be the status of the Holocaust in a general European historical culture, or the way that any political matter raised as a question of national security tends to command unlimited attention.7 With the concepts of theme, thematization and cardinal theme, I intend to describe the process through which genocide became a predominant issue within Yugoslav historical culture. This, I believe, was partly the result of the deliberate discursive strategies of individual history writers. But it may also reflect a broader trend, and perhaps even general and shared international tendencies. The analyses in this book concentrate on the choices of themes and the‑ matization in representations of the Yugoslav massacres of the Second World War. Such choices are revealed in the positions that these issues are ascribed in the internal hierarchies of the texts, in the amounts, frequencies and levels of detail in which they occur, and in the degree to which they are simply stated and taken for granted or marked and emphasised by strategies such as wording and predication.

chapter 1

Historical culture and use of history In using the concept historical culture rather than history writing,, or sim‑ ply historiography, I wish to emphasize two aspects that are not necessarily included in these terms: firstly, that history is represented and drawn upon in a multitude of forms and fields in society. Historical culture is a broad concept, which includes historiography as well as the many other ways of communicating history. Secondly, that historical culture also denotes the culture of the academic and educational fields of history and the professional collective of historians. In this sense a historical culture is characterised by certain ways of researching and communicating history, and influenced by particular relationships to society.8 Historical culture includes texts, artefacts, and social practices in which history is communicated. Important elements of historical culture are popular representations of history such as schoolbooks and trivial history, as well as political speeches, commemoration ceremonies, monuments, and various art products.9 History may be more or less subject to ideological dictates or politi‑ cal control. Often historical culture is connected to nation or state, but the term can also be used in plural to emphasise that smaller cultures, subcultures and countercultures exist within a wider historical culture. Inevitably, I shall have to speak of several historical subcultures in order to distinguish between, for example, academic historical culture and more popular historical cultures, or between Yugoslav and national or republican historical cultures. In the case of post-Second World War Yugoslavia, the writing and teaching of history were subjects of concern for nearly all the shifting regimes, and often the communication of history was subordinated to and penetrated by politics. Since history was a highly institutionalised and hierarchical field, academic and educational history writing played a central role in Yugoslav historical culture. But history was also very present in media, for example in feuilletons in news magazines, and fictional representations of history in literature and film were common. Historical culture shapes and reflects historical consciousness.10 The lat‑ ter can be understood as a mental, subjective aspect of historical culture, in which history is employed by the individual as a source for orientation in time and for perception of the surrounding world and our expectations of it. At a more practical level, it is a widespread idea that history is the basis for general knowledge and predictions of future developments, as when A.L. Rowse sug‑ gested in 1946 that history is the best source for evaluating developments in the world of international politics.11

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At the core of historical culture lie the communicational processes through which history is presented and represented. Accordingly, these processes are the objects of analysis in this book. In this it differs from most studies of collective, collected or public memory, the focus of which are, obviously, on representations of memory rather than history.12 Nevertheless, approaches and methods of memory studies are often very like those used in studies of historical culture, and insights from memory studies can contribute to the understanding of historical culture. This is not least relevant in the present case, since the events included in the historical themes that are under question here occured within the living memory of many Yugoslavs in the period under investigation. Indeed, most of the history about the Second World War was, for several decades, written as a more or less official memory by persons who had par‑ ticipated on the winning side of that war. But outside official historiography other memories existed, the articulation of which would later challenge hith‑ erto accepted representations of the war and the events that took place in its shadow. In this way, different memories entered historical culture, supplying bases for historical counter-cultures, or maybe even for a historical cultural transformation.13 Memories were regarded as more authentic and legitimate representations of the past than official historiography.14 In general, however, I will deal with the issue of memory mainly as a communication of history and hence as an element of historical culture. Historical culture is often intimately connected to ideology – among the most obvious examples are the relations between historiography and national states, or between historiography and communism. In these cases history has been used to make certain political constructions appear natural and legitimate. However, use of history can take many other forms. Defined broadly by Klas-Göran Karlsson, use of history is “… when aspects of a historical culture are activated in a communicative process in order for certain groups to satisfy certain needs or look after certain inter‑ ests.”15 In Karlsson’s terminology use of history need definitely not be abuse or misuse. Rather, his approach emphasises the functions that articulations of history have in society. Scholarly historiography, according to Karlsson, is just one way of using history, aimed at explaining the past on its own premises according to causal models, sources and established knowledge. He proposes a handful of other ways of using history, which include: general ‘existential’ uses, reflecting the common human need to remember and feel rooted in time and space; ‘moral’ uses, related to the idea that something should be remembered, and often based on indignation because of missing or

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insufficient attention to these particular elements of history; ‘political’ uses, characterised by metaphoric, comparative and symbolic representations of history, and often directed at or directly addressing later or contemporary issues; and ‘ideological’ uses that situate the past within particular contexts of meaning and select historical elements in order to convince, rationalise and legitimise certain concepts. A special way of using history, dubbed ‘non-use’, is the deliberate and ideological endeavours to ignore or downplay certain elements of history.16 The different ways of using history are most often overlapping. Works of academic history may well include existential and ideological uses of history. Nevertheless, the differentiation of uses of history according to function, points to some of the ways in which historical culture interacts with and influences society. The intentions behind these uses may be countless, as may the conse‑ quences, many of which are surely unintended. The concepts of historical culture and use of history are closely related, yet functionally distinct. Historical culture denotes the communication of history in general. Use of history refers to the aims and the more or less intentional functions of the communication of history.

The importance of context Representations of history take place in communicative acts, in the forms of texts, or discourse. I suggest that any act communicating history may be un‑ derstood as a discursive act in the sense of Norman Fairclough; a form of social practice within a socially and materially constituted reality.17 Thematization is one type of discursive act, which denotes what is of high priority or what could be assumed within a particular text or discourse. Discursive acts contribute to characterising and constituting society, but are themselves shaped and constrained by what is already socially and materi‑ ally constituted. Obvious examples of constraining structures in our case are established institutions of historiography and the presence of political power close to the production of historical discourse. Political and social contexts are fundamental in enabling and constraining the communication of history. These contexts remain essential to every re-representation of historical discourse. As texts and discourse travel from context to context they are sur‑ rounded by changed conditions of replication and commentary, and influ‑ enced anew by relationships of power, as well as the inscription of ethnic and other categorisations. When discursive acts reappear in new contexts, they

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are invested with new meanings.18 The medium and genre in which they ap‑ pear constrain and enable discursive acts, too. A historian interpreting past events in a newspaper article will inevitably have to state points in a sharp and concise manner, without the lengthy hedging, clarification, and emphasis on important exceptions and complexities that would be standard in a scholarly book. While chances are that the statements made in the newspaper will reach a larger audience, these statements will probably also seem less balanced and, in sensitive cases, more confrontational. Political and social contexts are also crucial to the reception of discursive acts. Once a discursive act has left its author, its interpretation is essentially the property of the reader or receiver, and this interpretation is necessarily influenced by the context in which the act is received.19 Thus, the contexts in which history is communicated are of crucial importance to the production of historical representations as well as to their reception and further commu‑ nication. A text thematizing genocide is received differently in a context of common interethnic interests and agreed future perspectives than in one of polarised ethnic relations and political instability. Since the part of Yugoslav historical culture concerned with twentieth century history was strongly influenced by politics, political circumstances and agendas set a framework of constraints and possibilities for the commu‑ nication of history. Therefore, in this book, the main political developments, and especially cases in which the field of history is specifically addressed, are discussed in relation to productions of historical accounts.

Genocide, term and theme Genocide represents the ultimate threat, that of extinction, against an ethnic or national group. When in 1944 the Polish-Jewish lawyer Rafael Lemkin coined the term genocide, he saw it as directed “against the national group as an entity” and against individuals “as members of the national group”. Later, the United Nations genocide convention of 1948 defined the possible victims of genocide as members of “national, ethnical, racial or religious groups”.20 Founded in a national perspective on history, the term ‘genocide’ does not correlate easily with a communist class-based historiography. A history of genocide will also have to be, at least partly, a victim-centred and civil history, rather than one of military feats, class struggles and economic progress. Though discussed by the United Nations prior to the genocide resolution of 1946 and the convention of 1948, the term genocide was not widely used

chapter 1

in the first decades after its creation. It probably did not enter more common vocabularies before the 1970s. Studies of the history and public commemoration of the Second World War and the Holocaust, seen by many as the archetype of genocide, have shown that during the first decades after the war neither historians nor the general public showed any great interest in massacres, victims and genocide.21 In general the technical and political aspects of the war, and the ‘national suffering’ of states under Nazi-occupation were much more in focus. With the aim of reconstructing depraved and fractured national communities after a devastating war, most European nation-states created positive narratives of united and heroic national resistance against external axis enemies.22 In Israel, where memory of the war and its victims would indeed be pressing, the Holocaust was largely absent from history and other scholarly fields until the early 1960s, when the Eichman trial brought this history into focus.23 In Western Europe and North America, the Holocaust stayed out of focus for even longer. In the United States the Holocaust was hardly identi‑ fied as a particular tragedy until the end of the 1960s, and public interest rose markedly from the late 1970s.24 The historiographies of the countries of the East European socialist bloc followed a line of communist ‘anti-fascism’, hav‑ ing as its important themes the heroic struggles of the Partisans, the people’s armies and the Red Army.25 The Nazi politics of genocide and its victims were almost entirely absent from these histories: in 1981, the historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz, while researching a book on the Holocaust, found reason to fear that “the history of the 6 million murdered Jews would vanish from the earth as they themselves and their civilization had vanished”.26 This has certainly not been the case. Concerning Holocaust research, it has been pointed out that as much material was published between 1985 and 1995 as had been published in the entire period from 1945 to 1985.27 As scholarly fields, Holocaust studies and Genocide studies have gained in strength since the 1970s and flourished since the early 1980s.28 In the last decades, research and memorial centres dedicated to the Holocaust and more generally to genocide have been established throughout the world. It seems plausible to conclude that since the end of the 1970s there has been an unseen historical – as well as a public and general academic – interest in atrocities, genocide, and victims across the world as well as in Yugoslavia. There may be several reasons for this increased interest in genocide and victims. Perhaps there was a need for distance in time before these issues could be addressed.29 Other causes may lie in a widespread change in world view and perspectives on individuals in relation to institutional and stately structures.

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The anti-war movements of the 1970s, the rise of individual human rights and the end of the Cold War have shifted the points of identification within historical culture, at least partly, from states and military power to civil and individual human beings.

The term and theme of genocide in Yugoslavia The Serbo-Croatian equivalent of the word genocide, genocid, was not widely used in the first decades after the war. The word is not discussed in the com‑ mon encyclopaedia of Yugoslavia, Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, published in the 1960s.30 Nevertheless, the Genocide Convention of the UN was included in the Yugoslav criminal code of 1951.31 In the Military Encyclopaedia, Vojna Enciklopedija of 1960, genocide is described as a crime under international law, of which the Fascist and particularly Nazi-German persecution of Slavic peoples, Jews and Roma during the Second World War is the main example. Yugoslavia and the Ustasha wartime practices are not mentioned.32 That the term was also available for political use is shown in a 1951 speech by Tito, ac‑ cusing Molotov and the Soviet Union of genocide against the Crimean Tartars, Chechens and Volga Germans.33 It seems that for the first decades following the Second World War, the term of genocide was applied only to issues of international and foreign politics. In this period, it was hardly ever used to denote the wartime events in Yugoslavia. One of the first historians to use genocide as a general term to describe nationally motivated persecution within Yugoslavia was the journalist and Partisan historian Vladimir Dedijer, in his chapters in Istorija Jugoslavije from 1972.34 Dedijer participated as a Yugoslav representative at the United Nations negotiations on the question of genocide in the late 1940s, and in the grassroots ‘Russel Tribunal’ of the late 1960s, at which the United States of America was convicted of genocide in Vietnam.35 Dedijer may indeed be one of the sources for the later widespread use of this word. During the 1970s and especially in the 1980s the term was used much more frequently among Yugoslav scholars and journalists, referring to past events as well as current events. In her eminent study of the Serbian intelligentsia in the 1980s, Jasna Dragović-Soso points out the tendency on Serbia’s intellectual scene of rewrit‑ ing Second World War history from the perspective of national victimisation and genocide. This is combined with widespread mention of genocide history within the Serbian press, sometimes suggesting that the Serbian nation in Yu‑

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goslavia continues to be endangered. Dragović-Soso identifies these currents as the ‘theme of genocide’.36 Other researchers have addressed the theme of genocide in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Bette Denitch and Robert Hayden particularly should be credited for showing how ‘genocide history’ influenced public and political discourse in this period.37 Yet none of these studies are concerned with the issue of how the massacres of the Second World War were dealt with in Yu‑ goslav historiography before 1980. Wider studies of Yugoslav Second World War historiography touch the issue superficially, but the development of the theme of genocide over a longer period of time remains to be studied.38 In the present book, the theme of genocide will be understood broadly as referring to the waves of historical works and popular representations of history that point out genocide as an important element. In the second half of the 1980s, groups in Serbian historiography would claim that questions of genocide, particularly in relation to the wartime ‘Independent State of Croatia’ and the concentration camp at Jasenovac, were deliberately silenced, misrepresented or down-scaled, all for political reasons.39 Outside observers have suggested that the issue of the Ustasha’s persecution of Serbs was effectively buried, or that Titoist historiography attempted to exclude all ethnic aspects from official representations of the war.40 Approaches to the history of Yugoslavia’s wartime massacres were certainly constrained in the early post-war period. However, as this book shows, the internal Yugoslav massacres of the Second World War were neither ignored, nor silenced. Though they were not defined as genocide in the decades after the war, the events that were to become the central focus of genocide history in the 1980s were undeniably described in Yugoslav historical writing immediately after the war’s end. Wordings, perspectives and emphasis were different, but the internal Yugoslav massacres of the Second World War were certainly present in Yugoslav historical culture.

Sources As all aspects of the thematization of genocide in Yugoslav historical culture – the subject of this book – are far too wide-ranging to be thoroughly covered in the present publication, I have instead foregrounded the developments and examples that seem to me to be the most crucial. These are cases in which particular political attention is paid to representations of the war and its mas‑ sacres; examples of statements and representations of massacres and war history that have caused heated disputes among historians or in the public sphere;

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and introductions of new perspectives and points of focus in academic or popular representation of wartime massacres. In deciding what seems to have had an impact, I have relied on later reviews as well as the degree to which statements and representations are referred to and quoted in later research and presentations. Since the subject of history was a highly institutionalised and hierarchical field, academic and educational history writing played a central role in Yugoslav historical culture. Therefore, scholarly monographs, periodicals and school‑ books form the backbone of the analyses in this book. But history was also heavily drawn upon in the wider public sphere and therefore other methods of its communication are regularly included in the investigation. As political influence on the communication of 20th century history was critical, speeches, statements and accounts from communist and post-communist leading politi‑ cians are essential. Furthermore, I discuss representations of the war and its massacres in film and fictional literature, as some of the representations that were to challenge officially established versions came from this field. I also refer to war memorials: monuments to the victims of war crimes and the disputes surrounding them. Finally, I explore the publication and popularisation of historical representations in magazines and other printed media. N ote s 1

Remake, directed by Dino Mustafić, Bosnia-Herzegovina/France, 2002.

2

A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and the Terror of History’, Parallax, 17, 2011, 4, 90‑108; Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1988.

3

See Michael A.K. Halliday, System and function in language. Selected papers edited by Gunther Kress, London: Oxford University Press, 1976, 179‑182, and Michael A.K. Hal‑ liday, An introduction to functional grammar, London: Edward Arnold, 1989, 38‑67.

4 Halliday, System and function in language, 181; Halliday, An introduction to functional grammar, 45; Norman Fairclough, Discourse and social change, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003, 184. 5 Fairclough, Discourse and social change, 183 (It should be noted, however, that Halliday distinguishes between ‘theme’ and ‘given’ as two functionally distinct concepts that of‑ ten collide in the same elements). 6

Indeed, Michael Halliday himself points to an example where the theme of a group of sentences is also the theme of the book in which they occur. Halliday, An introduction to functional grammar, 67.

7

On Holocaust, see Klas-Göran Karlsson, ‘The Holocaust as a Problem of Historical Culture. Theoretical and Analytical Challenges,’ in Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zan‑

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der, eds., Echoes of the Holocaust, Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2003, 15. On politics of national security, see Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, Jaap de Wilde, Security: a new framework for analysis, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1998, 23‑26. 8

For a similar understanding of the concept, see also Jan Eivind Myhre, ‘Den Norske Historiske Kultur. Om sammenheng og fragmentering i norsk historieforskning’, Historisk Tidsskrift (Oslo), 1994, 3, and William H. Hubbard et al., eds., Making a Historical Culture. Histioriography in Norway, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1995.

9

Karlsson, ‘The Holocaust as a problem of historical culture’, 32; Claus Bryld, ‘Fra hi‑ storieskrivningens historie til historiekulturens historie? Idéer til en udvidelse af det historiografiske begreb’, in Historien og historikerne i Norden efter 1965, Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 1991; Jörn Rüsen, ‘Was ist Geschichtskultur? Überlegungen zu einer neuen Art über Geschichte nachzudenken’, in Klaus Füßmann et al., eds., Historische Faszination. Geschichtskultur heute, Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1994, 3‑5. The importance of many of these elements has also been emphasised in studies of public or collective memory; see for example: James E. Young, The Texture of Memory. Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993; Claus Bryld and Anette Warring, Besættelsestiden som kollektiv erindring, Copenhagen: Roskilde Universitetsforlag, 1998. In Maurice Hal‑ bwachs’ groundbreaking studies, the role of space is emphasised as well. See e.g. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980.

10 Bryld, ‘Fra historieskrivningens historie til historiekulturens historie’, 87; Karlsson, ‘The Holocaust as a problem of historical culture’, 45; Jörn Rüsen, ‘Was ist Geschichtskul‑ tur?’, in Klaus Füßmann et al., eds., Historische Faszination; and Rüsen, ‘Gescichtskultur als Forschungsproblem’, in Klaus Frölich et al., eds, Geschichtskultur, Jahrbücher für Geschichtsdidaktik, 1991‑1992, Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992, 40. Rüsen’s approach is more oriented towards cognitive aspects of historical culture and historical consciousness. On the relationship between historical culture and historical consciousness, see also: Carsten Tage Nielsen, Historie til aftenkaffen. En historiekulturel analyse af tv-nyhedsformidlingen som historieproducerende diskurs, PhD thesis, Roskilde Universitetscenter, 1996, 37‑58; Carsten Tage Nielsen, ‘Historiekultur og historiebevidst‑ hed – alternative diskurser om historie’, Den Jyske Historiker, December 1995. 11 A.L. Rowse, The use of history, (3. ed.), London: English Universities Press, 1947, 26. 12 For discussions of the concept of ‘collective memory’ see Amos Funkenstein, ‘Collec‑ tive Memory and Historical Consciousness’, History and Memory, 1, 1989, 1, 5‑26; Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, ‘Collective Memory – What Is It?’, History and Memory, 8, 1996, 1, 30‑50; Anette Warring, ‘Kollektiv erindring – et brugbart begreb?’, in Bernard Eric Jensen et al., eds., Eridringens og glemslens politik, Roskilde, Roskilde Universitetsforlag, 1996, 206‑231. The concept ‘collected memories’ was suggested by James E. Young in order to take into consideration the individuality of remembrance, Young, The Texture of Memory, xi.

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13 For a parallel example, see Francesca Cappelletto’s studies of the ways memories of war‑ time massacres in Italian villages have been preserved and sometimes solidified into fixed narratives, thereby forming alternatives to the official and national version of the events: Francesca Cappelletto, ‘Memories of Nazi-Fascist Massacres in Two Central Italian Vil‑ lages’, Sociologia Ruralis, 38, 1998, 1, 69‑85; Francesca Cappelletto, ‘Long-term memory of extreme events: from autobiography to history’, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 9, 2003, 2, 241‑260. 14 For a discussion of the recent changes in the relationship between memory and history, see Pierre Nora, ‘Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory’, Eurozine, 19 April 2002. 15 Karlsson, ‘The Holocaust as a problem of historical culture’, 38. 16 Ibid, 40‑43, Karlsson, Klas-Göran, Historia som Vapen, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1999, 57‑61. 17 Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change, 63ff. 18 Stef Slembrouck, ‘Explanation, Interpretation, and Critique in the Analysis of Dis‑ course’, Critique of Anthropology, 21, 2001, (1), 45. 19 Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change, 81ff. 20 Both quoted in Samuel Totten and William Parsons, ‘Introduction’, in Samuel Totten et al., eds., Century of Genocide. Critical essays and eyewitness accounts, New York: Rout‑ ledge, 2004, p. 3‑4. The U.N. resolution of 1946 included a broader scope of victims, but in a less precise way, and these were later excluded from the convention. See also Anders Bjørn Hansen, ‘Folkemordsforskningen gennem 50 år – en definitorisk tilgang’, Den Jyske Historiker, 90, 2000, 41. 21 David S. Wyman, ‘Introduction’, in David S. Wyman, ed., The World Reacts to the Holocaust, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996, xix-xxiii. 22 See e.g. Tony Judt, ‘The past is another country: myth and memory in postwar Europe’, Daedalus, 121, No. 4, 1992, 83‑118; R.J.B Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz & Hiroshima. History Writing and the Second World War, 1945‑1990, London: Routledge, 1993. 23 Orna Kenan, Between Memory and History. The Evolution of Israeli historiography of the Holocaust 1941‑1961, New York: Peter Lang, 2003; Dalia Ofer, ‘Israel’, in David S. Wyman, ed., The World Reacts to the Holocaust, 873‑880, 885‑889. 24 Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory. The American Experience, London: Bloomsbury, 2000. 25 Klas-Göran Karlsson, ‘The Holocaust and Russian Historical Culture’, in Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander, Echoes of the Holocaust, 201‑222; Pär Frohnert, ‘The Presence of the Holocaust. Vergangenheitsbewältigung in West Germany, East Germany and Au‑ stria’, in Ibid, 81‑114; Livia Rothkirchen, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in David S. Wyman, ed., The World Reacts to the Holocaust. 26 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni‑ versity Press, 1981, 1.

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27 Torben Jørgensen, ‘Udforskningen af folkemordet på de europæiske jøder’, Den Jyske Historiker, 90, 2000, 60. 28 Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, London: Sage Publications, 1993, 5; Hansen: ‘Folkemord gennem 50 år’, 39‑59. This tendency can also be detected from the amount of works cited and the years of publication in Israel W. Charny, ed., Genocide. A Critical Bibliographic Review, London: Mansell Publishers, 1988. 29 Charles S. Maier, ‘A Surfeit of Memory’, History and Memory, 5, 1993, 140. 30 A new Yugoslav Encyclopaedia was under publication in the 1980s, but the project was abandoned around the letter K. The volume containing G does not mention Genocide. Genocide is, however, included in the new Croatian Encyclopaedia, but without refe‑ rence to Ustasha or Yugoslav Second World War history. See Hrvatska Enciklopedija, vol. 4, Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod ‘Miroslav Krleža’, 2002, 150. 31 Vojna Enciklopaedija, vol. 3, Belgrade: 1960, 340. 32 Ibid, 339. 33 Josip Broz Tito, ‘Govor na proslavi dana ustanka na Kozari’ (27th July 1951), in Josip Broz Tito, Govori i Članci, IV, Zagreb: Naprijed, 1959, 74. 34 Ivan Božić, Sima Ćirković, Milorad Ekmečić and Vladimir Dedijer, Istorija Jugoslavije (second edition), Beograd: Prosveta, 1973, 476‑543. 35 Vladimir Dedijer, Vatikan i Jasenovac: dokumenti, Belgrade: ‘Rad’, 1987, 10‑11. See also Det internationale Krigsforbrydelsestribunal, 2. session, Danmark 1967, Copenhagen, 1967; Vladimir Dedijer and Arlette Elhaim, eds., Tribunal Russel: Le jugement de Stockholm, Paris: Gallimard, 1967. 36 Jasna Dragović-Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation’. Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism, London: Hurst, 2002, 100‑114. 37 Bette Denich, ‘Dismembering Yugoslavia: nationalist ideologies and the symbolic revival of genocide’, American Ethnologist, 21, 1994, 2, 367‑390; Robert M. Hayden, ‘Recounting the Dead. The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia’, in Rubie S. Watson, ed., Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994, 167‑184. See also David Bruce MacDonald, Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian victim-centred propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002, in which elements of this tendency are investigated from a perspective of national myths and propaganda. 38 For overviews of Yugoslav Second World War historiography, see e.g. Wolfgang Hoepken, ‘War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society: The Case of Yugoslavia’, East European Politics and Socities, 13, 1999, 1, 190‑227; Wolfgang Höpken, ‘Von der Mytholo‑ gisierung zur Stigmatisierung: “Krieg und Revolution” in Jugoslawien 1941‑1948 im Spie‑ gel von Geschichtswissenschaft und historischer Publizistik’, in E. Schmidt-Hartmann,

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ed., Kommunismus und Osteuropa. Konzepte, Perspektiven und Interpretationen im Wandel, München: R. Oldenburg Verlag, 1994, 165‑201. 39 See for example Dedijer’s introductions to Milan Bulajić, Ustaški zločini genocida i suđenje Andrije Artukovića 1986. godine, vol. I, Beograd: Rad, 1988, 9‑10, and to Vladimir Dedijer and Antun Miletić, Proterivanje Srba sa ognjišta: 1941‑1944: Svedočanstva. Beo‑ grad: Prosveta, 1990, 8. 40 Denich, Bette, ‘Dismembering Yugoslavia’, 367, 370; Jasna Dragović-Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation’, 104; Wolfgang, Hoepken, ‘War, Memory, and Education in a fragmented Society’, 200; See also Wendy Bracewell, ‘National histories and national identities among the Serbs and Croats’, in M. Fulbrook, ed., National histories and European history, Boulder 1993, 157; Robert M. Hayden, ‘Recounting the dead’, 173.

The Second World War in Yugoslavia The events of the Second World War in the Yugoslav areas are considerably more complex than many of the histories constructed to recount them. The interwar kingdom of Yugoslavia was dismembered by the occupying Axis powers. Yugoslav forces, divided along political, ethnic, religious and regional lines, fought with or against the occupiers, and they fought internally. Large scale massacres and war crimes were committed by the occupiers as well as by domestic groups against each other.1 These events left sore memories and a complicated history to the post-war Yugoslav state. This chapter aims to give a brief survey of the events of the Second World War in the Yugoslav areas, as they have since been illuminated by research, and to point out the elements of war crimes and massacres that were to cause particular dispute and sensation in Yugoslav historical culture.

Disintegration and war regimes The Second World War entered Yugoslavia on the 6th April 1941, when NaziGermany bombed Belgrade and several Yugoslav airports. Germany was joined by its Axis allies, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria, and a poorly prepared Yugoslav army was unable to resist the forceful attack. The king and the government went into exile on the 14th and the 15th April, and on the 17th an armistice, in fact an unconditional Yugoslav surrender, was signed in Belgrade.2 Yugoslavia was disintegrated, and parts of it were given to the pro-axis states surrounding Yugoslavia. Bulgaria annexed most of Macedonia, and bits of southern Serbia and Kosovo, while Hungary obtained Bačka north of the Danube and the northern regions of Prekomurje and Međumurje. Germany and Italy each seized a part of Slovenia, and the Italian controlled Albania seized north-western parts of Macedonia, most of Kosovo and some neighbouring districts in Serbia. Italy also annexed most of Dalmatia and occupied Monte‑ negro. The rest of Croatia was united with Bosnia and Srem in the so-called ‘Independent State of Croatia’, (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, known by the acronym ndh). The ndh was divided along the so-called demarcation line,

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which ran from the North-West, south of Zagreb, Banja Luka and Sarajevo, and ended north of Foča in the South East, leaving the Northern zone with the largest natural resources under German control, and the Southern zone connected with Dalmatia and Montenegro under Italy. Serbia was occupied by Germany and a quisling government was set up, which was headed by the pro-German general Milan Nedić from late August 1941. Nedić, however possessed very little real power. In all important matters Serbia was ruled by the German administration, which murdered most of the country’s Jewish population and exploited resources of food, labour and raw material. Acts of resistance were harshly punished. As widespread insurrection broke out in Serbia in the summer of 1941, the German High Command reacted in September by issuing a directive according to which 100 hostages were to be shot in retribution for every German soldier killed. In 1943, the number of hostages to be shot was reduced to 50, and later the procedure was gradually abolished.

Ustasha The ndh was ruled by Croatian fascists, the Ustasha movement, which was in fact a marginal group that was dependent on German and Italian sup‑ port to stay in power. The Ustasha government proved to be the most brutal of several excessively violent occupation and quisling regimes in Yugoslavia during the war. The Ustasha were characterised mainly by their fanatic antiSerbianism, their cult of the Croatian state, and unconditional obedience to their leader, or ‘poglavnik’, Ante Pavelić. The Ustasha were conservative and patriarchal, and idealized an imagined traditional Croatian lifestyle. Though their ideology was not predominantly founded on religion, they developed and profited politically from ties to the Catholic Church. While the church’s main representatives cooperated with the Ustasha administration and never openly condemned the regime, other parts of the Catholic clergy actively supported and even joined the Ustasha. In the ndh, Serbs, Jews, Roma and all opponents of the regime were subject to brutal persecution. Shortly after the proclamation of the new state on the 10th April 1941, the Ustasha instigated an exceedingly violent campaign against the Serbian population, constituting about 1.9 million, or approximately one-third of the population of the ndh.3 In Bosnia the Ustasha courted the Muslims, claiming they belonged to the best of Croats. Some Muslims joined the Ustasha militias and participated in massacres against Serbs, particularly in the Bosnian Krajina, Eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina.4

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The Ustasha’s massive persecution of the Serbian population severely desta‑ bilised the ndh. The mass violence forced the Serbian population to flee into forests and mountains, where they were to form the initial cores of the Partisan and Chetnik resistance movements within the ndh. This meant that large areas of the state came under Partisan or Chetnik control during the war, and the Ustasha proved unable to crush the riots and control the state’s territory. On its establishment, the Ustasha regime was supported by parts of the Croatian public, who had felt oppressed in the Serbian dominated interwar Yugoslavia. However, its brutal politics cost the Ustasha government most of the popularity it had initially gained from providing a Croat national state. During the summer of 1941 spontaneous revolts broke out in many Yugoslav areas. From July and August some of these became part of centrally organised uprisings, led by either Chetniks or Partisans.

Chetniks The Chetnik movement was headed by a group of officers from the Royal Yugoslav Army. These officers refused to surrender with the rest of the army, and led by Colonel Draža Mihailović they established a guerrilla resistance movement with headquarters at Ravna Gora in western Serbia.5 The Chetniks were conservative and patriarchal with veneration for the Serbian kingdom and the Serbian Orthodox Church. The aims of the Chetnik movement were to prepare a strong guerrilla army for an allied landing in the Balkans, and then to assist the liberation of Yugoslavia and the re-establishment of a Yugoslav state under Serbian domination and ruled by the Serbian royal house. It was also proposed, partly in reaction to the anti-Serbian politics of the ndh, to establish a Greater Serbia and ‘ethnically clean’ Serbian areas.6 The political programme of the Chetniks could only appeal to the Serbian parts of the Yugoslav population. Yet, they were supported by the king, himself a Serb, and the Serbian dominated government in exile. Mihailović was pro‑ moted to general and appointed minister of Army, Navy and Air Force. Thus recognized by Yugoslavia’s official international representations, Mihailović’s Chetniks also received assistance and military aid from the allies. Nevertheless, Mihailović’s hold of the movement was never firm, and Chet‑ nik units often acted independently – such as the so-called ‘legalized’ Chetniks, who assisted the Germans and the Nedić administration in fighting the upris‑ ings. In the ndh, Chetnik bands collaborated with the Italian occupiers, some‑ times to protect Serbs against Ustasha raids, sometimes to fight the Partisans. Occasionally they even sided with the Ustasha against the Partisans.

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Partisans The Partisans were headed by the Yugoslav Communist Party, under command of its secretary general, Josip Broz Tito. Outlawed since the early 1920s, the Communist Party was a small but disciplined and devoted organisation, trained in underground work, and most probably consisted of approximately 12,000 members when the war started in 1941. The communists engaged actively in resistance fighting after the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22nd June 1941 and Party cells in many parts of the country organised Partisan detach‑ ments. During the autumn of 1941, the main effort was in Serbia, where the Partisans, often in cooperation with Chetniks, took control of areas in western Serbia. It soon became clear that Chetnik and Partisan aims were incompatible. The programme of socialist revolution was scarcely hidden from the Partisans’ agenda. Though the great majority of their forces in the first years of the upris‑ ing were Serbs, the Partisans advocated inter-ethnic cooperation and aimed at including all nationalities, as opposed to the Chetniks’ exclusively Serbian appeal.7 Furthermore, the two parties disagreed on strategy: While the Chetniks preferred to postpone large scale fighting until an expected allied landing, the Partisans insisted on fighting the occupiers regardless of what the cost might be for themselves or for the Yugoslav population. This disagreement was sharpened as the cruel reprisal politics of the German administration made the Chetniks desperate to avoid wasting Serbian lives. In November 1941 German and Yugoslav collaborationist forces, assisted by some Chetnik groups, drove the main Partisan force out of Serbia. From then on, Chetniks and Partisans fought each other ruthlessly, both with the aim of deciding Yugoslavia’s post-war political system. The resistance fighting was thus increasingly combined with a Yugoslav civil war.8 At the local level the picture was often immensely complex. In Eastern Bosnia, Partisans and Chetniks cooperated until early 1942. Throughout the war, groups of resistance fighters switched from Chetnik to Partisan lines or the other way around, and sometimes whole regiments shifted from the Axis side to that of the resistance.9 Upon their defeat in Serbia, the Partisan main force and headquarters moved via Sandžak to Bosnia. Large offensives by combined occupation and Ustasha forces, the Italians often cooperating closely with Chetnik units, only succeeded in ousting the Partisans from their positions, from which they moved on to different mountain areas. In 1941‑1942, the Partisans fought with obvious revolutionary zeal, and did not hesitate to use terror against real or imagined opponents, supposed class enemies and Chetnik sympathisers. This politics was imposed most thoroughly in Montenegro, Herzegovina and Eastern Bosnia.

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In Eastern Bosnia in the spring of 1942, Partisan warfare aimed mainly at de‑ stroying the Chetniks.10 But as these strategies proved counterproductive, the Partisans changed their line. By autumn 1942, the socialist goals were down‑ played, and the Partisans began to present their aim as being an all-Yugoslav, anti-fascist, national liberation.

Partisan victory In September 1943 the allies began to support the Partisans as well as the Chet‑ niks. In the same month the Partisan position was significantly improved by the Italian surrender, which left large areas under Partisan control and brought much needed supplies of weapons and ammunition. By late 1943 Partisan popularity had grown enormously. Probably their ranks now consisted of more than 100,000 fighters. On 29th November 1943, in the Bosnian town of Jajce, a second meeting was held of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (Antifašističko Vijeće Narodnog Oslobodjenja Jugo‑ slavije, known as avnoj), which was the wider political wing of the Partisan movement. The 143 delegates from all parts of Yugoslavia formed a provisory government, as opposed to the royal administration in London, and declared that post-war Yugoslavia was to be a federation of six units: Bosnia and Her‑ zegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia and Serbia. The king was not to return to Yugoslavia until the country was completely liberated and the people had decided whether to re-establish the monarchy. From then on the Partisans had the upper hand. In the autumn of 1944 they attacked Serbia from the West and South West, and drove out Mihailović and his forces. At the same time the Soviet Red Army attacked Serbia from North-East, and on 20th October the Partisans, in cooperation with the Red Army, took over Belgrade. The Red Army moved on to Hungary, leaving the Yugoslav Partisans to fight the remaining occupiers and finish their civil war. In the spring of 1945, the Partisans, now called the Yugoslav Army, pursued the former occupying armies and Yugoslav anti-communist forces towards Germany. On the 15th May 1945, the last of these forces were turned back by the allied armies at the Yugoslav-Austrian border and were afterwards either killed by or had to surrender to the Partisans.11 In the following months, the Partisans’ Yugoslav Army eliminated the remaining Chetnik detachments in Bosnia and Serbia. Albanian nationalists and anti-Partisan forces remained powerful in Kosovo, until they were finally crushed in July 1945. The Communist Party moved swiftly to secure its own hegemonic power in post-war Yugoslavia. A provisional government, controlled by an over‑

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whelming communist majority, was set up, and elections for a constitutional assembly were held in November 1945. The election campaign left hardly any chances to non-communist parties, and the communist controlled Popular Front achieved a comfortable majority. The Communist Party then set out to reconstruct Yugoslavia as a centralised, socialist, federal state.

Massacres and war crimes All fighting parties of the Second World War in Yugoslavia committed atroci‑ ties and war crimes. Yet, as already mentioned, the crimes of the Nazi-German occupation administration and of the Ustasha regime stand out as particularly excessive. Nazi-German war crimes in Yugoslavia included the murder of most of the Jewish population of Serbia, and, assisted by Bulgaria, most of the Jews of Macedonia. The German administration also killed thousands of civilians as part of the politics of shooting civilian hostages in retaliation for insurrec‑ tions and acts of resistance. Among the worst examples are the shooting in October 1941 of about 2000 people in the town of Kraljevo, and about 3000 in Kragujevac.12 The Germans also organised mass deportations of Serbian officers and workers to Germany. In the ndh, German military fought together with Ustasha forces, often commanding the latter. Furthermore, special German militias manned by Yugoslav soldiers were established and used in campaigns in Yugoslavia. The Handžar SS division, mainly Bosnian Muslim soldiers, was deployed in Bosnia in 1944 and became notorious for its atrocities. Thus the Germans were indeed co-responsible if not direct participants in the excessive massacres committed as parts of the military campaigns. Also the Italian occupation administration, as well as those of Bulgaria and Hungary, committed their shares of war crimes, included herein the running of concentration camps. Yet, in Yugoslav historical culture, crimes committed by groups of Yugoslavs towards other Yugoslavs were to cause far more dispute than those committed by the occupying powers. The politics of terror and mass murder directed against Serbs, Jews and Roma in the Ustasha state has been the most problematic issue.

Ustasha crimes The radical and violent anti-Serbian ideology of the Ustasha rule was expressed by several ministers, but perhaps most clearly on the 2nd May 1941 by the

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Ustasha minister of legislation, Milovan Žanić: “there is no method that we as Ustasha will not use to make this country truly Croatian and clean it of Serbs …”13 During the spring and summer of 1941 groups of Ustasha soldiers raided Serbian villages and committed excessive massacres. Serbs were killed on the spot, or they were tied and locked inside churches or other buildings, which were then burned. Sometimes they were driven away, slaughtered and thrown into ravines. In some cases only men were killed, while at other times women and children were also slaughtered. The first round of mass slaughtering took place in late April and early May 1941, in villages near Bjelovar east of Zagreb, around Glina north of the Bosnian border and in the Krajina region of Kordun, where probably 200‑300 were killed at each place. During June 1941, the Ustasha instigated new waves of massacres in Herzegovina and in Dalmatia. After most of the German soldiers had departed for the Eastern Front, the Ustasha accelerated their murderous campaign. In July more massacres took place in Dalmatia and Krajina, of which the burning of several hundred Serbs in the church in Glina is particularly notorious. The Ustasha also spread their terror to Western and Eastern Bosnia, where probably tens of thousands of Serbs were killed in murderous raids.14 In April 1942, the Serbs of Eastern Bosnia fell victim to a massive wave of Ustasha terror as part of a combined Ustasha-German of‑ fensive against the insurrection. Special Ustasha units raided Serbian villages, slaughtered the inhabitants, and forced many Serbs to flee towards the brink of Drina, where mass slaughtering took place.15 The rate of these massacres was later slowed down in some areas, partly because of the outbreak of the various insurrections, which controlled large parts of the ndh, and partly by Italian occupation of ndh territory all up to the German-Italian demarcation line.16 But Ustasha raids and massacres con‑ tinued throughout the war. The village massacres left numerous mass graves and pits full of skeletons. These graves and pits posed problematic questions to Yugoslav historiography decades later. As another means to rid their territory of Serbs, the Ustasha expelled thou‑ sands to Serbia, while many others fled to escape the terror. It is estimated that in the summer of 1942, about 200,000 transferees and refugees from the ndh were in Serbia.17 In the autumn of 1941, the German administration in Serbia closed the border for official deportations from the ndh. This in combination with the growing armed insurrection forced the Ustasha to change strategy. Especially from September 1941 to early 1942 a policy of forced conversions of Serbian peasants was widely implemented, only to be gradually abandoned when the Ustasha leadership changed strategies again and opted for the estab‑

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lishment of a Croatian Orthodox Church. It is estimated that about 100,000 Serbs in the ndh were forcibly – or under threat – converted from Orthodoxy into Catholicism, in order to turn them into Croats.18 The Ustasha regime also ran concentration camps and death camps where prisoners were worked and starved to death. Others were brought there just to be executed. The camp guards were notorious for their brutality, using rela‑ tively primitive killing methods; many victims were slaughtered by knife, slain with heavy mallets, or simply shot and buried in mass graves. But numerous types of torture and mutilations happened as well. Most of the victims were Serbs, Jews and Roma, but also communists and all sorts of regime opponents, Croats as well, were sent to the camps. In the most notorious of these, the camp complex at Jasenovac, it is now estimated that more than 80,000 per‑ sons were killed, of which at least 50,000 were Serbs. Thousands perished in other camps, such as Jadovno and Jastrebarsko.19 The numbers of victims of the camps, particularly of Jasenovac, have been intensely discussed in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav historiography and popular history.

Chetnik crimes Chetnik bands also engaged in mass terror, particularly within the ndh, some‑ times in order to avenge Ustasha atrocities. Some attacks were directed against Croat villages, but most victims of Chetnik terror were Muslims in Eastern Bosnia, Sandžak and Herzegovina. The worst massacres were conducted in three waves; the first between the Autumn of 1941 and February 1942, in which many villages in Eastern Bosnia and the Foča area in particular were burnt down and civilians killed; the second in August 1942, mainly around Foča, from where many fled to Sarajevo; and the third – and worst of them – was conducted in January and February 1943, in Sandžak and Eastern Bosnia, where villages were attacked and burnt down, and unarmed men, women and children slaughtered. Thousands of Muslims were killed in these campaigns.20 In Serbia, where the Chetniks dominated the resistance from late 1941, they persecuted and executed Partisans and their families as well as supposed Par‑ tisan sympathisers.

Partisan crimes In Montenegro, Herzegovina and eastern Bosnia, particularly during the first years of the war, Partisans engaged in organised terror against civilians, which was mainly directed against what they saw as pro-Chetnik villages or potential

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class enemies. Sometimes Partisans were also involved in unruly violence and looting.21 Later, when the Partisan detachments were under stronger central control, and because the terror proved counter-productive, this policy was abolished. These ‘Left deviations’, as the revolutionary terror and early attempts at establishing a new revolutionary order were euphemistically called, remained one of the sensitive issues of communist historiography. In the Spring of 1945, the victorious Partisan Army mercilessly eliminated their enemies. Large groups of anti-communist soldiers – Croatian and Muslim Ustasha and home guards, Slovenian collaborationist forces and Chetniks, probably also accompanied by some civilians, attempted to surrender to the Allies in Austria. They were rejected, as the Yugoslav army was by then con‑ sidered an allied force and, according to agreements, war prisoners were to surrender to the local allied authorities. Many were killed, either in vicious fighting against the Partisans; at the hands of the Partisans after having sur‑ rendered; or in forced marches and prison camps in Yugoslavia. This settling of accounts with the Partisans’ political and military opponents cost tens of thousands of lives.22 These atrocities and massacres from the side of the communist forces were to become central issues decades later in re-evaluations of communist history. The killings at the border were later referred to as the Bleiburg massacre or the Bleiburg tragedy after the Austrian border town Bleiburg.

Numbers of victims The zealousness and brutality with which the Second World War was fought in the Yugoslav areas, as well as the murderous politics led particularly by the Ustasha and the Germans caused a very high number of casualties. While the exact number of victims cannot be established, research of the late 1980s has proposed much more valid estimates than what was initially suggested. Imme‑ diately after the war, the new Yugoslav administration stated an official number of 1,706,000 actual Yugoslav victims; that is persons who had been killed or had perished as a direct result of the war, and not including demographic losses such as fallen birth rates. Though the matter was politically sensitive, it was later attempted to confirm or correct this number, but these attempts remained abortive during the communist period. Finally, in the second half of the 1980s, it was convincingly demonstrated by two independent demographic calculations that slightly more than one million people out of a population of a little more than 17 million lost their lives because of the Second World War in Yugoslavia.23 The total number of victims is the most reliable, whereas

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calculations according to ethnicity and region are less precise.24 Most of the victims, about 500,000‑600,000, fell within the borders of the ndh. Of the Yugoslav peoples, Serbs and Muslims suffered the heaviest losses, around 7‑8 % of the populations, while around 5‑5.5 % of Croats perished. Montenegrin losses were slightly smaller, maybe around 5 %, Slovene losses around 3 % and Macedonian losses approximately 1 % of the populations. Serbs within the ndh were particularly hard hit: around 300,000, or 15 %, were killed. The Jewish and Roma minorities suffered even heavier losses: Due mainly to Nazi German extermination policies, between 75 % and 80 % of Yugoslavia’s Jews were murdered, and possibly a third of the Roma population. The ethnic German population of Yugoslavia was also strongly reduced, partly because of post-war deportations and communist retribution, and partly because of their active participation in German warfare. N ote s 1

I leave out the word ‘genocide’ from this account, not with the intention of denying that the massacres committed may have constituted acts of genocide. But since the main topic of this book is to analyse the discursive creation of a theme around the concept of genocide, I believe the use of the term here will confuse the matter.

2

For an overview of the events of the Second World War in Yugoslavia, see for example Jozo Tomasevich, ‘Yugoslavia During the Second World War’, in Wayne S. Vucinich, ed., Contemporary Yugoslavia. Twenty Years of Socialist Experiment, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969, 59‑118; Stevan K. Pavlowitch’s chapter ‘The Chaotic Gap: 1941‑1945’, in his Yugoslavia, London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1971, 107‑172; John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History. Twice there was a country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 201‑232. For more detailed accounts, see Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder. The Second World War in Yugoslavia, New York: Columbia Uni‑ versity Press, 2008; Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941‑1945. The Chetniks, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975, and Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941‑1945. Occupation and Collaboration, Stanford: Stanford Univer‑ sity Press, 2001. Tomasevich’s planned third volume on the Partisans was unfortunately never finished.

3

On the Ustasha and their anti-Serbian politics, see: Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941‑1945. Occupation and collaboration, 335‑415; Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, 1941‑1945, Zagreb: Školska Knjiga, 1978, particularly 158‑187; Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country. Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919‑1953, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, 103‑127; Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat, Der Kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 1941‑1945, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1964, particularly 93‑103, 126.

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4

On the events in Bosnia, see also: Enver Redžić, Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Second World War, New York: Frank Cass, 2005.

5

By adopting the name of ‘Chetniks’, they drew on South Slav traditions of outlaw and guerrilla bands. Chetnik units were used by the Serbian and other Balkan armies before and during the Balkan wars, 1912‑1913. In the interwar period, a Chetnik Association with many local brands was established in Serbia, from 1932 led by Kosta Pećanac. See Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941‑1945. The Chetniks, 115‑126.

6

These plans for a large and ethnically clean Serbian entity were proposed initially by Ste‑ van Moljević in the summer of 1941, before he became a central figure in the Chetnik movement. Similar suggestions were made by others, but not officially from the side of the Chetnik top military leadership. For a discussion of this, see Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941‑1945. The Chetniks, 166‑178 and John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as history, 206.

7

Attila Hoare, ‘The People’s Liberation Movement in Bosnia and Hercegovina, 1941‑1945: What Did It Mean to Fight for a Multi-National State?’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 2, 1996, 3, 415‑445.

8

See also Stevan K. Pavlowitch, ‘Neither heroes nor traitors: Suggestions for a reappraisal of the Yugoslav resistance’, in B. Bond and I. Roy eds., War and Society. A Yearbook of Military History, vol. 1, 1975, 227‑242.

9

On cooperation and civil war between Partisans and Chetniks, see Marko Attila Hoare, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia. The Partisans and the Chetniks 1941‑1943, Ox‑ ford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

10 Lucian Karchmar, Draža Mihailović and the Rise of the Četnik Movement, 1941‑1942, New York: Garland Publishing, 1987, 498‑450. 11 Thus, the last Yugoslav anti-Partisan forces surrendered a week after the war had offici‑ ally ended. For a description of the last fighting and the final surrender from a Partisan perspective, see Milan Basta, Rat je završen sedam dana kasnije, Ljubljana: Globus, 1976. 12 Venceslav Glišić, Teror i zločini nacističke Nemačke u Srbiji 1941‑1945, Beograd: Rad, 1970, 60‑69. The number of victims in Kragujevac remains uncertain; according to some estimates as many as 7000 were killed there. Ibid, 66. See also Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941‑1945. Occupation and collaboration, 69. For an ac‑ count of the crimes based on German sources, see Walter Manoschek and Hans Safrian, ‘717./117. ID: Eine Infanterie-Division auf dem Balkan’, in Hannes Heer und Klaus Naumann, eds., Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941‑1944, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995, 360‑365. 13 Quoted from the Ustasha paper Novi List, 3rd June, 1941, in Viktor Novak, Magnum Crimen. Pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj, Beograd: Nova Knjiga 1986 (first published in Zagreb 1948), 606.

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14 See Tomislav Dulić, ‘Mass Killing in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941‑1945: a case for comparative research’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8, 2006, 3, 255‑281; Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, 166‑167; Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941‑1945. Occupation and collaboration, 397‑409, Hory and Broszat, Der Kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 100‑103. For a detailed description of the massacres in Herzegovina, see Tomislav Dulić, Utopias of Nation. Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941‑1942, Uppsala: Studia Historica Uppsaliensia, 2005, 123‑165. 15 Ger Duijzings, ‘World War Two’, Chapter 3 in his History and Reminders in East Bosnia, appendix 4 from the report Srebrenica. A ‘safe’ area. Reconstruction, background, consequences and analysis of the fall of a safe area, Netherlands Institute of War Documenta‑ tion (NIOD), at http://www.srebrenica.nl/en/a_index.htm. See also Dulić, Utopias of Nation, 216‑226; Hory and Broszat, Der Kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 126. 16 Srdja Trifkovic, Ustaša. Croatian Separatism and European Politics, 1929‑1945, London: The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, 1998, 150‑156. 17 Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941‑1945. Occupation and collaboration, 397. 18 Mark Biondich, ‘Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the Ustaša Policy of Forced Religious Conversion, 1941‑1942’, Slavonic and East European Review, 83, 2005, 1, 71‑116. 19 On the Ustaša camps, see Mirko Peršen, Ustaški Logori (2nd revised and expanded edi‑ tion), Zagreb: Globus, 1990; Ivo Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, Zagreb: Novi Liber 2001, 247‑362. On Jasenovac, also Nataša Mataušić, Jasenovac 1941‑1945. Logor smrti i radni logor, Zagreb: Biblioteka Kameni cvijet, 2003. On the number of Jasenovac vic‑ tims, see See e.g. Vladimir Žerjavić, Opsesije i megalomanije oko Jasenovca i Bleiburga. Gubici stanovništva Jugoslavije u drugom svetskom ratu, (2nd edition), Zagreb: Globus, 1992, 69‑74; Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 338‑343; Mataušić, Jasenovac, 116‑122, and, for a recent overview of various estimates, see also Dragan Cvetković, ‘Stradanje civila Nezavisne Države Hrvatske u Logoru Jasenovac’, Tokovi Istorije, 2007, 4, 153‑168. 20 Vladimir Dedijer and Antun Miletić, Genocid nad muslimanima 1941‑1945. Zbornik dokumenata i svjedočenja, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 1990; Dulić, Utopias of Nation, 194‑215; Redžić, Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Second World War, 124‑151; Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941‑1945. The Chetniks. 256‑261. On the first wave of massa‑ cres, see also Karchmar, Draža Mihailović, 462, 473, 481. 21 Rasim Hurem, Kriza narodno-oslobodilačkog pokreta u Bosni i Hercegovini, 1941‑1942, Sa‑ rajevo: Svjetlost, 1972, particularly 142‑162; Redžić, Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Second World War, 210‑216. For an inside account, see Milovan Djilas, Wartime, London: Mar‑ tin Secker and Warburg, 1977, 147‑156. 22 According to Vladimir Žerjavić, the number of Croatian and Muslim victims may have been at most about 50,000, possibly less. To this should be added about 10,000 Slovenes

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and 2,000 Chetniks. The majority were not killed at Bleiburg, but during the following forced marches and imprisonment. See Žerjavić, Opsesije i megalomanije oko Jasenovca i Bleiburga, 77‑79. For a critical discussion of the numbers of victims according to studies based on Croatian émigré sources see also Tomislav Dulić, ‘Tito’s Slaughterhouse: A Critical analysis of Rummel’s Work on Democide’, Journal of Peace Research, 41, 2004, 1, 85‑102. 23 Vladimir Žerjavić, Gubici stanovništva Jugoslavije u drugom svjetskom ratu, Zagreb: Jugo‑ slovensko viktimološko društvo, 1989, 70‑75; Bogoljub Kočović, Žrtve Drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji, London: Naše Delo, 1985, 130. The figures given by these two calcu‑ lations are now widely accepted. For an overview of various calculations of Yugoslav Second World War victims, see also Srđan Bogosavljević, ‘The Unresolved Genocide’, in Nebojša Popov, ed., The Road to War in Serbia. Trauma and Catharsis, Budapest: ceu Press, 2000, 146‑159. 24 Žerjavić, Gubici stanovništva Jugoslavije, 4.

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Establishing an official narrative, 1945‑1948 The ‘National Liberation Fight’ of the communist led Partisans during the Second World War was the core of the founding and state-bearing myths of socialist Yugoslavia, providing political legitimacy to the communist hold on power. The successful fight against the Axis occupiers, their Yugoslav collabora‑ tors and the Partisans’ political opponents paved the way for the establishment of communist rule in the re-constructed Yugoslavia. The war had, however, also been the scene of large scale massacres and atrocities among different groups of the Yugoslav population, which would obviously challenge the rebuilding of Yugoslavia as a multiethnic common state. Thus the communists, while developing and exploiting the myths of the war, had to manage a recent history of internal political and ethnic violence and large scale massacres. At the establishment of communist rule, the complex and many-sided conflict that had been the Second World War in Yugoslavia was reduced to a simplistic Manichaean account, glorifying those now holding power. The history of war crimes and massacres, many of which had been part of funda‑ mentalist ethno-nationalist policies involving Yugoslavia’s peasant masses, was reduced to fit that uncomplicated narrative. This chapter investigates how the internal Yugoslav massacres of the Sec‑ ond World War were presented in official accounts immediately at the end of the war. It shows that the history of massacres and war crimes was embed‑ ded in a simplistic overall interpretative framework according to which the good Partisans were on the one side and all their opponents on the other. In comparison to the Partisans’ strategic exploits and the military development of the war, massacres and war crimes received relatively little attention and were mainly referred to in order to emphasise the cruelness and bestiality of the anti-Partisan forces.

3

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The communist reconstruction of Yugoslavia The Communist Party of Yugoslavia seized power swiftly as the Second World War was ending. Already in 1943, Tito had adopted the title ‘Marshal of Yugoslavia’. In the provisional government established in March 1945 he was both Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. Pretending to cooperate, the communists united with non-communist and pre-war parties within the ‘Popu‑ lar Front’ (Narodni front), which served as a bogus coalition under strict communist control. In the campaign leading up to the elections of the new constitutional assembly in the Autumn of 1945, hardly any space was left to parties outside the front, and most competitors withdrew. At the elections on the 11th November 1945, the only alternative to supporting the front was to cast a protest vote for an empty list. The Popular Front received an overwhelming majority of votes, approximately 90%, and the Communist Party set out to install itself with hegemonic power. As highly devoted Stalinists, the Yugoslav communists intended the new Yugoslavia to model that of the Soviet Union. The first post-war constitution, ratified in January 1946, was largely a copy of the Soviet one from 1936. In accordance with the program adopted at the Second avnoj meeting in No‑ vember 1943, and in order to secure the individual nations against internal oppression, Yugoslavia was rebuilt as a federation of six republics, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia, and within Serbia, which was the largest of the republics, the two autonomous regions Vojvodina and Kosovo. Nevertheless, national relations remained sensitive. To avoid clashes, a law against the incitement of national, racial or religious hatred was passed, and the granting of privileges based on nation, race or religion was prohibited. The republics held considerable cultural autonomy, but they remained under ideological constrains sharply limiting, for example, the praise of national pasts.1 In spite of its formal federalism, the new state was highly centralised with all political power in the hands of the Communist Party leadership; Tito as Secretary General of the party also held the positions of head of government, Minister of Defence, Commander in Chief and head of the Popular Front; Edvard Kardelj was responsible for foreign policy; Milovan Djilas headed the departments for agitation and propaganda; and Aleksandar Ranković was in charge of internal security and the secret police. Early post-war Yugoslavia was a Stalinist police state.2 An oppressive po‑ litical security apparatus, the so-called Department for the Protection of the People (Odeljenje za Zaštitu Naroda; ozna), from 1946 renamed the State

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Security Administration (Uprava Državne Bezbednosti; udba), ensured that all opposition was quietened in a couple of years. Non-communist members of the Popular Front, pre-war politicians and other political opponents were sentenced either to imprisonment with hard labour or death. According to recent estimates, probably tens of thousands were killed by the udba in the immediate post-war years, and many more were held in concentration camps.3 The political and economic aims of the Yugoslav communists were similar to those of the Soviet Stalinists and focused on heavy industry and forceful homogenisation of political expression. In 1947, the Yugoslavs introduced the first economic five-year-plan outside the Soviet Union, which was highly ambitious and with a strong focus on industry. Economic reconstruction was boosted, not least by large war reparations. Supported by massive propaganda campaigns and driven by the enthusiastic efforts of communist functionaries and youth brigades, ambitious reconstruction works were realized at impressive speed. When the workforce was lacking in numbers, brigades were sometimes mobilised by force, and at times camp prisoners also assisted in reconstruction projects.4 A cult of leadership was constructed around Tito and the Communist Party, mainly drawing on the history of the National Liberation War.

The first official accounts The Yugoslav communists promoted a simple understanding of the war as a struggle of the Partisans on the one side, representing all Yugoslavia’s peoples and “patriotic forces”, and the occupiers, collaborators and other enemies on the other. Among the main issues of Tito’s initial post-war speeches were the Partisans’ brilliant victories, their struggle for “Brotherhood and unity” among Yugoslavia’s different ethnic groups and the great sacrifices borne by the Yugoslav peoples. The speeches drew extensively on Partisan rhetoric and values  – for example by finishing with the Partisans’ war motto “Death to fascism – freedom to the people!”5 The heavy burdens borne by the Yugoslav peoples were repeatedly empha‑ sised, sometimes in connection with negotiations with the allies. In a speech given at a public meeting on the 27th March 1945 in Ljubljana, Tito, while criticising the allies’ approach to the disputes on the Yugoslav-Italian border, stated: Our peoples, all jointly, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Macedonians – have suffered together and together given enormous sacrifices in this great struggle

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of the freedom-loving nations” … “here are peoples who have given a million and seven hundred thousands victims in this war.6

This number of 1.7 million Yugoslav victims was to stay the official estimate throughout the history of socialist Yugoslavia. In 1946, when international reparations were discussed in Paris, the Yugoslavs declared that their country’s losses amounted to 1,706,000 persons.7 Decades later, the mathematician Vladeta Vučković revealed that as a young student shortly after the war he was employed in the Department of Statistics to supply Kardelj, then foreign minister and vice-president of the federal government, with scientific statisti‑ cal support for a significant number of victims.8 The number of 1,706,000 was also stated in a report from the Yugoslav reparations commission, from 1946. This number, according to the report, equalled 10.8% of Yugoslavia’s population. It was underlined that the number of Yugoslav victims was sur‑ passed only by the losses suffered by Poland and the Soviet Union, and when excluding these two, the Yugoslav war losses constituted 34% of all casualties on the allied side.9

Ill. 3.1. This table, titled “Allied losses in human lives”, graphically illustrates for everyone the enormous sacrifice of the Yugoslav peoples, compared to India, France, Greece, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, Holland, the USA and others. The losses of the USSR and Poland are conveniently left out, allowing those of Yugoslavia to constitute 34 % of allied losses. From Ljud‑ ske i materijalne žrtve Jugoslavije u ratnom naporu 1941‑1945, 7.

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The internal massacres were not main themes of Tito’s initial speeches af‑ ter the war. Yet they were regularly, if superficially, mentioned as well-known elements of the war. While the single most important enemy and aggressor in Tito’s accounts were the Germans, the planning and responsibility for war crimes were ascribed to foreign occupiers and internal, now dead or exiled, traitors and enemies. By presenting the war in this way, Tito laid the basis for a narrative that could rally all Yugoslav peoples together against external enemies. On 21st May 1945, in his first public speech held in Zagreb after the war, Tito stated: Did you see how the German conqueror in that terrible year of 1941, with the help of his servant Pavelić, and later also with the help of the traitors of the Serbian people, Nedić and Mihailović, and the traitor of the Slovene people, Rupnik, did everything to deepen the chasm not only between the Croatian and Serbian peoples, but also between all the peoples of Yugoslavia?10

Yet, according to Tito’s account, the Partisans erased this chasm when their fighters consisting of all Yugoslav nationalities fought together for brotherhood and unity.11 While this way of describing the war crimes served to externalise guilt and responsibility from the Yugoslav peoples, care was also taken to ‘bal‑ ance’ the blame and guilt for betrayal among the different ethnic groups. In this case Tito mentions Pavelić of the Croatian Ustasha, Serbian Chetnik leader Mihailović, Nedić of the Serbian puppet government, and next to them Leon Rupnik, leader of the marionette administration in Ljubljana under Italian and German occupation and instigator of a Slovenian collaborative militia, the Slovene home guards (Slovensko domobranstvo). Tito thus includes main representatives of Yugoslavia’s three largest nations.12 While the ethnic aspects of the wartime crimes were not foregrounded in Tito’s speeches, they were not ignored or denied either. The word for people, narod, was mostly used in plural, probably in order to emphasise that the com‑ munists recognised the several individual ethnic groups or nations that consti‑ tuted the population of Yugoslavia, and that, in line with the establishment of the formally federalised state, national oppression was not to be tolerated.13 That Serbs were the prime victims of Ustasha slaughtering was regularly mentioned. On the other hand, it was emphasised in Tito’s accounts that war guilt should not be ascribed to any of the Yugoslav peoples as such. In Tito’s speech in Zagreb, Ante Pavelić was openly identified as a Croat, “the greatest criminal who was ever born … by a Croatian mother”, who had thrown shame on the Croat people. But luckily the shame was washed of, claimed Tito, by

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the Croat sons and daughters, who went into fighting together with the other Yugoslav nations.14 Speaking at two public gatherings in Serbia on the 7th July 1945, Tito praised the Serbian Partisans, calling them “true bearers of unity and brotherhood”. Though nationalist propaganda had thrown responsibility for the slaughtering of Serbs in Croatia on innocent Croats, the Partisans did not carry any hint of hatred towards them, he declared: For them it was obvious that the Croatian people were not guilty because the Ustasha criminals committed such crimes; that the Slovenian people were not guilty for what the domobran criminals did; and that the Serbian people were not guilty for the crimes of various criminals belonging to Nedić or Draža.15

Thus war guilt was not attached to the peoples, only to the Yugoslav traitors and collaborators. These traitors were often mentioned en bloc, as a common unity, probably with the aim of underlining that they should be seen as similar phenomena, and that every nation had its share. Thereby guilt was distributed equally among the Yugoslav peoples. To further remove causes for regret and mutual incrimination, Tito claimed that all these traitors had received their punishment and were now dead or, very few of them, in refuge. Thus, according to Tito, the internal enemies and collaborators were now “a matter of the past” and were therefore no longer of any concern.16 This also meant that there would be no further reasons to discuss guilt and responsibility among the Yugoslav peoples. With the aim of securing brotherhood and unity and the internal coher‑ ence of the Yugoslav state, Tito’s version of the war externalised all the worst brutalities and ignored the co-responsibility of the peoples of post-war Yugo‑ slavia for the crimes committed during the war. While this strategy obviously simplified the reconstruction and stabilisation of the state under communist authority, it also left aside any chance to properly examine and condemn the radical nationalist policies and practices of wartime Yugoslavia.

The official report on Jasenovac The Ustasha concentration camp complex at Jasenovac was a main symbol of Ustasha crimes and terror. Immediately after the war Jasenovac was the subject of an official investigation, testifying to the terror and inhumanity of the place. The report on Jasenovac was published in 1946 by the Croatian National Commission for Investigation of crimes committed by the occupiers and

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their helpers. In this report, the commission made no attempt to hide the horrors of the camp system at Jasenovac. On the contrary, it was made clear that the camp should be seen as an “instrument to the annihilation of our peoples”.17 The report described how prisoners were worked or starved to death in Jasenovac, as well as how some were simply brought there to be killed. The procedures and terrors of the camp were described in detail through numerous and lengthy citations from victims. One survivor, Jakob Finzi, recounted: I worked as a grave digger at the camp cemetery only for 10 days. During this time I buried corpses without heads, without hands, with cracked heads, with fingers and toes torn of, with nails driven into the breast, with cut off genital organs, corpses deformed, blue and black from blows. In those ten days I buried, together with the comrades, about 3000 corpses …18

In describing the crimes committed in the camp, the report stated that “it seems unbelievable, impossible, that one can find criminals who will out of so much sadism, out of so much perversity imagine and carry out such cruel ways and means of torturing people.”19 The ethnic identity of the victims – mainly Serbs, Jews and Roma – was openly stated. When massacres were aimed at only one ethnicity, this was clearly described, as in the case of a liquidation of about 600‑700 Serbs near Jablanac.20 Yet the ethnic aspect was not in itself foregrounded. In most in‑ stances, the victims were simply referred to as prisoners. With regard to the perpetrators, ethnic affiliation was almost completely absent. They were re‑ ferred to either as Ustasha or Fascists – or sometimes as the Germans and the Ustasha. The report did not suggest any connection between the Ustasha and the Croatian people. On the contrary, it was emphasised that “the leaders of the Ustasha terrorist organisation were well aware, already before their entry into Yugoslavia, that they did not have support in the popular masses and that they could only remain in power by means of terror.”21 It was underlined in the report that the precise number of victims at Jase‑ novac could not be established. Yet by adding the number of victims of mass killings and the number of individuals killed in the camp, the report reached a figure around 500,000-600,000.22 In conclusion, the report stated: “Never did a single criminal in history ever slaughter a tenth of a people, such as Ante Pavelić did to his own people”.23 Thus, the victims were seen as belong‑ ing essentially to one people. In this perspective, the crimes committed by the Ustasha, and in Jasenovac in particular, were not seen in separate ethnic

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terms, but as a major crime against the common Yugoslav population of the ndh. At the same time, Pavelić was presented not as a Croatian nationalist, but as a traitor towards his own Yugoslav people.

Settling accounts The new Yugoslav regime made little attempt at internal reconciliation, as all guilt of war crimes and massacres was isolated to the enemies of the Partisans, and thereby, according to the communist representation, to the enemies of the people. These enemies were, apart from the occupying Axis powers, primarily the Ustasha, the various Chetnik movements, and Serbia’s pro-Nazi admin‑ istrators. While most representatives of these parties had either fled or been annihilated by the Partisan army at the end of the war, in the immediate postwar years regime soldiers still chased remaining Ustasha and Chetnik units. A number of military trials were held against representatives of the Catholic Clergy, who were accused of collaboration with the Ustasha and participation in war crimes and slaughtering. The fact that these trials and condemnations were not particularly discussed in the public sphere shows that they were mainly intended as punishment and elimination of former enemies and criminals, not as official statements.24 In 1946, however, major trials were held against top representatives of anti-communist and anti-Partisan movements, and these trials were meant, at least partly, as public statements. The trials were widely broadcast and sub‑ stantial material from the courtrooms was published with the obvious aim of stigmatising enemies of the new regime as traitors and collaborators. The following investigation of the two greatest trials, against the Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović and the Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac respectively, show how these two main enemies of the communists were presented, and how wartime massacres figured in these representations.

The trial against Mihailović From 10th June to 15th July 1946, Draža Mihailović was put on trial together with 23 other “traitors and war criminals” with connections to the Chetnik movement. The indictment against Mihailović personally consisted of 47 points, holding him responsible for the actions of Chetnik units throughout Yugoslavia, also the so-called legalized units under the Nedić administration. The greatest focus and by far the largest part of the indictment, points 1‑40,

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concentrated on collaboration, betrayal, attacks on Partisans and their support‑ ers, and other anti-Partisan activity of the Chetniks. Yet a particular chapter, point 41‑47, was dedicated to Chetnik war crimes.25 Most mentioned victims of these war crimes were Partisans, but the indict‑ ment also held several descriptions of mass murder and large scale massacres of Muslims and Croats. Sometimes bestial details were included, as in this short description of a series of massacres in Dalmatia: “In September 1942, the Chet‑ niks of Petar Baćović killed 900 Croats in Makarska, skinned several Catholic priests alive and set fire to 17 villages.”26 Repeated massacres of thousands of Muslims, particularly in East Bosnia, were also described. Some instances of mass murder of up to thousands of civilians were recounted without stating the ethnicity of the victims – most probably Muslims in these cases.27 The accused were all sentenced to death. The verdict of the trial largely repeated the text of the indictment; again focus was on the collaboration and anti-Partisan activity of the Chetniks, while war crimes were included in a separate, minor, chapter. Significant efforts were made for the trial against Draža Mihailović and the other Chetnik leaders to reach the public. According to the official excerpts,

Ill. 3.2. Photograph from the excerpts of the trials against Draža Mihailović and other Chetniks leaders. The original caption states: “The traitor Mihailović on the prisoner’s dock under the weight of the crimes proved before the court”.29

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around 100 journalists were present, many from countries outside Yugoslavia, and the trial’s proceedings were broadcast from Radio Belgrade.28 This all testi‑ fies to the intention from the side of the communists to stigmatise Mihailović as a national traitor in the widest possible sphere, inside as well as outside Yugoslavia. The inclusion of Chetnik war crimes in this widely published trial also shows that the regime had no scruples about addressing these issues in public, as long as they were connected to traitors and enemies of the Partisans. A collection of sources, titled Documents about Draža Mihailović’s betrayal had been published already in 1945. It followed the same pattern as the trial: the Chetniks’ collaboration and anti-Partisan activities were foregrounded, while massacres and ethnic cleansing received far less attention and were not even mentioned in the introduction, where Mihailović’s main crimes, as they occurred in the printed documents, were stipulated.30 A few documents on massacres were included, though. A letter was reprinted and presented by the editors of the documents as Mihailović’s instructions to the commanders in Montenegro to conduct “a truly hitlerish bloodthirsty, terrible slaughter” of the people, aimed at “the cleansing of stately territory of all national minorities and un-national elements”.31 And a small chapter, reprinting internal Chetnik communication, showed how, according to the editors, … the Chetniks slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslim and Croat lives, [who were] unarmed and helpless, while they at the same time drank and fraternized with the Ustasha, who had killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Serbs, made agreements and recognized ‘the supremacy of the ndh’.32

The trial, as well as the collection of documents, mirrors the communists’ official view and representation that Draža Mihailović and the Chetniks were primarily traitors and enemies of the people, and secondarily war criminals and perpetrators of large massacres and ethnic cleansing. In general, the com‑ munists held Mihailović and the Chetniks, as national traitors, responsible for the Partisan-Chetnik struggle and what they called “the fratricidal war”.33 This perspective was also promoted within the historians’ environment.34

The trial against Stepinac A few months later, on the 9th September 1946, another trial that was also to receive great publicity began in Zagreb against Erih Lisak, a prominent Ustasha official and police chief, Pavao Gulin, leader of the Slovene legion of Chetniks, and a number of Catholic priests and friars, some of them members of the

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Archbishop’s administration in Zagreb. Lisak was accused of mass murder and, together with the others convicted, of organising a conspiracy to overthrow the new regime. The prosecutor’s questions, according to Stella Alexander, were designed to point suspicion towards the Zagreb Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac.35 On the 18th September, the trial was interrupted and Stepinac was arrested the same day. The trial was resumed on the 28th, now with Stepinac among the indicted, being accused of collaborating with and supporting the Ustasha regime, col‑ laborating in the forceful conversion of tens of thousands of Serbs, and partici‑ pating in the conspiracy arranged by Lisak and others. Among the numerous witnesses for the prosecutor, Serbian villagers rendered gruesome testimonies of forced mass conversion.36 On the 11th October, Stepinac was declared guilty and sentenced to 16 years of hard labour. Lisak and Gulin were sentenced to death. The remaining indicted received prison sentences and two were declared not guilty. That the trial to a large extent was intended as a public event is testified by the fact that extracts and reports were published in great detail in several Yugoslav newspapers, and that an official edition of the proceedings from the trial were published shortly after the verdicts were given.37 The trial against the Archbishop of Zagreb followed a period of growing tension between the communist regime and the Catholic Church, who tended to criticise the new government harsher than they had ever spoken out against the Ustasha, at least in public. At the trials against Lisak and Stepinac, the very top of the church was linked to the Ustasha and their terror regime, and the church was held responsible for parts of the Ustasha crimes, the forced mass conversions in particular. Tito had also pointed to this connection in a public answer to regime critical statements made by the top of the clergy at a bish‑ ops’ meeting in September 1945. The bishops protested, among other things, against the persecution and harassments of priests and other representatives of the church and attacks on church privileges.38 In his response, which was pub‑ lished on the front pages of Yugoslav newspapers, Tito criticised the bishops for spreading racial hatred when it was time to heal the wounds from the war. He also wondered why they had never issued such statements against the killing of Serbs in the ndh, and he reminded them of the many Ustasha leaders who had been educated in the Catholic seminaries in Bosnia and Herzegovina.39 While members of the Catholic clergy had indeed assisted Ustasha crimes and thus deserved judicial prosecution, there is little doubt that this trial was also an official statement against the Catholic Church, aimed at de-legitimising a major ideological enemy of the communists.

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A volume of documents and testimonies about crimes committed by parts of the Catholic clergy before, during and after the war was also published in 1946. In a chapter on the role of the Catholic clergy in the forced conversions of Serbs, the responsibility of the clergy was underlined, not only as neces‑ sary accomplices in the act of conversion, but many of them also as active members of the Ustasha movement and participants in crime.40 The volume held numerous statements from Serb villagers, who explained how these con‑ versions were conducted under threats and often accompanied by other acts of persecution. Four persons from the village Crkveni Vrhovci had signed the following account: … in January 1942, an order was issued by the local authorities that whoever did not convert would be driven into a camp, so we had to come to Požega to be con‑ verted by the priest Pipinić, which meant that from our village Pipinić converted about 150 peasants. … But in spite of all assurances from Pipinić and the Ustasha that nothing would happen to us when we converted, our village was burnt down in 1943 by the Ustasha and the Germans and the people were driven into a camp. In all this, there was not one priest who reacted to this and protected us, but they stood cold-bloodedly observing everything that happened to us.41

Another chapter described the direct involvement of representatives of the Catholic clergy in the Ustasha massacres all over the ndh. In Herzegovina, it was claimed, priests and friars were inspiring bestial hatred against the Serb people, and they personally participated in persecution and killing.42 It was to become political and historical dogma that the Catholic Church carried the main responsibility for the forced conversions of Serbs in the ndh, and that parts of the clergy had cooperated and participated directly in Ustasha massacres.43 The issue of Catholic responsibility was to become one of the dominant themes in the historiography about the ndh and the massacres committed there. There is hardly any doubt that these trials against representatives of the Chetnik, Catholic and Ustasha leaderships, while calling certain persons to account for the crimes of the war, were also planned as great public showdowns against the main enemies of the communists. The trials exposed and confirmed the official version of the history of the war. Despite the fact that war crimes and massacres received far less attention than the issues of national betrayal and anti-Partisan activity, they were openly mentioned and included in the testimonies and accounts of the trials. The ethnicity of victims was freely as‑ serted. Yet in general descriptions, the victims were not specified as belonging

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to any particular group, but as the ‘people’ as a common totality without ethnic specification. Neither were the perpetrators, the Chetniks, Ustasha and mem‑ bers of the Catholic clergy, ascribed to any nationality, though in practice they obviously belonged respectively to the Serbian and Croatian side. In general, ethnicity was never thematized, and massacres were not described or defined as genocide.

Tito’s 1948 report of the war In 1948, the Yugoslav communist leadership was forced to state even more explicitly how recent Yugoslav history, the Second World War and the com‑ munist seizure of power in particular, were to be understood. By then the communist regime was solidly established, the reconstruct‑ ing of the country according to Stalinist ideals was developing quickly, and all possible competitors for power and ideological influence were effectively eliminated. Used to seeing themselves as the vanguard of Stalinism outside the Soviet Union, the Yugoslavs had also been granted the honour of hosting the Cominform headquarters, which was established in Belgrade in 1947. Yet, during Spring and early Summer 1948, the self-perception of the Yu‑ goslav communists was badly shaken by Soviet-Yugoslav disagreements and severe incriminations from the Kremlin, claiming, amongst others, that the Yugoslav communists overestimated their own success in the National Lib‑ eration Struggle and that their victory was in fact caused by the efforts of the Soviet Red Army.44 On 28th June 1948 Yugoslavia was formally expelled from the Cominform, its communist leadership accused of incorrect policies, anti-Soviet attitudes, revisionist, Trotskyist and Menshevik tendencies, petty bourgeois nationalism and betrayal of the international solidarity of the work‑ ing people.45 The split deprived the Yugoslav communists of their external source of legiti‑ macy as part of the victorious international communist movement. This meant that they had to stress their internal sources of justification even further, and the National Liberation Struggle now, besides justifying the construction of the new federal state and supplying heroic national myths for the communists, also had to serve as a proper autochthonous socialist revolution.46 While feverishly denouncing the critique of their party and politics, the Yugoslav communists guarded and exploited the image of the National Liberation Fight.47 In July 1948, shortly after the expulsion from the Cominform, the Com‑ munist Party of Yugoslavia held its fifth Party Congress, largely with the aim

51

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of proving and securing Party unity in the face of the crisis. For more than eight hours, Tito explained the history of the Yugoslav communists, partly meeting some of the Soviet criticism, while stressing wartime solidarity and post-war achievements.48 This speech, according to one historian, summed up “the pragmatic consensus of communist historical interpretation” and its version of Yugoslavia’s 20th century history was to dominate institutional historiography through the following decades.49 In Tito’s report, the warring parties are depicted as the ‘heroic Partisans’ on the one side and on the other an almost undifferentiated group of ‘occupiers’, ‘quislings’ and ‘collaborators’. The enormous sacrifices and superhuman efforts of the Yugoslav peoples are repeatedly emphasised. Through the 75 pages of Tito’s speech concerned with the period of the Second World War, war crimes and massacres are regularly mentioned as part of a general and well-known background to the Partisan warfare, but they are seldom discussed in more than one sentence: Explaining the beginning of the war, Tito states: When the Ustasha started already in the month of May to commit the mass slau‑ ghtering of Serbian citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Lika, and in Kordun, and the people started to flee into the hills and forests to save their lives, the party sent its staff to take the leadership of this unfortunate people, in order to resist the bestial Ustasha mass murderers.50

And later, when discussing the so called “first enemy offensive” in the autumn of 1941, Tito recounts: See, such a criminal gang burnt, killed, and plundered in the month of September in the peaceful villages of Mačva and in Pocerina: Ustasha, Nedić-people, Ljotićpeople, Pećanac’s Chetniks – all these bandits together with the German fascist beasts committed this terrible cruelty on the peaceful citizens of Mačva, Pocerina and Jadar. Eight hundred and sixty Serbian peasants, women, children, and old people, who were found killed in the valley of Jadar, were strewn with flour to make the swine eat them. They were victims of an organised bestial gang, made up of German, Ustasha, Nedić, Ljotić, and Pećanac’s bandits. … But in spite of this cooperation of German, Serbian and Croatian degenerates, in this offensive they did not succeed in defeating the heroic Partisans.51

As earlier in Tito’s accounts, the fascist occupiers are the main culprits, assisted by Yugoslav traitors and collaborators. The ethnic identities of both victims

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and perpetrators are mentioned, but not thematized as such. In fact, there is hardly any differentiation between the Yugoslav collaborators, none of whom are essentially worse than anyone else.52 Tito’s speech had an immense impact in setting a pattern for Yugoslav historiography of the war and its massacres, according to scope as well as perspective on war crimes.53 In this version of Yugoslav wartime history, focus was on the Partisans’ strategic exploits, the development of the Partisan army and the strategic course of the fight for liberation. Compared to the Partisans’ military achievements the wartime massacres received relatively little attention. Second World War history was to glorify the Partisans’ exploits; it was to be told as a story of heroes rather than victims. In this grand narrative the short descriptions of massacres and brutal violence would serve mainly to underline the cruel and inhumane character of the enemies. N ote s 1

Paul Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question, New York: Columbia Uni‑ versity Press, 1968, 101‑124.

2

See Pavlowitch, Yugoslavia, 175‑187.

3 Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 238. See also Marko Milovojević, ‘The role of the Yugoslav intelligence and security committee’, in John B. Allcock, John J. Horton and Marko Milovojević, Yugoslavia in transition, New York: Berg, 1992, 206‑207. The UDBa (Uprava Državne Bezbednosti, or State Security Administration) was created in 1946 to replace the wartime security service, ozna (Odeljenje za Zaštitu Naroda, or Department for Protection of the People), also headed by Ranković. 4

On reconstruction, propaganda and the labour brigades, see Carol S. Lilly, Power and Persuasion. Ideology and Rhetoric in Communist Yugoslavia, 1944‑1953, Boulder: Westview Press, 2001, especially 115‑136; Carol S. Lilly, ‘Problems of Persuasion: Communist Agi‑ tation and Propaganda in Post-war Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review, 53, 1994, 2, 395‑413.

5

This phrase was used in several speeches held during the summer of 1945, see e.g. Josip Broz Tito, Izgradnja nove Jugoslavije I, Beograd: Kultura, 1948 (collection of articles, spe‑ eches, interviews and declarations), e.g. 50, 69, 78, 81.

6

Josip Broz Tito, ‘Jugoslavija ne traži ništa drugo do ujedinjenje svojih naroda’, in Tito, Izgradnja nove Jugoslavije I, 22.

7 Žerjavić, Opsesije i megalomanije oko Jasenovca i Bleiburga, 15. 8

Vladeta Vučković, ‘Žrtve rata’, Naša Reč, 368, 1985, 2‑3. Vučković’s account seems to hold some inaccuracies. He claims that he was preparing statistical material for the Peace conference in Paris in the spring of 1947, which should, obviously have been 1946.

9

Reparaciona komisija pri vladi Federativne Narodne Republike Jugoslavije, Ljudske i materijalne žrtve Jugoslavije u ratnom naporu 1941‑1945, Belgrade, 1945, 5.

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10 Josip Broz Tito, ‘Prvi govor u oslobođenom Zagrebu’, in Tito, Izgradnja nove Jugoslavije I, 13. 11 Ibid. 12 On Rupnik, see e.g. Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941‑1945. Occupation and Collaboration, 95‑96, 122‑126. 13 The concept of narod denotes people both in the sense of “the common citizens” or “the broad masses” and as an ethnic people, close to the German concept of “Volk”. In 1946, five groups were recognised as nations, or narod: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians, each with a home republic in Yugoslavia, as opposed to narodnosti (nationalities), which were assumed to have a home country outside Yugoslavia. In 1968, the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Bosnia-Herzegovina stated that the Muslims were to be recognised as Yugoslavia’s sixth narod. See e.g. Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav national question, 114ff; Mustafa Imamović, Historija Bošnjaka, Sarajevo: Preporod, 1998, 565; Pedro Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1963‑1983, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, 147. 14 Josip Broz Tito, ‘Prvi govor u oslobođenom Zagrebu’, in Tito, Izgradnja nove Jugoslavije I, 9. 15 Josip Broz Tito, ‘O Srbiji u narodno-oslobodilačkoj borbi’ in Tito, Izgradnja nove Jugoslavije I, 72. 16 Tito, ‘Jugoslavija ne traži …’, in Tito, Izgradnja nove Jugoslavije I, 23. 17 Zemaljska komisija Hrvatske za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača, Zločini u Logoru Jasenovac, Zagreb: Novinsko-izdavačko poduzeće ‘Naprijed’, 1946, 3. 18 Ibid, 25. 19 Ibid, 19. 20 Ibid, 58. 21 Ibid, 3. 22 Ibid, 38‑39. 23 Ibid, 39. 24 Stella Alexander, Church and State in Yugoslavia since 1945, London: Cambridge Univer‑ sity Press, 1979, 61f. 25 Izdajnik i ratni zločinac Draža Mihailović pred sudom. Stenografske Beleške i dokumenta sa suđenja Dragoljubu-Draži Mihailoviću, Beograd: Izdanje saveza udruženja novinara narodne republike Jugoslavije, 1946. Point 1‑40, describing collaboration, attacks on Par‑ tisan units, support for the Germans, anti-Partisan propaganda, takes up pp. 17‑53. The war crimes indictments, point 41‑47, are covered on pp. 54‑59. 26 Ibid, 56. 27 Ibid, 57. 28 Ibid, 9. 29 Ibid, 23.

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30 Dokumenti o izdajstvu Draže Mihailovića, knjiga 1, Državna Komisija za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača, Beograd, 1945, 5‑6. 31 Ibid, 10. 32 Ibid, 501. 33 Izdajnik i ratni zločinac Draža Mihailović pred sudom, 61; Dokumenti o izdajstvu Draže Mihailovića, 11. 34 See Viktor Novak’s review ‘Istoriska građa u izdanjima Državne komisije za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača’ Istoriški Časopis, 1, 1948, 1‑2, 335‑337. 35 Stella Alexander, The Triple Myth. A life of Archbishop Stepinac, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, 141. 36 Ibid, 166 (also 141). 37 Suđenje Lisaku, Stepincu, Šaliću i družini, ustaško-križarskim zločincima i njihovim pomagačima. Dokumenti o protunarodnom radu i zločinima jednog dijela katoličkog klera. Zagreb 1946. On the newspapers, see Alexander, The triple myth, 148. The trial was also covered in numerous newspapers outside Yugoslavia, largely perceived as a classic communist show trial, and Stepinac as a martyred religious leader. 38 The “pastoral letter” with the bishops’ protests are reprinted in Richard Pattee, The case of Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1953, 470‑480. Pattee’s study is very pro-Catholic and overtly anti-communist. 39 Josip Broz Tito, ‘O pastirskom pismu’, from Borba, 25th October 1945, reprinted in Tito, Izgradnja nove Jugoslavije I, 169‑172. See also Alexander, Church and State in Yugoslavia, 70‑73. 40 Dokumenti o protunarodnom radu i zločinima jednog djela katoličkog klera, Zagreb: Rožankowski, 1946, 54. 41 Ibid, 66. 42 Ibid, 140, 124‑180. 43 For a strongly anti-Catholic appreciation of the documents and Stepinac trial, see Viktor Novak’s review ‘Dokumenti o protunarodnom radu i zločinima jednog dijela katoličkog klera’ Istoriški Časopis, 1, 1948, 338‑339. 44 See the letter from Molotov and Stalin to Tito and Kardelj, 4th May 1948, in Stephen Clissold, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union 1939‑1973. A documentary survey, London: Ox‑ ford University Press, 1975, 183‑197. Also in Ernest Halperin, The Triumphant Heretic. Tito’s struggle against Stalin, London: Heinemann, 1958, 66‑67. 45 See e.g. Clissold, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, 202‑207. 46 Höpken, ‘Von der Mythologisierung zur Stigmatisierung: “Krieg und Revolution” in Jugoslawien 1941‑1948’, 175‑176. 47 For an example of the Yugoslav communists’ defence of the national liberation war, see e.g. Kosta Popović, ‘Za pravilnu ocenu oslobodilačkog rata naroda Jugoslavije’, Komunist 1949, no. 3.

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48 Pavlowitch, Yugoslavia, 213. 49 Ivo Banac, ‘Historiography of the countries of Eastern Europe: Yugoslavia’, American Historical Review, 97, 1992, 4, 1085‑1086, quote from page 1085. 50 Josip Broz Tito, ‘Izvještaj na V kongresu KPJ’, in Josip Broz Tito, Izgradnja nove Jugoslavije III, Zagreb 1951, p. 187 f. The translation is not quite true to Tito’s words, as he used the word ‘narod’ to refer to the people, conveying both the idea of an ethnic group and of ordinary people, whereas he refers to the party representatives with the fairly neutral word ‘ljudi’ meaning people in the sense of a group of persons. 51 Ibid, 211. 52 See also Ljubodrag Dimić, ‘Od tvrdnje do znanja’, Vojnoistorijski Glasnik, 1996, 1‑2, 203‑205. 53 The speech is widely cited in Yugoslav historiography and, according to the ten year report and bibliography of the National Committee of Yugoslav Historians, accounts for the basic source on the beginning of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Jorjo Tadić, ed., Dix années d’historiographie Yougoslave 1945‑1955. Belgrade: “Jugoslavija”, 1955, 578. See also Đorđe Stanković and Ljubodrag Dimić, Istoriografija pod nadzorom. Prilozi istoriji istoriografije, Belgrade: Službeni List SRJ, 1996, vol. 1, 292‑297.

Massacres in memoirs and fiction, 1945‑1952 Yugoslavia’s socialist revolution in 1945 was soon to be reflected in wider his‑ torical culture. Following the break with the Cominform in 1948 and the deStalinisation of the following years, Yugoslavia’s cultural sphere was allowed a growing artistic freedom. While the overall interpretative framework of the war had been established in speeches, trials and reports immediately after the war, more detailed representations of particular incidents, including war crimes and massacres, were developed within the realms of memoirs, novels and poetry. This chapter investigates how internal Yugoslav massacres of the Second World War were presented in literary representations of history in the early period of Yugoslav socialism from 1945 to 1952. It shows how, compared to official accounts in political statements and reports, personal memories and literary descriptions enabled stronger emotional evocation and made room for terrible details of individual suffering that did not fit easily into general accounts of war history. It also shows that communist cadre played key roles in producing these representations within memoirs, poetry and novels.

The bloody cloth of Krajina – massacres in memoir literature In the first years after the war, Yugoslav communism was overtly Stalinist. Stalinism was also the dominant principle in cultural politics, dictating that culture was to serve and support the revolutionary cause and the establishment of socialism.1 The Partisan war and the national liberation were industriously used to boost the popularity of the new regime and to justify the reestab‑ lishment of the multiethnic community, which had been shattered by the interethnic massacres committed during the war. Immediately after the war, high-ranking Partisans published personal mem‑ oirs of the war years. While these were of course personal accounts, they also became official memories of the war and they were regarded as significant and authentic contributions to war history.2 The most influential diaries, among those the diaries of Vladimir Dedijer and Rodoljub Čolaković, were reprinted numerous times throughout the communist period.

4

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usable history?

During the war, Vladimir Dedijer, who was a journalist by profession, stayed with the supreme staff of the Partisan army, recording large and small daily events and developments within the Partisan movement in his diary. Allegedly his work was encouraged by Tito, and the diary was published immediately after the end of the war, thus constituting an official inside account of the Partisan warfare from the viewpoint of the supreme staff. In Dedijer’s wartime diary, massacres and war crimes are regularly recorded, sometimes in detail and in touching prose. A chapter recounting events in July-August 1942, titled “The bloody cloth of Krajina”, holds several references to the Ustasha slaughtering of Serbs and to the praxis of throwing bodies and living people into deep pits.3 Included in this chapter is an emotional account by Milovan Djilas of his visit to the village of Urije shortly after an Ustasha attack and massacre: … We continued down the road, hedges of ferns and hazels on both sides, and, at once, in the middle of the road, I don’t remember the exact number, ten or twelve bodies. It seemed to me, just two middle-aged men. The rest were women, girls, boys, little children. Three or four steps from this pile of blood and flesh – an empty cradle, without napkin, without child, with the hay still humid from the child’s urine. This hay in the cradle seemed as if it was still warm from the child’s body. The child lay in the pile of bodies. But the head was all crushed, without lid, without a drop of blood in the hollow scull. A brain – that of the child? – actually a bit of white solid mush lay next to the head with bits of flesh. What had killed this child? Maybe a bullet, maybe a rifle butt, maybe a stone or maybe the infant’s head had been sufficiently soft for a hobnailed Ustasha boot? …4

Djilas further recounts how he walked through the village, from one house to another, all filled with blood and dead bodies. As Djilas was then one of Tito’s most trusted lieutenants, his account represents a wartime testimony of the very top of the Partisans’ communist leadership. It was reprinted several places after the war, and Dedijer included it in his collection of documents about the Vatican and Jasenovac. Dedijer’s diary also holds a description of Chetniks massacres of Muslims in Eastern Bosnia. In late January 1942, when the supreme staff of the Partisan movement was near Foča, which was recently taken over from the Chetniks, Dedijer recounts the scene: Today I walked next to the Drina. Clear, icy. I watched the rocks. Some people stood at the edge of the bank. One cried: ‘That is Ibro’. Corpses in the water – one,

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Ill. 4.1. History in the making: Vladimir Dedijer (right) writing his Partisan diary in the Montenegrin mountains, here together with colonel in the Partisan forces, Pavle Ilić.6

two, three … on the bank lay one – like a statue of wax in the Museum of Madame Tussaud. It threw its head back. That was Muslim families who buried the victims of the Chetniks. The tailor tells me that they slaughtered 86 people in one night!5

Massacres in Eastern Bosnia are also described in the memoirs of Rodoljub Čolaković, who was Political commissary of the general staff of the Parti‑ san movement in Bosnia. In the Autumn of 1941, according to the diary, Čolaković was travelling from Serbia to the headquarters in Eastern Bosnia, where he was to support the establishment of the Partisan movement. On his way, Čolaković hears about massacres and crimes committed by the Ustasha. One morning he talks to an old lady, whose three sons were murdered, and Čolaković recounts the incident, which he already heard about in the café the evening before: Just a few hundred meters away was the local warehouse, in which the Ustasha had slaughtered about one hundred Serbian peasants from the surrounding villages. They had led them here, locked them in the loft and then one by one to “inter‑ rogation”. In one part of the warehouse was a large barrel. They led the victim there, cut his throat, and collected the blood in the barrel. Before the slaughter, the Ustasha chopped the nose or mouth of some victims, on some they crushed an arm or a leg.7

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What characterises the Ustasha in Čolaković’ account is their senseless antiSerbianism and their lust for blood. There is no attempt to downplay the ethnic element of this violence. In this area many of the Ustasha were Muslims, and Čolaković mentions that the local Chetniks were not always able to distinguish between the local “turks” and the Ustasha and that the mutual hostility among the peasants led to reciprocal attacks on Serbian and Muslim villages.8 Terror and massacres were also regularly described and referred to in mem‑ oirs by local Partisan leaders.9 In the memoir literature, war crimes and mas‑ sacres are described freely and often in detail, but the focus of attention stays on the Partisan warfare. The ethnicity of victims is openly stated, and conflicts are sometimes described as interethnic warfare. Yet, the main enemies remain the occupiers and their collaborators, who are seen as traitors and class enemies and not emphatically ascribed to any nationality or ethnicity. The amount of this type of material published after the war clearly shows that the communist regime did not mind a widespread addressing of these issues, as long as it stayed within the Partisan perspective.

Jasenovac The Ustasha concentration camp complex at Jasenovac has become a main symbol of Ustasha terror and persecution of Serbs, Jews, Roma and regime opponents in general. Shortly after the war Jasenovac was the subject of several accounts and memoirs testifying to its terror and inhumanity.10 One of the most frequently quoted descriptions of conditions in the camp is Jasenovački Logor, a personal account by Nikola Nikolić, a medical doctor and communist, who was brought to the camp in 1942 and worked in the camp’s hospital. According to Nikolić, Jasenovac was part of a large project by Hitler’s Nazi-Germany to annihilate all peoples – Slavs particularly, who were in the way of the Nazis’ ambitions to construct a greater Lebensraum. The Germans chose as their helpers Croatian clero-fascists, Ustasha and Serbian Chetniks, and inspired and led them “in the basic principles and methods of mass extermination”. Similar camps, claims Nikolić, were established by the Serbian Nedić-regime and by the Chetniks.11 There is an obvious equalisation of Chetniks and Ustasha in Nikolić’s account. As a rule, the ethnic aspect is down-played. In a common, undif‑ ferentiated categorization, the main victims are described in general accounts as “human beings” or “the Yugoslav peoples” 12 The ethno-national policies of

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the Yugoslav warring parties are not mentioned. The main explanatory factor is the Nazist racial ideology. In more detailed descriptions of individual events, however, Nikolić often points out the ethnicity of the victims. He describes mass killing of Serbs in 1941, and afterwards massacres of Serbs, Croats, Jews, Muslims, Roma and communists in individual chapters. A large part of the book is dedicated to a catalogue of “Mechanisms of killing humans” in Jasenovac. In this long record, Nikolić mentions different types of fire arms and cold weapons such as knives, mallets, whips, hammers etc. Of further killing methods, he emphasises hanging, burning, cold, gas, suffocation, hunger and diseases and epidemics intentionally caused via the inhuman conditions and lack of hygiene in the camp. The most infamous weapon of the Ustasha were knives, about which Nikolić states: The dearest weapon and speciality of the Ustasha was the knife … The killing of a child by knife was the greatest bravery. In order to demonstrate this their ‘bravery’, with which the Ustasha had to distinguish themselves, they overcame all the inner restraint that they had.13

Another particular Ustasha tool was a specially developed knife with a bracelet for cutting the throats of many victims. Also the heavy wooden mallets that the Ustasha camp guards used to crash the sculls of victims are often mentioned. According to Nikolić, these mallets were used very skilfully, ensuring that the victims were immediately silenced and immobilised.14 A particularly morbid tale from the camp claims that human bodies, immediately after being killed, were used to produce soap at the factories in Jasenovac.15 Nikolić does not attempt to give a total number of victims for the Jasenovac camp complex, but he suggests that in the part of it around Gradina alone, 6‑700,000 people were slaughtered.16

Ill. 4.2. Drawing of Ustasha slaughtering knives from Nikolić’s catalogue. The original caption reads: “The Ustasha massively used these bloody arguments of Nazi ‘culture’.”18

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In the descriptions of Jasenovac, the brutality of the Ustasha movement and the camp system is clearly emphasised. Yet, extermination procedures in the camp are seen as much as an element of German Nazist politics as an Ustasha project. Ethnicity is not ignored, but it is definitely not foregrounded either. The Ustasha are always described as one of several fascist movements; at no point are they seen as a national movement or as Croat at all. In fact Nikolić explicitly states that the notion of the Ustasha as a Croat government was incredibly shameful.17 Nikolić ends his account by declaring the end of this brutal past and salut‑ ing the construction of a new and better system under socialism: The people have won and on this wasteland, on the graves of hundreds of thou‑ sands of innocent victims and heroic fighters, it will soon build a new, free, happy fatherland that will be a bulwark against fascism, against the return of this terrible past, which it has forever defeated.19

This belief in the new state system’s ability to overcome the shadows of history largely characterised the communists’ approach to the past.

The war and its massacres in songs and poetry Already during the war, the communist Partisans described their quest in forms very much like the traditional South Slav epic poetry. Folk songs about the fighting and suffering were composed and collected, and proved useful also for raising support for the Partisans’ cause. After the war, these songs were reprinted and contributed to create the party’s own heroic symbolic imagery.20 Generally, these songs presented the Partisans as traditional heroes in a merciless war of good versus evil. Most songs called to fight and encouraged more volunteers to join the struggle or simply praise the Partisans and partisan units. Many also lamented the deaths of well-known or local Partisan heroes. Battles, blood and suffering are described, sometimes in great detail, as well as grief for lost relatives. The Partisans’ enemies were presented as national traitors and called to justice for their crimes and the suffering and waste of blood that they had caused. In a song recounting the Partisan attack on Banja Luka, the Yugoslav enemies were presented as agents of the Germans and equipped with one-line characterisations:

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Do you remember, my dear brothers, This struggle was not long ago, When our heroic brigades Attacked the German Fascists, The Ustasha, our bloodsuckers, And the Chetniks, disgusting traitors, And other agents of the Germans Who wished to plunder from the people, That many tormented the people And committed bloody violence. …21

At times massacres and atrocities against civilians were described. In a song commemorating the German-Ustasha offensive against the mountain area Kozara in Bosnian Krajina, the crimes of the Ustasha, the concentration camps, the plundering and the many deaths were recounted: When I remember the misfortune and sorrow of the offensive in forty-two. The Ustasha drove us into camps and plundered all our houses. … Grave by grave in the green wheat, but Kozara takes the oath to Tito. Pavelić, you also intended to annihilate the people of Kozara. …22

Here it is claimed that the main aim of the Ustasha and Pavelić was the an‑ nihilation of the people of Kozara. Yet the victims are the people in general; it is not mentioned that most victims in the Kozara area were Serbs. Some songs commemorate individual acts of terror. One song tells the story of twelve young girls who were killed by an Ustasha soldier. The song dwells on the sorrow and worries of the mothers as they imagine what torments the girls may have suffered at the hands of the Ustasha:

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… The poor mothers run through the woods, everyone asks: where is my child? My daughter, my green stalk, stretch out your hand to your poor mother, tell us, our dear daughters, have the Ustasha tortured you? Have they killed you with a rifle? Or thrown you alive into a pit? …23

This song clearly refers to some of the most infamous Ustasha practices, such as mutilation with knife, leaving people to die in pits, and possibly also rape. These songs often talk about the torments of the war on individual and generally human levels. They express suffering and sorrow, and crimes and massacres are commemorated. But it is not from a national perspective, and ethnicity is not a theme. Though it is of course possible that the term ‘Usta‑ sha’ in the minds of the public had connotations of Croats and Muslims as such, this was not how it was presented in the songs. Rather, the fundamental dichotomy suggested in these representations is again between violent fascist traitors and patriotic progressive people and Partisans. The most famous poem of the Partisan war, Jama (the Pit), was written by the Croatian poet Ivan Goran Kovačić, who supported and stayed with the Partisans from December 1942 until he was killed by Chetniks in July 1943. Jama is a long description of Ustasha practices of torture and murder. The poem talks in the voice of one of the victims, who describes how the execu‑ tioners mutilate him and the other victims, cut their eyes and earlobes, and afterwards rest and celebrate with food and wine. Later the narrator and the other victims are thrown half alive into a pit, filled with suffering and dying people. He manages to crawl out, smells the fire from his burning village and in the end dies in the arms of a female Partisan, member of a unit that has chased away his tormenters.24 The text of Jama is incredibly bloody and filled with poetic and detailed descriptions of torture and pain. This is contrasted with the advancing Parti‑ sans, who represent the better future that the victim wishes he could fight for, had he only been able. What is thematized in Jama is the torture and massacres committed by the Ustasha against villages in the ndh. Jama’s addressing of these issues was probably stronger and more legitimate, because Kovačić was a Croat, killed

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by the Chetniks, and because of his support and idealisation of the Partisans. Kovačić’s poem was widely cited immediately after the end of the war, and it was reprinted numerous times.25 Clearly, the communist regime regarded it as a worthy and usable account of the most infamous Ustasha practices.

Partisan novels In the early 1950s, following the break with the Cominform, Yugoslav cultural politics was gradually relaxed. Soviet artistic dogma was deprecated, and more artistic freedom was allowed. This was most famously expressed by the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža in a speech at the 3rd Congress of the Yugoslav Writers’ Union, November 1952, where he openly denounced the concept of Socialist realism.26 Yet, socialist realism and party dogmatism remained influential in Yugoslav post-war literature. War and revolution were the main preoccupation of prose writers in the first post-war decades.27 Among the best known of the “Partisan novels” is Daleko je sunce (Far away is the sun), published in 1951 from the hand of the Serbian writer and Partisan veteran, Dobrica Ćosić. This book depicts a group of Serbian Partisans strug‑ gling to survive the winter of 1942‑1943 in a mountain area, suffering from cold, hunger and heavy losses in encounters with the enemy. The action takes place in Serbia, and ethnic issues are almost absent. The main enemies are, along with the Germans and Bulgarians, various Serbian collaborators. The book mentions how Chetnik units terrorise the civilian population, knifing down real and imagined enemies, plundering the villages and kidnapping women, one of them the wife of a leading Partisan. At a Partisan trial, Chet‑ niks admit to having murdered numerous civilians. Yet, most of the Chetnik followers are described as weak and ignorant peasants, who accepted Chetnik conscription to save themselves and their families.28 In a disturbing literary stroke, Ćosić lets one of the Partisan heroes, the young political commissary Pavle, lead the trial of a Chetnik leader, who turns out to be Pavle’s old friend from school. In this meeting, Ćosić emphasises the similarities between these two uncompromising idealist young commanders, yet the reader is never left in doubt that Pavle is fighting for the right side. Rather than thematizing massacres and war crimes as such, the main point of Daleko je sunce is the darkness and tremendous human suffering caused by war, and the heavy sacrifices that follow from fighting for a just cause. The Partisan leaders are not infallible; they worry, get confused and at times react strongly out of impulse and temperament rather than ideology and political sense.

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Another well-known Partisan writer, Branko Ćopić, authored several novels about experiences of Serbian peasants in the Bosnian Krajina during the Second World War. In Prolom, (Breach) from 1952, Ćopić depicts how young men from the Serbian peasantry are captured by the Ustasha. One of them, Todor, is held – together with his uncle and numerous other Serbs – as prisoner in an old school. One night, the Ustasha order the prisoners into the schoolyard, where they are maltreated and severely beaten. Afterwards they are tied together two by two, driven onto trucks and taken into a nearby mountain area. The scene of the mass liquidation is described: Deep in the mountains they drove them out of the trucks, they lined them up pair after pair as they were already tied together, they surrounded them with Ustasha and they drove them about twenty meters to the right of road, on to the stony plateau among the sparse knotty beeches. At the edge of the plateau, illuminated by the ghostly light from the headlights, a small unimpressive depression was seen, overgrown with tiny bushes and mountain grass. In this messy bunch of grass and thorny branches was a deep cleft known by all shepherds, charcoal peddlers and hunters from the surrounding villages. There, the Ustasha already waited with rolled up sleeves, leaning on heavy square stone carving hammers on long handles. … The two Ustasha emigrants, properly uniformed and belted, separated the first pair of peasants from the row and shoving them with the bayonets they drove them towards the cleft. When they had forced them out on the overgrown edge, the two with the rolled up sleeves quickly swung the hammers and by full force hit the peasants on the heads. … Moving ever closer to the terrible depression, in wooden walk and as under foreign command, the men were purely bewitched by the unbelievable and gruesome spectacle that renewed itself uniformly before their eyes, with few words or totally silent, in details the same and yet every time new, closer to the men and with a better view from shorter distance …29

Ćopić thus describes the experiences of the Serbian peasants and the immense cruelty of the Ustasha in realistic prose. He recounts how the Ustasha throw a grenade into the cleft and go to pick up more prisoners, while discussing whether it would be more efficient to shoot the prisoners ten by ten with a machine gun. Ćopić also describes how one Ustasha leader tortures a young girl.30 Though most of the prisoners at the mountain cleft are killed, Todor and his uncle manage to escape. Many other young men seek refuge from the Ustasha and hide in mountains and forests. They become the core of a Parti‑ san detachment, established and led by a local communist and a former army

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officer. Wounded and hiding in the forests, Todor is saved by the Partisans, and in the end he joins the Partisan detachment. In the Bosnian Krajina described in Prolom, many Ustasha were Muslims. The novel frequently refers to enmity between Serbs and Muslims, often called ‘Turks’. Yet numerous young Muslims join the Partisan detachment, and the Partisan leaders endeavour to convince the peasant Serbs that they should fight together with these Muslims against Ustasha, Chetniks and other enemies.31 At the end of the novel, a successful tolerant and multiethnic Partisan detachment is established. While Ćopić’ novel describes in detail Ustasha massacres and interethnic violence in the Bosnian Krajina, the main focus of the book is on the devel‑ opment of the Partisan detachment and the evolution of the main characters, the young Partisans and their leaders. The book is a strong celebration of the Partisan struggle, but even more it is a patriotic praise of the Bosnian peasant as heroic and invincible. N ote s 1

Ljubodrag Dimić, Agitprop kultura. Agitpropovska faza kulturne politike u Srbiji 1945.1952. Belgrade: “Rad”, 1988, 191ff. See also Lilly, Power and Persuasion, 92‑100.

2

See Viktor Novak’s review of Vladimir Dedijer, Dnevnik, Dragoje Dudić, Dnevnik 1941, Čedomir Minderović, Za Titom. Zabeleške jednog partisana, and Rodoljub Čolaković, Zapisi iz oslobodilačkog rata, in Istoriški Časopis, 1, 1948, 1‑2, 328‑331.

3

‘Krajina, Krvava Haljina’, Vladimir Dedijer, Dnevnik, prvi deo, Belgrade: Državni Izdavački Zavod Jugoslavije, 1945, 230ff. The Diary was reprinted in a shorter edition in 1951, and in its full length in 1970 and 1981.

4

Ibid, 237‑238.

5

Vladimir Dedijer, Dnevnik. Prva Knjiga, od 6 aprila 1941 do 27 novembra 1942, (3rd ed.) Belgrade: Prosveta, 1970, 90. See also 78‑79, 87, concerning massacres of Muslims and Serbs in Hercegovina, 88.

6

From Savo Orović, Fotografije iz narodnoooslobodilačkog rata, Belgrade: Vojnoistoriski Institut ja, 1951.

7

Rodoljub Čolaković, Zapisi iz oslobodilačkog rata I, Belgrade: Prosveta, 1956 (first publis‑ hed in Sarajevo, 1946), 309‑310. Čolaković’ memoirs were also reprinted in 1966. After the war, Ćolaković was minister and later president of the government of Bosnia and Hercegovina.

8

Ibid, 314.

9

See for example Todor Vujasinović, Ozrenski partizanski odred, Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1950, 75ff or Drago Gizdić, Dalmacija 1942. Prilozi historiji Narodnooslobodilačke borbe, Zag‑ reb: Izdavačko odeljenje glavnog odbora saveza boraca Hrvatske, 1959, 573‑587.

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10 E.g. Drago Čolaković, Jasenovac 21.8.1941/31.3.1942, Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1948, especially 35‑110. See also Novak’s review: Viktor Novak, ‘Nikola Nikolić, Jasenovački Logor’, Istoriski Časopis, 1, 1948, 1‑2, 340‑342. 11 Nikola Nikolić, Jasenovački Logor, Zagreb: Nakladni Zavod Hrvatske, 1948, 5‑6. Also 31ff, 49. 12 Often described as “ljudi” and “naši narodi”, e.g. ibid, 49. 13 Ibid, 77. 14 Ibid, 83‑84. 15 Ibid, 59‑61. 16 Ibid, 434. 17 Ibid, 204. 18 Ibid, 80. 19 Ibid, 421. 20 See also Maja Brkljačić, ‘Popular Culture and Communist Ideology: Folk Epics in Tito’s Yugoslavia’, in John R. Lampe and Mark Mazower, eds., Ideologies and National Identities. The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe, Budapest: ceu Press, 2004, 180‑210. 21 Salko Nazečić, ed., Slavne Godine. Narodne pjesme iz narodno-oslobodilačkog rata i borbe za socijalizam, Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1949, 63. The rhyme and rhythm of the songs are un‑ fortunately lost in the translations. 22 Ibid, 78. 23 In this case, even the name of the Ustasha perpetrator, Bale Markovljević, is mentio‑ ned. From the song ‘From the silence there is no answer’ (Iz tišine odgovora nema), in Vladimir Popović, ed., Narodne pjesme borbe i oslobođenja, Zagreb: Prosvjeta, 1947, 35. See also ‘A mother’s song’ (Pjesma jedne majke), which were allegedly printed in a local women’s newspaper, Ženski List, in Kordun during the war and in 1955 in Hrvatske žene u nob, Zagreb 1955. See Stanko Opačić-Ćanica, ed., Narodne pjesme Korduna, Zagreb: Prosvjeta, 1971, 253, 461, note 229. 24 Ivan-Goran Kovačić, ‘Jama’, Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1959 (graphically illustrated edition to celebrate the 40 years anniversary of the establishment of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia). Also Ivan Goran Kovačić, ‘Jama’, in Le pont/The bridge, 49, Zagreb, 1976, (Published by the association of Croatian writers, Zagreb) where it is translated in rhy‑ mes into English and other languages. 25 See previous note and, e.g, the quotes from the Serbian daily Politika, January 1945, in ibid, 5. 26 Dimić, Agitprop Kultura, 256‑257. See also Lilly, Power and Persuasion, 29‑242; Carol S. Lilly, ‘Propaganda to Pornography: Party, Society, and Culture in Postwar Yugoslavia’, in Melissa K. Bokovoy, Jill A. Irvine, and Carol S. Lilly, State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia 1945‑1992, London: Macmillan Press, 1997, 139‑162.

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27 Sveta Lukić, Contemporary Yugoslav Literature. A sociological approach, Urbana: Univer‑ sity of Illinois Press, 1972, 12ff, 31; Antun Barac et al., Geschichte der jugoslawischen Literaturen von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1977, 308ff, 341ff. See also Dimić, Agitprop kultura, 198ff. 28 Dobrica Ćosić, Daleko je Sunce, Belgrade: Prosveta, 1966 (12th edition, first published in 1951); On the trial and the Chetnik followers, see 365‑374, on Chetnik terror, 27‑28, 233‑234, 247. Ćosić became a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party in 1941 and took part in the Partisan struggle as political commissary of a unit in central Serbia. 29 Branko Ćopić, Prolom, (Sabrana dela Branka Ćopića, knjiga treća), Beograd: Prosveta, 1966 (first published in Belgrade, 1952), 124. See also 100ff. During the war, Ćopić was political commissary of a Partisan unit and correspondent of the communist newspaper Borba. 30 Ibid, 121‑122, 126. 31 Ibid, e.g. 267, 280‑281, 472‑473.

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Titoist institutional historiography, 1945‑1960 Actual historical accounts of the Second World War and its massacres came several years later than the addressing of these issues in official statements, memoirs and poetry. The historical studies, however, reflect a more planned and lasting interpretative strategy that would continue to be presented and represented within the fields of academic and educational history in the fol‑ lowing decades. The field of twentieth century history and the interpretation of the Partisan war remained issues of essential concern for the Yugoslav com‑ munists through the first decades after the war. This chapter investigates the communication of the history of inter-Yugoslav Second World War massacres from the standpoint of public institutions of history research and education, in the late 1940s and in the 1950s. It shows how the communist regime endeavoured to dominate historical culture and ensure that history communication remained in concurrence with the general interpretative framework promoted from the official side. It also shows that history writing did indeed refer to the massacres, in detailed studies as well as in general syntheses.

Breaking with Stalinism From its establishment in 1945 Yugoslavia was swiftly working its way towards a Stalinist system. But due to its relatively short period as official ideology, Stalinism was never thoroughly established outside the political and adminis‑ trative system. Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet bloc in 1948 brought major changes. On the one hand, it led to new conditions within politics and the spheres of cultural production and, on the other, to new and further demands to the interpretation of the Partisan struggle. The Partisan war and the national liberation now had to serve also as an autochthonous socialist revolution, as worthy as that of the Soviet Union. The Soviet-Yugoslav conflict, the damning accusations from the Soviet leadership and the formal expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in June 1948 dealt a hard blow to the self-perception of the Yugoslav communists.1 As

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they sincerely believed that this was all based on misunderstandings, the Yugo‑ slavs initially handled the crisis by trying to prove themselves proper Stalinists, sternly following the marked road.2 Among the harsh points of criticism from the Cominform had been the slow progress of the collectivisation of agriculture. After their expulsion, the Yugoslav communists accelerated collectivisation by ruthless use of force. Stalinist methods were employed to clean the Yugoslav party of all real and suspected Soviet sympathisers who were then interned in concentration camps not unlike the Gulag. Particularly infamous was the camp at the Adriatic island Goli Otok, which was to become a major theme in dissident literature of the 1980s. As their condemnation and isolation from the rest of the Soviet bloc proved to be a lasting condition, the Yugoslavs were forced to search for alternatives. At the turn to the 1950s a new ideological line was on its way. In June 1950, Yugoslavia’s first law declaring workers’ self-management was adopted. At the Sixth Party Congress in November 1952, Tito declared that by placing the management of enterprises in the hands of the workers, the state had taken its first step towards ‘withering away’.3 To emphasise the break with Soviet-style communism, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. It was decided that communists were to influence politics and economics by persuasion rather than command. In 1953 Yugoslavia’s Stalinist constitution was revised with the aim of manifesting a new line of decentralist socialism. Yugoslavia also had to establish itself in a different position internationally. The Yugoslavs turned to the Western capitalist powers, and economic aid, much of which came from the USA, started to flow into the country, peaking in 1953.4 There were, however, limits to the liberalisation of communist Yugoslavia. When in late 1953 Milovan Djilas, one of Tito’s most trusted lieutenants, in a series of articles attacked the communist system, warning against the dangers of bureaucratisation and calling for further democratisation, he passed the line of acceptable communist behaviour. In January 1954, at a live broadcast Central Committee plenum, Djilas was renounced by Tito, Kardelj and other top communists. He received a final warning and was purged from the Central Committee and the presidium.5 A few months later Djilas left the League of Communists on his own initiative and continued his fierce criticism of the communist system. His activities resulted in several prison sentences. Never‑ theless, the fact that a communist top figure escaped from such heresy and abundant attacks on the League of Communists alive testifies to the less severe character of the Titoist regime in comparison with conditions in the countries of the Soviet bloc.

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Soon after Stalin’s death, in the summer of 1953, the new Soviet leadership initiated a process of reconciliation between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. This culminated in 1955, with an excuse from the side of the Soviets, and in 1956, when Tito visited Moscow and signed an agreement of cooperation be‑ tween the Soviet and the Yugoslav Communist Parties. However, relationships soon deteriorated following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956, which Tito reluctantly supported, while at the same time criticising the Soviets for alienating the Hungarian people. However, communist Yugoslavia clearly preferred to see itself as belonging within a socialist community.6 The Djilas crisis and the fear of a Hungarian style counter-revolution worried Yugoslav communist leaders and made them cautious against further liberalisations in the following years. But Yugoslavia’s insistence on communist ideals and the courting of alliances with the Soviet bloc aside, it remained independent, following its own path of gradual reforms, decentralisation and limited liberalisation. The particular Yugoslav style also characterised the relationship between regime and historiography. Though not as Stalinist or strictly directed as in other communist states, history, especially that of the recent period, remained an area of political concern and supervision.

Historiography and society Due to its short period in authority, Stalinism never thoroughly penetrated Yugoslav historiography.7 Already in 1949, Kardelj encouraged Yugoslav histo‑ rians to strive for a more creative use of Marxist historical theory.8 In spite of the introduction of a new ruling ideology, it was not possible to install thoroughly a new line of history at the universities. In general, the Communist Party did not have much support at the Universities. In 1948 only 7% of the University professors were party members, and most of them were newly accepted into the party and often not very dogmatic.9 In Belgrade, many of the old ‘bourgeois-educated’ professors remained in place after the introduction of the new regime, partly by escaping into more ancient and less politically sensitive fields of history.10 Nevertheless, academic history research and writing remained under the supervision of the League of Communists through the ideological commissions for history. Historical associations were established on communist initiative in all Yugoslav republics shortly after the Second World War. The Party used these associations to influence the historians’ environment politically and ideologi‑

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cally. According to one communist official, the main responsibilities of the historians were to clean history of bourgeois falsifications and to supply the youth with a correct assumption about their history.11 Republican Historical Associations began to cooperate in 1950, and in 1955 an umbrella association, the League of Historical Associations of Yugoslavia, was established. Coop‑ eration between the historians’ environments in the Yugoslav republics was thereby formalised under the supervision of the party. Certain parts of Yugoslav historical culture were deeply politically embed‑ ded. Modern and contemporary history were fields that touched on themes relevant for the political legitimacy of the League of Communists, and these fields were strongly characterised by political considerations and influenced by personal ties to the party. Whereas the communists generally struggled with mobilising Yugoslav academic historians, party membership was the norm among historians of the twentieth century. According to one observer, Yugoslav contemporary historiography did not understand itself as an independent science. Rather, contemporary historiogra‑ phy played a functional role in relation to politics by accepting the task of the socialisation of people according to communist conformity.12 Speeches from the party’s leading figures possessed strong “normative powers”, and at times politicians demanded that certain aspects and explanations be emphasised.13 More than ideologically constrained, twentieth century history was subordi‑ nated to and supervised by practical politics. The history of the Second World War in Yugoslavia was particularly im‑ portant. In the first decades after the war, accounts of the National Liberation Struggle were the property of Partisan veterans and much of the material published consisted of personal memoirs.14 As stated in one of the earliest historical overviews of the war: The National Liberation Struggle of the Yugoslav peoples can only be described fully and regularly by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, for its cadres partici‑ pated in, led and carried out our peoples’ revolution to final victory and lay the foundations for a new social order in our country – socialism.15

Under the supervision of the department of Agitation and Propaganda, headed by Milovan Djilas, an image of the war was forged, which, rather than rejecting the violent nationalism that had cost so many lives, stressed a joint Yugoslav Partisan struggle against the Germans. In spite of relaxations and ideological changes, this struggle was to remain the central theme of Yugoslav historiog‑ raphy until the 1980s.16

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The Communist Party was reluctant to admit the significant variation in support for the National Liberation Struggle among the Yugoslav nations, and it hesitated to recognise that in some regions Croats may have supported the Ustasha. Though the war had been fought largely between peasant populations supporting different war parties, national hatred was blamed on the foreign invaders, the ruling class and the bourgeoisie in general, and not on the work‑ ing people. The purpose of this was not only to consolidate communist power, but also to strengthen post-war national equality. This insistence on national equality or symmetry in the contribution to the Partisan war was, according to some observers, one of the fundamental principles in Tito’s Yugoslavia.17

Education Education is a crucial element of historical culture. Primary and secondary school, the formative years of childhood and youth, are obvious fields for a stately structure to attempt to influence the self-perception and world-view of its future citizens.18 This was no less so in Socialist Yugoslavia, where the education system and children’s pioneer organisation aimed at raising good workers and citizens with a healthy socialist conscience. From the establishment of the federal state, responsibility for education lay, at least officially, at the republican level. Though it had been proposed to centralise education and introduce unified textbooks, this was abandoned. In 1948, the Party criticised some of the republican curricula in history and literature for being overtly nationalistic, and initiatives were taken to centralise education planning. A federal Ministry of Science and Culture was established, but shortly afterwards abolished.19 There were no common curricula either. The republics were allowed to choose their own texts for cultural disciplines, such as history and literature. This gave room for differences in the study programs, which were planned and published by the republican Ministries of Education. An analysis of the programs published in 1947 has shown significant variations, for example regarding the degree of specificity on required reading about the interwar period.20 At the 3rd plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in 1950, Milovan Djilas as head of the Department for Agitation and Propaganda gave a speech in which he discussed “the problems of the school system in the struggle for socialism in our country”. Djilas claimed that Yugoslavia’s socialist revolution was the beginning of a new historical era, for which everything else was just a long prehistory. As the revolution had been founded in Marxism-

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Leninism, Djilas argued, so also must the educational system be based on these principles. The goal of the education was the construction of “a socialist man who loves his country and honours other peoples”.21 Djilas emphasised the importance of pre-school education and leisure activities, such as the pioneer and youth movements and the involvement of the families in school activities, obviously also with the aim of framing and reforming the citizens of socialist Yugoslavia. Finally, he pointed out the need for new and better schoolbooks, particularly in the social sciences, “because they are translated from Russian, and in them are not only great general ideological weaknesses, but also erroneous, unscientific and underestimating treatments of not just other peoples’, but also of our own national history”.22 The third plenum of the Central Committee adopted a statement on the tasks of the school system that echoed Djilas’ points.23 The statements of Djilas and the Central Committee plenum regarding the politics of education in Yugoslavia in 1950 clearly demonstrate how the school system was seen as instrumental in the construction of the desired socialist citizens. Furthermore, it is clear that the break with the Soviet bloc and the consequent new demands to the interpretations of social science and history in particular resonated also in the sphere of schooling. Thus, Yugoslavia’s denunciation of its Soviet communist heritage also led to the rewriting of its history from a patriotic Yugoslav rather than an internationalist communist perspective. To my knowledge, no detailed study has yet been published on the rep‑ resentation of the Second World War in Yugoslav history textbooks from the first decades after the war. But studies of individual examples testify that history textbooks were strongly ideologised, teaching the students patriotism, glorifying the communists and the Partisans, and expecting the students to study the history of the National Liberation Struggle.24 In the introduction to a textbook for the third grade of primary school, printed in 1952, Tito wrote to the young students: “Every pioneer must know the history of our struggle. … It is easy to learn because it is very interesting and because it is the duty of every pioneer”.25 The simple schematic presentation of the war was repeated in a more outspoken version in the textbook material: in the war, the good patriotic Partisans fought and protected the people against enemies and trai‑ tors. The textbooks hardly differentiated between Ustasha and Chetniks, and the ethnic element was strongly downplayed: in one case the people killed in Jasenovac were simply termed patriots.26 An analysis of abc textbooks from these years also demonstrates that Tito and the Partisan struggle were featured prominently.27 The students were to

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imitate and follow the offered idols: Tito and the Partisans. Numerous read‑ ings were about the Partisans’ efforts. Tito was clearly the prime focus of identification; one of the earliest textbooks, published in 1944, even started with the letters I, O and T, to enable the students to spell the name of their great leader.28 In some of the early textbooks, the enemies of the Partisans were dedicated substantial space. In a textbook from 1944, which was also in use after the war, the students could read: For all evil and misery, not only the Germans, but also the domestic traitors will be responsible … The degenerates of the Croatian people are Ustasha, and the degenerates of the Serbian people are the Chetniks, Ljotics and Nedics. …29

The early textbooks show that the Yugoslav educational system developed a cult around Tito and the Partisans, who were idolised as good examples to follow. On the evil side were the Partisans’ opponents, the traitors, carefully balanced between different Yugoslav peoples. The education of able and politically acceptable teachers for primary and secondary schools was among the main duties of the higher educational insti‑ tutions. Due to its political sensitivity, contemporary history was not taught at the University of Belgrade for more than a decade, from 1944 to 1958. In 1953 Vladimir Dedijer, Partisan veteran, political commissary during the war, journalist and author of Tito’s official biography, was appointed professor for the new subject “History of the people’s revolution”. But due to Dedijer’s sup‑ port for Milovan Djilas in the latter’s confrontation with the party elite, his lectures were boycotted and he was expelled from Belgrade University. Instead the first course on contemporary history was given in 1958 by Jovan Marjanović, who was director of the historical archives and absolutely trustworthy for the League of Communists because of his credentials as Partisan veteran and top communist functionary.30 History was a central concern in the education of the Communist Party cadre as well. This meant that history was also taught at various types of Party schools and courses. The Party’s research institutions, such as the Institute of Social Sciences, were used to educate the Party cadre and Party historians. This institute was also entrusted with delicate problems, as for example investigat‑ ing the interwar period in a manner acceptable to League of Communists perspectives.31

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Titoist historiography of the massacres Within the academic and professional fields of history, significant efforts were made to document the experiences of the National Liberation War and the Partisans’ exploits. Large collections of sources from the warfare in each re‑ public and region were published, a project that was also accelerated as a consequence of the break with the Cominform and the need to emphasise the merits of the domestic revolution.32 The war was described as an uncom‑ promising, superhuman and all-sacrificing effort, and the Partisan leadership would be exorbitantly praised for their genius and clear-sightedness.33 It was regularly underlined that each region and republic followed its own individual road via Partisan struggle to social revolution, which probably also reflected the Yugoslav need to insist that theirs was as valuable a revolutionary path as that of the Soviet Union. In comparison to the strong focus on the strategic developments of the Partisan warfare, war crimes and massacres received relatively little attention.34 But in spite of the relatively few publications about wartime atrocities, these were not completely absent. In the late 1940s and in the 1950s, historical studies were published, in which harassments and massacres committed by Ustasha or Chetnik units were described. The dominant themes of these books were the Ustasha and their relation to the Catholic Church. Later, during the 1950s, the first attempts were made at synthesising the Partisan war. Main examples of these trends are analysed in the following.

The ndh and the Catholic Church From the late 1940s, the Ustasha movement and the question of its relationship with the Catholic Church were the subject of several studies. One of the first and most comprehensive studies of this relationship is Vic‑ tor Novak’s Magnum Crimen, published in 1948. Though belonging to the old group of bourgeois historians, Novak was highly respected in the historians’ environment in Socialist Yugoslavia.35Magnum Crimen constitutes more than 1,100 pages dedicated to the investigation of Croatian clericalism in the 20th century. One of the main theses of the study is that the Croatian Catholic Church was accomplice to the Ustasha movement in the forced conversion of the Serbs in the ndh, and that members of the Catholic organisation were active leaders of some of the worst excesses of the Ustasha regime.36 More than 200 pages of Novak’s book are concerned with terror and forced conversions in the ndh.

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Novak recounts the persecution of Orthodox clergy, and he cites numerous examples of massacres and harassment of the Serbian population from all over the ndh.37 He describes how terror, torture and mass murder of thousands of villagers was used to create a psychological pressure to make the Orthodox Serbs convert to Catholicism. The book also gives examples of cases in which the call for conversion was used as an opportunity of mass slaughtering, or for collecting young girls, who were then locked in Serbian churches, raped and killed.38 The book contains lists and profiles of individual priests, friars, teachers at Franciscan schools and lay brothers, who supported and sometimes actively participated in massacres against Serbs. Some were also regular members of the Ustasha movement.39 This cooperation, according to Novak, existed even at the top of the Ustasha and Catholic hierarchies, also at the level of the Bishops, and the ndh is presented as a common product of the Ustasha leader Ante Pavelić and the Zagreb Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac.40 In Novak’s account, the main victims of the Ustasha and Catholic crimes are openly defined as Serbs, though it is underlined that also supporters of the Partisan movement were subject to terror. The perpetrators are the Ustasha and to a large extent also the Croatian Catholic clergy. Novak does not use the word genocide for the crimes against Serbs in the ndh, but his descriptions cover many of its related meanings: for example “cleansing”, “extermination”, “terror”, “slaughtering”, “persecution” etc.41 Novak’s book was received with acclaim, it is widely cited, and it was reprinted in 1986.42 Novak’s point about the Catholic Church’s complicity in the crimes against Serbs in the ndh was also restated in other works in the following years. In an account and selection of ‘secret documents’ on the relationship between the Vatican and the ndh, published by the Society of Croatian Journalists in 1952, it is claimed that the reprinted documents should convince any reader that the Vatican played a “satanic role” during the Second World War, and that the Vatican, headed by the Pope, were open and brutal enemies of Yugoslavia and its peoples.43 In this book, Ustasha crimes are regu‑ larly mentioned, but only superficially described. Yet it is clearly stated that Orthodox Serbs were by far the main victims of these crimes committed by the Ustasha with support and assistance from the Catholic Church.44 Massacres and crimes are largely absent in another study on the role of the Catholic Church in the ndh, Prekrštavanje Srba za vreme drugog svetskog rata, (Conversion of Serbs during the Second World War), published by Sima Simić in 1958. Rather than recounting the brutal circumstances, Simić analyses published speeches by leaders of the Ustasha movement, in which the program of either forced assimilation or abolishment of Serbs was clearly expressed.

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Simić concludes that the aim of the Ustasha was a Croatia without Serbs and that it shows from their praxis that “…they had two plans for the realisation of this goal: mass killings and forced conversion to Catholicism.”45 Examining statements from representatives of the Croatian Catholic clergy, Simić then proposes that the policy of the Catholic clergy ran parallel to this and that the Ustasha plans and practices of forced conversions was welcomed and accepted by the Croatian Catholic clergy, and also by the Vatican.46 As is clear from the title of the study, in Simić’s presentation the Orthodox Serbs are explicitly thematized as primary victims of this policy. Guilt is not associated with the Croat nation, and Simić underlines that Croat politicians in exile criticised the conversions.47 The Ustasha and the clergy, collectively, are the culprits, that is, Catholicism and fascism are to blame. Though focusing on the crimes and massacres of the Second World War, these books about the wartime complicity of Catholic clergy and the Vatican were obviously not in conflict with regime perspectives. On the contrary, their descriptions and condemnation of the actions and attitude of the Croatian priesthood and the Vatican were quite in concurrence with the communists’ enmity towards religion, and the Catholic Church in particular. The ethnic‑ ity of the victims was freely and even pointedly stated. But even though the Catholic clergy was obviously Croatian, none of the books connect the war crimes with the Croatian nation.

Pavelić and the ndh The booklet Pavelić constitutes a short popular history about the leader of the Ustasha and the ndh, published in 1952 by the communist writer and jour‑ nalist Šime Balen.48 This relatively short book is written in an unproblematic language. It is easy to read and with few references and no notes, but numerous excerpts from sources, it was clearly intended for the general public. Balen is quite explicit in his judgement of Pavelić and the Ustasha organi‑ sation: in his introduction he states that Ante Pavelić was the bloodiest of all European quislings, that none of the others have committed equal crimes in their own countries and that the concentration camps of the Ustasha in no way lagged behind the most infamous of Himmler’s camps. Furthermore, according to Balen: “Pavelić placed in his program an unprecedented task – to physically annihilate a whole people, the Serbian people, which made up one-third of the population of his Independent State of Croatia.”49 Pavelić’ massacres against the Serbs, according to Balen, are in the same class as the acts of Attila and Dzengis Khan.

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Ill. 5.1. Ustasha slaughterers. The original caption reads: “The Ustasha swam so much in blood that they often photographed how they slaughtered …”. From Balen, Pavelić.50

The crimes and terror of the Ustasha regime are obviously thematized in this book. The ndh is described as a “bloody jungle of lawlessness and terror”.51 The massacres and terror of the Ustasha are openly accounted for, some of the most brutal examples in thorough detail. Balen quotes a long testimony from a young Ustasha soldier, who describes how he was educated as a proper Ustasha killer by being forced to knife young children.52 Jasenovac is described as far worse than Dante’s hell; “There is no pen that can describe it! All words are too weak. …”53 Balen also recounts the widespread massacres of mainly Serbian but also pro-Partisan villages by Ustasha units all over the ndh. In a long quote, the single survivor of a massacre in Glina testifies how about 700 Serbs were collected in a church to convert to Catholicism, but instead they were tortured with knifes, killed and thrown into pits.54 The focus of Balen’s book is, as the title suggests, Ante Pavelić. In discussing the causes for Ustasha’s brutal politics, Balen points out that Pavelić nursed an old hatred towards Serbs and, furthermore, that he, and his wife as well, were perverted sadists.55 It is emphasised that Pavelić and the Ustasha had no hold on the Croatian population and that the take over of power in the ndh was based on betrayal. The author thereby distances the common Croatian people from the practices of the ndh. Balen also suggests that the politics of massacres and persecution were actually a service to the Ustasha’s masters in Berlin and Rome, who benefited

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from a fratricidal war in Yugoslavia. The reader is further reminded that Draža Mihailović and the Chetniks executed the other half of this politics, and Balen thereby, while focusing on Pavelić and the Ustasha, spreads war guilt and complicity among several nations.56

Towards a historical synthesis While most early writings about the National Liberation War tackled particular regions and local developments, few attempts were made to synthesise the complex war history. One of the first overviews of wartime history was made in the early 1950s by two communist veterans and army officers. In this Pregled historije narodnooslobodilačkog rata i revolucije naroda Jugoslavije (Survey of the history on the national liberation war and the revolution of the Yugoslav peoples), inter-Yugoslav war crimes and ethnic issues in general are close to absent. Focus is exclusively on strategic developments and Partisan tactics. The mass slaughtering of Serbs in the ndh is only barely mentioned, but apart from that, the victims mentioned are communists, antifascists and “our country”. The book refers to the concentration camps at Jasenovac and elsewhere and states that “freedom fighters” were taken there and mass slaughtering committed.57 Thus, in this presentation, focus is on the anti-communist and anti-Partisan rather than the nationalist and racial side of Ustasha crimes. A short overview of the war was also given in another of the authoritative works from the standpoint of the Yugoslav communists, the classic Tito biogra‑ phy of 1953, written by the renowned Partisan and journalist-historian Vladimir Dedijer. Here massacres and atrocities are described in some detail. Referring to Ustasha’s practices of “mass extermination” and “some of the worst murder‑ ing” of the Second World War, Dedijer describes how “whole villages were led in front of huge graves and here men and women, mothers and children were slaughtered and thrown into them. At other places people were simply thrown into ravines.”58 However, Dedijer immediately afterwards points to the massa‑ cres committed by Serbian “quislings” on Muslims and Croats in Bosnia, though these are accounted for less explicitly. The war crimes committed by Serbian and Croatian quislings are literally described as two sides of the same thing, namely Hitler’s occupation policy in Yugoslavia. Thus the crimes and responsibility are associated with the occupation forces, and crimes of complicity are carefully balanced between collaborators of different Yugoslav nationality. The concentration camp of Jasenovac, one of the issues to be hotly dis‑ puted from the 1980s, not least by Dedijer himself, is hardly mentioned in the

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biography. Dedijer turns to it only in a note in the final chapter dealing with the post-war reconstruction of Yugoslavia, claiming that more than 200,000 were killed in that camp during the war.59 This number was significantly lower than what was stated elsewhere and also in Dedijer’s own later accounts. Among the first attempts at a serious synthetised overview of the history of the Second World War in Yugoslavia from the standpoint of professional historiography was Jovan Marjanović and Pero Morača’s Naš oslobodilački rat i narodna revolucija 1941‑1945. Istoriski pregled (Our liberation war and national revolution 1941‑1945. Historical Survey), published in Belgrade in 1958. Marjanović and Morača were prominent figures in the historiography of Yugoslavia’s Second World War, and both had strong ties to the League of Communists.60 This book was intended as a survey of the history of the war and was written for the general public: short, without notes and in an easily comprehensible language. Marjanović and Morača’s book illustrates the state of the art of narrating the Second World War in socialist Yugoslavia. The Par‑ tisans’ warfare is simultaneously described as a patriotic liberation war and a struggle for social revolution. In Marjanović and Morača’s presentation, the war is largely a project of the Nazi and Fascist enemies. From this perspective, the Ustasha and their crimes are tools of the occupiers, aimed at destroying the unity of the Yugoslav peoples.61 Genocidal policies and massacres are described only superficially, and crimes as well as perpetrators are parallelised, meaning that on the one side are enemies and collaborators committing atrocities, and on the other are the communists and the people protecting Yugoslav unity: The communists together with the people sharply condemned the national persecu‑ tions that were committed from the first days of the occupation by the Ustasha in parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, by the Magyar fascists in Vojvodina, and by the Germans in Slovenia.62

The authors emphasise that the Ustasha were totally dependent on the Axis powers and weapons, and that the Croat people did not support them.63 War crimes and massacres are thereby externalised as belonging to the occupiers and collaborators, while the whole Yugoslav people, here referred to in the singular, probably to emphasise its unity and disregarding ethnic differences, stands united against them. Marjanović and Morača’s study is carefully balanced also when it comes to participation in the Partisan struggle. The book contains regular summa‑ ries of strategic developments and victories in every Yugoslav region, thereby

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emphasising that every Yugoslav nation and region contributed vitally to the Partisan struggle. The Chetniks, one of Marjanović’s fields of expertise, are analysed in greater detail. According to Marjanović and Morača, their main task, rather than fight‑ ing for liberation of the country, was to safeguard the position of the royal government. Thus they were against the Partisans, because they supported “the rotten and corrupt bourgeois order of Yugoslavia”.64 Instead of contributing to the uprising, they turned the people’s enthusiasm “in the direction of plundering and annihilation of Muslim and Croat citizens, exploiting in their propaganda the terrible Ustasha terror against the Serbian people. …”65 Numerous examples of Chetnik massacres against non-Serb citizens and villages are mentioned, but never in detail. According to the authors, the Chetniks were used in much the same way as the Ustasha to sharpen the hatred between Serbs, Muslims and Croats and spread “the fratricidal slaughtering”. In general, the Chetniks are presented as co-responsible for much of the inter-Yugoslav fighting during the war, and they are particularly blamed for the conflict with the Partisans.66 One of the main themes of Marjanović and Morača’s book, as the title itself suggests, is the way the Partisan war should be seen as both a national liberation fight and a social revolution. The authors argue that the Partisan motto “Death to fascism – freedom to the people” covers both of these aims. Fascism thus refers to the Axis occupiers as well as to their Yugoslav helpers, who support an ideology of hunger, death, plundering, slavery, massacres and terror. Freedom means freedom to the working people as well as freedom from fascism, but also freedom from everything dark and reactionary, from national oppression, exploitation and hunger. To the communists, according to Marjanović and Morača, the Partisan struggle was not only a contribution to the international anti-Axis front, but also a possibility of establishing a new Yugoslav army, free territories and new types of people’s government.68 Thus, in this synthesis of the wartime history, liberation struggle and social revolution are united, which means also that the Partisans’ opponents carry the combined functions of traitorous collaborators and reactionary counter‑ revolutionary forces. In this double stigmatisation, perpetrators of massacres are not emphasised or singled out. The issue of mass war crimes is, so to speak, drowned in a very politically loaded narrative of the Partisans’ and the people’s struggle for national liberation and social revolution against the occupiers and all the “traitorous forces of counterrevolution”. Marjanović and Morača recount how the Yugoslav Partisans had to fight for six more days at the Austrian border, after the Germans had capitulated all over Europe:

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Ill. 5.2. “The Pavelić guard at its bloody work in Bosnia, 1943”, in Marjanović and Morača, Naš oslobodilački rat i narodna revo‑ lucija.67

In this last offensive for the final liberation of the country, JA [the Yugoslav Army] annihilated all enemy forces that were in the spring of 1945 located on Yugoslav soil. On this occasion, about 300,000 enemy officers and soldiers were killed or captured. …69

Though the word “annihilation” is used in the description, the more trou‑ blesome details about this final showdown with the enemies, including the massacre of thousands of these soldiers and officers by Partisan are not at all discussed. The book repeats the official number of victims stated by the State commis‑ sion in 1946, that is 1,706,000 people, emphasising that “the largest number of these victims perished in the bestial fascist slaughtering of the population”, and that 800,000 men, women and children were killed in Jasenovac.70 Marjanović’ and Morača’s book summarises the main points and perspec‑ tives of Yugoslav Second World War historiography. Included herein are also massacres and war crimes against specific ethnic groups. But these issues are largely overshadowed by the main narrative of patriotic peoples and Partisans against traitors and fascists. As shown, this way of narrating Yugoslavia’s Second World War characterised most communist historiography in this period. The political and ideological use of wartime history was manifest, not least in the educational system. Historians created a single monolithic narrative

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about a united patriotic and freedom loving Yugoslav people. In focus was allYugoslav patriotism as opposed to fascism and collaboration. Chetniks, Ustasha and other anti-Partisan forces were not seen as Yugoslav national parties, but as traitors and collaborators subordinated the main enemies, the Nazi-fascist occupiers. Representations of wartime history downplayed Yugoslav national and ethnic questions, and thereby they also avoided the stigmatisation of any nation or national idea. Compared to the Partisans’ achievements, war crimes and massacres received very minor attention. Nevertheless, crimes and massacres were accounted for and at times analysed in great detail, openly stating the ethnicity of the victims as the cause of these crimes. As long as these accounts stayed in concordance with the officially promoted narrative of the war, they did not trouble the communists. Yet, two points seem untouchable in Titoist historiography: On the one hand, guilt of war crimes was not to be ascribed to any of the Yugoslav na‑ tional parties. And secondly, brutality and crimes on the part of the Partisans were not to be described. The atrocities committed against surrendered enemy forces did not become part of Yugoslav Second World War history before the end of the 1980s. By then, accounts of these massacres would fundamentally shatter the heroic image of the Partisans, not least in the Croatian public. N ote s 1

See e.g. Clissold, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, 202‑207.

2

Dennison Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment 1948‑1974, Berkeley and Los Angeles, Uni‑ versity of California Press, 1977, 33ff. For an almost contemporary account, see Adam B. Ulam, Titoism and the Cominform, Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1952, 96‑134, also Halperin, The triumphant heretic, 69‑94. For a discussion of changes and continuities in the Yugoslav politics, see also Lilly, Power and Persuasion, 161‑191.

3

Woodford McClellan, ‘Postwar Political Evolution’, in Wayne S. Vucinich, ed., Contemporary Yugoslavia. Twenty Years of Socialist Experiment, Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer‑ sity of California Press, 1969, 134.

4 Lampe, Yugoslavia as history, 257‑260. Also Branko Petranović, Istorija Jugoslavije 1918‑1988, III, Belgrade: Nolit, 1988, 242‑246. 5

A summary of the Djilas affair can be found in Stephen Clissold, Djilas. The Progress of a revolutionary, Hounslow, Middlesex: Maurice Temple Smith, 1983, 231‑246.

6

On the relationship between the Yugoslav and the Soviet leadership in these years, see e.g. Russinow, The Yugoslav Experiment, 87‑95.

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7

See e.g. Mirjana Gross, ‘Die Jugoslawische Geschichtswissenschaft von heute’, Osterreichische Osthefte, 8, 1966, 239.

8

Kardelj in Istoriski Časopis, 2, 1949‑1950, 11. Quoted in Höpken, ‘Von der Mythologisi‑ erung zur Stigmatisierung’, 172.

9

Lilly, ‘Problems of Persuasion’, 410.

10 Stanković and Dimić, Istoriografija pod nadzorom, 200. Also Stevan K. Pawlovitch, The improbable survivor. Yugoslavia and its Problems, 1918‑1988, London: Hurst, 1988, 129‑130. 11 Stanković and Dimić, Istoriografija pod nadzorom, 239‑240. 12 Höpken, ‘Von der Mythologisierung zur Stigmatisierung’, 171. 13 See e.g. Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question, 198‑201; Höpken, ‘Von der Mythologisierung zur Stigmatisierung’, 168. 14 Ibid, 204. See also Dimić, ‘Od tvrdnje do znanja’, 201‑203; Gross, ‘Die Jugoslawische Geschichtswissenschaft von heute’, 239, 241. 15 Tomo Čubelić and Milovan Milostić, Pregled historije narodnooslobodilačkog rata i revolucije naroda Jugoslavije, Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1963 (11th edition, reprint of 2nd enlar‑ ged edition, Zagreb, 1952) 5. 16 Lampe, Yugoslavia as history, 236‑237. 17 Predrag Marković, ‘Istoričari i jugoslovenstvo u socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji’ Jugoslovenski Istorijski Časopis, 34, 2001, 1‑2, 154; Djilas, The Contested Country, 162. 18 On the relationship between schooling and the national state, see e.g. Ernest Gellner, Nations and nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996 (first published 1983), 35ff. 19 Lilly, ‘Problems of Persuasion’, 402‑403; Lampe, Yugoslavia as history, 237. 20 Andrew Wachtel and Predrag Marković, ‘A Last Attempt at Educational Integration: The Failure of Common Educational Cores in Yugoslavia in the early 1980’s’, in Lenard J. Cohen and Jasna Dragović-Soso, eds., State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe. New Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2008, 205‑206. 21 Milovan Đilas, Problemi školstva u borbi za socijalizam u našoj zemlji. Rezolucija III. plenum ck kpj o zadacima u školstvu, Zagreb: Kultura, 1950, 13. 22 Ibid, 20. 23 Ibid, 47‑55. 24 Stanković and Dimić, Istoriografija pod nadzorom., 206ff. 25 Quoted in ibid. 26 Ibid, 207. 27 Radina Vučetić, ‘abc textbooks and Ideological Indoctrination of Children: “Socialism Tailor-made for Man” or “Child Tailor-made for Socialism?’, in Slobodan Naumović

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and Miroslav Jovanović, eds., Childhood in South East Europe: Historical Perspectives on Growing Up in 19th and 20th Century, Belgrade: Čigaja, 2001, 251. 28 Ibid, 253. 29 Quoted in ibid, 256‑257. This textbook was originally intended for the education of il‑ literate Partisans, but it was also used in primary school in the first post-war years. 30 Stanković and Dimić, Istoriografija pod nadzorom, 1996, 211‑212. Also in Predrag Marković, Miloš Ković and Nataša Milićević, ‘Developments in Serbian Historiography since 1989’, in Ulf Brunnbauer, (Re)writing History: Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism, Münster: lit Verlag, 2004, 278. 31 Ibid, 256f, 262. 32 Stanković and Dimić, Istoriografija pod nadzorom, 186. 33 See e.g. the introduction to Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o narodno-oslobodilačkom ratu jugoslovenskih naroda. Tom V, Knjiga 1. ‘Borbe u Hrvatskoj 1941. God’. Beograd 1952. 34 In the official bibliography of Yugoslav historiography from 1955 more than 300 works on the National Liberation Struggle are mentioned, of which about ten are said to be at least partly about the massacres. See Tadić, ed., Dix années d’historiographie Yougoslave. 35 Born and educated in Croatia, Novak was employed at the University of Belgrade in the interwar period. During the war, Novak was interned by the Germans in a prison camp near Belgrade. In 1947 he was appointed director of the Historical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and from 1948 he edited the institute’s periodical Istoriski Časopis (Historical Journal). See his obituary: Vladimir Stojančević, ‘Viktor Novak (10.II 1889 – 1.I 1977)’, Istoriski Časopis, xxiv, 1977, 5‑7. Also Ko je ko u Jugoslaviji. Biografski podaci o jugoslovenskim savremenicima, Belgrade: Sedma Sila, 1957, 500. 36 Novak, Magnum Crimen. Pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj, xii-xiii. 37 Ibid, particularly 617f, 645ff. 38 Ibid, e.g. 685. 39 Ibid, eg. 662‑678. 40 Ibid, eg. 784. 41 “čišćenje”, “istrebljenje”, “teror”, “pokolj”, “progon”. Ibid, 599‑804. 42 M. Marjanović, ‘Viktor Novak, Magnum Crimen’, Istoriski Časopis, 2, 1949‑1950, 268‑271 (at this time, Novak himself edited that journal). 43 Tajni dokumenti o odnosima Vatikana i ustaške ‘ndh’, Zagreb: Biblioteka Društva Novi‑ nara Hrvatske, 1952, 6. 44 Ibid, 86‑100. 45 Sima Simić, Prekrštavanje Srba ze vreme drugog svetskog rata. Titograd: Grafički Zavod, 1958, 45.

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46 Ibid, 49, 143ff. See also Sima Simić, Vatikan protiv Jugoslavije, Titograd: Grafički Zavod, 1958, in which he elaborates his interpretation of the Vatican’s anti-orthodox policies in South Eastern Europe, particularly p. 129, 132. 47 Simić, Prekrštavanje Srba, 151‑152. 48 Balen had been a member of the Communist Party since 1935 and participated in the Partisan struggle as member of the avnoj as well as the Croatian regional anti-fascist council, the zavnoh. See e.g. his obituary: Bozidar Novak, ‘Osnivac “Vjesnika”, vjernik novinarstva’, Vjesnik, 18th March 2004, 5. 49 Šime Balen, Pavelić, Zagreb: Hrvatska seljačka tiskara, 1952, 6. Also p. 60. 50 Ibid, 81. 51 Title of chapter 4 in ibid, 55. 52 Ibid, 78‑80. 53 Ibid, 83. 54 Ibid, 121‑126. 55 Ibid, 60‑61. 56 Ibid, 60, 112. 57 Čubelić and Milostić, Pregled historije narodnooslobodilačlog rata i revolucije naroda Jugoslavije, 58‑59. Čubelić taught at one of the Communist Party’s educational institutions, Milostić was a major in the Yugoslav army. 58 Vladimir Dedijer, Josip Broz Tito. Prilozi za biografiju, (2nd ed.), Belgrade: Kultura, 1953, 289. 59 Ibid, p. 545. 60 Partisan veteran and major of the reserve, Marjanović was a communist insider. In 1953 he was appointed director of the State Archives in Belgrade, and from 1958 he taught the course in contemporary history at the University of Belgrade. See Ko je ko u Jugoslaviji, 418. See also Stanković and Dimić, Istoriografija pod nadzorom, 211‑212; and Marković, Ković and Milićević, ‘Developments in Serbian Historiography since 1989’, 278. Morača held similar credentials: member of the communist youth movement since 1936, party member since 1941, and political commissary in a Partisan brigade during the war. After the war he headed the Department of the History of the Communist Party at the Military Academy in Belgrade, and he was director of the Military Museum and the Archive of Military History. From 1958 he was also secretary of the League of Communists’ commission for history. See Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, vol. 6, Zagreb, 1965, 160; Morača’s obituary in Istorija 20. veka, 1993, 1‑2, 258‑260. 61 Jovan Marjanović and Pero Morača, Naš oslobodilački rat i narodno revolucija 1941‑1945. (Istoriski pregled), Belgrade: Prosveta, 1958, 30. 62 Ibid, 40. 63 Ibid, 38‑39.

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64 Ibid, 62. 65 Ibid, 63‑64. 66 Ibid, e.g. 89‑91. 67 Ibid, 144‑145. 68 Ibid, 65ff, 71. 69 Ibid, 288. 70 Ibid, 290.

New perspectives on wartime history, 1960‑1980 In the 1960s and 1970s, socialist Yugoslavia provided a relatively stable politi‑ cal framework and comparatively high living standards. This was reflected in historical research, which was significantly expanded and, along with the politi‑ cal system, decentralised, resulting in individual and more nationally oriented research environments in each republic. The Yugoslav communists, feeling safe and self-sufficient, allowed re-consideration of their main legitimizing myth, that of the National Liberation Struggle. This chapter describes the main developments within Yugoslav historiogra‑ phy and investigates how wartime history, including questions of inter-Yugoslav massacres and war crimes, were re-addressed. It shows how new approaches challenged the politically dictated narrative of the Partisan war, and how, as a part of this, genocide was introduced as an issue within Yugoslav historiography.

Yugoslav politics The 1960s and 1970s were probably the proudest and most self-assured years of Yugoslav socialism. The communist regime remained safely in power, champi‑ oning its own version of socialist ideology under the catch phrase of ‘self-man‑ agement’ socialism. Seeing itself as an exponent of a successful line of socialist development, Yugoslavia held a prestigious position on the international scene as one of the leaders of the movement of non-alignment. Internally, the period was characterised by a continuing decentralisation of political power to the republics and provinces of the Yugoslav federation. The incitements for reforms were initially economic, but soon initiatives spilled over in the political sphere as well. In the summer of 1966, Aleksandar Ranković, vice president of the League of Communists and head of the security service udba (in 1964 renamed sdb), was ousted from the power circles on accusations of conspiracy against Tito and other party leaders.1 The removal of Ranković, who was regarded as a Serbian centralist hard-liner, was a clear victory to the liberal pro-reform wings of the Party. The road was paved for further liberalisa‑ tions and decentralisations of the Yugoslav system.

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From the mid-1960s the communist leadership, parallel to the trends of political decentralisation, abandoned whatever ideas had existed of a unitary Yugoslav nationality and stated that the individual Yugoslav nations would not be eliminated. The republics were now regarded as legitimate agents of popular sovereignty, and this laid the ground for subsequent political decentralisation. Beginning in 1969, regional party conferences were scheduled before the con‑ gresses of the Federal Party, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. From then on, agendas and decision-making power emanated from the periphery rather than from the federal centre, which was also confirmed by the 1974 constitution.2 Also, from the late 1960s, the autonomous provinces Kosovo and Vojvodina, which were integral parts of the Serbian republic, had obtained largely the same autonomy and influence in federal organs as the republics. From the 1960s, Yugoslav politics experienced several outbursts of social and national dissatisfaction. In 1968 Belgrade and other university cities were the scenes of massive student protests against market reforms and unemploy‑ ment, which probably warned the regime against too much openness and liberalisation. From 1967 to 1971, the so-called “Croatian Spring” or “Maspok” (from masovni pokret, meaning mass movement) dominated public life in the Croatian republic. Maspok was initiated by intellectuals who protested against what they saw as consistent discrimination against Croatia, both economically and culturally. The Croatian communist leadership, belonging to the liberal pro-reform wing of the party, allowed public manifestations of Croatian na‑ tionalism to continue until late 1971, when they culminated in massive student strikes and demonstrations. The Federal Party top then forced the Croatian leadership to resign, and the Croatian Communist Party was purged of thou‑ sands of its members, while the leading intellectuals received prison sentences.3 In Kosovo signs of dissatisfaction had been in the open since the fall of Ranković and his repressive security regime. In November 1968, Priština was the scene of violent anti-Serbian demonstrations, to which the regime reacted swiftly by imprisoning riot leaders and purging the League of Communists of Kosovo. Afterwards, however, concessions were made to the Kosovo Albanians, granting among other things a proper university in Priština and the right to fly the Albanian flag.4 In the early 1970s, after the implementations of liberal and decentralist reforms, liberal communist leaderships were removed in most republics, signal‑ ling the end of the reform process. Stable and reactionary Titoist cadres were to run Yugoslav politics through the 1970s. Though Yugoslavia’s economy remained troubled and the course of reforms was swaying, the country upheld comparably high living standards which

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enabled its citizens to participate in international consumer culture. Yugoslav society was rapidly modernised and urbanised, and an extensive educational system was established.5 In the face of economic recession in the early 1960s, Yugoslav workers were allowed to travel abroad as guest workers in German and other European industries. To facilitate the expanding tourist industry, Yugoslavia abolished the tourist visa in 1967.6 The considerable freedom of movement across the Yugoslav borders also allowed massive cultural imports and exports.

Professionalized historiography The conditions for Yugoslav historiography changed significantly in the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1960s, Yugoslav history research was significantly ex‑ panded, particularly the fields of modern and contemporary history.7 Party research institutions dedicated to the history of the workers’ movement were established in all Yugoslav republics. These were exclusively research institu‑ tions, in the same sense as the traditional ‘Academies of Sciences’ in Ljubljana, Zagreb and Belgrade, which also held departments of historical studies. The history of the Second World War in Yugoslavia was a subject of research at the federal level at the Military History Institute, at the Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade, and at the republican institutes for the study of the workers’ movement.8 From the 1960s, academic historical culture in Yugoslavia was increasingly professionalised, and based on academic education and formal methodological standards. Numerous skilled young history teachers and researchers were edu‑ cated. Contemporary history was taught at the universities in most republican and provincial capitals, that is, in Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Novi Sad, Skoplje, Priština and also in Zadar in Croatia.9 From mid-1960s a new generation of Second World War historians was entering Yugoslav historical culture. Instead of experience from the Partisan War, these young researchers had earned their credentials from university education and methodological and theoretical training. In the mid-1960s, the Party dominated institutes of the History of the Workers’ Movement and housed about 120 young educated researchers.10 A significant amount of Yugoslavia’s research in contemporary history was produced at these Institutes of the History of the Workers’ Movement. The work of these institutes was under more direct control from the Party’s histori‑ cal commissions than that of other research institutions. Yet it was an explicit

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aim from the side of the communists that historical research was to be of high scientific quality, produced by educated historians, and free of political pres‑ sure. Thus, more history was left to the historians, but the liberalisation was not unlimited. Historians were not allowed to be under “foreign influence”, they had to distance themselves from “bourgeois historiography” and avoid “individualism”, all of which were considered erroneous. In the end, the party had the last word, and it was still posing questions and demanding answers.11 Yugoslav academic history was mainly empirically oriented and much work was invested in collecting and editing sources as well as recording information. Between 1949 and 1965, enormous collections of documentation on the Na‑ tional Liberation War, amounting to 116 volumes, were edited and published by the Institute of Military History.12 Furthermore, new archives were opened, meaning that sources and circumstances finally allowed proper historical work on the National Liberation War, which, according to a contemporary judge‑ ment, had not been possible until then.13 Marxism, interpreted in traditional tones of dialectical materialism, re‑ mained a necessary interpretative framework, but after the first post-war decade most ideological obligations could be fulfilled by paying lip service in “alibi footnotes”.14 Most Yugoslav academic history stayed traditionally positivist, closely based on primary sources, and evaded theoretical challenges. In this way, it remained traditional into the 1980s.15 Yugoslav academic historiography was characterised by international aware‑ ness and orientation. Often West European and North American studies and journals were reviewed in Yugoslav historical journals. Academics were able to travel, participate in meetings and conferences and study abroad. Historical research cooperation crossed Yugoslavia’s borders, and though the majority concentrated on East European Socialist States, a significant part involved Western Europe or North America.

Republican and national research environments Parallel to the professionalisation and expansion of the field of historiography, the historians’ environments were distributed among the individual republics and provinces, each having their own universities and research institutions. Though extensive contacts remained across republican borders, for example at the meetings in the Yugoslav historians’ association, the republican and regional distribution of history research eventually led to separate research environments, each publishing their own academic journal, and each with

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their own regional fields of expertise, in effect regional and often national history. As a consequence, history was increasingly separated into local and national research. This allowed for more national perspectives on historical questions. In the 1960s and 1970, history polemics repeatedly evolved along national lines. Among the examples were the attempts to write an officially sponsored multivolume national history, Istorija Naroda Jugoslavia (History of the Peo‑ ples of Yugoslavia), which stranded in the 1960s, allegedly because it proved impossible for the historians of various nationalities to agree on how to write the third volume that was to cover the nineteenth century and the Yugoslav national movements.16 Another sensitive and fiercely disputed topic in Yugoslav historiography of the early 1960s was the role of Croat bourgeois politicians during the Second World War, particularly the Croat role in the April war of 1941 and the Axis invasion. This issue was most hotly debated between two Partisan veterans and army generals turned historians, Velimir Terzić and Franjo Tuđman, who was to be Croatia’s president in the 1990s. These two ex-Partisans seemed eager to establish a certain amount of national responsibility for the collapse of the Yugoslav Army in April 1941. Terzić proposed that the Croatian bourgeois politician Vladko Maček was to blame for the lack of enthusiasm among Croat soldiers in the defence of Yugoslavia. Tuđman defended the Croat effort, while underlining the negative influence of “great Serbian hegemon‑ ism” of the interwar period and of the government in exile.17 In reaction to the increasing nationalisation of historical discussions, Tito and the League of Communists criticised Yugoslav historiography repeatedly trough the 1960s for bourgeois nationalist tendencies.18 During the Croatian Spring in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the issue of Croatian history was interwoven with the national revival. In 1971, schoolteach‑ ers and authors of textbooks proposed that Croatian schoolbooks should allot more space to national history.19 The issue of Ustasha history and Second World War victims was raised by the journalist Bruno Bušić in Hrvatski Književni List, a journal of independent Croatian writers and one of the mouthpieces of the Maspok. Bušić argued that the numbers of victims were deliberately manipulated and that while Chetnik crimes were not really talked about, the horrors of the Ustasha regime were frequently described and the blame was ascribed to all of the Croatian people.20 Thus attacking the official interpre‑ tation of the war, which still stated that 1,706,000 had been killed, Bušić implicitly suggested that war history was anti-Croat propaganda. In fact, his critique of official wartime history was partly a call for Croatian national pride in opposition to the official communist version of history.

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As director of the Zagreb Institute of the History of the Worker’s Move‑ ment, Franjo Tuđman was closely associated with the circles of nationalist intellectuals. In 1967 he was forced to retire, and in 1972 he received a prison sentence together with numerous other Zagreb intellectuals. Tuđman was replaced as head of the Institute by Dušan Bilandžić, and the Party afterwards stated that “In the year 1967, the Institute was considered a nationalistic cen‑ tre. The same year the situation was cleaned up. Thus the weaknesses in the development of the institute were confronted.”21 Yet fierce historical discussions along national positions continued into the 1970s. In 1972, as the publication of the third volume of the common History of the Yugoslav Peoples was perpetually postponed, Vladimir Dedijer, Ivan Božić, Sima Ćirković and Milorad Ekmečić published a one-volume Istorija Jugoslavije (History of Yugoslavia). Unlike the History of the Yugoslav Peoples, this volume was not an official project, but an initiative from the Belgrade publishing house “Prosveta”.22 Particularly the contributions by Milorad Ekmečić on the nineteenth century and the national politics of this period caused consider‑ able dispute, not least from the Croatian historians’ side.23 As the book was written by four Serbian historians, three of them Belgrade-based, the discus‑ sions developed along national lines. At issue was the relationship between 19th century individual nationalism and Yugoslavism, but some observers, including Ekmečić himself, have claimed that below the discussion of Croa‑ tian nationalist politicians lay also the question of continuity from Croatian national awakening and ideologies of the nineteenth century to the Ustasha.24 The discussion could be seen as parallel to German confrontations with the past and continuity. Yet, it was inevitably even more sensitive and complicated, since it also involved divisions and confrontations among Yugoslavia’s nations, both in the case of 19th century Croatian and Serbian national ideologies and with regard to the underlying question of Croatian nationalism developing into Ustashism.25

New perspectives on Second World War history In spite of the growing independence of research in contemporary history, the general narrative and interpretative framework of Second World War history remained largely the same during the 1960s as dictated in the early post-war years.26 Yet, from the beginning of the 1970s, part of the mythical Partisan history was gradually relaxed and some of it was challenged by academic his‑ tory research and intellectual critique.

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One of the first openings of the hitherto orthodox narrative came from the very top of the communist hierarchy. On the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1972, Tito was interviewed about his life and career by Belgrade Radio and tv. As the discussion touched on the Second World War, the interviewer asked: “Much has been said and written about the events during the time of the armed struggle. Is there any significant moment or event about which you have not talked until now?”27 To this Tito answered in the affirmative, mentioning the example of the failed attempts to cooperate with Draža Mihailović, which developed into a class struggle between the bourgeoisie, including Draža, supporting the occupiers, and the Partisans standing on the side of the people. Tito further recounted, “it came to a heavy and bloody struggle. It came to a showdown, like in Croatia between Partisans and Ustasha”. Tito then admitted that the Ustasha in fact had a great influence on parts of Croatian society, and that the situation was similar in Slovenia. And then he stated: “It was, therefore, a civil war. But we did not want to talk about that during the war, because it would not have been useful for us.”28 Here Tito actually admitted that the National Liberation Struggle was not, as it had been presented earlier, simply a struggle between the Yugoslav peoples and the Partisans on the one side, and the fascists occupiers supported by the bourgeoisie on the other. Rather, it was a civil war in which large groups of people supported different sides, and though Tito insisted on the class struggle perspective, he admitted that there was a heavy and bloody struggle between Yugoslav forces. From the early 1970s, professional historians questioned the previous re‑ search on the war period. At a roundtable conference arranged by the periodical Gledišta in early 1972 several speakers criticised the low scientific level of this research, which, they complained, had predominantly been conducted by veterans of the Partisan movement and not by proper historians. They further criticised that the research had almost exclusively concentrated on military aspects of the war period, and one participant at the conference noted that the war historiography held several scientific blank spots, among them the actual numbers of victims and fighters during the war.29 Thus, it was argued from the side of academic historiography that it was time to open new perspectives on the war history. One of the issues pointed out was the real number of war victims, which in 1945 was established rather quickly to amount to 1,706,000. Attempts at more precise calculations had been initiated since then, but the conclusions were not published, probably due to the political sensitivity of the issue.30

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One of the most ambitious new approaches to Partisan history came from Rasim Hurem in his doctoral thesis Kriza nop-a u Bosni i Hercegovini krajem 1941. i početkom 1942. (The crisis of the National Liberation Movement in Bosnia and Hercegovina at the end of 1941 and beginning of 1942), published in Sarajevo 1972. Hurem’s thesis was defended in East Berlin and one of his supervisors was an East German professor. This connection to an academic environment outside Yugoslavia would have supplied Hurem’s work with outside perspectives as well as with relative independence from the academic environment in Sarajevo, which probably contribute to explaining the radi‑ cally new theses proposed in Hurem’s study. As suggested by the title, the book argued that the Partisan movement in late 1941 – early 1942 went through a severe crisis that developed most clearly in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It further claimed that the crisis manifested itself as ‘left deviation’ and ‘red terror’.31 In doing so, it did in fact constitute a strongly revisionist stand against hitherto written Partisan history. According to Hurem, Second World War historiography had until recently treated the National Liberation War and the revolution exclusively as epics, emphasising the fight against the occupiers and the Partisans’ success in uniting the Yugoslav peoples.32 In line with Tito’s statements in his birthday interview in May 1972, Hurem now argued that “the National Liberation Struggle was to a great extent mixed up with class struggle, and as such became a thing which mainly concerned the communists.”33 This class struggle perspective meant, amongst others, that the struggle against Chetnik supporters in fact included actions against a social stratum of powerful and wealthy farmers. Under the pretext of the ‘struggle against kulaks’ and the beginning of the ‘second phase’ of the revolution, a veritable pogrom against respected and wealthy farmers began.34 An essential element of this phase of the Partisan struggle was, according to Hurem, the so-called “fight against the fifth column”, classified by the Communist Party’s Central Committee as belonging to the most important tasks of the National Liberation Fight. The fifth column was defined as not only those in the service of the occupiers, but also included numerous political ‘enemies’ (neprijatelji) and ‘neutral’ (neutralci), people of different professions, ownership situation and societal status.35 Hurem further stated: Under the pretext of fighting the fifth column, liquidations were carried out not only of “today’s” enemies, that is of recognised opponents of the nob [Narodna oslobodilačka borba, the National Liberation Struggle], but also of persons who were not opponents: persons whose only error consisted in their having different

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political views, or simply being politically undecided. In other words, liquida‑ tions were carried out of persons who were not opponents: i.e. persons whom the people were not convinced were really enemies of the National Liberation Struggle.36

Hurem further described how the Shock Battalion of the Operative staff of the National Liberation Movement’s detachment for Hercegovina, known as the First Shock Battalion, served as an instrument for the physical liquidation of the fifth column. And he claimed that the First Shock Brigade, formed by the supreme staff, mercilessly eliminated anyone whom it considered to be fifth columnists paid by the occupiers.37 Among Hurem’s fiercest accusations is the claim that the Hercegovinian Partisan leadership and units terrorised, burnt and looted Muslim and Croat villages that were considered to be in opposition to the National Liberation Movement. Often the inhabitants of these villages were killed. Hurem suggests that in the first months of 1942, around 250 persons accused of belonging to the fifth column were shot. In the same period, more than 500 prominent Chetniks were killed in this ‘unmerciful cleansing’.38 In Rasim Hurem’s account, it is presented as a tremendous deed that the communists and the Partisan movement made their way through this crisis and broke with these policies in order to establish a broadly based anti-fascists peoples’ liberation movement, which in the end won the war and liberated Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, his attempt to write the ideological crisis, strategic mistakes and war crimes into a history of the Partisan movement was manifestly at odds with the ways Partisan history had been written until then. The idea in itself that the National Liberation Movement had experienced a severe ideologi‑ cal crisis was an anathema to traditional Yugoslav Second World War history. This attack on the infallibility of the Partisan movement came at a time when the ideological constraints of Yugoslav society were loosening and the regime felt safe enough to relax and open its own mythical genealogy. Even Tito had done so in his birthday interview. Yet, Hurem went further than most communists and contemporary historians were willing to accept. The book provoked various reactions. The sociologist Nebojša Popov quoted Hurem’s research as proof that the communist leadership of the Partisan move‑ ment, believing that the war would not last long, introduced already in 1941 “the second phase of the revolution”. This meant, according to Popov, that they had immediately from the start of the war initiated a class struggle and a struggle for political power in Yugoslavia, in essence a civil war parallel to the war for liberation.39

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Hurem’s book was severely criticised from various sides, including the Bosnian party leadership.40 The fact that the book was at the limits of what was tolerable within Yugoslav historical culture became obvious at a discussion in June 1975, which was arranged by Hurem’s own employer, the Institute for History in Sarajevo (until 1973, the Institute for the History of the Worker’s Movement).41 In his welcome and introduction, Rafael Brčić of the Institute regretted and apologised that this discussion had not taken place earlier. Brčić recounted how affairs had been rather busy at the institute, but, he empha‑ sised, Hurem’s work had indeed been criticised among the historians at the institute. Furthermore, Hurem’s work had raised criticism at several confer‑ ences.42 At the meeting, 12 of Hurem’s associates at the institute contributed to the critical discussion. Among the main points raised was that though the communist leadership might have made some mistakes, there was no sources or literature documenting that the leaders initiated terror and harassments, as Hurem argued.43 Furthermore, Hurem’s colleagues rejected the thesis that the National Liberation Movement underwent a crisis at all, and they rebuffed the argument that a multitude of the uprising in Bosnia could have been outside the planning and direction of the Communist Party. Indeed, if the communists did not plan, initiate and lead the uprising, who did?44 The idea that many local riots were spontaneous and that there was a significant overlap between Partisans and Chetniks in Bosnia in 1941‑1942 would certainly not have been an acceptable explanation in this forum. Rasim Hurem’s study is but one important example of the readdressing of Yugoslav Second World War history. Not even the Partisans and the commu‑ nist movement were untouchable anymore.45 Yet, attacks on their status met with significant obstacles, not least within the historians’ own environment. A considerable amount of internal censorship was at play, especially in the research institutions connected to the League of Communists. Nevertheless, new questions were addressed and new perspectives added. While Hurem emphasised the aspect of civil war and introduced the issue of communist terror and war crimes, others were to introduce more ethno-national per‑ spectives. This was accompanied by the issue of genocide, which was later to significantly contribute to a change of discourse on Yugoslavia’s Second World War history.

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Genocide becomes an issue Before 1970 Yugoslav historiography rarely used the word genocide, or genocid in Serbo-Croatian; it was mainly connected to international law and associ‑ ated with Nazi-German war crimes.46 In 1966 the concept of genocide was introduced in the last chapter of Mirko Peršen’s study Ustaški Logori (Ustasha Camps) to define the scope of terror committed by the Ustasha in the camps in the ndh. Peršen referred to the United Nations’ genocide convention, but he also associated the crime of genocide with Nazi and Gestapo terror methods.47 In the early 1970s, however, two studies of the Second World War, authored by Vladimir Dedijer and Mladen Colić, openly focused on genocide as an aspect of Yugoslav war history.

Dedijer’s Istorija Jugoslavije In Vladimir Dedijer’s chapters on the Second World War in Istorija Jugoslavije (History of Yugoslavia) from 1972, the issue of genocide occupied a prominent position. The word genocide was mentioned in a chapter headline; it was described as a concept; and it was referred to in the text.48 Describing the persecution of Serbs in the ndh, Dedijer argued that the Ustasha were driven partly by the ideology and war aims of Nazi-Germany, which they served, and partly by radical Croatian nationalism as championed by the so-called Frankists (Frankovci) in the early 20th century: Thus in 1941 two nationalist positions colluded, the great-German and the FrankistUstasha, which developed into racism. From Hitler, Pavelić also adopted the met‑ hods of denationalization of other peoples, no longer just by way of assimilation through cultural genocide, such as nationalist politicians had proposed in earlier periods, but through nationalization of territory, through its fundamental clean‑ sing of all those belonging to a people doomed to annihilation, that is, through pure genocide.49

In this analysis, Dedijer introduces a distinction between cultural genocide, kulturni genocid, by which he refers to efforts to assimilate different cultural groups by removing cultural symbols and practices, but otherwise leaving the human carriers of these symbols and practices alive, and pure genocide, čisti genocid, which is the direct elimination of certain human beings from an area, either by killing or expulsion. The Ustasha’s massacres and persecution of Serbs were pure genocide, the method of which having been learned from Nazism.

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Though Dedijer emphasises that the idea to persecute Serbs also had Croatian roots, and that it was realised by Pavelić’ Ustasha movement, he nevertheless ascribes the main initiative and responsibility behind the genocide of Serbs to Hitler and the Nazis. Like earlier accounts of the war, Dedijer’s presentation argues that the German occupiers exploited and encouraged internal Yugoslav enmities. The Chetniks, according to Dedijer, constituted the other side of this politics, equally committing pure genocide: … Hitler had not arranged this destiny only for the Serbian people … It is sig‑ nificant that also the right wing of the Serbian bourgeoisie, headed by Draža Mihailović and Milan Nedić, used the Hitlerist concept of genocide (territorial cleansing) against Muslims and Croats.50

Included in this argument is the point that the Serbian war criminals were hardly any better than the Croatian ones, and that both sides had their trai‑ tors and war criminals. Thus guilt of war crimes was nationally balanced, and much of the responsibility was externalised, assumed to belong mainly with the Nazi occupiers. Nevertheless, Dedijer suggested that the wartime massacres were also an internal Yugoslav issue, rather than solely initiated and organized by the oc‑ cupiers. Some of the accounts of massacres recounted in Dedijer’s narrative of the war were ascribed to “the social psychology of the peasantry”. Dedijer argued that confessional and national differences, as well as influence from chauvinist circles and pressure from the Ustasha onslaught, made Serbian peasants attack and plunder Croat and Muslim villages.51 In general, Yugoslav massacres occupied a significant part of the chapters. Region by region, Dedijer mentioned campaigns and incidents: The Ustasha’s murdering of Serbs in Hercegovina and Bosnia, revenge attacks by Serbian rioters on Muslim civilians, Chetnik terror against Muslims and Croats and Partisans’ counter-terror in Montenegro and Hercegovina against villages seen as pro-Chetnik, and against class enemies.52 The references to this “terror”, “sharp course” and dogmatism of the Partisans were similar to some of the points made by Rasim Hurem. Dedijer’s history of Yugoslavia’s Second World War was an account thema‑ tizing, amongst other issues, inter-Yugoslav conflicts and violence. Parts of his war history focused on cultural and ethnic conflicts instead of clashes between occupiers and patriotic resistance or class-based conflict between progressive workers and fascist bourgeoisie. By using the term genocide, Dedijer underlined that the victims of these conflicts and massacres were cultural and ethnic groups

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rather than individuals or progressive working people. Dedijer’s emphasis on the war as also being an ethnic war was probably the most important new perspective introduced into the debate. Dedijer’s version of Yugoslavia’s wartime history met considerable criticism from the academic historiography side. While most reviewers welcomed the attempt to write a general synthesis of the war, they disapproved of Dedijer’s text. Though his approach was described as interesting, his work was largely seen as a piece of subjectivist essay-writing, troubled by numerous factual er‑ rors, hence not a piece of proper historiography.53 Two reviewers specifically criticised Dedijer’s treatments of war crime and massacres, suggesting that he had a craving for sensational stories. One of them further pointed out that Dedijer’s description of a particular massacre at Glina was incorrect and was probably the result of his confusing two different massacres, and the reviewer, suggesting that Dedijer’s figures for Serbian war losses were significantly over‑ estimated, warned against the uncritical parading of numbers of victims.54 This comment seems to emphasise the need for a responsible and sober treatment of the more troublesome sides of Yugoslavia’s wartime history – an approach that was not to characterise later treatments of the issue.

Colić’ Takozvana Nezavisna Država Hrvatska While Dedijer’s wartime history and his focus on war crimes and genocide were not received very positively among his academic colleagues, some shared his perspective. In 1973, the year after Istorija Jugoslavije, Mladen Colić’ study Takozvana Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941., (the so-called Independent State of Croatia, 1941) was published. A main part of the book was based on Colić’ magister thesis, which was defended at Belgrade University. According to a reviewer in the Croatian historical journal Časopis za suvremenu povijest, this was the best part of the book, whereas the rest was less well researched.55 Colić claimed that no work until then had treated in detail and complete‑ ness the establishment and development of the Ustasha movement and the role and place of the ndh in the occupation system in Yugoslavia. His book was intended as a modest contribution to the historical investigation of this, “… for the sake of a more complete view on the proper place and evaluation of the really anti-national, anti-Yugoslav, anti-communist, criminal, traitorous and servant role of the Ustasha and the ndh…”56 In the Colić account, as in Dedijer’s, the politics of the ndh was described as genocide: “The Ustasha government began the terror already in the first days after the establishment of the ndh. … The terror took the massive measure

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and character of genocide.”57 Though the groups of victims mentioned as be‑ ing subjected to terror politics included communists, Serbs, Jews, Roma and all other pro-Yugoslav anti-fascists, it was emphasised that a large part of the terror was aimed mainly at Serbs. Massacres of Serbs were represented as a purposeful effort to change the ethnic structure of the population of the ndh by annihilating the Serbian population as well as all antifascists from the rows of Croats and Muslims in Bosnia and Hercegovina. The Colić account gives numerous examples of the massacres in villages and of people being thrown into ravines, and of the mass slaughtering of Serbs.58 Furthermore, the forced conversion of Serbs was described as a state plan aimed at their removal as an ethnic community.59 Colić, like many before him, stated that the Catholic Church carried a great deal of the responsibility for events in the ndh, since Church representatives with few exceptions placed themselve openly and unconditionally in the state’s service, and a considerable number of the lower clergy belonged to the rows of the Ustasha slaughterers. In Colić’ account, the Catholic Church was also ascribed the responsibility for inciting genocide: “The leadership of the Catholic Church in ndh … eagerly accepted ndh and Pavelić. It had thereby, on its side, given the initial stroke to the Ustasha state to fight on religious and national foundations, committing the crime of genocide.”60 Mladen Colić’ perspective on the history of the ndh was inspired by Ed‑ mond Paris’ Genocide in Satellite Croatia 1941‑1945, which was published 1961 in Chicago. In this work, Paris thematized the Ustasha’s murderous persecu‑ tion of Serbs as genocide in accordance with the Genocide convention of the United Nations. Paris compared the anti-Serbian politics of the ndh to the Holocaust and to the genocide on the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire, claiming that “the greatest genocide during the Second World War, in proportion to a nation’s population, took place not in Nazi-Germany, but in the Nazi-created puppet state of Croatia”.61 According to Colić, Paris in this account pioneered in placing the necessary emphasis on the crimes of the Ustasha.62 In thematizing the crimes in the ndh as genocide, Colić, like Dedijer, described the victims primarily as members of ethnic communities. In the Colić study, the emphasis in his examination of the ndh was outspokenly on the persecution of Serbs, though he might just as well, from the same logic, have discussed the mass killing of Jews or Roma.

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Towards a theme of genocide? Numerous similarities exist between Dedijer’s Second World War chapters in Istorija Jugoslavije and Mladen Colić’ Takozvana Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941. Both emphasise internal Yugoslav conflicts and massacres addressed from the perspective of genocide. In both accounts, the main victims are subject to ethnically motivated persecution. The massacres are, so to say, “Yugoslavised” and situated within an ethnic logic. The extent of this, however, is limited. The perpetrators are distanced from the Yugoslav peoples as such. A main part of the initiative behind the inter-Yugoslav massacres remains ascribed to the occupiers’ manipulation, and the Chetniks are seen as the Serbian equivalent to the Ustasha in this project.63 The almost simultaneous introduction of the issue of genocide by Colić and Dedijer deserves further consideration. Why was the perspective of genocide brought into Yugoslav Second World War history in the early 1970s? The emphasis of massacres and genocide in Dedijer’s account of Yugoslavia’s Second World War may have a lot to do with his personal worldview. Dedi‑ jer was confronted with and repeatedly engaged in discussions on genocide through his career: During the Second World War, he assisted in collecting sources documenting war crimes of the occupiers and their domestic col‑ laborators; he was present when the United Nations negotiated the Genocide convention in the late 1940s; and in the 1960s and 1970s he was a key member of the grass-root “Russel Tribunal” that prosecuted and condemned the USA for genocide in Vietnam.64 Both Dedijer and Colić were acquainted with and inspired by discussions and studies of genocide outside Yugoslavia. Their emphasis on the genocide aspect of Second World War history may well be seen as part of a general and international turn towards such issues within historiography and social sciences. This was also expressed in the growth of Holocaust and genocide studies as international scholarly fields in the 1970s, and in the discussions of genocide and Holocaust that were beginning to generally appear in Western Europe, North America and Israel, the Russel Tribunal being one example of this.65 At the core of this turn there also lay a growing focus on people rather than states as historical actors, and on civilians rather than military as victims and heroes. By applying the perspective of genocide, the Dedijer and Colić accounts of Second World War history emphasised exactly civilian and ethno-national victimhood, as well as internal Yugoslav conflict. Thereby, they were part of an increasing presence of nationalism and ethnicity in Yugoslav history writing, which was in part an effect of the establishment of national research institutions

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and national prerogatives within professional historiography. Yet, the writings of these books had hardly been possible without the general loosening of the narrative of the Partisan war. Dedijer’s and Colić’s introduction of the issue of genocide did not signal an immediate rise in Yugoslav genocide studies. Though the interest in the history of war crimes was clearly increasing, this was not automatically ac‑ companied by a growing focus on the issue of genocide. In the late 1970s, several thorough and well researched studies of the Ustasha were published, particularly from the side of Zagreb-based historians. In Fikreta Jelić-Butić’s Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941‑1945 (The Ustasha and the Inde‑ pendent State of Croatia 1941‑1945), published in Zagreb 1977, the Ustasha movement, its road to power and particularly its state administration were investigated in great detail.66 According to Jelić-Butić, terror was an essential element, the basic idea, of the Ustasha movement. While their anti-Semitism was adopted from German Nazism, the massacres and prosecution against Serbs was a particular Ustasha project, aimed at the expulsion and exter‑ mination of Serbs as a nation within the ndh.67 Thus, in line with Dedijer and Colić, Jelić-Butić emphasised the war crimes of the ndh as an internal Yugoslav matter and part of a particular national program. Nevertheless, she did not term it genocide. Jelić-Butić’ account of Ustasha terror and massacres was close to echoed in another very detailed investigation and presentation of the Ustasha, made by Bogdan Krizman, professor of history of law at the University of Zagreb.68 Like Jelić-Butić, Krizman did not describe the Ustasha’s practices as genocide, though the concept was obviously known to him, as in one of his introductions, he referred to Edmond Paris’ Genocide in Satellite Croatia for a description of “The Ustasha genocide”.69 It was an increasing tendency within Yugoslav historiography to investigate war crimes and anti-Partisan forces, both aspects that were overlooked by earlier accounts of the war. Thus, from the 1970s, the ethnic tensions and political conflicts that were among the main causes for the internal Yugoslav massa‑ cres and violence committed during the Second World War, but which had remained largely backgrounded in the patriotic all-Yugoslav accounts written in the first post-war decades, were gradually written into war historiography. Yet, historians with an institutional connection to the regime seem to have avoided obvious thematization of ethnic conflict and genocide. This was left to more independent maverick historians like Dedijer. Not before the 1980s was the concept of genocide to take a dominant position in Yugoslav historical culture.

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N ote s 1

See Russinow, The Yugoslav Experiment, 179ff.

2 Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 55‑56, 73f. 3

Ibid, 104‑140. For a contemporary account of the Students’ protests, see D. Plamenic, ‘The Belgrade Student insurrection’, New Left Review, 54, 1969, 61‑78. On “Maspok”, see George Schöpflin, ‘The Ideology of Croatian Nationalism’, Survey – A journal of East and West studies, 19, 1973, 1, 123‑146.

4 Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism, 156ff, 195. 5 Lampe, Yugoslavia as history, 276‑321. 6 Pavlowitch, Yugoslavia, 287‑288, 305‑307. 7 8

Gross, ‘Die Jugoslawische Geschichtswissenschaft von heute’, 242‑245. Dimitrije Djordjević, ‘Yugoslavia. Work in Progress’, in Donald Cameron Watt, ed., Contemporary History in Europe, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969, 250.

9

Ibid, 251.

10 Stanković and Dimić, Istoriografija pod nadzorom, 230. 11 Ibid, 230‑237. 12 Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o narodno-oslobodilačkom ratu jugoslovenskih naroda, i-ix, 1‑166, Belgrade, 1949‑1965. 13 Gross, ‘Die Jugoslawische Geschichtswissenschaft von heute’, 239. 14 Drago Roksandić, ‘Globalna istorija i istorijska svest’, Marksistička misao, 1983, 4, 54. See also Djordjević, ‘Yugoslavia. Work in Progress’, 254. 15 Roksandić, ‘Globalna istorija i istorijska svest’, 50‑51. 16 Wayne S. Vucinich, ‘Nationalism and Communism’, in Wayne S. Vucinich, ed., Contemporary Yugoslavia. Twenty Years of Socialist Experiment, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969, 280‑281; Milorad Ekmečić, ‘Odgovor na neke kri‑ tike “Istorije Jugoslavije” (xix Vijek)’, Jugoslovenski Istorijski Časopis, 13, 1974, 1‑2, 280. 17 Velimir Terzić, Jugoslavija u aprilskom ratu, Titograd: Grafički zavod, 1963, 498‑499; Franjo Tuđman, ‘Narodnooslobodilački rat’, Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, vol. 4, Zagreb, 1960, 273‑278; Franjo Tuđman, Okupacija i revolucija, Zagreb: Institut za Historiju Radničkog Pokreta, 1963, 211‑212. See also Wayne S. Vucinich, ‘Nationalism and Communism’, 277. 18 See e.g. Marković, ‘Istoričari i jugoslovensto’, 154‑155, Vucinich, ‘Nationalism and Communism’, 277; Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav national question, 198‑201. 19 Schöpflin, ‘The Ideology of Croatian Nationalism’, 133‑134. Though there were appa‑ rently no attempts to rehabilitate Pavelić and the ndh as such, it has been argued that the outburst of Croatian nationalism and reports of anti-Serbian demonstrations caused deep worries among the Serbian minority in Croatia. See D. MacKenzie, ‘Yugoslavia since 1964’, in G.W. Simmonds, ed., Nationalism in the ussr and Eastern Europe in the era of Brezhnev and Kosygin, Detroit: University of Detroit Press, 1977, 454.

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20 Bruno Bušić, ‘Žrtve rata’, Hrvatski Književni List, 15th July 1969, 3. A similar argument was posed from a more marginal side by Zvonimir Kulundžić in his Tragedija Hrvatske Historiografije. O falsifikatorima, birokratima, negatorima Hrvatske Povijesti, Zagreb: Vlastita Naklada, 1970, 5‑6. See also Ante Cuvalo, The Croatian National Movement 1966‑1972, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, 115‑125, for a survey of the hi‑ story debates from the perspective of the Croatian nationalists. 21 ‘Deset godina Instituta za historiju radničkog pokreta Hrvatske’ Časopis za Suvremenu Povijest, 4, 1972, 1, 234. Franjo Tuđman was director of the Croatian Institute of the History of the Workers’ Movement from its establishment in 1961. In 1972 he was im‑ prisoned, accused mainly of contacts with émigré circles. See Darko Hudelist, Tuđman: Biografija, Zagreb: Profil, 2004, 303ff, 428ff, 484ff; Sava Bosnić, ‘The political career and writings of Franjo Tudjman’, South Slav Journal, 14, 1991, no. 1‑2. 22 Michael B. Petrović, ‘Continuing Nationalism in Yugoslav Historiography’, Nationalities Papers, 6, 1978, 2, 164. 23 See Mirjana Gross, ‘Ideja jugoslavenstva u xix. Stolječu u “Istoriji Jugoslavije”’, Časopis za Suvremenu Povijest, no. 2, 1973, 8‑21; Vera Ciliga, ‘O interpretaciji hrvatske povijest xix. st. u “Istoriji Jugoslavije”’, Časopis za Suvremenu Povijest, no. 2, 1973, 22‑31; Mirjana Gross, ‘Ideja jugoslavenstva u xix., stoljeću i “Dogmatski Nacionalizam”’, Jugoslovenski Istorijski Časopis, 1975, 3‑4, 121‑160; Vera Ciliga, ‘O pogledima Milorada Ekmečića na hrvatsku povijest’, Jugoslovenski Istorijski Časopis, 1975, 3‑4, 161‑169. For Ekmečić’ an‑ swers, see Ekmečić, ‘Odgovor na neke kritike’, 217‑281; Milorad Ekmečić, ‘Završna riječ o polemici sa Mirjanom Gross’, Jugoslovenski Istorijski Časopis, 1976, 1‑2, 150‑156. 24 Ekmečić, ‘Odgovor na neke kritike’, 276f. See also Petrović, ‘Continuing Nationalism in Yugoslav Historiography’, 163, 171‑173. 25 See also Marković, ‘Istoričari i jugoslovensto’, 157‑159. 26 Höpken, ‘Von der Mythologisierung zur Stigmatisierung’, 178ff. 27 ‘Intervju Predsednika Tita Radio-Televiziji Beograd’, Politika, 24th May 1972, 6. 28 Ibid. See also Pavlowitch, The improbable survivor, 33, 132. 29 ‘Istoriografija i revolucija’, Gledišta, 1972, 1, particularly 32, 34, 35, 40‑41, 63‑64; See also ‘Šta reći o revoluciji danas’, nin, 13th February 1972, 40. 30 Žerjavić, Opsesije i Megalomanije oko Jasenovca i Bleiburga, 33‑36; Bogosavljević, ‘The unresolved Genocide’, 152‑155. 31 Hurem, Kriza nop-a u Bosni i Hercegovini, 9. 32 Ibid, 11. For an example of this traditional ‘epic’ version, see the official history of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia: Rodoljub Čolaković, Dragoslav Janković and Pero Morača, eds., Pregled istorije saveza komunista Jugoslavije, Beograd: Institut za izučavanje radničkog pokreta, 1963, 362. 33 Hurem, Kriza nop-a u Bosni i Hercegovini, 155, also 279‑283. 34 Ibid, 146.

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35 Ibid, 142. 36 Ibid, 149. 37 Ibid, 150‑151. 38 Ibid, 153, 155. 39 Nebojša Popov, ‘Les formes et le caractere des conflits sociaux’, Praxis. Revue Philosophique, edition internationale, 8, 1971, 3‑4, 355‑356. 40 See Husnija Kamberović, ‘Najnoviji pogledi na Drugi svetski rat u Bosni i Hercegovini’, in Husnija Kamberović, ed., 60 godina od završetka Drugog svetskog rata – kako se sjećati 1945. godine, Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2006, 25‑29. 41 The Institute of the History of the Workers’ Movement in Sarajevo was founded in 1959 with the aim to investigate “major questions of the history of the establishment and de‑ velopment of the labour movement in Bosnia and Hercegovina, the National Liberation War and Revolution as well as the period of construction of the socialist society”. Enver Redžić, ‘Riječ redakcije’, Prilozi, 1, 1965, 1, 4‑5. In 1973, as the Institute was renamed the Institute for History, its program of orientation was significantly expanded to include “research and academic treatment of the history of the peoples and nationalities of Bos‑ nia and Hercegovina and Yugoslavia … from the arrival of the Slavs in this region to today”. Nikola Babić, ‘Riječ redakcije’, Prilozi, 9, 1973, 1, 9. 42 ‘Diskusija o knjizi dr Rasima Hurema Kriza narodnooslobodilačkog pokreta u Bosni i Hercegovini krajem 1941. i početkom 1942. godine’, Prilozi, 11‑12, 1975‑1976, 343‑344. At the conference “avnoj i Narodnooslobodilčka borba u Bosni i Hercegovini (1942‑1943)” held in Sarajevo on 22nd and 23rd November 1973, Party historian Pero Morača strongly criticised Hurem’s thesis about the kpj’s emphasis on class struggle. See Pero Morača, ‘O jednoj interpretaciji razvitka nop-a u bih krajem 1941. i početkom 1942. godine’, in av‑ noj i Narodnooslobodilčka borba u Bosni i Hercegovini (1942‑1943). Materijali sa naučnog skupa održanog u Sarajevu 22. i 23. novembra 1973. godine, Belgrade: Rad, 1974, 97‑112. 43 ‘Diskusija o knjizi dr Rasima Hurema’, 357. 44 Ibid, 356‑357, 360, 362‑362. 45 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Communist Party’s “left deviations” in 1941 and 1942 were the subject of several studies; e.g. Miša Leković, ‘Reagovanje cnetralnog komi‑ teta kpj i Vrhovnog štaba na razvoj situacije u Crnoj Gori u toku 1942. godine’, Istorjski Zapisi, 22, 1969, 2‑3, 421‑433; Đuro Vujović, ‘O lijevim greškama kpj u Crnoj Gori u prvoj polovini 1942. godine narodnosolobodilačkog rata’, Istorijski Zapisi, 20, 1967, 1, 45‑113; Branko Petranović, ‘O levim skretanjima kpj krajem 1941. i u prvoj polovini 1942. godine’, Zbornik za istoriju, 1971, 39‑82. See also Morača, ‘O jednoj interpretaciji razvitka nop-a’, 97 and note 1. 46 See e.g. the military encyclopaedia, Vojna Enciklopedija, vol. 3, Belgrade: 1960, 340. 47 Mirko Peršen, Ustaški Logori, Zagreb: Stvarnost, 1966, 177‑178, 165.

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48 Božić, et al., Istorija Jugoslavije, 457, 467ff. Dedijer also introduced the concept of genocide to describe Austro-Hungarian practices against Serbs in Bosnia during the First World War, see ibid, 392, 394‑396. Dedijer was a former top communist and close employee of Milovan Djilas in the Department for Agitation and Propaganda. As aut‑ hor of a renowned wartime diary and Tito’s official biography from 1953, Dedijer used to be some sort of official party historian of the war. However, as he followed Djilas in the latter’s fall from grace, Dedijer spent years banned from the Yugoslav public sphere, travelling between various European and North American universities. From the late 1960s, however, Dedijer returned to the Yugoslav historians’ scene, inter alia as corre‑ sponding member of the historical department of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. See e.g. his obituary in Srpska Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti Godišnjak XCVII za 1990, Belgrade: sanu, 1991, 471‑473. 49 Božić et al., Istorija Jugoslavije, 467. The Frankists were followers of Josip Frank and his politics of Croatian national unification within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Frank and his followers were radically anti-Serbian and viewed Serbian identity as an act of political treason. See e.g. Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia. Origins, History, Politics, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994, 94ff, 260ff. 50 Božić et al., Istorija Jugoslavije, 467. See also 473. 51 Ibid, 480‑481. 52 Ibid, 477‑478, 481, 498, 500‑501, 519. 53 See ‘Diskusije o “Istoriji Jugoslavije”’, Gledišta, 14, 1973, 3, particularly 268, 276‑277, 317; Ivan Jelić, ‘O pristupu povijesti jugoslovenske revolucije u “Istoriji Jugoslavije”’, Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 2, 1973, 63‑64; Slobodan Žarić, ‘O nekim pitanjima pri‑ kaza NOB-a i revolucije u “Istoriji Jugoslavije”’, Časopis za suvemenu povijest, 2, 1973, 72‑73. See also Kosta Nikolić, Prošlost bez istorije. Polemike u jugoslovenskoj istoriografiji 1961‑1991, Belgrade: Institut za savremanu istoriju, 2003, 46‑56 and Petrovich, ‘Continu‑ ing Nationalism in Yugoslav Historiography’, 165. 54 See Đuro Stanisavljević’ and Alija Bojić’ contributions in ‘Diskusije o “Istoriji Jugosla‑ vije”’, Gledišta, 14, 1973, 3, 290, 308‑309. 55 Rafael Brčić, ‘O knjizi Mladena Colića’, Časopis za suremenu povijest, 4, 1974, 3, 121f. See also Nikolić’ Prošlost bez istorije, 67ff. 56 Mladen Colić, Takozvana Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941., Belgrade: Delta Press, 1973, 4. 57 Ibid, 341. 58 Ibid, 356ff. 59 Ibid, 367. 60 Ibid, 167, 175, quote on p. 402.

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61 Edmond Paris, Genocide in Satellite Croatia, 1941‑1945. A Record of Racial and Religious Persecution and Massacres, Chicago: The American Institute of Balkan Affairs, 1962 (translated from the French by Lois Perkins, first published in 1961), 3ff, 9. 62 Colić, Takozvana Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, 4. 63 Ibid, 401. 64 Dedijer, Vatikan i Jasenovac:, 9‑11; See also Det internationale Krigsforbrydelsestribunal, 2. session, Danmark 1967, and Dedijer and Elhaim, eds., Tribunal Russel. See also his biography in Srpska Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti Godišnjak za 1978, Belgrade, 1979, 431‑432. 65 Fein: Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, 5; Hansen: ‘Folkemord gennem 50 år’, 42‑44. In Israel, public interest developed after the Eichman trial in Jerusalem in 1961, and since the 1970s the Holocaust has been frequently referred to in political discourse, Kenan: Between Memory and History; Ofer: ‘Israel’. In the USA, public interest in the Holocaust, which was hardly identified as a particular tragedy until the end of the 1960s, rose markedly from the 1970s. Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory. See also Tea Sindbæk, ‘Anden Verdenskrigs massakrer og folkedrab og genopdagelsen af ofrene – tendenser inden for det socialistiske Jugoslaviens historiografi i et internationalt perspektiv’, Den Jyske Historiker, 112, 2006, 145‑156 / Tea Sindbæk, ‘Masakri i genocid počinjeni u Drugom svetskom ratu i ponovno otkrivanje žrtava’ in Kamberović, ed., 60 godina od završetka Drugog svetskog rata – kako se sjećati 1945. godine, 63‑74, and the In‑ troduction to this book. 66 Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i nezavisna država Hrvatska. On Ustasha terror see particularly 159ff; on village massacres, particularly 166‑167. Jelić-Butić was educated in Zagreb and employed at the Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement in Zagreb. Ustaše i nezavisna država Hrvatska 1941‑45 was her doctoral thesis, defended in Belgrade and later published in Zagreb. 67 Ibid, 163, 158, 178. 68 Krizman’s study of the Ustasha movement was published in several volumes: Bogdan Krizman, Pavelić i Ustaše, Zagreb: Globus, 1978; Bogdan Krizman, Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija, Zagreb: Globus, 1980; Bogdan Krizman, Ustaše i treći Reich (2 volumes), Zagreb: Globus, 1982. His descriptions of Ustasha massacres are mainly in Krizman, Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija, 123ff, 124‑126 in particular. 69 Ibid, 8.

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Public commemorations and popular culture, 1960‑1980 In the 1960s and 1970s, the temporal distance to the Second World War approached a generation and the obvious signs of warfare were fading and covered by the reconstructed Yugoslavia. The Partisan war was thus becom‑ ing history and had to be commemorated in words and monuments in order to remain present in the Yugoslav public sphere. By then, war crimes and massacres took a more prominent position in popular historical culture and public manifestations of war history. In 1966 a monument was raised for the victims of Jasenovac, testifying to the need to represent and commemorate wartime massacres. The suffering and massacres of the war were described and commemorated more explicitly in new collections of Partisan songs and in feature films about the Partisan war. And along with the teaching of numerous strategic details of the war, school pupils had to read about the history of war crimes and the perspective of genocide. This chapter explores how public communications of history, in the forms of memorials, song collections, films and schoolbooks, addressed questions related to internal Yugoslav war crimes. It shows how popular representations of wartime history, parallel to the revision and readdressing of the Partisan war within academic historiography, reflected a growing interest in the massacres as such, while school books retained a more conservative perspective on war history.

The memorial area of Jasenovac The fields on which the Ustasha’s infamous concentration camp complex Jasenovac had been situated constituted a particularly troublesome “site of memories” from the Second World War in Yugoslavia.1 Immediately after the war, the bombed areas of the camp were cleared. Most of the buildings and interior disappeared, possibly to be reused in the reconstruction of the surrounding villages. Nothing happened to the site of the camp as such for more than a decade.

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Yet, the camp system at Jasenovac remained a central issue in Yugoslav historical culture. As has been shown already in this book, Jasenovac was described in reports and memoirs immediately after the war.2 In the follow‑ ing decades, academic as well as general public interest in the history of the camp was steadily growing, which can be seen from the increasing number of publications dedicated to that subject.3 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jase‑ novac was described as the most horrible example of the brutality of the Axis occupiers and the Ustasha, modelled after Nazi annihilation camps elsewhere in Europe. According to Mirko Peršen’s study of the Ustasha concentration camps, printed in 1966, camp III in the Jasenovac camp complex “… was in a true sense a factory of death and could by its cruel deeds and large number of murdered men, women and children be compared to the largest annihilation camps in Nazi Germany”.4 Usually, Jasenovac was assumed to have cost the lives of around 600,000‑700,000 prisoners. These were also the numbers given in various en‑ cyclopaedias, which, as standard reference works edited by large professional boards, summarised the official stances of research and knowledge on the con‑ cepts described. In Enciklopedija Jugoslavije (the Encyclopaedia of Yugoslavia), volume 4, from 1960, under the heading ‘Jasenovački logor’ (the camp of Jase‑ novac) it was stated that the exact number of victims could not be established, but that an estimate founded on documents and testimonies from victims and Ustasha guards suggested that around 700,000 were killed there. According to this publication, the victims were “antifascist Serbs and Croats, as well as Jews and Gypsies.”5 Thus, Serbs as a nation were not singled out as victims. This was different in Vojna Enciklopedija (the Military Encyclopaedia), volume 10, from 1967, where, under the heading ‘Ustasha’, one could read: “Mass annihilations of Serbs, Jews and antifascists were conducted in Ustasha concentration camps: In Jasenovac about 600,000 …”.6 Following a description of the Ustasha’s per‑ secution and mass murder of Serbs and Jews in the ndh, this exact phrase was reprinted under the heading ‘Ustasha’ in the Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, volume 8, from 1971, with due reference to Vojna Enciklopedija.7 The Jasenovac camp system was an obvious symbol of the suffering of the war. Yet, its importance in Yugoslav historical culture was probably also enriched by the very large estimated number of victims, which, as the total number of war victims was officially established to be 1,706,000, meant that the number of victims of Jasenovac alone would have constituted between 35% to 41% of all victims of the war.8 The first attempts to preserve the remains of the actual site of the camp system in Jasenovac and the numerous mass graves in connection with it were

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made in the late 1950s.9 In 1966, on the initiative of the Yugoslav association of veterans of the National Liberation Struggle, a monument in the shape of a giant flower was erected. The flower was chosen to symbolise the strength of life.10 In the crypt below the flower, lines from Kovačić’ poem ‘Jama’, prais‑ ing peaceful homely happiness, was engraved. In 1968 a memorial area was established, housing a research institution and museum of the camp system of Jasenovac, as well as an exhibition cinema showing documentary films about the camp.11 According to a tourist guide from 1986, the permanent exhibi‑ tion at the memorial museum “offered many documents and details about the criminal activities of the occupiers and domestic traitors, as well as about what happened in the camp system. It is a striking testimony of horror and terror.”12 The memorial museum in Jasenovac was a monument for the victims of the Ustasha in general, and while the national aspects were increasingly included in war history, for Serbs and Jews in particular. Yet, it was also a monument of the inhumanity of the enemies, and thus of the victory of the Partisans in the great Yugoslav narrative of the Liberation Struggle. School children were bussed there on educational excursions.13 Even by the end of

Ill. 7.1. The monument at the site of the concentration camp at Jasenovac, Kameni cvijet (Stone flower) designed by architect Bogdan Bogdanović, erected 1966. Photo: Polfoto.

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the 1980s, Jasenovac was emphasised as an important means for educating the citizens of the self-managing socialist society.14 The monument and memorial museum at Jasenovac thus represented existential needs to remember human loss and suffering, combined with remembrance of victims of particular nations, and a politically toned, institutionalised commemoration of the Partisan’s victory.15 In the 1970s, the monument represented a general consensus of communist wartime commemoration. However, through the monument and museum, Jasenovac was becoming one of the main symbols, or stock references, of war‑ time history in general and of Ustasha crimes in particular. As such, it was to become a main focus of Serbian genocide history in the 1980s, and a central element of Serbian national remembrance. By the end of the 1980s, the his‑ tory of Jasenovac would be sharply disputed among historians from various Yugoslav republics. The monument and symbol of Jasenovac only began to cause national tensions when it became contested as a national symbol and was invested with significant national loading. Apart from the Jasenovac memorial area, numerous monuments were raised in honour of the Partisans throughout the Titoist period. According to one observer, 14,000 monuments were raised for the Partisans between 1947 and 1965.16 Victims of war crimes and massacres were also commemorated. In Herzegovina, on the initiative of predominantly Serbian Partisan veterans, memorials were raised to commemorate the victims of the Ustasha. In some cases, local Croats held responsible for Ustasha crimes were allegedly pressured to pay the costs of these memorials.17 Also in Eastern Bosnia, memorials were raised to the victims of “Fascism”.18 As in the historical accounts, ethnic aspects of the war and its internal conflicts were never foregrounded on monuments. Often, only the names of the victims were listed, while perpetrators remained unnamed. Some victims were not really commemorated at all: in Eastern Bosnia, according to one observer, monuments for Muslim victims hardly existed, even though numer‑ ous innocent civilian Muslims had been killed.19 The Muslim population had been the main recruiting basis for the local Ustasha, while the majority of the Partisans were Serbs, who also dominated the post-war political system. These examples demonstrate how the politics of commemoration were significantly interwoven with political agenda and power, also on the local level.

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Partisan poetry Collections of Partisan poetry and war songs were continuously printed throughout the Titoist period. In the 1970s, songs printed in these collections increasingly addressed themes of war crimes and massacres. Terror and mas‑ sacres were accounted for more explicitly, and victims were to a larger extent identified nationally. Some songs and poems described particular events and individual massacres.

Partisan songs At times references to massacres and crimes were mainly used to stigmatise the partisans’ opponents as traitors and criminals. In a song called “The Partisans from Zelengora”, Ante Pavelić is warned that he will receive a judgement for his crimes. The song refers to some of the most infamous Ustasha practices: Partisans from Zelengora Pass by Pavelić’ court, Judge him for what he has done, He killed boys and girls, He killed old men and women, He filled pits and caves, He depopulated villages and towns …20

Unlike the emphasis on Pavelić’s responsibility for massacres and harassments of civilians, the Chetniks, as in earlier songs and accounts, were mainly seen as national traitors. An example is the song “traitors”, the focus of which is Chetnik collaboration: They carry the Serbian tricolour, But with the Germans they go to war! … Oh Chetniks, shameful cowards, for you traitors is a beautiful name. …21

In comparison to earlier collections of Partisan lyrics, violence and massacres featured prominently in an anthology of poems and songs from the moun‑

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tainous area Kordun in Croatian Krajina, one of the places where the Ustasha persecution of Serbs had been most brutal. The songs were collected from various sources, but all allegedly originated from Kordun. In this collection, printed in 1971, it was often explicitly stated that the victims of massacres were Serbs. An example is the song “At Kordun, the sun has darkened”: At Kordun, the sun has darkened, Great and small began to cry When darkness overloaded Veljun, Swallowed five hundred Serbs. Here remain three hundred widows, Three hundred families begin to lament. St. George’s day, do not green, Enemy, do not celebrate, Pavelić, may you rot alive, May you strangle in our blood!22

In a song called “One morning, just at early daybreak”, two ravens testify to the murdering of Serbian civilians, including women and children: We watched from night to morning How the executioner slaughtered the Serbian people; He cut down the father, then the mother and the son, the innocent angel in the cradle.23

Thus the massacres were indeed commemorated as crimes against the Serbian people, or, one may say, as national tragedies. In the collection from Kordun was also printed a song cursing the Ustasha commander Jure Francetić and his infamous “Black Legion”.24

Epic poems Besides these short songs, Ustasha massacres in the Kordun area were com‑ memorated in the traditional form of long epic poems. Often these epic songs start with the narrator calling the people to listen to his story, and then he describes the scenery and circumstances of the drama. In one of these poems, “Black St. George’s Day”, the narrator accounts the situation in 1941:

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When through the country a mad wind blew, When the beast judges without law. / … / As soon as Ante moved into Zagreb, Here the bloody deed began …25

This obviously refers to Ante Pavelić and the Ustasha’s take over of government in the ndh. The narrator then describes how many good communists were captured by Pavelić, assisted by Vladko Maček, head of the largest Croatian Party in the interwar period, The Croat Peasant Party. And the narrator quotes how Hitler from Berlin sent his orders to Pavelić and the bishop in Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac: Baptize, slaughter those who call themselves Serbs, Like a butcher who slaughters oxen. And the Croats who stretch them their hands, Put them under torture without mercy…26

According to this poem, Hitler and Nazi Germany were the main organ‑ izers of the crimes, and Pavelić, Stepinac and the Ustasha movement were simply servants. The local Ustasha leaders around Kordun set out to fulfil Hitler’s orders and “clean the country of Serbs”.27 The poem describes how three drunken Ustasha slaughtered the whole family of a Croat, who called on other Croats to assist their Serbian brothers and kumovi.28 And on St. George’s Day, 6th May 1941, according to the poem, the Ustasha collected six hundred men and killed them: “These men never returned, / They filled the pits in Blagaj…”.29 The poem then narrates how in August the same year, communist Parti‑ sans returned to Kordun and captured the guilty Ustasha, who were forced to confess the massacre on St. George’s Day. In this way, according to the poem, the people of Kordun learned about the destiny of their loved ones, and young men and women of the region took arms to revenge them. In another epic poem, ‘The bloody massacre at Krnjak’, the narrator de‑ scribes a massacre that he himself witnessed in his youth.30 The date and scenery is set: It all took place near Krnjak on 29th July 1941. The poem describes how peasants were called to Krnjak to deliver food to Slovenian victims of Hitler’s deportation plans, but when the peasants arrived, the Ustasha drove them together in the local prison:

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They tied both their feet and hands, Put them under great torture; In the rooms of the police barracks They tore out their dark black eyes.31

The poem continues to describe how this went on from night to morning, while the Ustasha collected more peasants from other villages and towns. They drove the victims in vans to a place where graves were already dug. The victims were hit by mallets, knifes and axes and thrown into the pits. Afterwards, the poem describes how mothers, sisters, young widows and children lamented, and how the blood flew from the pits into the river where the water was no longer blue, but filled with blood. Only one victim escaped, namely the narrator of the poem, who was then able to tell this story, which, it is underlined, is an account of real events.32 In “The bloody massacre at Krnjak”, the massacres are described in detail and the place and time are precisely noted. Yet no ethnic aspect of the crime is considered, neither from the victims side nor that of the perpetrators. In this poem, events are described as simply the Ustasha massacring peasants and people from the area around Krnjak. The poem ends by forecasting that the Communist Party will put an end to these crimes and bring freedom to Kordun. The poem ‘Bloody song’ describes an Ustasha massacre in a village in Kordun, on 18th April 1942, “That heavy and bloody year, / When many heads fell, /…/ And pits were filled with dead bodies”.33 The men are away from the village, and barehanded and defenseless women and children attempt to flee into the mountains: Listen to the sorrow and shed tears For the destiny of 500 peasants, Innocent and owing no one, Because they carried a Serbian name.34

The Serbian villagers are caught and surrounded by Ustasha units. Some are gunned down, and others are mutilated and killed with knives: They began to slaughter women and old men, Stabbed the children with knives, With riffle butts cracked the heads; The streams here flew with blood, Oh, think, nobody remains, For everyone lies on the bloody ground.35

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The poem then describes how a young girl saves her small siblings and old mother from an Ustasha soldier. The soldier is killed, and the girl declares that his rifle is to be hidden and given to the Partisans so that they can revenge the village. In the “Bloody song” the Ustasha’s crimes and bestiality are described in great detail, and it is openly stated that the victims of the crimes are Serbs, killed and mutilated for no other reason than their Serbian identity. The ul‑ timate heroes are the Partisans, Croats as well as Serbs, who are to return to secure that “the bill is paid”.36 In general, these epic poems from Kordun are very detailed in their descrip‑ tions of Ustasha torture and massacres.37 At times, they even name particular Ustasha guards and commanders as directly responsible. The Serbian ethnicity of the victims is regularly stated and sometimes even clearly thematized. Yet the instigators and perpetrators are never ascribed a national affiliation. The main initiators are Pavelić and Hitler, while the perpetrators are Fascists, Ustasha and national traitors. The poems all praise the multiethnic Partisans, who are to save the people and take revenge in the end.

War films Within Yugoslav historical culture, feature films about the Second World War constitute some of the most popular and widest reaching representa‑ tions of wartime history. As fictional re-enactments of real events, these feature films could more creatively and freely than academic or educational historiography address historical issues. As tableau, the filmic picture is able to describe complexity, nuances and contradictions, transferring in one mo‑ ment various contemporary and complementing information to the viewer. The visual communication of film and the use of dramatic effect may convey stronger emotional appeal and reach a different and wider public than the written word. The Yugoslav communist regime was well aware of the ideological useful‑ ness of film.38 Yet, as a non-compulsory offer, films work differently than for example schoolbooks or youth organisations. Watching a film is a freely chosen activity associated with pleasure and entertainment. And in order to raise an audience, films have to appear sufficiently attractive to make the cinema goers pay the price of the ticket. In the 1960s and 1970s films reached large audiences in Yugoslavia; according to a survey from 1960, going to the cinema was the most popular leisure activity among Belgrade workers.39

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Since Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union, Yugoslav cinema was largely oriented toward the West. Films produced in the Western capitalist world were by far the most popular among the audiences.40 This contributed to a turn towards a more Western style and tendencies within Yugoslav cinema. Fur‑ thermore, the commercial aspects of film production increasingly influenced the production of Yugoslav films. Even more than adhering to the politically acceptable, producers had to consider how to make films appeal to a large audience in order to make film production economically feasible. Yugoslavia’s many republican film companies constituted a rich and diverse landscape of film production.41 As well as commercialisation, Yugoslav cinema in the 1960s and 1970s was characterised by cultural exchange and internation‑ alisation. Several large productions were realised in cooperation with Western film companies. Yugoslav cinema was of international high quality, renowned and experimental. In this period, feature film production was one of the most daring and in‑ novative fields of Yugoslav cultural life. At times, feature films even challenged the sacred narratives of the Partisan war and the Yugoslav revolution, picturing the Partisans as cynical and whoring, as well as the Stalinist brutality of the early post-war years.42 In the end, however, the considerable artistic freedom of Yugoslav cinema was still subject to political control. Films that were too controversial or daring risked being banned, in which case they would not be screened in Yugoslav cinemas.

Partisan films A large amount of the films produced in the Titoist period were some sort of representation of the Partisan war, particularly so in the early post-war decades. Most feature films produced until 1951 idealized the Partisan struggle or pictured revolutionary enthusiasm in the struggle for reconstruction of the war-torn country. The Partisans were represented in naïve, simplistic narratives of black and white stereotypes.43 In the 1950s, the Partisan war film genre gradually expanded, as a wave of new realism in the war films addressed the tragic and human dimension of the warfare, and the psychological dilemmas caused by these brutal circumstances. Films like Daleko je Sunce (Far Away is the Sun), produced in 1953 after the novel by Dobrica Ćosić, and San (Dream) from 1959, pictured cruel, hopeless struggles of Partisan units against the might of the Germans.44 In the late 1950s some of the most popular Partisan films were shaped as “tightly drawn stories of action, suspense and bravado”.45

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The expensively produced, well crafted epic of the war, Kozara, from 1963, directed by Veljko Bulajić, became a tremendous success. It broke all domestic records by selling more than 3 million tickets, and it was also one of the most popular films among the audience at the film festival in Pula.46 The key to Kozara’s success was probably a combination of the beautifully presented tragic narrative, the great emotional appeal of both photography and story, and the thematization of the suffering of ordinary people. Kozara distinguished itself from mainstream Partisan films in its focus on war crimes against civilians. It pictured the German-Ustasha offensive in 1942 against the mountain area of Kozara, which was held by the Partisans. A main theme of the film was the sorrow of war and the suffering of civilians: the opening scene showed Nazi-German soldiers, who, assisted by the Ustasha, attacked villages around Kozara, executed the men and drove women and children to concentration camps. The villagers took refuge in the mountain woods, and Partisan forces rose to defend them, entering an impossible battle in order to break through the Nazi-Ustasha encirclement and save the refugees. The attempt failed, and Ustasha and German soldiers, assisted by Chetniks captured most of the villag‑ ers hiding in the woods. Yet, groups of Partisans and villagers avoided capture, and at the end of the offensive surviving Partisans and villagers moved on to continue their liberation struggle.47

Ill. 7.2. A line of Ustasha soldiers, serving the Nazis, execute a row of peasants by shooting. From Kozara.

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Kozara holds numerous descriptions of terror and civilian suffering: apart from the deportations of villagers to concentration camps, villages are burnt, an old man is lobbed into a ravine, children become orphans, a woman is raped, and the defenceless villagers lament their lost relatives. Yet, ethnicity is close to absent in the accounts of terror against civilians. While the Partisans are obviously multi-ethnic, which is visible from their names and their signs written in both Cyrillic and Latin letters, the civilians are simply narod (the people), persecuted as part of the occupiers’ struggle against the Partisans. Thus, the main enemy is the German forces, and the Ustasha and Chetniks are primarily assistants and collaborators. In the 1960s and 1970s, a large number of Partisan films presented the Partisan warfare to the public mainly in the form of magnificent war scenes with enormous amounts of shooting and exploding accompanied by descrip‑ tions of Partisan heroism – as opposed to German brutality and impotence in attempting to crush the Partisan movement and capture Tito and the Partisan supreme staff. Among the typical examples of this genre is the film Desant na Drvar (Descent at Drvar) concerning the German attempt to directly annihilate the supreme staff and Tito at Drvar in Western Bosnia 1944. The Partisans bravely hold their positions for long enough to allow them to escape the German attack. Confronted with German brutality, the local citizens, led by the young sister of one of the Partisans, defy the German demands for cooperation, and many are killed.48 Some of the most renowned and classic examples of these Partisan films depict famous battles from the Partisan war. Bitka na Neretvi (The Battle at Neretva), a Yugoslav, American and Italian co-production from 1969, portrays the attempts of the combined Axis and Chetnik Armies to destroy the Partisan main force in early 1943. The Partisans manage to escape the encirclement by blowing up the bridges over the Neretva River, thus convincing their enemies that they are not planning to cross the river. Afterwards they cross the water on wooden fleets, defeat the Chetnik forces in fierce battle and save a large group of wounded and ill Partisans. Yul Brynner is the explosive expert blow‑ ing up the bridges, and Orson Welles is the Chetnik leader. The film depicts great battle scenes and Partisan heroism, also on the part of women. The battle against the Chetniks firmly underlines the national treason of the Chetnik army. The Ustasha are referred to as participants on the German side and are hardly discernible as an individual battle force.49 One of the most expensive Yugoslav films, Sutjeska, was released in 1973, celebrating the 30 year anniversary of the Battle at the river Sutjeska.50 The film was made in cooperation with a British company, directed by Stipe Delić

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Ill. 7.3. Richard Burton as commander Tito riding in front of the Partisan army in the Bosnian mountains. From Sutjeska.

and featuring Richard Burton as Tito. Sutjeska depicted, just like the examples mentioned earlier, the Partisans struggle to break out of an enemy encircle‑ ment and save the wounded. While the breakthrough succeeds, the Partisans suffer great casualties, losing a large section of the army. The focus of Sutjeska is on the heroism of the Partisans and of Tito himself, as well as on the strong insistence on solidarity with the wounded Partisans. The magnificent pictures show much bravery, death and suffering. War crimes and massacres are hardly referred to, and ethnicity is close to absent. The theme is the struggle of the Yugoslav Partisans – primarily against the Nazi-German forces. What characterised many of these great Partisan films was the simple onesided narrative, glorifying the Partisans and the communist leadership as op‑ posed to Axis occupiers. Though sorrow and suffering were often thematized, as well as the hopeless perspectives of the struggle, the films did not question the war effort, and they did not raise ethnic issues. Usually, they displayed a complete symbiosis between the Partisans and the Yugoslav people; along with the Partisans wander old men and women, children, helpless, ill and wounded persons, who share the hardships of the Partisans and celebrate their victories with them, often in gay rounds of kolo.51 Though the war films were fictional re-enactments of history, they were nevertheless closely interwoven with Partisan history, and their aim was to glorify that history. War films would often depict mythological events from the Partisan war, such as the battles at Neretva and Sutjeska. In many cases, historical consultants were connected to these film productions, or the films referred to particular sets of memoirs in order to underline their credentials

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as history. The fact that some of them were realised with support from the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army underlines that the Yugoslav state and military saw a great interest in promoting a glorious Partisan history in an attractive and even commercially feasible way.

The war as an inter-Yugoslav conflict During the 1970s, Yugoslav Partisan films addressed some of the problematic issues of Yugoslavia’s Second World War, including internal Yugoslav conflicts and inter-Yugoslav war crimes and massacres. Užička republika from 1974, directed by Žika Mitrović and produced by the Serbian film company Inex, depicted life in the republic of Užice, which was established in the Partisan held area in the autumn of 1941.52 While the film described the decision by the Nazi-German leadership to annihilate the Yugoslav resistance, as well as the Nazis’ brutal retribution politics of killing civilians in retaliation for German soldiers, the main focus was on the relations and conflicts between Chetniks and Partisans. The film pictured Draža Mihailović and the Chetnik leadership deciding that the aims of the movement include the construction of a “Chetnik-mo‑ narchic dictatorship” and the establishment of a Greater Serbia, cleansed of all ethnic minorities. It established an obvious opposition between the right‑ eous, sober Partisans conquering German garrisons, and the Chetniks – who drink, party, fight internally, and cooperate with the Germans. As presented in this film, the Chetniks overtly wanted and aimed at a civil war against the Partisans.

Ill. 7.4. Chetnik soldiers shooting men, women and children in Serbian villages. From Užička Republika.

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Chetnik war crimes were also depicted: Chetniks killing Partisans and in‑ nocent villagers; gunning down women and children; attacking and burning villages; raping and torturing. The Chetniks were also shown assisting the Germans in collecting Serbian villagers, locking them in a church and setting it on fire – a type of mass murder usually associated with the Ustasha. In Užička Republika, the betrayal committed by the Chetnik army was empha‑ sised as in many earlier accounts. But the Chetniks’ brutality and their complicity in war crimes were far more thematized than in most earlier filmic representa‑ tions. This was probably due to the increasing recognition of the civil war char‑ acter of the struggle between Partisans and Chetniks, which demanded further emphasis on the brutality and criminality of the Partisans’ opponents. Yet, Užička Republika did not present the Chetniks as a single undistinguished mob: it held a relatively sympathetic Chetnik character, a young royal officer, who is in deep doubt and despair about the behaviour of the Chetniks. Thus, Užička Republika, suggested a certain psychological nuance in the historical enemy figure. Another important film from this period, Okupacija u 26 slika (Occupation in 26 pictures) from 1978, directed by Lordan Zafranović, pictured events in Dubrovnik in 1941, during the axis invasion and establishment of the new regime.53 The film was extremely popular in Yugoslavia and attracted more than 6 million viewers in its first year of release.54 It received several prices and contemporary critics saluted its ideologically unprejudiced approach and its appeal to both popular and elitist viewers.55 Okupacija u 26 slika probably owed its tremendous success to a combination of the brilliant pictures, the slightly grotesque carnival-like staging, and the complex narrative, which is both appealing and disturbing.

Ill. 7.5. Chetnik soldiers decapitating a man by sawing through his neck. From Užička Repu‑ blika.

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Okupacija u 26 slika tells the story of a group of friends: Miho, the son of Jewish shopkeepers, Niko, a young man from the Dubrovnik upper class, and Toni, whose family background is Italian. A friend of the family, Toni is also engaged to Niko’s sister. During the German-Italian invasion, Toni and his family join the Italian fascists, while Niko involves himself with the com‑ munist Partisans. Miho and his father are arrested and put on a bus together with a group of Serb, Jewish, and other prisoners. The bus becomes the scene of an extremely bestial massacre. Calling out the Serbs first, the Ustasha, clad in civilian clothing, start torturing the prisoners, hammering nails into their sculls, cutting out the tongue of an Orthodox priest, raping the women and eventually killing most of them. Miho manages to escape, and when he returns to Dubrovnik, he and Niko kill Toni and leave the town.56 Except from the overtly heroic young communists, and the singularly evil Ustasha officers and guards, the characters of the film are not without complex‑ ity. Niko belongs to a rich family, but he is driven to side with the Partisans because of Ustasha and Italian practices and as a good patriot. Miho, the Jewish boy, is initially quiet and succumbs to the new circumstances of fascist domination and harassments, but when forced to take action, he is resolute. Toni is actually a sympathetic figure, but is weak and easily persuaded into a career as a Fascist officer.

Ill. 7.6. Civilian clad Ustasha cutting the tongue out of an orthodox priest during a massacre against prisoners in a bus. From Okupacija u 26 slika.

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While the Italians and Germans are generally described as depraved and foolish, the film is very direct in its depiction of Ustasha brutality. There is no doubt about the overt condemnation of this element of the Croatian past. Nev‑ ertheless, the complexity of the figures and the humanity with which members of the wrong side are described allows an understanding of the various sides of the war, and, to a certain extent, presents the conflict between Fascists and Partisans as an internal Yugoslav, or in this case, Croatian, question. It is, after all, Yugoslav and Croat citizens, former close friends and relatives, who are placed both by will and circumstance on various sides in this conflict. This is underlined, when Niko by killing Toni also kills the husband of his pregnant sister. In these two films, Užička Republika and Okupacija u 26 slika, inter-Yu‑ goslav conflicts and Yugoslav complicity in massacres and war crimes were thematized. The films thereby addressed some of the problematic issues that had largely been overlooked or avoided in Yugoslav historical culture. This was possible because film production was one of the least conventional spheres of cultural production in Yugoslavia. It is worth noting that Užička Republika, addressing the Chetnik betrayal and complicity in war crimes, was mainly a Serbian production, while Okupacija u 26 slika, confronting the Ustasha past, was produced by a Croatian film agency. Thus, the republican film institu‑ tions scrutinised the dark sides of these republics’ own nations. This would presumably be more acceptable within the Titoist logic of “brotherhood and unity”, which was more vulnerable to condemnations of the wartime activities of other Yugoslav nations. Balancing between popular demands, political acceptability and artis‑ tic ambitions, several Yugoslav war films were on the forefront of revising and readdressing wartime history. In the 1970s, films like Užička Republika and Okupacija u 26 slika echoed the new insights and perspectives of aca‑ demic historiography, thematizing internal Yugoslav conflicts and violence. Thus, through war films some of the more problematic insights of Yugoslav academic historiography were popularised and communicated to a wide audience.

History schoolbooks Unlike some of the more popular representations of history, particularly the film media, schoolbooks remained under direct communist control via the republican administrations. History schoolbooks represented the consensus

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of what future citizens were supposed to know and think about the past. History education was (and is, per se) a coercive and asymmetrical relation‑ ship. The curricula had to be learned in order for students to complete their education. Here was a field in which the Yugoslav authorities could be sure that the country’s future citizens were embedded in what was seen as primary dogma and values. Throughout the Titoist period, history education remained a responsibil‑ ity of the individual republican administrations. Yet, regarding the general interpretative framework of 20th century history, history schoolbooks were remarkably similar. While the number of texts about Tito in abc textbooks was significantly declining from the 1970s, the Partisan war remained the dominant theme in the teaching of contemporary history. Textbooks on 20th century history, used in the eighth grade of primary school and the fourth grade of gymnasium, dedicated a disproportionally large share of pages to the Partisans and the military-strategic developments of the war.57 Serious efforts were invested in securing that post-war generations were familiar with the state’s founding narratives about the struggle of the Yugoslav Partisans and peoples. Yet, while they wanted the students to know and treasure the heroism and suffering of the Partisan war, they had no use for shattering the image of the Partisans or too much emphasis on recent civil war and interethnic violence. The schoolbooks were written by professional textbook authors, who were usually specialised in either primary school textbooks or books for the gymna‑ sium. Textbook authors also edited the so-called čitanke, reading books with bits of prose and lyric, which accompanied the general textbooks’ descriptions of historical events and developments. Both textbooks and reading books were often reprinted and used for more than a decade and translated into minority languages within the republics: in the Croatian case into Italian and Hungar‑ ian, and in the Serbian into Romanian, for example. Eighth grade history books were quite explicit in their representations of war crimes and inter-Yugoslav massacres. It was described in a Croatian schoolbook used in the mid-1960s, how the greatest misfortunes took place in the ndh, where 800,000 people, among them a large number of women and children, were killed. The Ustasha’s concentration camps were mentioned, as well as the massacres of Serbian villages in Croatia and Bosnia.58 The willingness to address the issues of war crimes and massacres is clear from one of the exercises at the end of the chapter on the wartime occupa‑ tion regimes in the Croatian 1960s schoolbook: the student was to investigate “Which crimes were committed by the occupiers and the domestic traitors in

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your region or town”?59 The book thus encouraged the students to engage in individual reflection and to discuss war crimes. That the main victims of the Ustasha were the Serbs of the ndh was openly stated in the Croatian schoolbook, but apart from that national issues were hardly discussed. The initiative behind Ustasha crimes was ascribed to the oc‑ cupiers as a part of Nazi racial ideology along with the wish to create greater German living space and enslave non-German populations. In this project, according to the textbook, Ante Pavelić and his Ustasha were simply servants and traitors to their own people. As stated in the conclusion of the chapter on wartime regimes: In our country, the occupiers attempted to throw our peoples into a fratricidal war in order to exterminate them and rule them easier. A particular role was intended for Pavelić’ Ustasha in the ndh. They committed massacres on the Serbian popu‑ lation and killed all those who resisted their terror regime.60

Thus, the responsibility for war crimes and massacres were externalised: The initiative was ascribed to the occupiers, and ethnic violence was seen as a part of Nazi racism and their general politics. The intention was to make the Yugoslavs kill each other in “fratricidal warfare” in order to ease the work for the invaders. Yugoslav war criminals and collaborators were simply seen as traitors and servants of the occupiers. Rather than stressing the dangers of fanatical national ideologies among the Yugoslavs themselves, this schoolbook stressed the common Yugoslav struggle against outside enemies and internal traitors. In a Bosnian schoolbook from the 1970s, a more critical approach was taken to Yugoslav national ideologies. Again the mass murdering was generally seen as the occupiers’ project, in which they were assisted by domestic collaborators and Fascists.61 Yet, the Bosnian textbook differed from the earlier Croatian one in its emphasis on Chetnik war crimes, which were dedicated nearly as much text as the crimes of the Ustasha. The relatively equal stress on Chetnik and Ustasha practices probably reflected the fact that both committed some of their worst acts in Bosnia and Hercegovina, as well as the need to balance Bosnian history education fairly among the nations of the Bosnian republic. The book also shifts between Latin and Cyrillic letters. In fact, Chetniks and Ustasha were described as rather similar. The Bosnian textbook argued that both parties aimed to expand their states by embracing Bosnia. It described how the Chetniks wanted to create a “Great Serbia” and afterwards stated:

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Thus, the Fascist powers of the Croatian and the Serbian bourgeoisie, Ustasha and Chetniks, had the same goal in Bosnia and Herzegovina: in fighting for Bosnia and Herzegovina, leading a fratricidal war, they threatened its peoples with physical annihilation.

And later: Realising the criminal plans of ‘the clean nation’ Ustasha and Chetniks often an‑ nihilated whole settlements with a population of a different nationality.62

Implicit in the last part of this quote is an established knowledge that Ustasha and Chetniks represented some sort of nationalist programme, Croatian and Serbian, respectively. Thus, the nationalist aspects of Chetnik and Ustasha massacres were indeed recognised. Nevertheless, the national identity of the victims was not thematized as such. Rather, it was emphasised that Chetniks and Ustasha were agents of the fascist bourgeoisies of Serbia and Croatia and on their behalf persecuted and killed all progressive people.63 In effect, what was stressed in this schoolbook was the common struggle of progressive Yugoslav peoples, headed by the communists, against the occupi‑ ers and their servants among the Yugoslav nationalist bourgeoisie. The main victims in this narrative were in fact the progressive, pro-Partisan people, in the communist sense of the word, rather than any ethnic or nationally identified groups. This perspective was also stressed by the fact that in connection to the teaching of the history of the Partisan war the Bosnian students were to read Ivan Goran Kovačić’s poem ‘Jama’ about the victims of an Ustasha massacre dying in a pit.64 Readings of various prose and lyrics from and about the war usually ac‑ companied the teaching of Second World War history. Again, there were no attempts to hide the horrors of massacres committed by and towards Yugoslavs. In a Serbian history reading book, used in the 1960s and 1970s, texts about the war included an eyewitness account of individual and mass murdering in Jasenovac in late 1942 and extracts from the war diaries of Vladimir Dedijer and Rodoljub Čolaković, both about Chetnik torture and massacres. The text by Dedijer described torture and killing against Partisans, whereas Čolaković’s text recounted how Chetniks in Goražde mutilated Muslims, threw them dead or alive into the Drina River, or tied them to the bridge and left them to die.65 Similarly, a Bosnian history reading book from the end of the 1970s included a testimony from one of the commanders of Jasenovac, describing the administrative procedures of mass liquidation in the camp.66 Apart from

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such accounts, the books contained numerous descriptions of Partisan strategy and heroism. In primary school textbooks, though conservative, the internal Yugoslav massacres were far more elaborately described than could have been expected. No attempts were made to hide the fact that brutalities had taken place. But crimes remained ascribed to the initiative of the occupiers, and accounts were downplayed in comparison to the main narrative of the people and Partisans against occupiers and collaborators. Contemporary history textbooks for the gymnasium, though containing very large chapters on the Second World War, generally touched only very slightly – and quite superficially – on the issues of war crimes and massacres. In a Serbian history textbook, printed in 1974 but used in various other edi‑ tions since the early 1960s, war crimes and massacres were seldom mentioned. That the Serbs of the ndh rose to defend themselves against Ustasha terror was barely referred to. Otherwise, war crimes, massacres and concentration camps were described as parts of the politics of the occupiers. It was argued that the enemy attempted to cause a fratricidal war leading to the self-destruction of the Yugoslav peoples, particularly between Serbs and Croats, which forced the communists to invest all means in preventing such a war.67 While the persecution of Serbs in the ndh was not really described, it was stated that the enemy committed “systematic and planned annihilation (genocide) of Jews and Roma”.68 Thus, the crimes founded in Nazi racial ideology were pointed out specifically and defined as genocide, apparently in order to emphasise the magnitude of the war crimes committed by the Germans and their collabora‑ tors, but the massacres among Yugoslav national groups were hardly mentioned. Thus, war crimes were not represented as a Yugoslav question at all. In stead, the far majority of material about the Second World War consisted of strategic and military history. In a Bosnian gymnasium textbook from the late 1970s, war crimes were described in more detail. Initially, it was claimed that the Ustasha as well as the Chetniks were the main supporters of the occupiers in the introduction of fratricidal war between Serbs and Croats.69 Thus, the guilt of war crimes and collaboration was balanced between the collaborators of both sides. Later, however, the book stated that: On the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, the fascist organisers of this quisling construction … carried out open genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma, as well as against all citizens who were dangerous to its security.70

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And the book further described how mass slaughtering was committed against men, women and children in Krajina, Srem, Slavonia, Hercegovina and other places.71 These descriptions of war crimes were included in a chapter titled “the terror of the occupiers”, thus emphasising that the main initiative and responsibility behind the crimes belonged with the foreign Axis conquerors. This was also the case with the concentration camps, including Jasenovac, which were, according to the textbook, set up by the occupiers.72 And the chapter concluded: … the whole of Yugoslavia was turned into a place of torture and execution, pri‑ sons and concentration camps, in which repressive measures and genocide were carried out in its most brutal form against the population. In carrying out these measures, the fascist occupiers hoped that they could create out of Yugoslavia a peaceful region and that they would be able to undisturbed carry out in action their plans of conquest. …73

Hence, while this textbook to a greater extent addressed the issue of war crimes, including concentration camps and genocide, it avoided distinguishing individual Yugoslav nations and nationalities in relation to these questions. War crimes were described as carried out by the fascist occupiers against the population of the whole of Yugoslavia. In this connection, the concept of genocide represents a particularly cruel crime committed by the occupiers and their Yugoslav allies, against the common Yugoslav people, rather than against any of the individual Yugoslav nations. The gymnasium textbooks from the 1970s adopted the concept of genocide from contemporary Yugoslav historiography, yet without the thematization of internal Yugoslav national conflicts. In the textbooks, genocide was continu‑ ously seen as a crime committed by the occupiers. Though the Chetniks and the Ustasha, as well as the Serbian and Croatian bourgeoisies were blamed as collaborators, the initiative and responsibility behind war crimes and massacres remained a property of the fascist occupi‑ ers. Usually, the victims in these accounts were the Yugoslav people in general and rarely a national group as such. In most cases, national issues were back‑ grounded. What was stressed in these books, then, was the common struggle of the progressive Yugoslav peoples against the foreign fascist invaders. While the Yugoslav collaborators were represented as despicable traitors and collabo‑ rators, they were in reality of secondary importance in this narrative. As a general rule, in the Yugoslav contemporary history schoolbooks, war crimes and massacres were included as part of the descriptions of the horrors

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and suffering of war as well as the bestiality of the occupiers and their Yugo‑ slav collaborators. Unlike more popular representations of Second World War history, such as films and folk songs, history schoolbooks did not incorporate the new revisionist arguments included in parts of the Yugoslav academic historiography of the early 1970s. On the contrary, schoolbook interpretations were conservative, in accordance with party politics, and were adopted from the work of historians close to the regime.74 Thus, the simplistic narrative that was constructed in the decades after the war was largely upheld in the history schoolbooks. There were no attacks on the infallibility of the Partisans and their communist leadership, and internal Yugoslav conflicts were downplayed and totally subordinated to the main pattern of liberation struggle against the fascist occupiers. Public and popular representations of massacres and war crimes’ history were continuously used politically and pedagogically. By testifying to the brutality of the Partisans’ enemies, accounts of war crimes magnified the victory of the Partisans. The schoolbooks represent a main example of the way the original grand narrative of the Partisans’ heroic struggle remained a backbone of Yugoslav historical culture throughout the Titoist period. Even though the textbooks adopted the term of genocide, they remained faithful to the traditional way of narrating the Partisan war. The interest in war crimes aside, public representations of the Second World War in Yugoslav historical culture remained under considerable influence of communist agenda and pressure. N ote s 1

On the concept of ‘sites of memory’ see e.g. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and Hi‑ story: Les Lieux des Mémoires’, Representation, 26, 1989, 7‑24.

2

E.g. Zemaljska komisija Hrvatske za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača, Zločini u Logoru Jasenovac; Čolaković, Jasenovac 21.8.1941/31.3.1942; Nikolić, Jasenovački Logor. See chapters 3 and 4 in this book.

3

See Jovan Mirković, Objavljeni izvori i literature o Jasenovačkim Logorima, Belgrade: Mu‑ zej Žrtava Genocida, 2000, 297ff.

4 Peršen, Ustaški Logori, 87. See also Colić, Takozvana Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941., 390‑394; also Nikola Nikolić, Jasenovački Logor Smrti, Sarajevo: Oslobođenje, 1975, 190‑192. (Jasenovački Logor Smrti is a new and extended version of Nikolić’ Jasenovački Logor from 1948, see this book chapter 4). 5

Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, vol 4, Zagreb, 1960, 467.

6

Vojna Enciklopedija, vol. 10, Belgrade, 1967, 321.

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7

Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, vol. 8, Zagreb, 1971, 444. This article was authored by Ljubo Boban, a prominent Croat historian who would in the late 1980s become one of the main critics of Serbian genocide historiography and the inflation in the number of vic‑ tims.

8

More recent estimates, based among others on demographic calculations, suggest that the number of victims of Jasenovac was probably around 80,000‑90,000. See e.g. Žerjavić, Opsesije i megalomanije oko Jasenovca i Bleriburga, 72; Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 342; Mataušić, Jasenovac, 116‑123: also this book, chapter 2.

9 Mataušić, Jasenovac, 145f. 10 On ‘Jama’, see this book, chapter 4. 11 Mataušić, Jasenovac, 149‑152. See also Branislava Milošević, ‘Presentacija spomenpodručja-muzeja koncentracionih logora’, in Jelka Smreka, ed., Okrugli stol “Jasenovac 1986” 14. i 15. 11. 1986, Spomen-područje Jasenovac, 1989, 255‑259. 12 Jugoslavija. Spomenici revoluciji. Turistički Vodić, Beograd: Turistički Štampa, 1986, 143. 13 Between 1967 and 1983, the Jasenovac memorial and museum had 3,300,000 visitors. See the report in Dobrila Borović, ed., Jasenovac 1984. Okrugli stol. (Materijali s rasprave), Spomen područje Jasenovac, 1985, 12. 14 Dušan Kojović, ‘Stalna postavka Memorijalnog Muzeja “Koncentracioni Logor Jaseno‑ vac 1941‑1945’, Zbornik radova (Muzej Revolucije Bosne i Hercegovine), 11, 1990, 282‑283. 15 On existential, ideological and political uses of history, Karlsson, ‘The Holocaust as a problem of historical culture’, 40‑43, and Karlsson, Historia som Vapen, 57‑61. See also the introduction to this book. 16 See Max Bergholz, ‘Među rodoljubima, kupusom, svinjama i varvarima: Spomenici i grobovi nor-a 1947‑1965. godine’, in Husnija Kamberović, ed., 60 godina od završetka drugog svetskog rata – kako se sjećati 1945. godine, Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2006. Also ‘Partizanima tri spomenika dnevno’ (interview with Max Bergholz), Novi List, 13th No‑ vember 2005, 19. 17 See the example of the monument in Surmonci in Herzegovina, raised by local Serb po‑ wer holders in 1973, in Mart Bax, ‘Mass Graves, stagnating identification, and violence: A case study in the local sources of “the war” in Bosnia-Hercegovina’ Anthropological Quarterly, 70, 1997, 1. 18 Ger Duijzings, ‘Under Communist Rule’, in his History and Reminders in East Bosnia. 19 Ibid. 20 In Sait Orahović, ed., Narodne Pjesme Bunta i Otpora. Motivi iz revolucije, borbe i obnove, Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1971, 156‑157. Unfortunately the rhyme and rhythm of the ori‑ ginal is lost in my translation. 21 In Ibid, 153. For a quite similar song emphasising Chetnik collaboration with the Ita‑ lians, see ‘Oh, Chetniks, Serbian traitors’, Opačić-Ćanica, ed., Narodne pjesme Korduna, 266.

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22 In Opačić-Ćanica, ed., Narodne pjesme Korduna, 220. Also in Momčilo Zlatanović, ed., Sija zvezda. Narodne pesme oslobodilačke borbe i socijalističke izgradnje, Niš: Gradina, 1974, 193. 23 In Opačić-Ćanica, ed., Narodne pjesme Korduna, 223. 24 ‘At Kordun Francetić has fallen’ (Na Kordunu Francetić je pao), in ibid, 248. 25 From the song ‘Black St. George’s Day’ (Crni Đurđevdan) in ibid, 268. 26 Ibid, 269. 27 Ibid, 270. 28 Ibid, 272. Kumstvo is a close relationship with persons outside the family. The Kum is a close friend of the family who acts as godfather at baptisms and sometimes also as a witness or best man at weddings. 29 Ibid, 173. 30 ‘Krvavi pokolj kod Krnjaka’. Allegedly this song was composed and sung by a Partisan fighter from the county of Krnjak. Ibid, 462. 31 Ibid, 277. 32 Ibid, 281. 33 ‘Krvava pjesma’, in Ibid, 282. This song was, according to Opačić-Ćanica, narrated at the Gusle by a refugee from Kordun in 1944. Ibid, 453. This song is also discussed and quoted in Brkljačić, ‘Popular Culture and Communist Ideology’ 200‑201. 34 Ibid, 283. 35 Ibid, 284. 36 Ibid, 290. 37 See also ‘Zločini u selu Liplju’ (Crimes in the village of Liplje), in ibid, 291‑294. 38 Daniel J. Goulding, Liberated Cinema. The Yugoslav Experience, 1945‑2001, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, 38ff. 39 In nin, 18th September 1960, quoted in Predrag J. Marković, Beograd između istoka i zapada, 1948‑1965, Belgrade: Službeni list SRJ, 1996, 437. 40 Ibid, 454; Lampe, Yugoslavia as history, 238. 41 See e.g. Stevan Majstorović, Cultural policy in Yugoslavia, Paris: Unesco, 1972, 75f; Ni‑ kola I. Kern, ed., Press, radio, television, film in Yugoslavia, Belgrade: Yugoslav Institute of Journalism, 1961, 70ff. 42 E.g. Jutro (Morning), directed by Puriša Đorđević, 1967, and Zaseda (Ambush), directed by Žika Pavlović, 1969. After a short time, Zaseda was banned from domestic circula‑ tion. See Daniel Goulding, Liberated Cinema, 91‑102. 43 Ibid, 7ff, 20. 44 Ibid, 47f. On Daleko je Sunce, see this book, chapter 4. 45 Goulding, Liberated Cinema, 46. 46 Ibid, 235, note 26; Marković, Beograd između istoka i zapada, 455. 47 Kozara, directed by Veljko Bulajić, Yugoslavia: Bosna Film, 1963.

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48 Desant na Drvar, directed by Fadil Hadžić, Yugoslavia: Avala Film, 1963. 49 Bitka na Neretvi, directed by Veljko Bulajić, Yugoslavia: Udruženi jugoslovenski produ‑ centi, 1969. 50 Sutjeska, directed by Stipe Delić, Yugoslavia: Sutjeska Film, 1973. 51 Traditional South Slavic round dances. 52 Užička Republika, directed by Žika Mitrović, Yugoslavia, Inex Film, 1974. 53 According to the film’s introductory text, it was based partly on events described in Drago Gizdić, Dalmacija 1941. Prilozi za historiju Narodnooslobodilačke borbe, Zagreb: “27. srpanj”, 1957. 54 Goulding, Liberated Cinema, 154. 55 Damir Radić, ‘Filmovi Lordan Zafranovića’, Hrvatski filmski ljetopis, 6, 2000, 24, 64‑65. 56 Okupacija u 26 slika, directed by Lordan Zafranović, Yugoslavia: Jadran Film, 1978. 57 Wolfgang Höpken, ‘History Education and Yugoslav (Dis-)integration’, in Wolfgang Höpken, ed., Öl ins Feuer? Schulbücher, ethnische Stereotypen und Gewalt in Südosteuropa, Braunschweig, 1996, 105. On the abc textbooks, see Vučetić, ‘abc Textbooks’, 255‑256. 58 Šarlota Đuranović and Mirko Žeželj, Prošlost i sadašnost 3. Udžbenik povijesti za VIII razred osnovne škole, (5th unchanged edition), Zagreb, Školska knjiga, 1967, 105‑106. 59 Ibid, 106. 60 Ibid, 107. 61 Stanko Peravić and Husein Serdarević, Povijest 8. Udžbenik za viii razred oznovne škole, Sarajevo: Svetlost, 1974, 111‑113. 62 Ibid, 123‑124. 63 Ibid, 124. 64 Ibid, 113. On ‘Jama’, see this book, chapter 4. 65 Đorđe Grubac, Istorijska čitanka za viii razred osnovne škole (8th edition), Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva, 1973, 119‑121, 153‑154. 66 Tonči Grbelja and Dušan Otašević, Istorijska čitanka za viii razred osnovne škole (second edition), Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1980, 92‑93. 67 Đorđe Knežević and Bogdan Smiljević, Istorija najnovijeg doba za IV razred gimnazije (11th reworked edition), Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva, 1974, 73, 75, 76. 68 Ibid, 73. 69 Tonci Grbelja and Dušan Otašević, Istorija za IV razred Gimnazije (1st edition), Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1978, 115. 70 Ibid, 117. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid, 116. 73 Ibid, 118. 74 Höpken, ‘History Education and Yugoslav (Dis-)integration’, 103.

The breakdown of communist history and the theme of genocide, 1980‑1986 At the beginning of the 1980s, Yugoslav communism entered a period of combined political, ideological and economic crisis. Within an atmosphere of doubt and scepticism, the fundamental historical myths of the Partisan War and the early communist regime were revised and scrutinised. As part of this, the interest in the massacres of the Second World War rose markedly within Yugoslav historical culture. Genocide history became a dominant issue within creative arts such as literature and drama, and it was also referred to and used in public debates, particularly – but not only – in Serbia. This chapter shows how the thematisation of genocide contributed to the break down of the communist historical mythology in the first half of the 1980s. It claims that the thematisation of genocide was both a confrontation with the official communist narrative and a readdressing of what was seen as an over-looked part of the common Yugoslav past. Yet, the use of genocide thematisation in public debate also contributed to a polarisation of national relations in Yugoslavia.

Politics of crisis The turn of the 1980s constituted in many ways a break in the history of socialist Yugoslavia. Tito died in May 1980, leaving no obvious heir to take over the role of mediator between the republican power bases. Since 1974 the chairmanship of federal power was in the hands of a rotating presidency, ensuring that representatives of every constitutive unit had their time as head of the federal government, thus avoiding the dominance of any federative unit. This arrangement, however, had also made the federal centre weak and unstable. Tito’s death inaugurated various statements of loyalty towards Titoism. Initially it seemed that a new turn of conservatism was on its way, with in‑ creased repression against critical intellectuals, particularly in Belgrade.1 But

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from the beginning of the 1980s, Yugoslav society displayed several signs of crisis, which would lead to political and cultural changes on both republican and federal level. Since the late 1970s, the ever troubled economy was experiencing yet an‑ other period of recession.2 The economic difficulties sharpened the sense of political paralysis and impotence. By 1983, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia openly declared that the country was in crisis. Various types of reforms were suggested, but hardly any action was taken.3 Political stalemate characterised the League of Communists, with confident and self-sufficient republican parties not responding to calls from the federal centre and failing to show up at planned meetings. With the idea of a unitary Yugoslav nation far gone, the Yugoslav federation resembled now more a community of nations and national republics. In 1981 renewed riots in the autonomous province of Kosovo suggested that reforms had far from solved the problems there. The situation was initially brought under control by military intervention, causing several deaths, while the League of Communists of Kosovo was purged and numerous demonstra‑ tors imprisoned.4 Yet, police and military from other republics had to remain in the area, and unrest was to haunt the province throughout the 1980s. The continuing trouble and the emigration of Serbs and Montenegrins from the province caused particular worries in Serbia, whereas Croat, Slovene and Mac‑ edonian representatives tended to support Kosovo’s independence of Serbia. Serbian representatives thus felt that Serbian interests were ignored by the other republics, and the Kosovo question increasingly became a source of disagreement among the republics. Though the main political debates stayed within the framework of the League of Communists, the general atmosphere of crisis and instability was reflected culturally. Historiography, literature and intellectual discourse increas‑ ingly uncovered dark sides of Yugoslavia’s 20th century history.5 Revisionist and “iconoclastic” history added to the gradual de-legitimising of the crisis-ridden communist regime and even to questioning the state structure as such. Among the most frequently addressed issues within this revising of history were Second World War massacres, which gradually developed into a politi‑ cally significant theme, focusing on the massacres as genocide. This theme of genocide was promoted and used from various sides, often questioning the common past from national and anti-communist perspectives. One of the conditions that allowed these various ways of communicating and thematizing the history of the Second World War as genocide was the disappearance of a unitary Yugoslav historical culture.

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Fractured historical culture The academic field of contemporary history and in particular the work of the institutes of contemporary history (the former institutes of the history of the workers’ movement), remained closely connected to the party. At the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade, 39 of the 45 employees were members of the League of Communists.6 Many of the leading figures, such as Dušan Bilandžić in Zagreb or Jovan Marjanović in Belgrade, were also highly respected party officials. Nevertheless, by the early 1980s the continuous decentralisation of the Yugoslav federation that had taken place during the preceding decades and the consequent self-sufficiency of the republics had gradually created inde‑ pendent and distinct historical cultures in each republic. The academic side of Yugoslav historical culture was effectively fragmented in national environ‑ ments. The director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade, Petar Kačavenda, claimed in 1984 that the strengthening of the sovereignty of republics and provinces and the constitution of the federation had led to the standpoint that also academic activities were to be directed within the framework of republics and provinces.7 Describing Yugoslav historiography in 1983, the historian Drago Roksandić suggested that it in fact consisted of a collection of national historiographies of varying developments.8 As claimed by the American historian Ivo Banac, it had become increasingly clear from the end of the 1960s that the unity of Yugoslav historiography was dependent on regime unity.9 In the 1980s, such a unity was gradually disappearing. This was also illustrated by the failed attempts at preparing a new common historical synthesis. Though there was ample political support and even financial cover‑ age provided for the writing of a History of the Yugoslav Peoples and Minorities, nothing came of the project.10 In the early 1980s, Second World War history was still a dominant issue within Yugoslav historiography. In the year 1980, 219 history books were pub‑ lished, of which 125 were about the People’s Liberation War and between 1979 and 1982, 426 historical meetings and conferences were held, focusing mainly on the Second World War.11 Yet, even the image of the “sacred” National Lib‑ eration Struggle was fragmented: Of the 125 books published on this subject in 1980, 46 were war stories from particular regions, 26 were mainly about local Partisan detachments, and 13 focused on local heroes.12 Outside the official academic institutions, Yugoslav historical culture was even more fractured. Though Yugoslavia in many ways constituted a unitary cultural sphere, the outspoken autonomy of the republics in relation to the

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degree of cultural liberty and freedom of expression meant that limitations to what could be said and written varied considerably. In the early 1980s, particularly Belgrade and Ljubljana were scenes of daring criticism and the breaking of hitherto established norms, but also Novi Sad and other cities offered relative openness with regard to cultural expression. This enabled art‑ ists and historians to search for the most tolerant spaces for their works to be staged or published. This meant on the one hand that it was often possible to find alternative places of publication if a daring work had been banned in one city and, on the other, that the degree of expressions of criticism and revisionism was very uneven among the republics. In the early 1980s, criti‑ cism and revisionism of Yugoslav history was particularly outspoken among Belgrade writers, and also in Slovenia and Vojvodina norms were broken and icons smashed by authors and artists. The unequal distribution of revisionism meant that the national rethinking of history developed in some republics, whereas the historical debate was rather conservative in others. While Serbian historical culture thematized national victimisation in the Second World War, the Croatian historians’ environment, which had been efficiently purged and therefore scared off nationalist tenden‑ cies after the Croatian spring, remained largely silent about these issues until the late 1980s. This also meant that the national debate was relatively debarred from inputs from the views of other national historiographies.

The breakdown of communist history One of the first and most important contributions to the revision of Yugoslav history came from the ever-present Vladimir Dedijer. Journalist turned histo‑ rian, Dedijer had a nerve for sensations, but he seemed also sincerely dedicated to uncovering the truth in every bit of hidden darkness. As a formerly close associate of Tito, his revelations had an aura of trustworthiness and inside knowledge.13 In his massive volume Novi Prilozi za Biografiju Josipa Broza Tita (New Contributions to the biography of Josip Broz Tito), published in 1981, Dedijer aimed mainly at revealing scandals and hitherto hidden contro‑ versial sides of Tito’s person. But he also opened a number of questions that were to dominate Serbian historical culture during the 1980s: Novi Prilozi reintroduced the issue of the persecution of Serbs in the ndh, closely linked to the question of the concentration camp complex at Jasenovac and the issue of co-responsibility of the Catholic Church and the Zagreb Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac in particular. According to Dedijer, Stepinac was the spiritual father

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and political mentor of Ante Pavelić, he was chiefly responsible for the forced conversion of Serbs, and he and the Catholic Church were closely linked to the Ustasha’s politics of genocide.14 Parallel to Stepinac and the Ustasha, Dedijer also raised the issues of Chetnik terror and generally of the “genocidal inten‑ tions” of the Serbian bourgeoisie towards other nations in the Balkans, again thematizing the perspective of genocide.15 Furthermore, Novi Prilozi contained a specific chapter on Jasenovac, writ‑ ten by Antun Miletić, colonel in the Yugoslav Army and connected to the museum at the camp complex. According to Miletić, investigations suggested that 700,000 people were killed in Jasenovac. The camp, claimed Miletić, was thus the most terrible in Yugoslavia and the third in all of occupied Europe.16 Miletić’s description strongly emphasised the horror and terror of Jasenovac, and it is clear from his account that by far the majority of victims were Serbs. Yet, he underlined that the Ustasha was a minority in the ndh, staying in power only by their use of terror, and that their camp system was modelled after Nazi and Fascist practices.17 Though thematizing Serbian national victimisation, Dedijer was not simply a Serbian nationalist. Faithful to his Partisan adherence and to the ideology of Brotherhood and Unity, Dedijer constantly underlined that war crimes and genocide were committed by all sides. Yet, insisting on the need to address the issues of ethnic conflicts and genocide, he missed no chance to claim that the Catholic Church and the Vatican were the main culprits. The arguments and statements in Novi prilozi were not all that new: As has been shown in earlier chapters of this book, Jasenovac, the persecution of Serbs and the role of Stepinac and the Catholic Church had all been ad‑ dressed immediately after the war and repeatedly ever since. What was new, however, was the thematization of internal Yugoslav massacres and genocide as such, featuring in subtitles and constituting a main element of the massive description of the Partisan war, and situated within the scandal-revealing and taboo-breaking context of Novi prilozi. Discussions, documents and accounts of the Second World War occupied more than two thirds of Novi Prilozi’s 1300 pages. Descriptions of internal Yugoslav massacres were foregrounded in subtitles and in particular supplementary accounts (prilozi), and they were accompanied by scandal-revealing accounts of cruel executions and random liquidations ordered by top figures of the Partisan leadership, material that was obviously damaging to the myth of the Partisan war.18 Dedijer’s work functioned as a first call to revise these issues from the perspective of national conflict, victimisation and genocide, while disposing of old restrictions and taboos. It is no wonder that Novi Prilozi was severely

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criticised from the official side; the Partisan veterans’ organisation accused Dedijer of slandering the revolution and communist officials questioned the motives behind his publication. Nevertheless, the book was a remarkable suc‑ cess and its initial print-run of 70.000 copies was quickly sold out, testifying that it was received with interest and enthusiasm by the general public.19 While Novi prilozi signalled the beginning of the breakdown of the estab‑ lished communist history, much of the following revisionism was made by people outside the established historians’ community and by non-historians. A leading role was played by non-academic and fictional representations of history. Authors engaged in fictional rewriting of some of the very darkest sides of Yugoslavia’s communist history. The internment on the infamous prison-island, Goli Otok, of thousands of communists suspected of supporting the Cominform and the Soviet bloc, after the break in 1948, was the subject of numerous novels in the early 1980s.20 In 1985 a very popular film, Otac na službenom putu (When father was away on business), directed by Emir Kus‑ turica, constituted a beautiful and ironic comment to the oppressive nature of Yugoslavia’s Stalinist and early post-Stalinist regime. Kusturica’s film presented the purges of the communist cadre and the suffering it caused them and their families as essentially unrelated to ideology and politics. Instead, they were results of petty skirmishes, jealousy and the abuse of power by local officials and security service members.21 Also the communist take-over of power in the early post-war years was scrutinised, most famously in the book Stranački pluralizam ili monizam: društveni pokreti i politički sistem u Jugoslaviji 1944‑1949 (Party pluralism or monism: Social movements and the political system in Yugoslavia 1944‑1949) by two social scientists from Belgrade University, Kosta Ćavoški and Vojislav Koštunica, the latter of which was to overturn Slobodan Milošević as president of Yugoslavia in October 2000.22 One of the effects of this revisionism was the realisation that the estab‑ lishment of communist power in Yugoslavia had, in many ways, been just as cruel as it had been in the Soviet Union and other countries – countries which Yugoslavia as a more free and democratic country had liked to distinguish itself from. This raised questions as to whether a system established in this way could be truly humane. And, furthermore, if this was the type of history that was hidden through the communist period, how could any communist-supported historiography be trustworthy at all? Not all Yugoslav republics gave room for revisionism, however. In Croatia, attacks on official communist historiography caused harsh retribution. In 1981, the former general and dissident historian, Franjo Tuđman was tried for spread‑ ing hostile propaganda in foreign media, amongst other things by denying

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the official number of victims in Jasenovac. Tuđman was punished with three years imprisonment and a five year ban from participating in public life.23

The rehabilitation of the Chetniks A particular Serbian aspect of the readdressing of the past was the gradual revi‑ sion of the image of the Chetnik movement. Throughout the Titoist period official historiography regarded the Chetniks as national traitors, war criminals and slaughterers of Partisan supporters and civilian Muslims and Croats. From the early 1980s, however, as the established communist history was gradually losing ground, a new perspective on the Chetniks developed within Serbian historiography. In his Revolucija i Kontrarevolucija u Jugoslaviji (Revolution and Contrarevolution in Yugoslavia) from 1983, the respected communist historian Branko Petranović proposed that the Chetniks were in origin and principle anti-fascist, though their politics of collaboration with the Serbian quisling regime as well as with the Germans made this stance questionable.24 A far more radical reinterpretation of Yugoslavia’s Second World War came in Veselin Đuretić’s Saveznici i jugoslovenska ratna drama (The Allies and the Yugoslav War Drama) from 1985. Unlike earlier studies of the war, Đuretić’ was not particularly inter‑ ested in Partisan warfare and the revolution. His main aim was to investigate how the Chetniks lost the support of the allies and the Yugoslav peoples. In Đuretić’s study, Chetnik and Partisan war strategies were somehow presented as parallel and equally legitimate. The Chetnik aims were seen as concentrated on avoiding excessive Serbian war losses, an interpretation quite different from the traditional communist perspective of the Chetniks as national traitors, servants of the occupiers and of the Serbian bourgeoisie.25 This new perspective on the Chetniks was severely criticised by the com‑ munist regime.26 Also within the Croatian historians’ environment these new interpretations of the Chetnik movement were met with wonder and critique. In 1986, Fikreta Jelić-Butić, historian at the Institute of contemporary history in Zagreb, published a book on the Chetniks in Croatia, in which she explored their use of terror against both Croat and Serb civilians.27 In the foreword, the publisher, with explicit reference to Đuretić’s study, stated that readers of Jelić-Butić’s book would easily be assured of the inaccuracy of the claim that the Chetnik movement was an anti-fascist organisation.28 While the Chetniks had indeed constituted an organized resistance in Serbia and other places, the attempts at their rehabilitation made little sense in Croatia and Bosnia, where Chetnik crimes had been excessive. Yet, this was

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not considered by some Serbian historians. The construction of individual historians’ environments in each republic had resulted in individual republican or national histories, which were not necessarily aware of or interested in one another’s perspectives. The attempts to rehabilitate the Chetniks, furthermore, were an attack on the national symmetry that had characterised the Titoist representations of war crimes and traitors, according to which all nationalities had their traitors, and all traitors were equally bad. Thus, the delicate balancing acts of Titoist historiography were gradually abandoned. The Serbian revising of the history of the Chetniks is quite illustrative of how republican historical cultures went their separate ways. The recast of the Chetniks’ image was part of a fundamental re-thematization of Second World War history from non-communist, often nationalist perspectives. Far more explicit than historians in this respect was the readdressing of history in fictional literature.29

Thematization of wartime massacres in literature In the early 1980s, several novels and theatre plays readdressed the history of wartime massacres from the perspective of national victimisation. One of the most important contributions to the dramatical reinterpretation of Yugoslav wartime history from an ethno-national perspective was the novel Nož (The Knife) by Vuk Drašković, published in 1982.30 Representations of Second World War history in Nož focus on crimes, slaughtering and Serbian suffering. The book contains several horrible and detailed descriptions of mu‑ tilation and massacres committed by Muslim Ustasha against Serbs, initially in Hercegovina, but later also in the area around Sarajevo. The book opens with a description of the celebration of Christmas, January 1942 in a Serbian family, the Jugović family. The feast is interrupted by the arrival of a group of Muslim Ustasha of the Osmanović family, who used to be close friends related to Jugovići by kumstvo, i.e. as godfathers and best-men. Nevertheless, the Muslim men tie up the Serbs, rape one of the women, mutilate, torture and eventually kill most of the family. The elderly uncle, father Nićifor, is locked together with other Serbian villagers in the local orthodox church, which is then burned. The only survivor of the Jugović family is an infant, who is taken to a woman member of the Osmanović family and raised as a Muslim.31 The cruelty and clinical details of this and other descriptions of the torture committed against Serbs in Nož is extraordinary. Completely at odds with

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the common narrative frameworks of Titoism is the way these horrors are explained: In the Osmanović case, references to Ustasha ideology are close to absent; instead Drašković’s account represents the crimes as driven by pure Muslim hatred of Serbs, a hatred founded in Muslim feelings of inferiority due to their ancestors’ conversion and, consequently, betrayal against their own nation and tradition.32 Another heavily symbolic account in the book describes a massacre of Serb prisoners, who are tied in a field of grain, as a unit of Ustasha cut the grain by scythe, simultaneously mutilating and cutting to pieces the captured Serbs, and thus exterminating them from the ground as they harvest the grain.33 The Ustasha committing the massacre are driven by a mad lust for blood. The aim of their project is a Croatia cleansed of Serbs. Here Drašković clearly refers to the Ustasha project as an essentially Croatian ideology, separate and quite independent of the Second World War and the Axis occupation. In Nož, wartime history is significantly twisted from its usual version. The book also plays with the idea of hidden history: the central figure, Alija, the orphaned child from the Jugović family, is told that he originates from a Muslim family who were massacred by Serbian Chetniks, but during the book he slowly unravels his own true story. The relationship between Parti‑ sans and Chetniks is touched upon as well: The local unit of Chetniks are seen as brave and decent Hercegovinian peasants, led by a worthy local hero. The struggle between Partisans and Chetniks is described as a pointless result of communist fanaticism and the communists’ practices of murdering local “kulaks”.34 While Nož challenged the official narrative in several ways, the main effect of the book was the thematization of Serbian national victimhood caused by other Yugoslav nations. Yet also the suggestion that history had been manipu‑ lated and that hidden stories of Serbian suffering could be uncovered, had a powerful impact in a historical culture that was about to reconsider the past, revealing hitherto hidden dark sides. It seemed to suggest that the crimes com‑ mitted against the Serbian nation were far greater than had ever been revealed or realised. Furthermore, the book held a clearly different and critical view of communist strategies and behaviour, both during the war in the struggle against the Chetniks, and afterwards in what was presented as a cynical and manipulated construction of an official history of the war. Drašković’s public readings of his novel met with great enthusiasm from the listeners, but the book also caused him to lose his job and party membership.35 Nevertheless, Nož became a remarkable success and was reprinted numerous times in the late 1980s and in the 1990s.

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Throughout the decade more literature readdressing war history from a national victim perspective appeared. In Danko Popović’s very popular Knjiga O Milutinu (The book about Milutin), which was first published in 1985 and within a year reprinted 14 times, Serbian and Yugoslav history was described from the perspective of the main character and narrator, the Serbian peasant Milutin. In a short chapter, Milutin recounted how he heard Serbian refugees from the Ustasha state describe the horrors happening there, the stories of the suffering of children seeming especially terrible.36 Yet, Knjiga o Milutinu also condemned Chetnik terror during the war and the post-war communists regime and its persecution and imprisonment of ordinary farmers, including Milutin himself, as class enemies or “kulaks”. A main point of the book was that Serbs had suffered and shed blood in warfare for ideologies, such as Serbian expansionism, Yugoslavism, communism, and for the fancies of their various governments, instead of caring for the welfare of their own country and people. In Knjiga o Milutinu, Popović recounted Yugoslav 20th century history from an exclusively Serbian perspective: it had been a history of continuous Serbian suffering, and he presented the idea of Yugoslav brotherhood and community as something that had only caused loss and misery for Serbs.37 Nož and Knjiga o Milutinu are examples of the way parts of Serbian lit‑ erature in the first half of the 1980s recomposed Yugoslav Second World War history along a line quite defiant of the official communist narrative of Partisan heroism and all-Yugoslav patriotism, thematizing instead Serbian suffering at the hands of other Yugoslav nations. These same issues were raised in Yugoslav playwriting, though from different angles.

Drama The Ustasha regime’s persecution of Serbs was the theme of the Croatian drama‑ tist Slobodan Šnajder’s play Hrvatski Faust (Croatian Faust), which was first staged in Belgrade in 1982. In Hrvatski Faust the Ustasha’s racial laws, the sepa‑ ration, deportation and massacres of Serbs and the horrors of Jasenovac lurks in the background and are sometimes commented upon satirically as the play simulates the staging of the great German drama Faust at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb during the Ustasha reign.38 In a scene in the Cathedral of Zagreb, an Ustasha leader meets a Catholic priest and asks him to confirm that Jasenovac is not as rumours have it. The priest replies by handing him a statue made of human bone and showing him an hour glass measuring the time run‑ ning between one killing and the next in the camp.39 The horror of the Ustasha system and its connection to the Catholic Church is thus emphasised.

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In the Ustasha version of Faust, the play is gradually transformed and Croatianised while Šnajder tells a parallel story of an actress of communist orientation who is raped and tortured to death by Ustasha soldiers, her new‑ born child abducted and probably killed.40 In Šnajder’s play, Ustasha crimes are explicitly connected to Croatian nationalism and culture. Standing alone, the actor playing Faust laments to himself: O Croatia, evil mother, Mother of many deaths, What kind of children do you warm under your skirts?41

And later, as the staging of the drama at the Croatian National Theatre is con‑ tinuingly disintegrating, and most of the original actors have been replaced by Ustasha faithful, Mephistoles exclaims: “Father, save me from Serbian heroism and Croatian culture.”42 In this way, Šnajder points out that the horrors of the Second World War should be understood as an essentially Yugoslav matter, closely linked to national ideologies and antagonisms. According to Šnajder’s play, the bases for the crimes of the Ustasha should be sought within Croatian national culture. While the terrible nature of the Ustasha regime is the main issue of Hrvatski Faust, the play’s description of the communists’ efforts immediately after the war to re-establish the National Theatre and to control it in a way not unlike that of the Ustasha seems cynical in the face of the actress’s violent death. Whereas the play is mainly an attempt to address Croatia’s troubled past, in essence it condemns any totalitarian ideology and holds a critique also against the communist take over of cultural life after the war. This point was not lost on the Yugoslav public. According to a reviewer in the weekly news magazine nin, the play’s initial farcical comic tone was translated into a moving drama and ended with a disturbing, tragic irony.43 The play was received with acclaim and it received the annual prize at the Yugoslav theatre festival in Novi Sad in 1983.44 Far more troublesome for the Yugoslav authorities was another play about the wartime past, namely Jovan Radulović’s Golubnjača (Pigeonhole), which was first staged in Novi Sad in October 1982. That Radulović’s play worried the communist establishment is clear from the fact that its staging in the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade was cancelled after eight nights due to pressure from the local communist party functionaries.45 Furthermore Golubnjača was banned from participating at the Yugoslav theatre festival in Novi Sad in 1983, even though it had packed theatres and received a prize in Slovenia.46

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The play is set in 1960 and 1961 in a Serbian village in the Dalmatian mountain region. It portrays a community characterised by physical and spir‑ itual poverty. The Serbs lament their lost relatives who were killed during the Second World War by Ustasha militias and thrown into a nearby pit, called the Pigeonhole (Golubnjača). According to one of the figures in the play, the pit used to be the home of a colony of pigeons, but the birds fled the atmosphere of blood and death.47 The play describes how Serbs in the village are clearly haunted by psycho‑ logical wounds that are only scarcely concealed by superficial communist slo‑ gans, which people repeat automatically and without conviction. The children of the village, playing around the pit and knowing about the bones of their relatives down there, inherit the trauma of the adults. On a pioneer excur‑ sion they meet with a group of Croat pioneers from the neighbouring village. Though the local communist hero from the Partisan war accompanies the excursion, praising brotherhood and unity between the Yugoslav peoples, the atmosphere is clearly hateful. The Serbian children catch a Croat boy, harass him, force him to declare himself an Ustasha and threaten to throw him in the pit.48 The theme of Radulović’s play is not the war crimes as such, but rather the way Serbs in the region were still tormented by the memory and the insensibil‑ ity with which communist officials and neighbouring Croats treated the issue. At one point in the play, Croats from the neighbouring village plan to throw a horse into the pit in order to kill it. The Serbian villagers, angry and horrified, run to the pit and the Croats are convinced to give up their plan.49 Implicitly, the play suggests that the new common state based on the brotherhood and unity of the Yugoslav peoples is a hollow construction, unable to cover the wounds and bridge the animosity from the war. The plays by Šnajder and Radulović appeared almost simultaneously and thematically they had much in common. Nevertheless, their very different receptions by official cultural critics may be explained by certain essential dif‑ ferences: In Šnajder’s play, the persecution of Serbs is continuously referred to, but the main victim in his narrative is the Croatian communist actress. In any case, as a Croat thematizing Serbian suffering, he could hardly be criticised for nationalism. And while Šnajder criticised the communist handling of the past, the problems he referred to were distant and belonged to the Stalinist period of Yugoslav communism, from which the Yugoslav party had officially distanced itself. Radulović’s main victim, on the other hand, was the traumatised and impoverished Serbian village, the same type of environment from which he himself originated. Radulović, furthermore, questioned a more recent period,

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namely the 1960s, and a continued communist procedure of handling the trauma of the wartime past. The perspectives on Yugoslav national reconcili‑ ation suggested in Golubnjača were rather pessimistic. At the end of the 1980s, Golubnjača was to return to public debate, when the Literary Society of Vojvodina suggested it should be rehabilitated. By then Radulović had made himself a voice of the Krajina Serbs and claimed that Serbs as a nation were threatened in Croatia. In this context, Golubnjača seemed more like a national statement than it did in 1983, when Radulović distanced himself from any political or national position.50

Wartime history and the concept of genocide in public debate As the history of both the Second World War and the inter-Yugoslav massa‑ cres was broken down and recast in new versions and from new perspectives, references to the concept of genocide and the history of the Second World War massacres became more frequent among the general public. Initially the Croatian and Serbian churches were at the forefront in public debate, read‑ dressing wartime history by suggesting new forms and contents of wartime commemorations. Later, also dissident intellectuals, particularly in Belgrade, used references to wartime history and the concept of genocide in public statements and debate. The history of Second World War massacres became a metaphor of national suffering, and genocide as a concept became a readily accessible accusation in debates of national inequality and suppression. Thus, I will argue, by drawing on Yugoslavia’s painful history the concept of genocide was on its way to becoming a cardinal theme.

The national churches and wartime history A key issue within the debates among the Croatian and Serbian churches was the role of the Zagreb Archbishop, Alojzije Stepinac, who was convicted in 1946 for high treason committed both during and after the war. From 1979, the Croatian Catholic Church repeatedly called for rehabilitation of Stepinac: he was commemorated at public masses, and his candidacy for martyrdom was submitted to the Vatican.51 In 1985, 25 years after his death, another memorial mass held for Stepinac provoked critical reactions and suggestions of a return of Croatian clericalism.52 While Stepinac in the eyes of the Croatian Catholic Church was a victim of communist manipulation and ‘show’ jurisdiction,

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parts of the Serbian public considered him a main instigator of the Ustasha genocidal politics, the forced conversions in particular. On its side, the Serbian Orthodox Church, on the occasion of the recon‑ struction of the orthodox parish church at Jasenovac, held a commemoration mass on the 2nd September 1984 in the rebuilt church. During the ceremony, the Serbian patriarch called on his listeners to forgive, but never forget.53 Ac‑ cording to the Serbian orthodox metropolitan of Zagreb and Ljubljana, the commemoration was meant to counter attempts to obliterate the traces of Jasenovac, to reduce the number of victims and to deny and forget the crime.54 Liturgies in Jasenovac were held every year afterwards, the most massive ones in the early 1990s.55 The commemoration of Jasenovac within the framework of the Serbian Orthodox Church meant that the ceremony became an explicitly and overtly Serbian ritual, thematizing Serbs as ethnic and national victims, and as vic‑ tims of genocide. In this way, the history of Jasenovac was addressed from an overtly national perspective. The Serbian Church’s insistence on the need to remember reflected existential and moral relationships to the past. The church presented itself as defiant towards what it saw as attempts to downplay the issue. The national and religious framework that the church constructed around remembrance of Jasenovac and the Ustasha past in general thus held a prominent element of indignation as a primary motive and mobilising force behind the attempts to gather more interest in these issues. In the discourse of the Serbian church, a threatening perspective of genocide was at times woven together with the history of the Second World War, the Ustasha past serving as a metaphor or metonym for Serb suffering, re-actual‑ ising senses of threat and victimisation. The term genocide and the histories of national victimisation became arguments in the discussions of national relations in Serbia and Yugoslavia, and of the raising of national demands and worries. A dominant issue within this discussion was the situation for the Serb and Montenegrin minorities in Kosovo. In 1983‑1984, the monk Atanasije Jevtić published a series of travel reports in Pravoslavlje, the organ of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The travel reports, titled ‘Od Kosova do Jadovna’ (‘From Kosovo to Jadovno’) linked the Serb emigration from Kosovo to the Ustasha crimes against the Serbs, with the massacres in Lika and Kordun and the concentration camps at Jadovno and Jasenovac mentioned as the worst examples.56 Describing various examples of pressure, harassment and even murder of Serbs in Kosovo, Jevtić’s account went on to discuss Ustasha practices, arguing that the numbers of victims must have been significantly larger than assumed in standard reference works

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such as the Yugoslav Encyclopaedia. Jevtić argued that during its four months of existence the camp at Jadovno was “… according to the intensity of the ‘work’ of its horrible ‘mill of death’, perhaps the most terrible of all hitherto known camps of the Second World War”. He proclaimed Jasenovac the site of the “most populated Serbian city in the history of this martyred people”.57 Whereas Jevtić believed that the number of Serbs murdered in the ndh was underestimated in most Yugoslav presentations, he also considered the sites of massacres and mass graves insufficiently indicated by monuments and landmarks. His travel account was thus intended to remind everyone of the need to remember Serbian suffering at the hands of the Ustasha during the Second World War, as well as that in Kosovo in the 1980s. Jevtić furthermore underlined that these suffering Serbs in both Kosovo and Krajina, as well as all other Serbs, will always be connected and united as one people through religion and ethnic origin.58 The idea of the commemoration of Serb suffer‑ ing during the ndh was thus intimately linked to the Serbs as a national and religious entity, and as such it was aimed at and appealed exclusively to Serbs.

Genocide as a metaphor – Kosovo and Croatia During the 1980s, the concept of genocide was increasingly linked to the crisis in Kosovo and the continuous emigration of Serbs and Montenegrins from the province. From the early 1980s the Serbian Orthodox Church had positioned itself as protector of the Kosovo Serbs. By the mid-1980s a significant part of Serbia’s critical intelligentsia equally adopted the cause of the Kosovo Serbs as a main point of their agenda.59 When complaining about the fate of Serbs in Kosovo, Serbian clergy and intellectuals referred to the concept of genocide to describe what they saw as an ongoing national tragedy in the province. An early example of this was the appeal sent by 21 representatives of the Serbian Church to the presidency and parliament of Serbia and the presidency of the Yugoslav federation in April 1982 stating that, “without any exaggeration it can be said that a well considered and planned genocide is gradually being committed towards the Serbian people in Kosovo!”60 In 1985 the Serbian farmer Đorđe Martinović was injured by a broken bottle in his rectum, allegedly because he was attacked on his field in Kosovo by Albanian bandits. The following debate in Serbian press drew on heavily loaded Second World War references: on the 10th June 1985, in an article called ‘Camp for one man’ in the magazine Duga, a journalist posed the question if “a Jasenovac for one man was created on Đorđe Martinović’ field?”61 Jasenovac,

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as a main symbol of Serbian historical suffering, was used as a metaphor to characterise Martinović’s fate, thus transmitting to him the qualities of Serbian national martyr and victim of nationally motivated persecution in Kosovo.62 The charge in January 1986 that a planned genocide on Serbs was taking place in Kosovo was repeated in a petition signed by 200 Serbian intellectuals and sent to the Yugoslav and Serbian parliaments.63 Similar claims were made in September 1986 in the famous Memorandum, written by a committee of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (sanu), which was leaked to the press and partly published in the newspaper Večernje novosti.64 The focus of the Memorandum, apart from Yugoslavia’s political and economic crises, was the difficult status of the Serbian nation in Yugoslavia.65 The document consist‑ ently argued that Serbs were discriminated against and cheated by their fellow Yugoslavs, Croats and Slovenes in particular. It also claimed that a physical, political, economic and cultural genocide was taking place in Kosovo. While this and other points about Kosovo held nothing new according to Večernje novosti’s journalist, Aleksandar Đukanović, the statement that “… except from the period of the Independent State of Croatia, Serbs in Croatia have never in the past been as threatened as they are today…” was seen as especially problematic and damaging to national relations in Yugoslavia.66 In the Memorandum, the Serbs’ current conditions in Kosovo and Croatia respectively, were linked to historical examples of massacres, persecution, in‑ terethnic strife and Serbian historical victimisation. The document obviously used these bits of history to underline and strengthen its main point that Serbs as a nation were treated unfairly. The reminder of the violent past and the positioning of the current situation within this historical context inevitably historicised inter-ethnic relations and threw a shadow of threat over the pre‑ sent. The thematization of genocide and Second World War history thereby contributed to troubling and polarising national relations in the crisis-plagued Yugoslav federation. The revision of Second World War history in the first half of the 1980s was a combination of a search for a more true form of history, free of manipulation; of regime critique attacking the communist system at its mythic roots; and of readdressing and rewriting history from national or nationalist perspectives, focusing on national victimisation. That Serbian writers were at the forefront of revising and re-thematizing wartime history from the national perspective was no coincidence. For one thing, Serbs did suffer enormous losses due to nationally motivated persecu‑ tion during the war. Thus, there was a history to rework, and, probably just as important, the relatively liberal regime of censorship in Serbia compared

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to, for example the conservatism and strict censorship in Croatia, made the publication of such reworkings possible. The calls to remember the victims gradually became a national appeal, op‑ posed to what was then seen as the official communist endeavours to forget for the sake of reconstruction and reconciliation. Thereby, the thematization of Second World War massacres as genocide was also directed against the official communist version of history, which was regarded as propagandistic and manipulative. The unveiling of the dark sides of Yugoslavia’s wartime and communist history implicitly suggested that communists were hiding certain issues, and the reinterpretations of the Chetniks further questioned official communist history. The narratives of the war presented in these mainly Serbian rewritings were not in their content significantly different from what had been described by communist historiography. What was new was the perspectives and thema‑ tization: Massacres and war crimes had been recounted in communist histo‑ riography as committed by enemies and traitors towards the entire Yugoslav population or parts of it, the descriptions often aimed at demonising the Par‑ tisans’ enemies. Now the mass killing of the war was thematized as genocide, seen from an exclusive Serbian national perspective and emphasising innocent Serbian civilian victims. By the mid 1980s, the concept of genocide came into far more frequent use, particularly within Serbia. The thematization of genocide within Second World War history was accompanied by the use of the concept of genocide and the history of massacres as metaphoric images of contemporary conditions. As a discursive trump, heavily loaded with historical meaning, the term ‘genocide’ was used to describe what was seen as current threats to the nation. The past was used to explain the present, and the present was understood in a web of historical references. Thus the thematization of genocide was accompanied by thematization of national conflicts and threats. N ote s 1

See e.g. Pedro Ramet, ‘Yugoslavia’s Debate Over Democratization’, Survey. A Journal of East and West Studies, 25, 1980, 3. Also Radio Free Europe Research, Background Report, 25th July 1980.

2

See e.g Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, Washington: Brookings Institution, 1995, 47‑67, Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 315‑327.

3

Sabrina Ramet, Balkan Babel. The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the War for Kosovo (3rd edition) Boulder: Westview Press, 1999, 5f.

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4

See Branka Magaš, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, London: Verso, 1993, 15ff; Ramet, Nationalism and federalism, 194ff; Noel Malcolm, Kosovo. A Short History, London: Macmil‑ lan, 1998, s. 335f.

5

See Pedro Ramet, ‘Apocalypse Culture and Social Change in Yugoslavia’, in Pedro Ra‑ met, ed., Yugoslavia in the 1980s, Boulder: Westview Press, 1985.

6

Petar Kačavenda, ‘Dvadeset pet godina Instituta za savremenu istoriju, 1958‑1983’, Isto-

7

Ibid, 211.

8

Roksandić, ‘Globalna isorija i istorijska svest’, 45.

9

Banac, ‘Historiography of the countries of Eastern Europe: Yugoslavia’, 1086.

rija XX Veka, 2, 1984, 1‑2, 212.

10 Wachtel and Marković, ‘A Last Attempt at Educational Integration’, 9. 11 Marković, Ković and Milićević, ‘Developments in Serbian Historiography since 1989’, 280; Marković, ‘Istoričari i jugoslovensto’, 159. 12 Marković, Ković and Milićević, ‘Developments in Serbian Historiography since 1989’, 280. 13 See e.g. Stevan K. Pavlowitch, ‘Dedijer as a Historian of the Yugoslav Civil War’, Survey. A Journal of East and West Studies, 28, 1984, 3, 95‑110. Also this book, chapters 4 and 6. 14 Vladimir Dedijer, Novi prilozi za biografiju Josipa Broza Tita. vol. 2, Rijeka 1981 535, 544. 15 Ibid. 16 Antun Miletić, ‘Logor Jasenovac’, in Dedijer, Novi prilozi, 555, 557. 17 Ibid, 552‑554. 18 Ibid, 532‑568; 726‑740. On Partisan executions, 717‑725. 19 See Pavlowitch, ‘Dedijer as a Historian of the Yugoslav Civil War’. 20 Ramet, ‘Apocalypse Culture and Social Change in Yugoslavia’, 11‑13. See also DragovićSoso, Saviours of the Nation, 81‑83. Goli Otok and the persecution of suspected suppor‑ ters of the Cominform were also the subject of a feuilleton in the weekly news magazine nin,

spring 1982.

21 See Golding, Liberated Cinema, 159‑164. 22 Vojislav Koštunica and Kosta Ćavoški, Stranački pluralizan ili monizam: društveni pokreti i politički sistem u Jugoslaviji 1944‑1949, Belgrade: Institut društvenih nauka, 1983. 23 Hudelist, Tuđman: Biografija, 515‑517. See also Franjo Tudjman, ‘Reply to the indict‑ ment at the trial at the district court in Zagreb on 17.2.1981’, in Boris Katich, ed., So speak Croatian Dissidents, Toronto: Ziral, 1982, 133ff. 24 Branko Petranović, Revolucije i kontrarevolucija u Jugoslaviji (1941‑1945), Belgrade: “Rad”, 1983, 139ff. See also Banac, ‘Historiography of the countries of Eastern Europe: Yugosla‑ via’, 1094‑1095. 25 Veselin Đuretić, Saveznici i jugoslovenska ratna drama, Belgrade: Multiprint, 1986 (first published 1985). See also Tea Sindbæk, ‘The Fall and Rise of a National Hero: Inter‑

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pretations of Draža Mihailović and the Chetniks in Yugoslavia and Serbia since 1945’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, vol. 17, 2009, 1, 47‑59. 26 Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation, 103, Marković, ‘Istoričari i jugoslovensto’, 161‑162. 27 Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Četnici u Hrvatskoj, 1941‑1945., Zagreb: Globus, 1986, e.g. 160‑164. 28 Ibid, 6. See also Željko Krušelj, ‘Pristrana ratna drama’, Danas, 24th of November 1987, 64‑66. For a critical stance towards the representation of the Chetniks in a collection of documents on Yugoslav history 1918‑1984, edited by Branko Petranović and Momčilo Zečević and published in Belgrade 1985, see Anto Milušić, ‘U povodu najnovije zbirke dokumenata o Jugoslaviji’, Časopis za Suvremenu Povijest, 18, 1986, 1, 108‑112. 29 See also Hoepken, ‘War, Memory and Education in a Fragmented Society’, 205. 30 Vuk Drašković, Nož, Belgrade: Srpska reč, 1998 (First published 1982). The book was reprinted several times. Drašković, a provocative dissident writer in the early 1980s, was later to become one of the leaders of the political opposition in the 1990s, deputy prime minister under Milošević in 1999, and foreign minister in post-Milošević Serbia. 31 Drašković, Nož, 29‑47. 32 Ibid, e.g. 28, 46. 33 Ibid, 141‑143. 34 Ibid, 25. The kulak murders are the so-called “left deviations” in Partisan historiography. (In 1998, in an interview with the Serbian magazine Vreme, Drašković claimed that the main story of Nož was true and that he had heard it secretly whispered several times as a child. Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation, 106, note 196). 35 Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation, 107. Nož is also discussed in Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation. Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998, 205ff. 36 Danko Popović, Knjiga o Milutinu, (14th edition, first printed 1985) Belgrade: Niro “Književne Novine”, 1986, 78‑79. 37 See e.g. Dušan Ičević, ‘Svako ima svoga Milutina’, Večernje Novosti, 19th September 1986, 2; Dušan Ičević, ‘Balkanizacija do – razlaza’, Večernje novosti, 20th September 1986, 2. For discussions of Knjiga O Milutinu and other works revisiting Second World War crimes and massacres, see also: Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation, 104‑108, Wachtel, Making a nation, breaking a nation, 204‑209, 221‑223; Aleksandar Pavković, ‘The Serb National Idea: A Revival 1986‑92’, Slavonic and East European Review, 72, 1994, 3, 452; Aleksandar Pavković, ‘From Yugoslavism to Serbism: the Serb national idea 1986‑1996’, Nations and Nationalism, 4, 1998, 4, 517. 38 Slobodan Šnajder, Hrvatski Faust (3rd edition, first published 1982), Zagreb: Cekade, 1988, 144‑149, 160‑165. 39 Ibid, 180‑181. 40 Ibid, 214‑215, 223‑226, 229. 41 Ibid, 170.

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42 Ibid, 218. 43

nin,

19th December 1982. Quoted in Petar Marjanović, ‘Slobodan Šnajder: the Croatian

faust (1982)’, Scena. Theatre Arts Review, 1985, 8, 226. 44 Heinz Klunker, ‘Die Taubenschlucht öffnet sich. Wie sich Vergangenheit und Gegen‑ wart Jugoslawiens in neuen Stücken darstellen’, Theater Heute, 1983, 9, 20, 22. 45 Ibid, 19. See also Dalibor Foretić, ‘Nove igre oko Golub-njače’, Danas, 14th February, 1989, 37‑38. 46 Klunker, ‘Die Taubenschlucht öffnet sich’, 20, 22. 47 Jovan Radulović, Golubnjača, Belgrade: Dereta, 2001, 184. 48 Ibid, 264‑273. 49 Ibid, 185‑189. 50 Foretić, ‘Nove igre oko Golubnjače’, 37‑38. 51 Vjekoslav Perica, Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States, Oxford: Ox‑ ford University Press, 2002, 148. 52 E.g. Branimir Stanojević, Alojzije Stepinac. Zločinac ili svetac, Belgrade: Nova Knjiga, 1985, 9‑14; Jakov Blažević, ‘Predgovor reprintu’, Novak, Magnum Crimen, XXIV. 53 Quoted in Perica, Balkan Idols, 149. See also Radmila Radić, ‘The Church and the Ser‑ bian Question’, in Popov, ed., The Road to War in Serbia, 255. 54 Perica, Balkan Idols, 149. 55 Ibid, 156. Radić, ‘The Church and the Serbian Question’, 260. 56 Atanasije Jevtić, Od Kosova do Jadovna. Putni zapisi Jeromanaha Atanasija Jevtića, Bel‑ grade: Prosveta, 1985 (reprinted from the original accounts in Pravoslavlje, 400, 15th November 1983; Pravoslavlje, 404, 15th January 1984; and Pravoslavlje, 405, 1st February 1984). 57 Jevtić, Od Kosova do Jadovna, 46. 58 Ibid, 22. 59 See Jasna Dragovic, ‘Les intellectuals serbes et la ‘question’ du Kosovo, 1981‑1987’, Relations Internationales, 89, 2, 1997 and Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation, 115‑145. 60 ‘Apel za zaštitu srpskog življa i njegovih svetinja na Kosovu’, in R. Petković, ed., Kosovo. Prošlost i sadašnost, Belgrade: Međunarodna politika, 1989, 340. For an example of the use of the concept of genocide within revisionist historiography on Kosovo, see Di‑ mitrije Bogdanović, Knjiga o Kosovu, Belgrade: sanu, 1986 (first published 1985), which explores, among other things “the history of the Turkish-Albanian genocide on the Serb people during the last hundred to two hundred years” Bogdanović: Knjiga o Kosovu, 4. 61 Brana Crnčević, ‘Logor za jednog čoveka’ Duga, 10th June 1985, reprinted in Svetislav Spasojević, Slučaj Martinović, Belgrade: Partizanska Knjiga, 1986, 317. On the case of Martinović and the way it was covered in Yugoslav press, see also Julie A. Mertus, Kosovo. How Myths and Truths Started a War, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali‑ fornia Press, 1999, 100‑121.

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62 The Martinović’ case was taken up by Serbian intellectuals as a particularly brutal example illustrating the general conditions for Serbs in Kosovo. See ‘Zahtev za pravnim poretkom na Kosovu’, in Aleksa Djilas, ed., Srpsko Pitanje, Belgrade: Politika, 1991, 261; ‘Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts’ is reprinted from sanu’s authorised version in Srdja Trifunovska, ed., Former Yugoslavia Through Documents, Haag: Martinus Nijhof Publ., 1999, 33. 63 See ‘Zahtev za pravnim poretkom na Kosovu’, 261. 64 The Memorandum was only ever written in draft form. It caused significant discus‑ sion and was condemned by communists both in Serbia and other republics. The full contents of it, however, became known to a wider public when the complete text of the document was printed in both the Serbian and Croatian press in 1989. On the Me‑ morandum, see also Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation, 177‑189; Tea Sindbæk, ‘Det Serbiske Videnskabsakademis Memorandum. Et dokuments omskiftelige karriere’, Den Jyske Historiker, 97, 2002, 146‑159. 65 Aleksandar Đukanović, ‘Ponuda beznađa’, Večernje novosti, 24th September 1986, 2. See also ‘Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts’, 4. 66 Aleksandar Đukanović, ‘I avnoj je “lažiran”’, Večernje Novosti, 25th September 1986, 2. See also ‘Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts’, 37. On Kosovo, see ibid, 32ff.

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Genocide as a cardinal theme, 1984‑1989 While in the early 1980s the history of Second World War massacres was in‑ tensely readdressed on the Yugoslav creative cultural scene, not least in Serbia, the issue remained relatively in the background of Yugoslav historiography. In the second half of the 1980s, however, the theme of genocide came to dominate academic historical culture, initially mainly among Serbian historians, but later also in Croatian historical debate, partly in reaction to what happened in Serbia. Historians with far greater enthusiasm than ever before engaged themselves in scrutinising the history of victims, concentration camps and massacres of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. This chapter shows how genocide during the 1980s became a cardinal theme within Serbian academic historiography, and how in the late 1980s Croatian historiography reacted to this, questioning the validity of the Serbian genocide thematization and protesting against what were seen as blatantly anti-Croat arguments. The chapter argues that the historians’ genocide thematization at the outset reflected legitimate needs to re-examine what were seen as over‑ looked or deliberately downplayed elements of history. Yet, as national tension increased, thematizations and debates of genocide history, widely published in Yugoslav media, became national battlefields between Serbian and Croatian historiography, thus underpinning the total polarisation of historical debate.

Politics and national tensions By the mid 1980s, Yugoslav politics remained plagued by political, economic and ideological crises. The political system was paralysed, as the republican leaderships were unable to agree on strategies for solving the crises and reform‑ ing the federation.1 The decline of living standards was a matter of serious concern and seemed further proof of the inability of socialist workers’ state to secure even the basic needs for its own workers.2 Unrest and trouble continued in Kosovo, and numerous Serbs and Mon‑ tenegrins left the province. The situation for Serbs in Kosovo had since the early 1980s been a cause championed by the Serbian Orthodox Church, and

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from the mid-1980s also prominent parts of the Belgrade intelligentsia started to protest against conditions in Kosovo.3 Until 1987, the Serbian leadership called in vain for reforms of the economy and the political system and for a revising of the early 1970s’ constitutional ar‑ rangements, which left Serbia practically without influence in her autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina.4 In 1987, however, the new president of the League of Communists of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, ousted the former leadership and pushed through a new line of politics, which led the Serbian republic to rearrange the federal structures to fit its own plans, disregarding the standpoints of the other republics. During 1988, by playing on Serbian popular nationalism, Milošević’s new Serbian leadership pressed the autono‑ mous governments in Kosovo and Vojvodina, as well as in the republic of Montenegro, to retire, and replaced them with supporters of the new Serbian political line.5 By 1989, Milošević could lead the celebration of the 600th an‑ niversary of the Battle of Kosovo as head of a unitary Serbian republic under his and his followers’ control. The disregard of constitutional rights and the defiant nationalism of Milošević’s leadership naturally frightened and angered the other republics. Whereas Slovenia had already embarked on its independent and, in many ways, equally nationalist political project, the more reactionary party leaderships of Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia were slower to react. At the end of the 1980s, the political changes in the Soviet Union and the stirrings in other socialist states further contributed to the sense of political breakdown and the drive for reforms. Relations between Yugoslav republican leaderships were tense, and the expressions of national agenda in both Serbia and Slovenia inevitably influenced national relations more generally. It was in this atmosphere of political conflict and national distrust that the theme of genocide came to dominate initially Serbian but later also other historiographies in Yugoslavia during the late 1980s. The thematization of genocide and the debates around it took place within what were then largely national historical cultures, which had since the 1960s and 1970s gradually developed in each republic.

The development of genocide historiography Though the historians’ thematization of genocide took place mainly in the second half of the 1980s, one of the cores of Serbian genocide historiography was established already in July 1984, when the Serbian Academy of Sciences

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and Arts, sanu, set up a committee with the aim of “collecting material on the genocide of the Serbian and other Yugoslav peoples in the 20th century”.6 The committee was headed by the invincible Vladimir Dedijer. In 1985, Dedi‑ jer’s committee was separated into several sub-committees, of which the one investigating genocide against the Serbian people proved particularly active.7 According to Dedijer himself, the work of the genocide committee was badly needed, because the Yugoslav state, under the influence of powerful persons and for nationalistic reasons, had for more than 40 years totally neglected these questions, included herein the need to establish the true number of war victims.8 Within the framework of this committee, it was planned to publish 21 studies and source collections on cases of genocide committed mainly in Yugoslavia.9 By 1990, 11 large volumes were published, of which there was only one – i.e. a collection of sources on genocide against Muslims 1941‑1945 – which did not have Serbs as the main victim group.10 Dedijer was most probably sincerely dedicated to uncovering as faithfully as possible the history of genocide in Yugoslavia. He had worked with geno‑ cide questions as a member of the grass-root Russel Tribunal, and in his much disputed Novi prilozi za biografiju Josipa Broza Tita (New Contributions to the biography of Josip Broz Tito).11 Beside his craving for sensational revelations and conspiracy theories and his obvious anti-Catholic views, he was driven by an honest indignation caused by what he saw as the Yugoslav state’s constant overlooking of the problem of genocide and the Vatican’s success in avoiding responsibility and trial for the unfortunate role of the Catholic Church in Yugo‑ slavia and elsewhere during the Second World War. The fact that he was among the first researchers to thematize the mainly Serbian mass killing of Muslims 1941‑1945, shows that he was not merely promoting a Serbian national cause. Characteristic of the publications from the genocide commission under sanu was, obviously, their thematization of genocide as an overlooked per‑ spective within Yugoslav historiography and, as follows from the genocide perspective, their thematization of national and, in the majority of cases, Serbian, victimisation. Most publications were large volumes of historical sources in the forms of reprinted documents and testimonies. This reflected, on the one hand, a rather democratic approach to historical knowledge as something constructed by the individual reader’s interpretation of the sources. Though the publications also held introductions and presentations, suggesting how to interpret the sources reprinted, the reader could personally control the particular evidence supporting the argument. The direct eye witness accounts, on the other hand, made the source collections quite emotionally appealing, and few attempts were made at qualifying the sources or the procedures behind

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selecting them. Furthermore, the sheer magnitude of documentary proofs made the publications seem very convincing in a traditional positivist sense. In effect, these massive publications from sanu’s genocide commission – and others as well – acquired a monumental character: large in size and in their degree of detail, they were written monuments testifying to and thematizing Second World War genocide and Serbian victimisation. While these massive volumes of documents and accounts probably did not themselves reach a wide Yugoslav audience, they indirectly did so through various journals and news magazines. Feuilletons on historical subjects were a common feature of Yugoslav news magazines such as Danas, a Zagreb based weekly which reached a circulation of 180,000 at its peak in the late 1980s, or nin, a Belgrade weekly which published more than 200,000 copies during the same period.12 Summaries and descriptions of major historical publications as well as interviews with the authors were common in the Yugoslav media, and often the dominant issues within academic historiography were also treated in journalistic books. In the second half of the 1980s, the developments and results within academic historiography were widely publicised and popularised and thereby became parts of more popular historical culture. During the late 1980s, the themes that were to cause the greatest interest and disputes among historians were closely related to the Ustasha politics of racial and national persecution; namely the history of the concentration camp complex at Jasenovac, the role and responsibility of the Catholic Church in the Ustasha’s persecution and massacres of Serbs, and, as a related issue, the question of wether, and to what extent, genocide could be seen as an inherent trait of Croat culture. In 1986, the trial in Zagreb against the former Ustasha minister of the Interior, Andrija Artuković, extradited from the usa on Yugo‑ slav requests, also became a source and matter of studies and debate. Behind all these revisions and debates on the history of Yugoslavia’s Second World War massacres lay the ongoing disputes about the number of real victims of the Yugoslav Second World War, in general, and of the Jasenovac camp in particular.

Jasenovac The question of the concentration camp complex Jasenovac became a nucleus of Yugoslav genocide historiography. During the decade from 1981 to 1990, more books and articles about Jasenovac were published than ever before or since, and several scientific meetings, some held in prestigious international style, were arranged to discuss the state of research on the camp.13 One of the

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issues repeatedly emphasised was the need to establish the exact number, or at least a valid estimate of the number of victims of the camp.14 A dominant argument in the calls for readdressing the history of Jasenovac was the claim that it was overlooked or, as argued by some, even manipulated out of nationalist considerations. According to the organiser of a round-table discussion in Jasenovac in 1984, Dobrila Borović, it was a well-known fact that both journalists and scientists wrote rather irresponsibly about Jasenovac, and that the number of victims had evidently been manipulated, which he con‑ nected to “a stench of the presence of aggressive klero-nationalism.”15 This was an obvious reference to Croatian nationalism and its connection to the Catholic Church, which was often discussed in relation to Ustasha history. Such and anti-Croat edge increasingly characterised the historiographic thematization of genocide. Through the second half of the 1980s, the argument that the history of Jasenovac was somehow a taboo and deliberately hidden was repeatedly stated from the side of Serbian genocide historians. At sanu’s conference on Jasenovac, held in November 1988, Vladimir Dedijer claimed that the Croat communist leader, Vladimir Bakarić had personally hidden important documents.16 The journalist covering the conference for the Belgrade weekly nin called his report “Genocide and silence” and suggested that Jasenovac was “for decades covered by silence as if by the lid of a coffin”.17 As shown in earlier chapters of this book, this was definitely not true. Numerous studies and accounts dealing with the history of Jasenovac were printed throughout the previous decades. Yet, earlier accounts had not addressed the issue primarily from the perspective of nationalist and genocidal politics, an approach that was now to dominate the history writing about the camp. In 1986, the publication of two large volumes of documents and testimonies about the concentration camp complex at Jasenovac enriched the discussion with much material and new points of departure. These volumes, titled Koncentracioni Logor Jasenovac 1941.-1945. Dokumenta (The Concentration Camp Jasenovac 1941‑1945. Documents), were edited by Antun Miletić, colonel in the Yugoslav army and employed at the Institute of Military History in Bel‑ grade. In the preface to the first volume, Jefto Šašić, a Yugoslav army general, greeted the publication as a new step in the development of Yugoslav histori‑ ography, which, he claimed, had not for various reasons investigated this issue sufficiently. According to Šašić, it was particularly important that the young generations learned of these crimes, in order to be able to recognise similar actions. Šašić emphasised that Ustasha politics and Jasenovac as part of this must be recognised as a particular type of crime, namely that of genocide, and

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he warned against various types of “political pragmatism” that attempted either to decrease the number of victims to only 50,000 consisting mostly of Croats alone, or to inflate the number, suggesting more than a million consisting of Serb victims alone.18 Miletić’s publication was in many ways traditionally Titoist: On the flap, it held a quote from Tito warning the Yugoslavs to guard Brotherhood and Unity as the pupil of their eye, and in its narrative it placed the ndh and the Ustasha crimes within the framework of the politics of the Axis occupiers.19 Yet, in pointing out the particular Ustasha cruelty and in thematizing the numbers of victims and the perspective of genocide, this publication signifi‑ cantly contributed to the growing interest in these issues. Miletić’s source collection on Jasenovac was received with acclaim and interest. One reviewer, Nikola Živković of the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade, praised Miletić’s “enormous effort”, but he also pointed out that “this genuine step in the investigation of the problem” led to several questions that further investigations would have to answer, included herein the issue of genocide and the establishment of the actual – or at least an ap‑ proximate – number of persons killed in the camp.20 According to another reviewer, Miomir Dašić’, Miletić’s work was a much needed contribution to the investigation of the issue of genocide in Yugoslavia during the Second World War, which had until then been overlooked by Yugoslav academic historiography. Miletić’s sources, stated Dašić, testified that “the ndh devel‑ oped under the conditions and as a sign of the most terrible genocide within the frames of the Second World War”.21 He obviously referred to the mass killing of Serbs in the ndh, which was the main focus of the review, though also Jews, Roma and anti-regime Croats and Muslims were mentioned as victims. It is difficult not to interpret Dašić’s statements as claiming that the persecution of Serbs in the ndh was worse even than the Nazi destruc‑ tion of European Jewry, which would be quite tendentious and unfounded. Nevertheless, this certainly testifies to a tendency to magnify the tragedy at Jasenovac. According to Dašić, it was clear from Miletić’s documents that the numbers of murdered men, women and children in the camp were larger than the original estimates from 1946. Instead, Dašić claimed, the newest investigations showed that 700,000 people were killed there.22 Yet, this num‑ ber, presented as important news, was not new at all. Nikola Nikolić’ book Jasenovački Logor from 1948 stated a number of 600,000‑700,000 victims for the main element of the camp alone, and standard reference works from the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Yugoslav Encyclopaedia made estimates around 700,000.23

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The historians’ growing interest in Jasenovac reflected both an insistence on investigating a problematic and traumatic historical issue that was considered overlooked or ignored by earlier research, and a wish to disentangle this issue from what was seen as a largely flawed and manipulated earlier history writ‑ ing. Included in this were simultaneously a moral indignation that a history of so much violence, suffering and death had not been properly examined, a scholarly interest in a new and complex problem, and an existential wish to safeguard this historical memory for future generations. The call for revision and re-examination of the history of Jasenovac, how‑ ever, also led to new very emotional and sometimes flawed and problematic presentations of the issue. Following the publication of Antun Miletić’s volumes of sources on Jasenovac, the magazine of the Yugoslav socialist youth organisa‑ tion, Mladost, published a feature on the camp. The article was introduced by the following statement from a former prisoner: No pen will be able to describe all the horrors and the terrible atmosphere of Jasenovac. It surpasses any human fantasy. Hell, inquisition, the most horrible terror  … the blood thirst of wild beasts, the outburst of the darkest and most repulsive instincts, such as have not until now appeared among people.24

Mladost further claimed that Jasenovac was the most gruesome human slaugh‑ terhouse during the Second World War, the worst camp in Europe; that the Ustasha boasted in 1942 of having murdered more Serbs than were killed through the entire Ottoman period; and, quoting Miletić, that even Jasenovac’s popular name “the camp of death” was unable to express just how terrible the camp had been.25 In conclusion, Mladost called for a disregard of political consideration in order to establish the truth about the genocide politics and Jasenovac for the sake of future generations. The insistence that the terrors of Jasenovac must by far exceed the crimes committed elsewhere in Europe during the Second World War is unfounded and sensationalist. Yet, the article in Mladost illustrates how, after the publica‑ tion of Miletić’s book, the history of Jasenovac was thematized, popularised in shocking and emotionally evocative ways and widely published, while it was also often suggested that the truth was unexplored or deliberately concealed. Furthermore, Mladost linked that lack of investigation to Croat national sen‑ sibilities, thus implicitly blaming Croat nationalism.26

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The role of the Catholic Church As in the first years after the Second World War, one of the issues that at‑ tracted most interest from the side of historians was the Catholic Church and its relationship with the Ustasha. In 1987, Dedijer published a collection of sources and accounts, titled Vatikan i Jasenovac. Dokumenti. (The Vatican and Jasenovac. Documents). The volume elaborated Dedijer’s earlier attacks on the Catholic Church and aimed at documenting Catholic involvement in and responsibility for Ustasha war crimes, which, claimed Dedijer, was always silenced by the Vatican itself. According to Dedijer, the Catholic Church blessed the construction of the ndh, while numerous priests and friars joined the ranks of the Ustasha even in high positions, and Catholic priests and friars participated in the onslaught on Serbs in Jasenovac and elsewhere. In fact, claimed Dedijer, photographs proved that Catholic clergy were the main murderers and commanders of the Ustasha camps.27 While Dedijer overestimated the active role played by the Catholic Church in Ustasha crimes, he was certainly right that the Vatican had done very little with regard to recognising and apologising for the Catholic involvement that did take place. However, claiming that Ustasha crimes and Catholic involve‑ ment in them was silenced in general made little sense. Indeed, most of the material in Vatikan i Jasenovac consisted of reprints and extracts from already published books, such as Nikola Nikolić’ descriptions of conditions in Jase‑ novac; collections of documents published in the 1940s and early 1950s; Sima Simić studies of forced conversion from 1958; and even bits from Dedijer’s own wartime diaries, among them Djilas’ account of the massacre in the village of Urije in July 1942.28 Yet, here the material was collected in a new order and under new titles, or, we may say, within a new thematization. Thus, Dedijer’s publication drew new attention to the issue of Catholic responsibility by republishing a large amount of material that related to it. While large parts of the material, such as the testimony from a Herzegovinian survivor of an Ustasha massacre, had no direct connection to the church, it did contribute to the emphasis of the horror of the Ustasha regime, of which it was Dedijer’s errand to thematize the Catholic co-responsibility. Since the question of Catholic responsibility was an old issue revisited, the readdressing partly took the form of reprints of old books. In 1986, Viktor Novak’s huge volume Magnum Crimen about the role of the Catholic Church in recent Yugoslav history, and particularly during the ndh, was reprinted. The 1986 edition held a new preface and introduction, which thematized what the editors considered the main points of the book, namely the responsibility of the church for genocide against Serbs in the ndh, the permanent anti-Yugoslav

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and anti-Serbian stance of the Catholic Church, and the risk of a repetition of history.29 The new introduction, written by Jakov Blažević, prosecutor at the trial against Stepinac in 1948 and high ranking member of the Croatian League of Communists, echoed these points, arguing that the reprint was necessary because of the need for historical remembrance and clear statements that this must never happen again, and “because the forces of darkness discussed in this book are still alive”.30 The republication of Magnum Crimen and the introductory warnings were at least partly provoked by the calls from the Croa‑ tian Catholic Church to have Zagreb’s wartime archbishop, Alozije Stepinac, who was seen by communist historiography as an ally and accomplice of the Ustasha, declared a martyr.31 By underlining the need to know and remember the crimes and the role of the Catholic Church, and at the same time thematizing the risk of repetition, the reprint of Magnum Crimen promoted the past as a key to understanding the present. As was stated in the new preface, “Historia est magistra vitae”, history is the teacher of life.32 It was thus suggested that the persecution and mass killing of Serbs during the Second World War was to be kept in mind when interpreting the developments in Yugoslavia. If the past was the key to the present, renewed massacres was what Serbs could expect. The republication of Magnum Crimen was welcomed by the Belgrade weekly magazine nin. According to journalist Ljiljana Bulatović, rumours claimed that almost the complete first print of 4000 copies of the book in 1948 was, im‑ mediately after the publication, bought and destroyed by the Catholic Church. Furthermore, the reasons for republishing the books, argued Bulatović, were obvious from the content of the book itself as well as from Jakov Blažević’s new introduction, which warned against the threats from the dark forces of clericalism.33 Magnum Crimen’s reprint was followed in 1988 by a volume of further material on the theme, called Varvarstvo u ime Hristovo. Prilozi za Magnum Crimen, (Barbarianism in the name of Christ. Contributions to Magnum Crimen), authored by Dragoljub R. Živojinović, professor of history at the University of Belgrade, and Dejan Lučić. Varvarstvo u ime Hristovo was mainly a collection of sources, but it also held expansive comments and introductions to each theme. Like Magnum Crimen, it thematized the responsibility of the Catholic Church for genocide against Serbs. In a chapter titled “The partner‑ ship between Ustasha and the Catholic Church in the creation of the ndh” it was claimed that these two parties were united in religious fanaticism, that the Vatican’s policy, dictated through the Croatian Catholic Church, was to

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conquer territory in the Balkans for Catholicism, and that the physical instiga‑ tor of this policy was the Ustasha movement and state.34 In Varvarstvo u ime Hristovo, the concept of genocide was continuously thematized, particularly in a chapter titled “The technology of genocide against the Serbian people”, in which “the Ustasha genocidal machinery”, the massacres against Serbian villages in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the concentra‑ tion camps, were described.35 Although the book also referred to crimes against Jews and Roma, it was quite obvious from the quotes and the titles of chapters that the main theme of the book was the Serbian victimisation of genocide com‑ mitted by both the Catholic Church and the Ustasha as Croatian chauvinists. Like in Vatikan i Jasenovac, most of the documents reprinted or recounted in Varvarstvo u ime Hristovo had already appeared in other studies and collec‑ tions printed in the first decade after the war.36 What was published in these large volumes, then, was largely the same material, but since it was reproduced in a radically new context and, from the viewpoint of the editors and authors, with a new understanding and a new thematization, the resulting historical accounts and conclusions were different. As a result of this “rethematization”, what were once presented as documents proving the crimes of the occupiers and their collaborators against the Yugoslav people, were now introduced as testimonies to genocide committed by the Catholic Church and Croatian chauvinists, with Serbs as the most important victim group by far.37 In an interview in nin after the publication of Varvarstvo u ime Hristovo, Živojinović also emphasised the Catholic Church’s responsibility both for the ideology behind the Ustasha massacres and for their practical realisation.38

The trial of Andrija Artuković The growing interest in the massacres of the Second World War was boosted by the trial in the Spring of 1986 of the Ustasha minister Andrija Artuković, who after several requests from Yugoslavia was finally extradited from the USA and brought before the public court in Zagreb. Via reports from the trial, the crimes of the Second World War invaded the front pages of the Yugoslav media. Throughout the Spring of 1986, Danas brought weekly synopses from the proceedings in the courtroom as well as feature articles of related themes such as eyewitness accounts of the horrors of the Ustasha regime, its massacres and concentration camps.39 In connection with the Artuković trial, Danas also printed articles on other famous war criminals, including Milan Nedić and Draža Mihailović, thus proving faithful to the Titoist principle of balancing war guilt among the Yugoslav nations.40

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Ill. 9.1. “The ‘forgetfulness’ of the minister of crime”. Front page of the Zagreb weekly Danas, 22nd April 1986, which referred to Artuković’s main defence strategy, i.e. denying that he had seen, heard or remembered anything.

Milan Bulajić, Partisan veteran and long term employee of the Yugoslav for‑ eign ministry, represented sanu’s genocide commission at the trial. In 1988 he published two massive volumes of comments and documents on Artuković and the trial. Vladimir Dedijer, who wrote the preface to the book, emphasised that the victims demanded their pages in contemporary history. According to Dedijer, Bulajić, both for the sake of finding the truth and to avoid any repeti‑ tion of such crimes, claimed it a personal, generational and societal obligation to document the history of the Ustasha genocide.41 The aim of Bulajić’ book was thus to prove that the Ustasha policy during the Second World War was really genocide, and that Andrija Artuković as minister of the interior in the ndh was directly and personally responsible for this policy. Both Bulajić and Dedijer were deeply offended by the fact that Artuković was only accused of – and convicted for – war crimes and not for genocide. They suggested that this had to do with certain chauvinist anti-Serbian and anti-Slovene fractions in the Croatian League of Communists.42 Thus, what was on the one hand a fundamental drive for documenting the history of genocide, was on the other characterised by suspicion and anti-Croat feelings.

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Ill. 9.2. “Massacred victim of the Ustasha genocide”. This decapitated corpse is one of numerous photo illustrations of mangled victims in Bulajić’s book. Bulajić, Ustaški zločini genocida, vol. 1, from photo pages between page 288 and 289. Most pictures were from the photo archive of the Military museum in Belgrade.

Needless to say, Bulajić’ book constantly thematized the Ustasha practices as genocide, and he did not spare the reader from the horrors. A particularly gruesome set of accounts dealt with child victims of the Ustasha politics, and again Artuković’s part in this was emphasised.43 In an interview in nin, Bulajić repeated his criticism of the Artuković trial, complaining that the history and official memory of Ustasha crimes were not properly investigated and suggesting that this was due to “our regime’s wish that the wounds were suppressed into oblivion”. Replying to a question from the journalist, Bulajić confirmed that the genocide remained a “taboo theme”, and that this was visible from the way documents had disappeared from the archives and from the way people avoided the issue.44 At sanu’s conference on Jasenovac in November 1988, Bulajić repeated these points and, clearly dissatisfied with the way the history of Ustasha crimes was commemorated, complained that the site of the camp rather than being properly marked now resembled a golf course.45

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Given the amount of scholarly activity and publications dedicated to the question of genocide, Bulajić’s claim that genocide was taboo seems plainly wrong. With regard to the Jasenovac memorial, contemporary descriptions suggest that the exhibition there was direct and brutal in its descriptions of the crimes committed in the camp.46 It is difficult not to regard his constant accusations and claims of a deliberate silencing of Ustasha crimes and Serbian suffering as attempts to draw even more attention to, and even sensationalise, these issues. Besides echoing Bulajić’s points, nin supplied Bulajić with a wide reaching platform from which to spread his message. In early 1989, Bulajić’s analysis and critique of what he saw as a flawed, manipulated and faulty trial, was published also as a series of feature articles in the Belgrade bi-weekly magazine, Duga.47 The example of Bulajić’s study of Andrija Artuković demonstrates certain elements of the thematization of genocide within parts of Serbian historical culture: one incitatment for the investigation was a fundamental human – or in Karlsson’s terminology “moral” and “existential” – wish to remember and do justice to the victims, and at the same time to learn from history in order to avoid its repetition.48 This wish was further strengthened by the sense that history had until then, and even in the case of the Artuković trial, been ma‑ nipulated by cynical officials and nationalists. There is no doubt that history in socialist Yugoslavia had been treated selectively and with functional aims. A readdressing of the history of Second World War crimes was certainly long due. But Bulajić’s accusative tone and claims of conspiracies did not contribute to an open and constructive de‑ bate between historians and the regime, nor across republican and national boundaries. Furthermore, Bulajić’s perspective on genocide history was unmis‑ takably focused on national aspects, both concerning the crimes and victims and in the accusations that Croat nationalism rather than Yugoslav socialism was behind what was seen as insufficient investigation or even silencing of the problem. Blaming Croatia in general for the inadequate treatment of the history of Second World War crimes was hardly fair. As has been demonstrated in earlier chapters of this book, throughout Yugoslavia’s socialist period Croat writers, filmmakers and historians were at the forefront of investigating and discuss‑ ing Ustasha history, and they often did so in works published by Croatian printing houses or staged at theatres in Croatia.49 Though the Artuković trial may have been clumsy, it did certainly not aim to deny Ustasha crimes, and in connection to the trial Croatian journals massively published reports and descriptions of crimes committed by the Ustasha.

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In any case, the reviving and constant thematization of wartime massacres in historiography, as well as in the public sphere, was bound to raise strong feelings both among Serbs and among other Yugoslav peoples. Furthermore, accusations such as the suggested existence of a Croatian national lobby ma‑ nipulating history and denying the crimes of the Ustasha inevitably alienated Croatian historians and public from Serbian genocide historiography. Though it was far from always the case, the thematization of wartime massacres on the part of Serbian or Belgrade based historians had at times a distinctly antiCroat tone, which inevitably contributed to a national polarisation of Yugoslav historical culture.

Croatian reactions and genocide discussions in the press While many Serbian historians were revising, questioning and thematizing the darkest sides of Yugoslavia’s contemporary history, the Croatian historians’ envi‑ ronment seemed quiet and subdued. Since the harsh suppression of the Croatian national mass movement of the early 1970s, the political climate in Croatia had remained utterly conservative. Reflecting this, the scene of contemporary his‑ tory adhered strictly to Titoist patterns, avoiding national issues. Yet, faced with Serbian genocide thematization, debaters and historians initially welcomed the discussions. By the end of the 1980s, however, Croat historians turned against the nationalist edge of the Serbian genocide debates, which were then met with progressively more scepticism, resentment and even anger. Vladimir Dedijer, one of the main proponents of the thematization of genocide, was criticised as a writer of unfounded and manipulative history, and his work as head of sanu’s genocide commission was seen as a service to the rising Serbian nationalism.50 History debates became increasingly sharp and uncompromising, reflect‑ ing the tense national relations in Yugoslavia in the second half of the 1980s. Leading Croat historians pointed out that history seemed to become ever more subordinated to political agenda and polemics. According to Ljubo Boban, professor of history at the University of Zagreb, controversies were an essential characteristic of the historiography of the late 1980s.51 Boban suggested that even academic historiography was politicised to such a degree that it became questionable if it was history at all.52 Ivo Goldstein, historian at the University of Zagreb, argued that the increasing public interest in history in late 1980s was accompanied by a growth of unscientific, unfounded and polemical history writing, the bitterest disputes of which concerned the numbers of war victims in general and in Jasenovac in particular.53

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The genocide history debates in Croatian press largely reacted to the themes addressed in the Serbian genocide-centred historiography: the concentration camp complex at Jasenovac as a main focus of genocide thematization; the role of the Catholic Church and the wartime Bishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac, in Ustasha massacres and terror politics; the trial against Artuković; and, woven into it all, the question of the numbers of victims. Yet, from a Croat point of view, the debates included another aspect, namely the sense of an often vague and implicit, but at times more overt suggestion from the perspective of parts of Serbian historiography, that Croat national culture and ideology were inherently genocidal. The remaining part of this chapter will examine how Croatian historians and public debaters reacted to each of these themes as they were posed by Serbian historians, or, more to the point, as they were perceived in Croatia.

A genocidal trait of Croat culture? In September 1986, Književne novine, the newspaper of the Serbian writ‑ ers’ association, published an article titled ‘O genezi genocida nad Srbima u ndh’ (‘On the genesis of the genocide of the Serbs in the ndh’), authored by Vasilije Krestić, professor at the University of Belgrade and member of the history department of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In the article, Krestić argued that deeper causes of the massacres and persecution of Serbs in Croatia could be traced through several centuries of Croatian history, that the idea of genocide had fully matured in Croatian bourgeois society before the First World War, and that it was deeply rooted in the consciousness of many generations.54 Krestić’ thesis was strongly criticised in the Yugoslav and not least Croa‑ tian media. In a comment, which was repeated on tv Zagreb and in Danas, Predrag Vitaz of TV Belgrade equalled Krestić’s type of scientific dialogue to “sinking into the wild whirlpool of dark nationalistic passions, which are fed by hatred and intolerance …”.55 In Komunist, the organ of the Yugoslav League of Communists’ Central Committee, Krestić was accused of nationalism and of renouncing his professional dignity.56 Nevertheless, the sense that Croats were accused of a certain genocidal trait remained in the debate. In January 1988, a journalist in the Croatian magazine Danas commented angrily on an interview given by Vuk Drašković to Glas Crkve, the journal of the Serbian episcopate of Šabac and Valjevo. According to the Danas journalist, Drašković had argued that Western philosophy and civilisation, including Catholicism, was what the world had encountered in

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Auschwitz and Mauthausen and what the Serbs had met in Jasenovac and Jadovno, at Kozara, in Lika and Hercegovina. The following quote was re‑ printed from the interview: “… These ‘arians’, these supermen of the thousand years of Croatian culture, we will remember them forever and as long as we exist”.57 In the view of Danas’ journalist, Drašković thereby linked Western and Croatian culture with Nazi crimes and the crimes of the Ustasha. The idea that Croat national culture held an inherently genocidal tendency was further linked to the role of the Catholic Church. At Christmas 1988, the Croatian Cardinal Franjo Kuharić rejected and criticised the thesis of a “geno‑ cidal nature” of the Croat nation and the Catholic Church. He was quoted in Danas, whose journalist similarly criticised the existence of this idea.58 Another Danas journalist saw the national protests by Serbs in Croatian Krajina in the Spring of 1989 as connected to “academic” elaborations on ‘genocidal trait’ as a constant Croatian characteristic.59 According to the Croat historian Ljubo Boban, “well known voices” saw in Catholicism “the genocidal instinct of the Croat nation, because it is Catholic”. These accusations, according to Boban, were not necessarily aimed at explain‑ ing the past, but also at confrontation in the present.60 Boban seems to suggest that the claim that Croatian nationalism, because of its link to Catholicism, was dangerous and genocidal served also as useful discursive ammunition in the political disputes between Yugoslavia’s republics. Boban and Milan Bulajić sharply and lengthily disputed this in various Yugoslav media, Bulajić claiming that Boban defended the Vatican, and Boban arguing that Bulajić manipulated his sources to prove the genocidal nature of the Catholic faith.61 Needless to say, the statements from Krestić, Drašković and Bulajić provoked anger in the Croatian public, and the polemics about the genocidal tendency of Croatian culture contributed to an increasingly offensive, stern and rigid climate of debates among Yugoslav historians of Croat or Serb observation.

Jasenovac and the “Jasenovac myth” The readdressing of the history of Jasenovac was initially welcomed in the Croatian media. Miletić’s publication of sources on the camp was welcomed by Danas journalist Željko Krušelj as until now “…the most complete testimony of the horrors of this Ustasha ‘factory of death’…”.62 According to Krušelj, a shocking and relatively new contribution to the history of Jasenovac was the numerous descriptions of bestial and bizarre types of torture used in the camp. If a few corrections were made, Krušelj continued, the nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia would owe Miletić special gratitude.63

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Also the scientific meeting about Jasenovac and genocide held by sanu’s genocide committee in Belgrade in November 1988 was appreciated. The aim of the meeting, according to a Željko Krušelj’s report in Danas, was to work against “the strategy of oblivion” by investigating closely and in great detail the events, the victims and the perpetrators, also in order to point out the responsible parties. The participating historians generally agreed that the Vatican and the Catholic Church bore its part of the responsibility, both for events during the war and for trying to avoid a proper scrutinising of the past. Krušelj welcomed this discussion, arguing that it was both possible and necessary for the wounds of Jasenovac to be peacefully closed.64 Yet, faced with the continuous thematization of the numbers of victims of Jasenovac as well as the rise of political nationalism with Milošević in Serbia, Croatian reactions to Serbian historiography sharpened. The discussions of Jasenovac were increasingly seen as politicised and nationalist. In a letter to the editor of Danas, three survivors of the Ustasha camps Jasenovac, Stara Gradiška and Lepoglava welcomed further serious investigations into the history of the camps, but at the same time they expressed discomfort and bitterness about the way the discussions on Jasenovac concentrated on the number of victims and the attempts to separate camp victims into groups according to national or religious affiliation. The three survivors argued in the best Titoist spirit that all camp victims fought together against fascism regardless of national adher‑ ence.65 Also the attacks on Croatian nationalism were met with anger. In April 1988, Željko Krušelj in a column in Danas reacted angrily to what he saw as false accusations from Dedijer and a journalist of the Serbian weekly nin, who both claimed that Croatian archives withheld and refused to grant researchers access to material on Jasenovac. Krušelj also condemned Dedijer’s suggestions that Jasenovac was a taboo theme.66 By 1989, it was suggested in the Croatian media that the Serbian thema‑ tization of Jasenovac had transformed the history of the camp into a sort of myth. The Croat journalist and author of a study on the Ustasha camps, Mirko Peršen, who had himself been a prisoner in Jasenovac, argued that it was time for “dissolving the Jasenovac myth.”67 In Peršen’s view, the myth of Jasenovac was a product of decades of politically motivated abuse of history by the communist regime, and it was now upheld by Bulajić and others who insisted on far larger numbers of victims even though they had no proof of such numbers. According to Željko Krušelj, who interviewed the author for Danas, “Peršen had refuted the ‘Jasenovac myth’ as a proposition for the ‘genocidal essence’ of

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the Croat nation …”, and he had at the same time demonstrated the absurdity of the politicisation of the issue, which clearly reflected the current relations among the Yugoslav nations.68 To Krušelj, the high number of Jasenovac victims suggested particularly by the Serbian side was clearly connected to discursive attacks on Croat nationality. The comparison of the history of Jasenovac to myth-making was also sug‑ gested by the well-known dissident historian, former general and soon to be independent Croatia’s first president, Franjo Tuđman. His 1989 book, Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti. Rasprave o povijesti i filozofiji zlosilja (The wilderness of historical truth. Discussions on history and philosophy of evil-doing), mostly a personal summary of the numerous historical disputes he had been involved in, dedicated several chapters to the discussion of Jasenovac and the number of Yugoslav war victims. In an attempt to disentangle what he saw as “the creation of the myth of Jasenovac”, Tuđman argued that sources from the wartime did not in particular emphasise the camp at Jasenovac.69 Instead, he claimed, Jasenovac had achieved its special status during the last decades. Tuđman criticised the works and claims of Vladimir Dedijer, Antun Miletić and the fictional writer Vuk Drašković, and he repudiated various Serbian authors, among them the historian Velimir Terzić and the novelist Vojislav Lubarda, for claiming that more than a million Serbs were murdered in Jasenovac. This constant growth of numbers, according to Tuđman, aimed at proving a certain historical guilt of the Croats.70 While he recognised that Jasenovac had been an inhumane place, the proper number of persons killed in the camp, according to Tuđman, was far from these Serbian suggestions: “… the truth is that the camp was organised as a ‘work camp’ … the prisoners were exhausted all the time and tormented by incredibly hard and unhygienic conditions at work, and besides they were tortured and killed for the smallest single disobediences, particularly the ex‑ hausted and old, and at times, usually during a declaration of punishment for a killed Ustasha or for an attempted escape, they were bestially killed also in smaller or larger groups (from ten and even up to a hundred persons). In this way, definitely some (probably 3‑4) tens of thousands of prisoners perished in the Jasenovac camp – mostly Gypsies, then Jews and Serbs, and also Croats.”71 In his discussions of Jasenovac and the Ustasha persecution of Serbs, Jews, Roma and regime opponents, Tuđman came close to trivialising the question of genocide, arguing that “final solutions” and genocidal politics have been practiced always and by countless cultures, regimes and movements.72 Tuđman’s strident revisionism, his persistent effort to minimise the number of victims of Jasenovac, and his estimate that 30,000 to 40,000 persons were

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killed in Jasenovac, which was among the lowest calculations ever in Yugoslav historical culture, were bound to stir up strong feelings. Furthermore, his com‑ parison of the history of Jasenovac to a myth, which could even be compared to arguments in nationalist Croat émigré circles that several hundred thousand Croat refugees were killed by the Partisans at the end of the war, were bound to trouble national relations further, both among the Yugoslav republics, and among Serbs and Croats in Croatia.73

The Catholic Church Whereas the increased interest and research in Jasenovac was initially welcomed in Croatian debate, publications on the role of the Croatian Catholic Church in the politics of the ndh were generally regarded as sensationalist and manipula‑ tive. Apparently, attacks on the Catholic Church in the eyes of the Croatian media and debaters also came close to attacks on Croatian nationality as such. The republication in 1986 of Viktor Novak’s Magnum Crimen was re‑ ceived with significant resentment. In a comment in Danas, journalist Nenad Ivanković argued that Novak’s book sacrificed scientific articulation and objectivity for “pamphletism” and emotional appeal and that it equated Ca‑ tholicism with clericalism and clero-fascism. Novak’s book nevertheless had its great qualities, claimed Ivanković, but reprinting it without recognising and commenting on its limitations, one-sidedness and mistakes was close to committing another “Crimen”.74 Ivanković was further angered by what he saw as deliberate manipulation of the book as part of a political play: he criticised in particular the editor’s preface to the reprint for stating that the Catholic Church was still the spiritual leader in the creation of a Catholic state of Croatia, a disintegrative force and an instigator of genocide against other peoples in Yugoslavia.75 While Ivanković was right that Novak’s book is one-sided in its tendency to equalise clericalism with the Catholic Church and thus to denounce Ca‑ tholicism in general, his critique of the newly written introductory remarks are much more to the point. The introduction was highly accusing and its threatening predictions of returns of the crimes of the past seemed to echo claims of an inherently genocidal nature in Croatian society. By tying it to the present in this way, Novak’s highly emotional account, characterised by the atmosphere of the immediate post-war years and the clear memory of the suffering under the Ustasha regime, was obviously used for political purposes in the present. It served to condemn the Croatian Catholic Church and thus also the Croatian national ideology associated with it.

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Also Dedijer’s Vatikan i Jasenovac was received with dismay by Ivanković. In a comment in Danas, he admitted that the book reached the public at a time when public interest in these issues was significantly growing, but, complained Ivanković, this was mainly because historiography was constantly coming closer to reflecting the political agenda. Ivanković claimed that Dedijer’s book was manipulative and steered by its own agenda. Instead of addressing its subject openly it was driven by the thesis that the Vatikan and the Catholic Church were closely involved in Ustasha politics and the genocide of the Serbs. Fur‑ thermore, argued Ivanković, the documents presented in the volume were selected according to this thesis, and thus documents mentioning the numer‑ ous Catholic priests and friars who supported or participated in the Partisan movement were not included in the collection.76 The bi-weekly magazine of the Croatian Catholic Church, Glas Koncila, bluntly claimed that Dedijer falsified history.77 In a review titled “Barbarianism in the name of Science”, history profes‑ sor Ljubo Boban fiercely condemned Živojinović and Lučić’ Varvarstvo u ime Hristovo, criticising the authors’ argument about continuity in Catholic and Croat politics since the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Boban, Živojinović and Lučić even claimed that the politics of Yugoslavia’s revolutionary movement constituted genocide towards Serbs, thus also sug‑ gesting a continuous threat against Serbs from the Croat communism side. According to Boban, the use of sources in Varvarstvo u ime Hristovo was flawed and manipulative.78

The Artuković trial Bulajić’ study of the trial against Andrija Artuković was far from welcomed in Croatia. It was the subject of a short polemic in which the lawyer Vlado Rajić criticised Bulajić for not deciding in his book whether he acted as historian, legal expert or veteran Partisan fighter. According to Rajić, Bulajić constantly manipulated facts in order to prove that the district court of Zagreb was abused, thus insinuating that the Ustasha movement and its crimes were to be rehabili‑ tated in Croatia.79 Željko Olujić, the lawyer who acted as Artuković’ defendant at the trial, echoed Rajić’ points, arguing in addition that Bulajić constantly inflated the number of victims. “Is this not”, Olujić asked, “the habitual method of insinuation, with which the Croatian nation has been gagged already for decades, blaming them also for the greatest crime (crimen maximum)”.80 Also Glas Koncila criticised Bulajić, arguing that his work was flawed, his thesis false and that he aimed at promoting a guilt complex in the Croat people.81

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Bulajić, for his part, insisted that his aim was to criticise the insufficient and faulty work of the Zagreb court and the failure to include the crime of genocide in Artuković’ verdict, and that he was not blaming the genocide on the entire Croatian nation. Yet Bulajić also suggested that Olujić aimed at rehabilitating Artuković.82 The parties of this polemic thus remained sternly opposed to one another: Rajić and Olujić reacted strongly to what they saw as Bulajić’s – and Vladimir Dedijer’s – manipulation and inflation of the history of the Ustasha massacres with the aim of throwing further blame and guilt on Croatia, whereas Bulajić condemned what he saw as Croat unwillingness to even recognise the crimes as genocide. The polemic was unavoidably national in character, with Rajić and Olujić answering to what they perceived as an attack on the Croatian na‑ tion and Bulajić attacking the “Zagreb court” and suggesting that there was an alignment between Rajić, Olujić and the Croatian Catholic Church.

Numbers of victims Behind most of these polemics lay the still unclear question of the number of Yugoslav victims of the Second World War in general, and the number of victims of the camp system at Jasenovac specifically. As was clear from the character and tone of the discussions of these issues, they were both sensitive and inflammable. Some Croat historians regarded the numbers referred in Serbian books as highly inflated and, as political and national relations dete‑ riorated, came to regard the Serbian insistence on increasing the numbers as a question of nationalist politicisation of history. From the Serbian side, on the other hand, the unwillingness on the part of some Croat historians to accept these numbers, and the suggestions of very low numbers from certain parts of the Croat historians’ environment, were seen as reflecting even a general refusal to recognise the genocide at all. That this conflict of views could reach as significant a scale as it did was mainly due to the loss of integrity and trust in the research conducted in the communist period. The disappearance of any common elements of consensus left the field of history totally open for new interpretations and proposals. Though several attempts had been made at reaching a more precise calculation of the number of persons killed during the Second World War in Yugoslavia, the figure of 1,706,000, which was fixed immediately after the war, had re‑ mained the official estimate throughout the Titoist period.83 In 1985, however, this estimate was attacked from several sides: Various emigré sources argued that the number of 1,706,000 was significantly inflated

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and that the number of real losses, that is, persons killed during the war, was probably around one million.84 In the meantime, sanu’s genocide commis‑ sion held a scientific discussion of the methodological problems in relation to establishing the number of human losses during the First and the Second World Wars. At the discussion, it was emphasised that earlier attempts at reach‑ ing a more precise calculation had remained incomplete, partly for political reasons. One speaker argued that judging from demographic estimates, the number of victims was significantly lower than the official estimate, probably between 1,100,000 and 1,150,000.85 Since this was covered in the daily press, it was clear also outside the narrow historians’ environments that the number of war victims was now a matter of uncertainty and dispute. Through the second half of the 1980s, the number of victims of the Second World War was to cause a significant and heated debate. Inflated numbers of victims, such as suggestions from Croatian emigré circles that 1,500,000 Croats were killed by the Partisans at the end of the war, or from some Serbian authors that at least one million Serbs alone were killed at Jasenovac, were seen as a source of tension and cooling of the relations among Yugoslav nations.86 According to Zagreb historian Ivo Goldstein, war victims in general and the victims of Jasenovac in particular were the subjects of the bitterest disputes within the “newly composed historiography” of the late 1980s.87 In 1989, the number was continuously debated, when the Croat engineer and retired employee of the United Nations, Vladimir Žerjavić published his survey of Yugoslav Second World War victims, Gubici stanovništva Jugoslavije u Drugom svjetskom ratu (Yugoslav population losses in the Second World War). The investigation was based mainly on demographic material. The re‑ sult, 1,027,000 real war victims, was significantly lower than the official figures stated in Yugoslav historiography of the communist days. Yet, it was close to the 1,014.000 calculated by Serbian émigré statistician Bogoljub Kočović in 1985.88 Žerjavić mentioned an example of a quite inflated number of Serbian victims cited in the press as one of his original incitements for starting the investigation.89 In the debates of the numbers of victims, the question of the number of victims of the Ustasha concentration camp system at Jasenovac constituted an individual theme. As the site of historical commemoration since 1967 and the subject of massive scientific interest throughout the 1980s, the camp had become a symbol of the Ustasha massacres of Serbs. By the late 1980s, in line with the revaluations of the numbers of victims in general, Croat historians started to question what they saw as consistent exaggerations of the number of victims of the camp.

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In an interview in Danas in April 1988, Ljubo Boban stated that the issue of Jasenovac was indeed inevitably emotional. Yet, he argued that the sentimental and emotional dimension was currently overemphasised and he warned against the dangers of this, stating that any exploitation of a crime was in itself a crime. Jasenovac was now an open issue of research and should be treated as such, claimed Boban. Pointing out the major gap between vari‑ ous estimates, he further argued that the exact number of victims could not be established.90 In the following dispute, which continued in Danas and also spread to other Yugoslav journals and magazines, including the Serbian bi-weekly Duga, Boban’s statements were severely criticised and compared to Franjo Tudjman’s attempts earlier in the 1980s at revising the number.91 One Belgrade professor, Ratislav Petrović, in a series of comments pointed to German sources which allegedly confirmed that more than 700,000 Serbs were killed in the ndh, and to a survey of mass graves in Jasenovac which would suggest that more than 500,000 victims were buried in the area. Petrović further rebuked Danas for allowing Boban to accuse his colleagues of “coffee shop mentalities”, charlatan‑ ism and speculation. The issue of Jasenovac and war victims, stated Petrović, was too tragic for that.92 In an interview in May 1989, Boban repeated that the precise number could not be established. He further quoted the demographic calculations of Žerjavić and of the émigré Serb Bogoljub Kočović, which estimated the number of all Serb victims at 530,000 and 487,000 respectively, and Žerjavić’s calculation that about 216,000 victims of all Yugoslav nations were killed in camps throughout Yugoslavia, obviously precluding the possibility that several hundred thousand Serbs were killed in Jasenovac alone.93 Milan Bulajić was deeply offended by Žerjavić’s – and Boban’s – sugges‑ tions. Obviously insinuating that Žerjavić’ calculations were based on selective use of sources, Bulajić wondered why Žerjavić and others did not take into account the demographic calculations made in the 1950s and 1960s, which were made when the data from the war was still fresh, and which suggested victim numbers up to several millions. According to Bulajić, the main problem was that the Yugoslav state had never established an exact number. He disap‑ proved of what he called “the number game” and proposed that material and information on names and belonging of the victims were collected in order to establish a well founded number.94 The disputes were mostly held in distinctly cold and hostile tones. In a reply to the Bulajić statements in Danas and elsewhere, Žerjavić repudiated Bulajić’s accusations that he was working to support Tuđman and the Croat

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cardinal Kuharić, and closed the discussion by arguing that the level of the debate was unacceptable.95 The disputes between Serbian and Croatian historians about Second World War history and the Ustasha massacres became totally polarised. The state‑ ments showed no respect for the opposite side in the polemics, even though a fundamental problem was shared by both parties: the existing research was considered flawed and politically determined, and it was therefore regarded as untrue by both sides. While Serbian and Croatian historians could agree on the fundamental need to revise history, however, the proposed corrections were sharply differing, in fact often mutually exclusive. N ote s 1

Steven L. Burg, ‘Political Structures’, in Dennison Rusinow, ed., Yugoslavia. A Fractured Federalism, Washington D.C.: Wilson Center Press, 1988, 11‑17.

2 Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 322ff. 3

See Dragović, ‘Les intellectuels Serbes’; Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation, 115‑132.

4 Ramet, Balkan Babel, 14‑15. 5

Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, 2nd edition, London: Penguin, 1996, 37‑47, 58‑69; Slavoljub Đukić, Između slave i anateme. Politička biografija Slobodana Miloševića, Belgrade: Filip Višnjić, 1994, 84‑116.

6

Srpska Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti, Godišnjak za 1984, Beograd, 1985, 188, 179.

7

Srpska Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti, Godišnjak za 1985, Beograd, 1986, 226, 232.

8

Vladimir Dedijer in the introduction to Dedijer and Miletić, Proterivanje Srba sa Ognjišta, 8.

9 Ibid. 10 Dedijer and Miletić, Genocid nad muslimanima 1941‑1945. Zbornik dokumenata i svjedočenja, Sarajevo: Svjetlost 1990. Other published volumes included Antun Miletić, Koncentracioni Logor Jasenovac 1941‑1945, dokumenta, volume 1‑3, Beograd: Narodna Knjiga, 1986‑1987; Dedijer, Vatikan i Jasenovac, 1987; Bulajić, Ustaški zločini genocida; Dedijer and Miletić, Proterivanje Srba sa Ognjišta. 11 See this book, chapters 6 and 8. 12 Jasmina Kuzmanović, ‘Media: The Extension of Politics by Other Means’, in Sabrina Petra Ramet and Ljubiša S. Adamovich, eds., Beyond Yugoslavia. Politics, Economics, and Culture in a Shattered Community, Boulder: Westview Press, 1995, 85. 13 On the number of publications, see Mirković, Objavljeni izvori i literatura o Jasenovačkim Logorima, 297, 323. For reports on scientific meetings, see e.g. Borović, ed., Jasenovac 1984., 1985; Jelka Smreka, ed., Okrugli stol “Jasenovac 1986” 14. i 15. 11. 1986, Spomen-područje Jasenovac, 1989. In 1986 several international guests were present, and the meeting was greeted by both the president of the Croatian republic, Ante Marković

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and by the president of the Yugoslav veterans’ association, Draga Mitrović. In November 1988, sanu’s genocide commission also arranged a scientific meeting in Belgrade about Jasenovac. See Milo Gligorijević, ‘Genocid i ćutanje’, nin, 27th November 1988, 26‑28 and Željko Krušelj, ‘Jasenovac bez tabua’, Danas, 29th November 1988, 35‑37. 14 See e.g. Antun Miletić, ‘Pet pitanja, pet odgovora o koncentracionom logoru Jasenovac’, Smreka, ed., Okrugli stol “Jasenovac 1986”, 157‑158, Jefto Šašić, ‘Izvori o genocidu i borbi protiv falsifikatora žrtve koncentracionog logora Jasenovac’, in ibid, 137‑144. 15 Dobrila Borović, ‘Zašto okrugli stol o “Jasenovcu”?’, in Borović, ed., Jasenovac 1984., 7. 16 Quoted in Gligorijević, ‘Genocid i ćutanje’, 28. 17 Ibid, 26. 18 Jefto Šašić, ‘predgovor’, in Miletić, Koncentracioni Logor Jasenovac, 7, 13-14. 19 Miletić, Koncentracioni Logor Jasenovac, 15ff. Šašić, ‘predgovor’, in Ibid, 8. Miletić had already cooperated with Vladimir Dedijer in the writing of the famous Novi Prilozi in 1980. His volumes of documents on Jasenovac were connected to the work of sanu’s genocide committee. See Dedijer and Miletić, Proterivanje Srba sa Ognjišta, 10. 20 Nikola Živković, ‘Antun Miletić, Koncentracioni Logor Jasenovac, 1941‑1945’, Vojnoistorijski Glasnik, 37, 1986, 1, 333‑335. 21 Miomir Dašić, ‘Antun Miletić, Koncentracioni Logor Jasenovac 1941‑1945’, Jugoslovenski Istorijski Časopis, 21, 1986, 1‑4, 238. 22 Ibid, 240. 23 Nikolić, Jasenovački Logor, 434; Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, vol 4, Zagreb, 1960, 467. See also this book, chapter 7. 24 ‘Dosije Mladosti: Tato, Jezus i Marija! Konc-logor Jasenovac’, Mladost, 8th to 21st Decem‑ ber 1986, 26. 25 Ibid, 26, 28. 26 Ibid, 28. Mladost referred to a polemic involving the Serbian historian Vasilije Krestić, who had claimed in an article that the genocide of Serbs in the ndh had deep roots in Croatian culture. This is discussed further in the following pages of this book. 27 Dedijer, Vatikan i Jasenovac, 38‑41, 10 also 385ff. 28 The works cited included Tajni dokumenti o odnosima Vatikana i ustaške “ndh” (see also this book, chapter 5); Joža Horvat and Zdenko Štambuk, eds., Dokumenti o protivnarodnom radu i zločinima jednog dijela katoličkog klera, Zagreb, 1946; Nikolić, Jasenovački Logor Smrti, 190‑192. (Jasenovački Logor Smrti is a new and expanded version of Nikolić’ Jasenovački Logor from 1948, see this book, chapter 4); Simić, Prekrštavanje Srba ze vreme drugog svetskog rata. (see also this book, chapter 5). On Djilas’ account in Dedijer’s diary, see this book chapter 4. 29 Slobodan Filimonović, ‘Napomene izdavača uz drugo izdanje’, Novak, Magnum Crimen, V. 30 Blažević, ‘Predgovor reprintu’ in Novak, Magnum Crimen, XVII.

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31 Ibid, xxiv. Also Perica, Balkan Idols, 148; Stanojević, Alojzije Stepinac, 9‑14. 32 Blažević, ‘Predgovor reprintu’ in Novak, Magnum Crimen, xxiv. 33 Ljiljana Bulatović, ‘Veliki greh’, nin, 9th March 1986, 35‑37. 34 Dragoljub R. Živojinović and Dejan Lučić, Varvarstvo u ime Hristovo. Prilozi za Magnum Crimen, Belgrade: Nova Knjiga, 1988, 539ff, 553. Živojinović was dean of the philosophical faculty in Belgrade since 1985. See Ko je ko u Srbiji, Novi Sad: Bibliofon, 1991, 551. 35 Živojinović and Lučić, Varvarstvo u ime Hristovo, 629ff, 632. 36 E.g. Tajni dokumenti o odnosima Vatikana i ustaške “ndh”; Horvat and Štambuk, eds., Dokumenti o protivnarodnom rad. 37 Other reprints testifying to the increased interest in and re-addressing of the cri‑ mes of Second World War history, not only from Serbian side, include Sima Simić, Prekrštavanje Srba za vreme drugog svetskog rata, (2nd edition, first published in 1958), Belgrade: Kultura 1990 (see also this book, chapter 5) and Peršen, Ustaški Logori, a revi‑ sed and expanded edition of Peršen’s study from 1966, published in Zagreb, 1990 (On the first version, see this book, chapter 7). 38 Luka Mičeta, ‘Novi prilozi za istoriju beščasća’, nin, 1st January 1989, 41‑42. 39 See e.g. Danas, February-May 1986, and also the journalistic account in Branimir Stanojević, Ustaški minister smrti: anatomija zločina Andrije Artukovića, Belgrade: Nova Knjiga, 1986. 40 E.g., Aleksandar Vojinović, ‘Povratak generala Nedića u klompama’, Danas, 8th April 1986, 73‑75; Aleksandar Vojinović, ‘Osude u Topčideru’, Danas, 29th April 1986, 73‑75. 41 Vladimir Dedijer, ‘Predgovor’, in Bulajić, Ustaški zločini genocida, vol. 1, 32. 42 Ibid, 9‑10, and Bulajić, Ustaški zločini genocida, vol. 1, 20. 43 Bulajić, Ustaški zločini genocida, vol. 2, 247ff, 281ff. 44 Milan Nikolić, ‘Istorija, zločini, sudbine’, nin, 17th July 1988, 26‑27. 45 Gligorijević, ‘Genocid i ćutanje’, 26. 46 See e.g. Jugoslavija. Spomenici revoluciji, 143; Kojović, ‘Stalna postavka Memorijalnog Muzeja “Koncentracioni Logor Jasenovac; also this book chapter 7. 47 Milan Bulajić, ‘Zagrebački proces ustaškom ministru Andriji Artukoviću’, Duga, 21st January-3rd February 1989, 83‑87; Duga, 4th-18th February 1989, 85‑89; Duga, 18th February to 3rd March 1989, 83‑87; Duga 4 -17th March 1989, 81‑86. 48 See Karlsson, ‘The Holocaust as a problem of historical culture’, 40‑43, and Karlsson, Historia som Vapen, 57‑61. See also the introduction to this book. 49 Among the most important examples are Fikreta Jelić-Butić’ study Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, 1941‑1945.; Slobodan Šnajder’s drama Hrvatski Faust; and Lordan Zafranović’ film Okupacija u 26 slika. See this book, chapters 6, 7 and 8. 50 Ivo Goldstein, ‘Novokomponirana historiografija’, Danas, 5th September 1989, 44‑45. Željko Krušelj, ‘Biograf bez distanze’, Danas, 22nd August 1989, 18‑19.

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51 Željko Krušelj, ‘Bijeg iz paukove mreže. Intervju: Ljubo Boban’, Danas, 9th May 1989, 11. 52 Željko Krušelj, ‘Istina ne trpi kompromise. Razgovori: Ljubo Boban’, Danas, 26th April 1988, 36. 53 Goldstein, ‘Novokomponirana historiografija’, 44. 54 Vasilije Krestić, ‘O genezi genocida nad srbima u ndh’, Književne novine, 716, 15th Sep‑ tember 1986, 1, 4‑5. Also quoted in Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation, 112. 55 ‘Divlji vrtlog strašti’, Danas, 30 September 1986, 6. 56 Quoted in ‘Izbor ne osuda’, Danas, 7th October 1986, 8. 57 Nenad Ivanković, ‘Zazivanje oluje’, Danas, 26th January 1988, 16. 58 Marinko Čulić, ‘Tko sije mržnju’, Danas, 3rd January 1989, 29. See also Glas Koncila, 1st January 1989, 5. 59 Milan Jajčinović, ‘Vježbe iz događanja naroda’, Danas, 7th March 1989, 22. 60 Krušelj, ‘Bijeg iz paukove mreže’, 12. 61 See also Ljubo Boban, Kontroverze iz povijesti Jugoslavije 3, Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1990, 299‑314. 62 Željko Krušelj, ‘Pakao u ravnici’, Danas, 6th May 1986, 29. 63 Ibid, 30. 64 Krušelj, ‘Jasenovac bez tabua’, 35‑37. 65 Josip Vidan, Dragan Roller and Sime Klaić, ‘Nepotrebna diskusija’, Danas, 12th July 1988, 5. 66 Željko Krušelj, ‘Zašto je zloupotrebljen Miletić’, Danas, 12th April 1988, 42‑43. 67 Željko Krušelj, ‘Rasplitanje Jasenovačkog mita. Sugorvornici: Mirko Peršen’, Danas, 7 November 1989, 24. 68 Ibid, 22. 69 Franjo Tudjman, Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti. Rasprava o povijesti i filozofiji zlosilja. Za‑ greb: Nakladni Zavod Matice Hrvatske, (2nd edition), 1989, 89‑90. Bespuća could be translated more precisely into “roadless area”. 70 Ibid, 94ff, 98. See also 10‑17. 71 Ibid, 316. 72 Ibid, 166. See also Ivo Goldstein and Slavko Goldstein, ‘Revisionism in Croatia: The Case of Franjo Tuđman’, East European Jewish Affairs, 32, 2002, 1, 56ff; Robert M. Hay‑ den, ‘Balancing Discussion of Jasenovac and the Manipulation of History’, East European Politics and Societies, 6, 1992, 2, 208f. 73 For the comparison between the “myths” of Jasenovac and Bleiburg, see Tudjman, Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti, 101ff. 74 Nenad Ivanković, ‘Igre s poviješću’, Danas, 25th March 1986, 23. 75 Ibid, 24.

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76 Nenad Ivanković’, ‘Dedijerove generalizacije odozdo’, Danas, 17th November 1987, 42‑43. 77 Glas Koncila, 29th January 1989, 10. 78 Ljubo Boban, ‘Barbarstvo u ime nauke’, Danas, 14th February 1989, 32‑33. 79 Vlado Rajić, ‘Ne/prešućeni genocid’, Danas, 10th November 1989, 26‑27. 80 Željko Olujić, ‘Zlonamjerni galimatijas’, Danas, 21st February 1989, 32. 81 Glas Koncila, 1st January 1989, 5. 82 Milan Bulajić, ‘O zločinu bez kazne’, Danas, 24th January 1989, 30‑31. 83 Žerjavić, Opsesije i Megalomanije oko Jasenovca i Bleiburga, 33‑36; Bogosavljević, ‘The unresolved Genocide’, 152‑155. 84 Serbian émigré statistician Bogoljub Kočović published a demographic calculation, ac‑ cording to which Yugoslav wartime losses were around 1,014,000 persons. See Kočović, Žrtve drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji, 130. Shortly afterwards, Vladeta Vučković, a professor of mathematics at the University of South Bend, USA, claimed in a London based émigré magazine that he had participated in the calculation of the number of victims in 1947. According to Vučković, the number of approximately 1,700,000 was actually an estimate of the demographic losses, meaning that the number of real losses would have been significantly lower, probably close to Kočović’s estimate. Vučković, ‘Žrtve rata’, 2‑3. 85 Quoted in S. Stojanović, ‘Tačniji broj žrtava’, Večernje Novosti, 22nd June 1985, 8. 86 Željko Krušelj, ‘Osporavanje najvećih brojki’, Danas, 11th April 1989, 44. 87 Goldstein, ‘Novokomponirana historiografija’, 44. 88 Kočović, Žrtve drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji, 130. 89 Krušelj, ‘Osporavanje največih brojki’, 44‑46. 90 Krušelj, ‘Istina ne trpi kompromise’, 37. 91 See Ratislav Petrović, ‘Izvori nisu u kavani’, Danas, 28th June 1988, 30. See also Ljubo Boban, Kontroverze iz povijesti Jugoslavije 2, Zagreb: Školska Knjiga, 1989, 347‑385. 92 Petrović, ‘Izvori nisu u kavani’, 31; Ratislav Petrović, ‘Tko štedi štedimliju’, Danas, 31st May, 1988, 28‑29; Ratislav Petrović, ‘Dokazi za zaključak’, Danas, 14th June, 1988, 29‑30. 93 Krušelj, ‘Bijeg iz paukove mreže, 13. See also Goldstein, ‘Novokomponirana historiogra‑ fija’, 44 94 Milan Bulajić, ‘Pitanje odgovornosti’, Danas, 1st August 1989, 29‑30. 95 Vladimir Žerjavić, ‘Ni igre ni licitiranje – o Bulajićevoj taktici politizacije žrtava rata’ Danas, 15th August 1989, 30‑31.

National conflicts and national historical cultures, 1990‑2002 When in January 1990 the Slovenian and Croatian Communist Parties walked out of the last general assembly of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the league fell apart, thereby leaving the way open for a fundamental political reconstellation in all of Yugoslavia. While formal political institutions remained, the Yugoslav republics soon moved in their separate ways. Elections were held in all republics during 1990, in most cases bringing new nationalist parties into power. During 1991 and early 1992, independent national republics were declared in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia. The break up of the Yugoslav federation, however, was to be accompanied by mas‑ sive warfare and excessive war crimes. The states that emerged from this violent dissolution all paid a high price – some, however, much more than others. Frequently through this process of destroying one state and establishing new ones, the history of the Second World War and its massacres was drawn upon and linked to the ongoing conflict. The events of the present were mirrored in and understood through crimes and warfare of the past. Claims of historical repetition in the form of renewed ethnic conflict and genocide were common from several sides. And as the past was also perceived through the present, the history of the Second World War was in various ways re‑ interpreted and rewritten to fit needs and dictates of the new political and social conditions. This chapter points out some of the main tendencies of thematizing and re-presenting the history of Second World War massacres during and after the break up of Yugoslavia and the establishment of new states. It shows how the history of the massacres was fundamentally reinterpreted and rewritten to serve new ideological demands, and how references to this history were used politically and ideologically in order to convince possible allies or mobilise support. The chapter focuses on the new national historical cultures of Croatia and Serbia and, to a lesser extent, the Muslim community in Bosnia and Herzego‑ vina. Far from being able to examine all aspects of the complex developments in the various thematization of genocide, which was by then widespread and frequent, it sketches main trends and emphasises illustrative examples.

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The establishment of the Croatian national state Croatia held its first multiparty elections since the Second World War in April and May 1990. The elections were won by The Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, hdz), headed by ex-general, historian and former dissident Franjo Tuđman. Winning 41.5% of the votes cast, Tuđman’s nationalist party, due to the election system, secured absolute majority in parliament.1 The state formation project promoted by the hdz was one of utterly Croatian nationalist orientation, redefining the republic of Croatia as a state foremost for the Croatian nation.2 The relationship between the cultivation of Croatian nationalism and the history of the last instance of some form of Croatian statehood, the wartime Independent State of Croatia, ndh, was often blurry. While the hdz admin‑ istration never formally rehabilitated the ndh, it never properly condemned it either, and often statements from the hdz or Tuđman spread doubts about their attitude towards the Fascist wartime state.3 At an hdz congress in Febru‑ ary 1990, Tuđman declared that the ndh was not simply a creation of fascist criminals; it also expressed the historic aspirations of the Croatian people for an independent state.4 The ghost of ndh surfaced also in connection to the flag and state insignia adopted for independent Croatia in May 1990. The red and white chessboard probably originated in the 11th century and had been associated with Croatia since the 15th century. It had also been part of the coat of arms of the Croa‑ tian socialist republic, while the red-white-blue flag of socialist Croatia was adorned by a five-pointed star. However, when the new authorities removed the star from the Croatian flag and replaced it with a chessboard with a white square in the upper left corner, many were reminded of the ndh symbols and flag, even though the Ustasha had added a U on the chessboard.5 The constitution of December 1990 changed the coat of arms so that the top left corner was now red, thus attempting to signal a distance from the wartime fascist statehood.6 In 1990, Zagreb’s city council, in agreement with Tuđman, renamed the “Square of the Victims of Fascism” as the “Square of Great Croats” thus sym‑ bolising the defeat of the struggle against fascism in the face of the rise of Croatian national heroes.7 hdz’s nationalist discourse and unclear relationship with the Ustasha past inevitably worried Serbs in Croatia. Their fear was increased by politi‑ cal changes and reforms directly aimed at limiting the Serbs’ status in the new state. The new constitution meant that Serbs were degraded from a

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constitutional nation of the Croatian Socialist Republic to a national minority in independent Croatia. The hdz administration also dismissed numerous Serbs from posts in police and public administrations with the aim to curb Serbian influence and overrepresentation. During the Summer of 1990, Serbs in Krajina repeatedly protested and a Belgrade supported Serbian national council was established, defying the Croat authorities and working for Serbian autonomy.8 Enmity and fear increased between Croats and Serbs, both in and outside Croatia. Second World War references were widely used to describe the situa‑ tion and to denote political and national enemies. From 1989, Croatian media had increasingly reported on the presence of Chetnik symbols and ideology among the Serbs in Krajina.9 In the Summer of 1991, Croatian television re‑ ferred to the jna as the “Serbian Chetnik army”, but later the preferred expres‑ sion, in accordance with the regulations set by the leadership of Croatian tv, became “Serbo-communist army of occupation”.10 After Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence in June 1991, war broke out in the former Yugoslavia. In Slovenia, the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija, jna) fought a short, half-hearted and unsuccessful war against the newly established Slovene defence. On the 18th July, the attempt to prevent Slovene independence was abandoned and Slo‑ venia was left to its own devices. In Croatia, however, armed conflict was to last considerably longer and cost significantly more lives. With the aim to “cleanse” regions of citizens of unwanted ethnicity, numerous war crimes were committed against civilians, mostly by Serbian but also by Croatian forces. In the Summer of 1991, jna moved in to support the self-declared Serbian autonomous areas in Krajina. In August, Croatian defence units blocked jna garrisons in Vukovar. jna bombed the town from a distance, while Serbian paramilitary groups entered into close combat, at the same time committing war crimes against Croat civilians. On the 19th November, Vukovar was taken by the jna and Serbian paramilitaries, new war crimes were committed, and jna went on to attack other Croat towns. From late 1991 the military situa‑ tion in Croatia was locked with approximately one-third of the territory of the Croatian republic under some sort of Serbian control. This situation was to remain relatively stable until Croat offensives re-conquered Slavonia and Krajina in the Spring and Summer of 1995. As Belgrade abandoned its support for the Croatian Serbs, most of them fled before the advancing Croat forces, leaving the Croats to rebuild and construct their national state.

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The Bleiburg tragedy and the thematization of genocide in Croatia The take over of power by the nationalist HDZ party, the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation and the constantly deteriorating relationship with Serbs both in Croatia and in Serbia itself were reflected in Croatian revisions of Second World War history. Croatian historical culture of the 1990s was characterised by an abrupt recasting of history, a nearly total turn of main narratives and a redefining of good and bad. History was to be written in new categories, and in a new, national, framework of understanding. Yet, many of the methods applied were the same as under communism. In 1990 a new thematization of genocide entered the Croatian public sphere. The so-called Bleiburg Tragedy, that is, the large scale massacres committed at the end of the war by the Partisan army against captured war enemies, were exposed and investigated. These massacres and their victims, mainly members of the Ustasha militia and Croatian home guard forces, but arguably also some civilian refugees, constituted a last truly silenced issue of wartime history. The fall of Croatia’s conservative communist leadership finally facilitated the ad‑ dressing of these crimes. In connection to this new historical theme, the mass graves of liquidated anti-Partisan forces were opened and the discoveries widely broadcast in the Croatian media. The question of Partisan massacres after the end of the war was one of the few truly untouchable subjects of Yugoslav history, having remained outside public discourse throughout the communist period, and only discussed in émigré publications and, from the late 1980s, in British books and debates.11 In 1990, the Croatian news magazine Start contributed to the opening of this subject by publishing witness testimonies from the events at the Austrian bor‑ der at the end of the war. Start also published a small book, Otvoreni dossier Bleiburg (Open dossier of Bleiburg), which thematized Bleiburg as a histori‑ cal problem. Claiming that Second World War history was taken prisoner and used in nationalist and political propaganda, the dossier’s editor, Marko Grčić, stated that, though understandable, it was in no way excusable that the question of the prisoners killed at the end of the war was never investigated in Yugoslavia. According to Grčić it was morally necessary to ask: can we, in the widest ethical perspective, silently pass by the fact that the commu‑ nist movement itself, fighting against fratricide, after the war stained its hands with blood in massacres that were, according to numerous witness accounts from both sides, too massive to be ascribed to simple retaliation, actions of a people craving

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for revenge; they were too widely founded, too diligently planned, making it a logic assumption that they were ordered by the supreme party leadership.12

At stake was the heroic history of Partisan moral superiority during the Na‑ tional War of Liberation. The thematization of the Partisans’ massacres of their defeated enemies – real and suspected – destroyed the narrative of the righteous Partisans. But at the same time, a new group of victims moved into focus, namely Croats, both as captured and murdered anti-Partisan armed forces and as civilians. While the call for investigation of these massacres was driven by existential and moral needs to re-examine the past and recognise the suffering of the victims, the thematization of them also opened a new perspec‑ tive of Croat national victimisation in connection to the Second World War.13 This was, furthermore, accompanied by a sense of deeply unfair treatment of the Croatian nationality in Yugoslavia’s communist historiography, as these Croat victims, unlike the Serbian victims of the Ustasha, were truly silenced.

Ill. 10.1. The excavators in the Jazovka pit, standing on a heap of bones. Photo by Nikola Šolić. From Žanko and Šolić, Jazovka.

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As part of the thematization of Croat victimisation by Partisans, the bones of the victims themselves became an issue.14 In June 1990, the Zagreb newspaper Vjesnik took part in an expedition into the deep natural pit Jazovka, near Sošice west of Zagreb. According to testimonies from witnesses, Jazovka was used as mass grave for groups of Ustasha and Domobran (Croatian home-guard) soldiers as well as suspected civilian assistants, killed by the Partisans shortly after the war. In the booklet Jazovka, published by two Vjesnik journalists after the ex‑ pedition, it was described how the excavators found piles of sculls and bones, some tied with wire, but also crutches, indicating that wounded prisoners were also executed at the pit.15 The book also held photos from the cave and from the reburial of the excavated, and testimonies from witnesses were included. An account of the crime, from a boy aged ten at the time, described how Par‑ tisans arrived in May 1945, captured all men and held them prisoners for two months, until in July and August columns of more than 100 tied prisoners, teenage boys among them, were liquidated and thrown in the pit.16 As opposed to hitherto written historiography of the war, which was now fast eroding, the sheer materialization of these bones and sculls seemed simple hard proof of hidden violence. The victims were visibly and physically present as undeniable testimonies to the crimes of the Partisans, until recently the righteous, blameless heroes. Furthermore, the bones testified to the blank spots of a communist historiography that appeared increasingly directed against the Croatian nation. In the journalists’ account, Jazovka was connected to the overall theme of the Bleiburg tragedy, suggesting that the pit was just one of the numer‑ ous “little Bleiburgs” that resulted from the massive persecution of suspected supporters of the Partisans’ defeated opponents. It was claimed that after the war all of Zagreb was characterised by an atmosphere of fear, and that the following silence surrounding the numerous executions left a large part of the Croat population traumatized for generations..17 The mass liquidations at Jazovka and elsewhere were ascribed to a com‑ munist strategy of annihilating all war opponents including family and rela‑ tives, thus implying that the Partisans and their leaders were responsible for systematic, politically and strategically motivated, war crimes in the summer of 1945.18 Yet, the liquidation of anti-Partisan soldiers at Jazovka and elsewhere was thematized mainly as a crime against the Croatian nation, thereby trans‑ forming the politically motivated war crimes into national victimisation. In the newspaper of the Croatian Catholic Church, Glas Koncila, Partisan massacres of Croats and mass graves with Croatian victims were repeatedly

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discussed during 1990, and witnesses and relatives described the liquidations.19 The mass grave at Jazovka was explicitly used as a counter-argument defying Serbian claims of victimisation. According to an editorial comment in Glas Koncila on the 8th July 1990, it was claimed in Belgrade that numerous pits existed filled with orthodox victims, while in Croatia it was known that Sošice pit contained at least one thousand square meters of deposited and crushed human bones.20 In some cases, the commemoration of Croat victims of Partisan reprisals after the war tended to function as a counter-victimisation to what Serbs had suffered at the hands of the Ustasha, establishing some kind of histori‑ cal symmetry of victimisation. This was sensed already in 1990, when several columns and letters to the editor in Danas warned against this parallelisation, emphasising that the victims of the Partisans were not primarily innocent civilians, but former war enemies, and that the Partisans had not introduced racial laws or developed death industries such as the Ustasha.21 Also Croatian academic historians noted and warned against the tendency.22 Nevertheless, Bleiburg remained a central theme in parts of Croatian his‑ torical culture. In 1995, an international symposium commemorating Bleiburg was held in Zagreb, housed by the Croatian parliament. One of the aims of

Ill. 10.2. The mass grave of a nation? The Croatian flag descending into the Jazovka cave, at the commemoration ceremony in July 1990. Photo by Nikola Šolić. From Žanko and Šolić, Jazovka.

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the symposium, according to the editor of the publication which appeared afterwards, was to “reveal at least a fragment of the truth about the Greater Serbian-communist genocide against the Croats …”.23 Several contributions at the symposium practically reversed the narrative of the Second World War as it had looked in communist historiography. Instead of emphasising crimes com‑ mitted by occupiers, Ustasha and other collaborators, conference participants outlined a history of a Croatian nation victimised by communist Partisans, often equalised with Serbs.24 According to one speaker, the crimes of Bleiburg were committed to fulfil Greater Serbian plans, which prevailed among the communists, to biologically destroy the Croatian people.25 Thus, the crimes of communists and of Serbs were seen as one unitary project. On the other hand, it was emphasised that many of the Croatian victims of these crimes were innocent civilians, or their complicity in Ustasha crimes and warfare was largely ignored. One speaker explicitly paralleled crimes committed by the Ustasha and by the Chetniks, arguing that whereas Ustasha crimes were always emphasised in order to support malicious claims against the Croatian nation, Chetnik geno‑ cidal crimes against Croats and Muslims were taboo in Socialist Yugoslavia.26 While it is true that the treatment of the Chetniks in communist historiography focused mainly on their cooperation with the occupiers and their war against the Partisans, Chetnik crimes against civilians, including Muslims and Croats, had certainly not been silenced. Such crimes were described at the trial against Draža Mhailović in 1946; in the memoirs of Partisan leaders and regularly, if superficially, in historical writing since.27 At the 1995 Bleiburg Symposium, the past presented as a history of genocide against Croats was also used to define and explain the situation in the 1990s: several contributions claimed that Chetnik crimes of the war were repeated in the early 1990s in Croatia and Bosnia, and one speaker suggested that Croatia would have suffered an even greater tragedy than Bleiburg if she had lost the “Homeland War” of the 1990s.28 Though not all speakers at this symposium adhered to this line of historical reinterpretations, some speakers clearly reconfigured history into an exclusively Croatian national narrative, emphasising Croat victimisation at the hands of Serbs. These presentations promoted an image of a threatening Serbian enemy both in connection with the Second World War and in contemporary national conflict. The violent past was explicitly linked to the events of the present, and the two historical periods were understood in the light of one another. Here history was used to create a coherent national, heroic and tragic genealogy,

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and to mobilise the Croatian population as a nation against a historical and national enemy, represented as a combination of Serbs and communism. In comparison with the interest in Bleiburg and Croatian victimisation, the history of the Ustasha and Jasenovac was less carefully attended to. After the outbreak of war in Croatia, the Jasenovac museum was emptied and the buildings and memorial area damaged.29 In 1995 President Tuđman proposed to turn the memorial at Jasenovac into a monument for all Croat victims of the Second World War in addition to the non-Croat victims of the Ustasha.30 This proposal, which would ultimately mean that victims and perpetrators of Ustasha crimes were to be commemorated together for the sake of reconciling the Croatian nation, is rather illustrative of the President’s lack of sensitivity towards the victims and their relatives and, more generally, towards Croatia’s problematic history.

Towards a Croatian national history War had its share of responsibility for the way Second World War history was addressed in Croatia. At the end of the war in 1995, Croatia, as a newly declared and costly defended national state, still faced the task of defining and rewriting its national historical narrative. Though historical culture in the independent Croatian state set out to remove the communist dictates from historical narratives, history writing was largely subordinated to the new political projects of Croatian state and na‑ tion building. Books published reflected this: Often the Ustasha’s persecution and mass slaughter of Serbs were included only very superficially. Croatian victimisation at the hands of Chetniks or Partisans and the Bleiburg tragedy were described rather more empathically than the Serbian suffering under the Ustasha regime.31 The political and ideological use of history in independent Croatia was particularly visible in the newly written history schoolbooks. Ivo Goldstein, historian at the University of Zagreb, argued in May 2000 that Croatia’s postYugoslav government, like all the regimes that had ruled Croatia through the twentieth century, viewed history as a handmaiden of politics. Goldstein claimed that the hdz government had created mythology out of older history and political propaganda out of modern history.32 The new history was utterly Croato-centric, focusing on the regions and republic of Croatia and never on the Yugoslav community. The common Yugoslav past was largely removed, and while the Second World War was still significant, Ustasha crimes were now

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downplayed, whereas Croat victimisation was emphasised. This was clearly politically programmed: in the early 1990s, two textbooks written by academic historians were criticised and later redrawn, because of what was considered exaggerated criticism of the ndh.33 History textbooks used in Croatia in the late 1990s and the first years of the 21st century usually described crimes committed by the Ustasha regime very briefly under euphemistic headlines such as “Ustasha dictatorship” or “The organisation of rule”.34 The persecution and mass killing of Serbs was very superficially referred to and Serbs were never pointed out as victims of genocide.35 In one textbook, it was stated that the Ustasha committed “geno‑ cidal crimes against Jews and Gypsies. They also conducted terror against a part of the Serbs …”.36 It appears as if it was more acceptable or legitimate to recognise the genocidal character of the crimes against minorities than to recognise the mass murder of Serbs as such. The reason for this is probably that the Serbs constituted a very recent and dangerous enemy, both politically and militarily, and faced with this threat it was too problematic to admit that Serbs might in fact have had a cause to defend and a reason to fear Croatian nationalism. In this case, the Croatian textbook remained loyal to the needs of current Croatian nationalism rather than to a faithful representation of the past. The Crimes of the Ustasha were not totally silenced, but they were radically backgrounded. Generally, there were few attempts to take issue with the dark sides of Croatia’s national history.37 The war crimes of Chetniks and Partisans and the Bleiburg tragedy on the other hand were foregrounded and thematized. These crimes were in the headlines and described in far more detail than those of the Ustasha.38 Fur‑ thermore, it was suggested that Chetnik crimes had been silenced throughout the communist period, whereas Ustasha crimes had been emphasised.39 Thus, Croatian national victimisation was emphasised, both with regard to war crimes and to the historical culture of communist Yugoslavia, which was presented as anti-Croat. The war in Croatia 1991‑1995, often referred to as the “Homeland War” (“Domovinski rat”), naturally took a prominent position in Croatian text‑ books. Whereas descriptions of Ustasha crimes in the Second World War were often scarce, the accounts of war crimes committed by the Yugoslav army and Serbian paramilitary forces in the 1990s were quite explicit. Some of these books directly compared the wars of the 1990s to Croatian suffering during the Second World War, as in the statement: “The martyred Vukovar is the symbol of the aggressor’s bestiality and Croatian suffering – ‘the Croatian Bleiburg of the homeland war’…”40

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The concept of genocide, which was hardly ever used in connection to Ustasha politics, was applied to the practices of the jna and the Serbian para‑ militaries in Croatia. As was claimed in one book: It is hard both to imagine and describe the Chetnik crimes. They plundered, burnt, razed, raped even girls and old women  – for strategic reasons, tortured, killed, massacred, drove in concentration camps … The barbaric destruction and ethnic cleansing are visible examples of the aggressor’s genocide, culture-cide, eco-cide, memo-cide …41

The concept of genocide was applied here with the aim of strongly thematizing the victimisation of the Croatian nation. In the worst of examples, post-communist Croatian historical culture lacked a proper critical examination of the darkest sides of Croatian national history, and at the same time it was characterised by a very emotional approach to national victimisation, framed within the concept and perspective of genocide. Newer textbooks, though, seem more balanced on these issues, as well as when it comes to the propagandistic uses of wartime denotations such as Ustasha and Chetniks during the war in Croatia.42

The lack of transition in Serbia In many ways during the 1990s, Serbia experienced less of a transition than most other former Yugoslav states. In the Summer of 1990, Serbian president and communist leader, Slobodan Milošević, changed the name of his party from the League of Communists of Serbia to the Socialist Party of Serbia, SPS. The SPS inherited the material basis of both the League of Communists and of communist mass organisations. In the elections in December 1990, SPS won 46% of votes cast, which, due to the election system, gave an absolute majority in Parliament, and Milošević was elected president.43 Through the 1990s, Milošević’s regime demonstrated a strange ability to stay in power in spite of numerous misfortunes, including lost wars, deteriorat‑ ing living standards and international isolation. According to sociologist Eric Gordy, Milošević’s rule is best described as “nationalist authoritarian”, mobilis‑ ing support by using nationalist symbols and agenda, and applying numerous anti-democratic means. Rather than aiming for complete control of society, Milošević’s regime stayed in power by “eliminating alternatives”; controlling the main media, intimidating and, if necessary, physically eliminating oppo‑

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nents.44 Furthermore, the regime was founded on an alliance with economic and criminal elites, and, most importantly, it was willing to use force against its own population, as was seen several times through the 1990s.45 During Milošević’s reign Serbian society was increasingly militarized; particularly the police and secret police expanded considerably.46 Though Serbia was not officially involved in the wars of Yugoslav succession, Serbia supported the jna and the Bosnian Serb Army with elite and paramili‑ tary forces. Serbian public life through the 1990s was largely subordinated to warfare and nationalist agenda. Historical culture as well was deeply affected by these public and political trends.

The theme of genocide in Serbia The developments, which in the late 1980s had characterised Serbian historiog‑ raphy of the Second World War, continued into the next decade. The Ustasha massacres and Serbian national victimisation remained dominant themes far into the 1990s.47 Besides general academic interest in the subject, the theme of geno‑ cide was very visible in the Serbian public sphere and media in the early 1990s.48 In the beginning of the 1990s, Serbia’s most read daily newspaper Politika, which had been under government control since the late 1980s, brought numerous articles about the Second World War, Jasenovac and the Ustasha regime. Articles about the protests among Krajina’s Serbs warned against cur‑ rent Croatian “Ustashism” and the risk of genocide.49 During the escalation of the conflict and armed clashes in Croatia in 1991, Serbian and Montenegrin television used Second World War expressions for the Croat military, among them “Ustasha forces” or “Tudjman’s black legions”, obviously referring to the infamous Ustasha black legion under Jure Francetić, which committed some of the cruellest massacres against Serbs in 1941‑1942.50 The Serbian Orthodox Church, which in the second half of the 1980s had established itself as champion of the Serb national cause, continued its focus on Serbian national suffering. The church newspaper, Pravoslavlje, repeatedly referred to the Second World War. In 1990‑1991 a series of commemorations of the Second World War were held, and the annual liturgies in Jasenovac were the largest ever.51 Commemoration ceremonies also accompanied exhumations of mass graves containing victims of the Ustasha and reburials of these victims in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Exhumations and reburials were widely covered in Serbian press and live tv.52 These physical remains of murdered humans made the history of the

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Ustasha massacres and their victims very present in Serbian public discourse in the early 1990s. As opposed to a written history that was regularly dismissed as flawed and also significantly revised since the 1980s, excavated bones appeared an indisputable evidence of victimisation. These remains of victims were exclu‑ sively commemorated in ethnic terms and thus contributed to the thorough nationalisation of victims and of Second World War history in general. As war broke out in Croatia in 1991, the theme of Second World War genocide was increasingly intertwined with the current conflict and the condi‑ tions of Serbs in Croatia. While the crimes of the 1940s were backgrounded by ongoing events, they were still regularly referred to as a framework for understanding the present. Even from top political circles, the representation of the ongoing conflict in Croatia was explicitly linked to Ustasha history. In January 1992, in a memo‑ randum addressed to the United Nations and other international organisations, the Yugoslav government appealed to international society to prevent what was described as the second genocide within 50 years against the Serbian people in Croatia.53 In this memorandum, the Yugoslav government also reminded the international community of the crimes committed in Jasenovac in the 1940s,

Ill. 10.3. Piles of bones and sculls exhumed from a pit at Prebilovci, Herzegovina, 1991. From the museum catalogue Croatia. Jasenovac. Ustasha system of death camps.55

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and called for protection of the monument and memorial of the camp, which was being damaged, allegedly by Croatian paramilitary forces.54 The intermingling of the Second World War with the ongoing crisis was visible also in cases when academic historiography engaged in public life. In 1992 and 1993, the Genocide commission of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts held meetings aimed at informing the public about war crimes and genocide in 1991‑1992 and “the system of lies about the crime of genocide”.56 Whereas the main themes of these meetings were the events of the 1990s, Sec‑ ond World War history was regularly referred to as a comparison, background or precedent.57 In 1992, in connection to discussions in the Serbian Parliament about what was referred to as the “renewed genocide against the Serbian people in the neo-Ustasha Croat Republic” and the downplaying and negation of the genocide of Second World War, it was decided to establish a “Museum of the victims of genocide” in Serbia.58 The museum, which began its work in 1995, did not have its own permanent exhibition. Functioning mainly as a research and information institution, it collected data on the victims of the Second World War, published various studies and reports and supported museum exhibitions elsewhere. Among the museum’s productions were exhibition catalogues about the Ustasha massacres and concentration camps. The catalogue Hrvatska. Jasenovac. Sistem ustaških logora smrti/Croatia. Jasenovac. The system of Ustasha death camps was written in both Serbian and English for exhibitions in Belgrade and New York in 1997.59 Both Milan Bulajić, who as director of the museum of the vic‑ tims of genocide wrote the preface, and the author of the catalogue, Mladenko Kumović, repeatedly compared the practices of the Ustasha and Jasenovac to the Jewish Holocaust, arguing that what took place in the Ustasha camps was in many ways just as bad, or worse even, than procedures in the Nazi death camps.60 Though the catalogue held little new information, it followed the pattern of Serbian genocide historiography, thematizating primarily Serbian victimisation through lots of horrible details, personal accounts and very high numbers of victims. The example of the museum catalogue illustrates the way parts of Serbian historical culture represented Jasenovac and the Ustasha mass killing, both internally in Serbia and outwards to an international public. By thematizing the Ustasha and Jasenovac as equivalent to the Jewish Holocaust, Bulajić and Kumović drew on established historical references, in fact a dominant issue, or, one could say, a cardinal theme of European historical culture.61 The aims of this presentation were several: the exhibition and catalogue aimed at point‑

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ing both national and international attention to the camp of Jasenovac, which was according to the authors deliberately downplayed in Yugoslavia and little known internationally.62 The museum catalogue further argued that genocide was now repeated in Croatia, and it appealed to the International community to protect the memorial at Jasenovac against harassments from Croatian mili‑ tary and Franjo Tuđman’s revisionism.63 Serbs were thus presented as primary and historically unrecognised victims of both the Second World War and the war in Croatia in the 1990s. The massive use of history under the Milošević regime provoked various reactions in the Serbian public sphere. In 1991 Andrej Mitrović, professor of contemporary history at the University of Belgrade, published a book in which he warned against the effects of what he called ‘parahistory’. According to Mitrović, this unfounded, sensationalist and manipulative way of com‑ municating history could endanger society’s critical approach to and trust in history as a discipline and make it vulnerable to conspiracy theories and myth production.64 Serbia’s marginalized network of ngos, protesting against the repressive Milošević regime and its use of nationalism to mobilise support for the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, also criticised what was seen as abuse of the past. The Belgrade Circle, a group of anti-regime intellectuals, published a journal in which chief editor Obrad Savić claimed in 1994 that the nationalistic discourse that dominated the public realm drew its energy from the power of myths and epic narrations. He also criticised Dobrica Ćosić, author of popular historical novels, for his celebration of Serbia’s history of suffering. According to Savić, Ćosić was “the voice of a people who jealously nurture and almost narcissisti‑ cally guard their suffering”.65 In 1997 the Serbian patriarch and 60 public figures, including leaders of the political opposition, signed a declaration against genocide towards the Serbian people. The declaration reminded the world of the horrible sufferings and injustice to which the Serbs had been subjected during the First and the Second World Wars as well as in the wars of the 1990s.66 Obrad Savić severely criticised the declaration for suggesting that Serbs were innocent victims in the 1990s, and he sarcastically questioned a plan to establish a St. Sava tribunal to investigate the question of genocide against Serbs, at which, according to Savić “Serb mystagogues … can immediately publicize the exalted vision of Serb suffering”.67

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Teaching Serbian war history The Serbian history schoolbooks of the 1990s and early 21st century reflected the tendencies within the official Serbian historical culture of this period, i.e. to foreground Serbian national victimisation, while omitting or downplaying crimes committed by Serbs in order to create a positive national narrative. The history textbooks of the 1990s, clearly the result of a state-controlled political project, were soon subject to severe criticism from Serbian academic historians.68 In the schoolbooks, the Ustasha percecution and mass killing of Serbs in the ndh constituted a main issue and thematized in chapter headlines such as “ndh and its politics of genocide” or “Genocide in the ndh and Kosmet”.69 Ustasha genocidal practices were described in considerable detail, focusing on Serb national suffering, while other victims of the Ustasha were mentioned only very briefly. The role of the Catholic Church was particularly emphasised. In some of these Serbian textbooks, the history of the Ustasha massacres was explicitly paralleled to the conflicts in the 1990s. In the words of a high school textbook from 1994: Comparing the events from the period of the war … with the events from 1991 in the same areas, they irresistibly give us the thought that actors, as well as crimes and instigators are the same.70

This textbook was reprinted numerous times and used throughout the 1990s and in the early 21st century. In its fourth revised edition printed in 2003, the formulation of this sentence is slightly softened, now claiming that the crimes were similar, while some actors and instigators were the same in the 1940s and in the 1990s.71 The effect of the statement in both cases, however, is to point to repetitive Serbian victimisation and the threat of genocide as a regular ele‑ ment of Serbian-Croat relations. Though the Partisan war was still a main subject of these textbooks, it was now also seen as directed against the Chetniks, that is, as a civil war, dividing the Serbian people. A new, hitherto unmentioned subject in Serbian school‑ book literature was the descriptions of the Partisan persecution and killing of war opponents and suspected class enemies during the so-called “left devia‑ tions” in early 1942.72 However, these Partisan war crimes were in no way as foregrounded as in Croatian history schoolbooks, and the massacres against mainly Croatian pro-Axis forces at the end of the war, the so called Bleiburgtragedy, were not mentioned at all.

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The Chetniks and Draža Mihailović were largely rehabilitated. The textbooks no longer presented them as national traitors, but rather as fighters of a just cause, which brought them into civil war against the communist Partisans. The Chet‑ niks were no longer described as criminals, and their massacres against Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina were not mentioned.73 In this way, the Chetniks were included in a positive national narrative of Serbian history, in which the Serbian political struggle and warfare were included, Serbian suffering and victimisation thematised, and crimes committed by Serbian forces largely omitted.

The Bosnian war In Bosnia, the elections of December 1990 split democratic power among the parties of each of Bosnia’s main national groups: the Muslim sda (Stranka demokratske akcije, Party of Democratic Action), headed by the soon-to-be Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović; a Bosnian sister-party of the Croatian hdz (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, Croatian Democratic Union); and the Serbian sds (Srpska demokratska stranka, Serbian Democratic Party), headed by Radovan Karadžić. In most parties, extreme nationalist wings soon pre‑ vailed over more moderate fractions, leading to an increase in the nationalist radicalisation of Bosnian politics.74 Following a referendum boycotted by Serbs, on the 3rd March 1992, Bosnia declared its independence in spite of Serbian protests. By April 1992, each national unit mobilised militarily, and a separate Croat region was set up in Herzegovina. The jna – soon to be replaced by a newly constructed Bosnian Serb Army based on the Bosnian Serb units of the jna – initiated a war in cooperation with Serbian paramilitary forces that was to be characterised by ethnic cleansing and large scale war crimes against civilians. From May 1992, Sarajevo was under siege and heavily bombed. Though Serbs were generally responsible for most crimes, while Muslims suffered most, all national sides of the conflict committed massive war crimes, among which internment of enemies and civilians in concentration camps, mass rape and mass execution.75 Internationally sponsored peace plans to divide Bosnia and Herzegovina into cantons governed by local ethnic majorities sent all parties into wars of ethnic cleansing. Muslim enclaves in Eastern Bosnia, among them Srebrenica, came under siege by Serbian forces, whereas Muslim gangs harassed Serbian villages. In July 1995 the Bosnian Serb army invaded Srebrenica and captured around 8000 persons, primarily men and young boys, who were then murdered in the

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largest single massacre during the war.76 Following the Srebrenica massacre and the Serbian bombing of civilians at the Markale market square in Sarajevo in August, nato finally intervened, bombing Serbian positions from the air. The end of the war in Bosnia was formally confirmed by the Dayton agreement of November 1995, which defined Bosnia and Herzegovina as an asymmetrical federation of two entities, the Bosnian Serb republic, Republika Srpska, and the Muslim-Croat federation.77 The war and the Dayton peace agreement cemented the Nationalist divi‑ sion of the former multiethnic Bosnian society. Post-1995 Bosnian politics was characterised by the struggle to construct a viable state out of a war-torn, ethnically divided and often externally governed Dayton Bosnia. During the war and the years after it, Bosnia’s Croat and Serb regions often identified themselves with the Croatian and Serbian national states, rather than with multiethnic Bosnia. Yet, to Muslims, or Bosniaks as they were now called, the Bosnian state was their country of identification. In the years after Dayton, Bosniak history writing engaged in the project of writing a Muslim Bosnian national history, parallel to the general nationalisation of history in the former Yugoslav areas.

Bosnian historical culture and the theme of genocide The national conflicts defined the agenda for approaches to the history of war crimes and massacres of the Second World War. In multiethnic Bosnia, which was the scene of some of the worst massacres during the Second World War, and which was now torn between Serbian, Croatian and Muslim nationalism, Second World War history became highly disputed and politicised. In the 1990s, Second World War victims were increasingly commemorated within exclusivist ethnic frameworks. Illustrative of the lack of interethnic un‑ derstanding in the politics of commemoration was a meeting in Foča in August 1990, arranged by the Muslim party sda to commemorate Muslim victims of the “Serb genocide”, committed by Chetniks. Flowers were thrown in the Drina as a symbol of reconciliation. The numerous Serbs killed in this area by the Ustasha, however, were totally left out of the ceremony. Serb political representatives were invited, but none attended the meeting.78 The contested character of Second World War history was visible also from the widespread destruction of communist monuments to the victims of Fas‑ cism, symbolising the rejection of the official communist commemoration of the war. As monuments mainly named victims of Serb Partisan orientation,

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groups of Muslims and Croats now concretely refused the material presence of this version of the past.79 In early 1992, when the parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina negotiated the republic’s possible future independence, the history of Second World War massacres was invested with very real political meaning. Serb representatives used this history to deny the right of the majority of Bosnia’s citizens to define the future of the state. Emphasising the numerous victims and immense suf‑ fering borne by the Serbian population in Bosnia, both in the Partisan struggle and due to the Ustasha’s murderous politics, Slobodan Bijelić from Bosanska Dubica stated: “Peoples whose members committed genocide cannot outvote, not even by referendum, the people against whom the genocide was commit‑ ted. …”80 Thus, the theme of genocide in the past was also used indirectly to legitimate Serbian claims to Bosnia.

Towards a Bosniak national history Faced with a sharpening national conflict both in and outside the republic and fierce disputes of genocide history in Serbia and Croatia, Bosniak histo‑ riography increasingly thematized the issue of genocide by focusing on the question of the Chetnik massacres of Muslims. Other nations’ victimisation was backgrounded in comparison. While the Chetnik persecution and massacres of Muslims were described in various types of communist narratives of the Second World War, the theme of genocide against Muslims had not been singled out in research before the 1990s. One of the first books addressing this question was in fact published by sanu’s genocide commission and authored by Vladimir Dedijer and Antun Miletić, two main representatives of Serbian genocide historiography.81 From the early 1990s, Bosnian Muslim victims of war crimes in the Second World War became a theme among Bosniak historians. In 1991 a conference was held dedicated to the question of genocide against Muslims in Yugoslavia,82 and in the new Bosniak national histories that were written in the late 1990s and early 21st century, the Chetnik massacres of Muslims was a main theme. The main protagonist of these new histories, obviously, was the Bosnian Muslim community through the centuries. In these histories, accounts of the Second World War focused on Muslim victimisation. It was argued that the ndh, even though officially courting the Bosnian Muslims as allies and the purest of Croats, in fact committed a type of genocide by their forcible as‑ similation of the Muslims. Muslims were thus presented as victims rather than

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allies of the Ustasha.83 At the same time, efforts were invested in underlining that most Muslims already in 1941 distanced themselves from the Ustasha re‑ gime; authors cited various protests from Muslim intellectuals and prominent figures in society. It was claimed that Croatian Ustasha units attacked Serbian villages dressed up in fez and used Muslim names to encourage Serbian hatred towards innocent Muslims, and even the establishment of the specific Muslim “Handžar ss division” was presented as a way of avoiding cooperation with the Ustasha.84 The persecution of Serbs, Jews and Roma in the ndh was mentioned and described superficially; yet the main theme in the accounts of Second World War was genocide against Muslims, primarily committed by the Chetniks. Under chapter headlines such as ‘The Chetnik genocide against Bosniaks’ or ‘The genocide of the Ravna Gora Chetnik Movement – the river Drina the greatest Muslim grave’, Chetnik massacres and war crimes against Bosnian Muslims were thematized and described in comparably more detail than other war crimes’ policies.85 Bosniak history schoolbooks repeated this tendency of distancing Bosnian Muslims from the main perpetrators of crime, and at the same time emphasis‑ ing Muslim victimisation. The text books used in the early 21st century pointed out that Muslims were victims of the Ustasha’s politics of denationalisation, and that Muslims quickly distanced themselves from the Ustasha.86 Interestingly, the Bosnian Muslim history textbooks, unlike Serbian and Croatian schoolbooks from this period, presented a positive image of the com‑ munists and the Partisan movement, emphasising the Partisan fight against national intolerance and “fratricidal war”, while ignoring Partisan war crimes or the Bleiburg massacres at the end of the war.87 This perspective on Titoist communism probably reflects that the establishment and peaceful existence of a Bosnian multinational republic as well as the recognition of a Muslim national community within it are intimately linked to Titoist communism. The widespread interest in the Chetnik massacres of Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Second World War was characterised by two essential features: Firstly, it was argued by some that the crimes against Muslims were deliberately silenced, or tabooed, quite in line with the claims about silenced crimes in both Serbian and Croatian historical culture in the preceding decade. Secondly, the thematization of Chetnik massacres was closely linked to the per‑ ception that these war crimes were repeated in the 1990s. Numerous accounts and studies situated the Chetnik massacres in 1942‑1943 within a perspective of renewed or continued victimhood of the Muslims, which culminated in the genocide of the 1990s.88

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As has been shown in earlier chapters of this thesis, Chetnik crimes against Muslims were not hidden. They were included in the trial against Draža Mihailović and other Chetnik leaders in 1946, and they were described in various memorial accounts of the war. Yet, the criticism was fair to the extent that Bosnian Muslim victims of the Second World War only became an issue of academic research in the 1990s. What is maybe more important, though, is the way the past was used as a direct explanatory key to understand the present. What was suggested was a clear continuity of Muslim victimisation and Serbian aggression. This pattern of understanding left out the complexity of Yugoslavia’s Second World War, in which Serbs as a nation were more victimised than they were perpetrators. The establishment of Bosnian Muslim national history, however, did not by then leave room for such complexities. While this perspective was surely promoted by the truly endangered and victimised situation of Bosnian Muslims in both the Second World War and the war of the 1990s, it also served to legitimise Bosniak claims to a proper independent Bosnian state and to create a national narrative of righteous Bosniak victims. The breakdown of communist historiography left a void behind it that was filled with reinterpretations and new narratives according to nationalist agenda. The general assumption that communist history had been selective and manipulative, that crimes and victimhood of one’s own nation was deliberately and strategically silenced meant, furthermore, that historiography was deprived of trust and integrity.89 In many cases, history was left as a flexible instrument of the politics and ideologies in power. Within the national historical cultures of the 1990s, the accounts of Second World War massacres were clearly subordinated to the writing of national his‑ tories. What had once been histories of a class based and all-Yugoslav patriotic struggle were now strongly invested with ethnic perspectives and interpretations. The new national histories were often as selective and one-sided as had been the case under communism. Crimes committed by members of the historians’ own nation were downplayed and relativized, and the nation was distanced from war crimes. On the other hand, the suffering and victimisation of the historians’ na‑ tion were thematized. In these ways, the re-thematizations and selective history writing of post-Yugoslav national histories served attempts to create national ‘usable pasts’ out of Yugoslavia’s problematic and complex history.90 The national recasting of history created incredible distances and con‑ tradictions between the ways the Second World War and its massacres were accounted in the different new national historical cultures. Furthermore, the widespread perception of historical continuity and repetition obviously left

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the former fellow Yugoslavs with very strong enemy images of one another. Understanding other Yugoslavs through the framework of the Second World War inevitably sharpened national enmity. By 2002, historical cultures in the former Yugoslav areas in many ways still needed to redefine and retell their common history in a way faithful to the academic ideal of investigating the past also for its own sake, with the aim of gaining as much knowledge as possible about the past of the human species. In order to make history usable as more than a tool of political and ideological propaganda, historians of the former Yugoslav areas still had to re-establish history as a trustworthy academic and educational subject, and as spectacles through which human beings can perceive their being in complexities of time and space, and, in the best of cases, gain enough knowledge to avoid repeti‑ tions of past mistakes. N ote s 1 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, 119. 2

Robert M. Hayden, ‘Constitutional Nationalism in the Formerly Yugoslav Republics’, Slavic Review, 51, 1992, 4, 657ff.

3

For an analysis of Tuđman’s statements about, amongst others, history and the ndh, see Gordana Uzelak, ‘Franjo Tudjman’s nationalist ideology’, East European Quarterly, 31, 1997, 4, 449‑473. See also Jill Irvine, ‘Ultranationalist ideology and state-building in Croatia, 1990‑1996’, Problems of Post-Communism, 1997, 4, 30‑44.

4

Quoted e.g. in Mark Biondich, ‘We were defending the state’, in John R. Lampe and Mark Mazower, eds., Ideologies and National Identities. The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe, Budapest: ceu Press, 2004, 70. See also Goldstein and Goldstein, ‘Revisionism in Croatia’, 63; Silber and Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, 86; Ivo Gold‑ stein, ‘The use of history. Croatian historiography and politics’, Helsinki Monitor, 1994, special issue, 93.

5

See Maja Brkljačić and Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Symbolwandel und symbolischer Wan‑ del. Kroatiens “Erinnerungskultur”’, Osteuropa, 53, 2003, 7, 933‑948. For a critique of Brkljačić and Sundhaussen, emphasising the widespread uses of the chessboard before and after the Ustasha, see Dunja Bonacci-Skenderović and Mario Jareb, ‘Hrvatski na‑ cionalni simboli između negativnih stereotipa i istine’, Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 36, 2004, 2, 731‑760.

6

Dijana Pleština, ‘Democracy and Nationalism in Croatia: The First Three Years’, in Sabrina Petra Ramet and Ljubiša S. Adamovich, eds., Beyond Yugoslavia. Politics, Economics, and Culture in a Shattered Community, Boulder: Westview Press, 1995, 132.

7

Biondich, ‘We were defending the state’, 71. (The name “Square of the Victims of Fa‑ scism” was restored in 1999).

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8 Ramet, Balkan Babel, 56‑57. 9

Fahrudin Radonić, ‘Sveti Sava dopisuje memorandum’, Danas, 27th June 1989, 25‑26; Marinko Čulić, ‘Kokarde opet sjaje’, Danas, 18th July, 1989, 7‑10; Jasna Babić, ‘Nova srpska država’, Danas, 10th October 1989, 21. On Serbian nationalist mobilisation with regard to Krajina, see Marinko Čulić, ‘Ispod krsta i hrasta’, Danas, 11th July 1989, 20; Milan Jajčinović, ‘Neoprostive hrvatske greške’, Danas, 19th September 1989, 12‑13; Milan Bečejić, ‘Miting u Francuskoj 7’, Danas, 5th September 1989, 24; Jajčinović, ‘Vježbe iz događanja naroda’, 20‑22.

10 Quoted in Kuzmanović, ‘Media: The Extension of Politics by Other Means’, 95; See also Sandra Bašić, ‘The media landscape’ in Marjan Malešić, ed., The role of mass media in the Serbian-Croatian conflict, Stockholm: SPF rapport, 1993, 34‑35. 11 The British discussion of the question began with the historian Nikola Tolstoy’s book The Minister and the Massacres, London: Century Hutchinson, 1986, which claimed that the British minister at the allied command of the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan, was responsible for the return of the anti-Partisan forces to Yugoslavia. See also Darko Bekić, ‘Verzija Cowgillova Isvještaja’, in Marko Grčić, ed., Otvoreni dossier Bleiburg, (2nd edition), Zagreb: Start, 1990, 27‑68. 12 Grčić, Otvoreni dossier Bleiburg, 9. 13 In Slovenia, a similar mass grave resulting from Partisan massacres after the war was discovered. The Slovenian leadership proposed it be used to promote Slovenian natio‑ nal reconciliation between various sides in the Yugoslav civil war during Second World War. See Zoran Medved, ‘Nedodirljivi arhivi OZNe’, Danas, 10th July 1990, 18‑19; Jelena Lovrić, ‘Rat oko pomirenja’, Danas, 17th July 1990, 7‑9. 14 See also Hayden, ‘Recounting the Dead’, 174‑175; Denich, ‘Dismembering Yugoslavia’, 378‑379. 15 Želimir Žanko and Nikola Šolić, Jazovka, Zagreb: Vjesnik, posebno izdanje, 1990, 18ff. 16 Ibid, 22f. 17 Ibid, 13, 32. 18 Ibid, 49. 19 E.g. Glas koncila, 2 September 1990, 6; Glas koncila, 23rd September 1990, front page. On 15th July 1990 a woman described how her father, allegedly singularly because of his critical attitude towards communism, was killed and thrown in the Jazovka pit. Glas koncila, 15th July 1990, 6‑7. On the 16th September, a man recounted how he survived a Partisan massacre of several thousands of innocent Croats. Glas Koncila, 16th September 1990, 6‑7. 20 Glas Koncila, 8th July 1990, 2. 21 See Danko Plevnik, ‘Jame i pomirenja’, Danas, 10th July 1990, 21; Duško Ćirić, ‘Heroji i zločinci’, Danas, 31st July 1990, 4.

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22 E.g. Mirjana Gross, ‘Wie denkt man kroatische Geschichte? Geschichtsschreibung als Identitätsstiftung’, Österreichische Osthefte, 35, 1993, 1, 94; Mihael Sobolevski, ‘Između Jasenovca i Bleiburga’, Erasmus – časopis za kulturu demokratije, 1993, 4, 42‑47. See also Žerjavić, Opsesije i Megalomanije oko Jasenovca i Bleiburga, 11, 77ff. 23 Anđelko Mijatović, ‘Proslov / Prologue’, in Anđelko Mijatović, ed., Bleiburg 1945.-1995. Zagreb: Hrvatska Matica Iseljenika, 1997, 6. 24 E.g. Nedeljko Mihanović, ‘Welcome address’, in ibid, 167. 25 Kazimir Kartalinić, ‘The end of the independent state of Croatia’, in ibid, 201. 26 Zdravko Dizdar, ‘Chetnik genocidal crimes against Croatians and Muslims’, in ibid, 180. 27 E.g. Izdajnik i ratni zločinac Draža Mihailović pred sudom, 54‑59; Dedijer, Dnevnik. Prva Knjiga, 78‑90; Marjanović and Morača, Naš oslobodilački rat i narodno revolucija, 63‑55; 89‑91. See this book, chapters 3,4 and 5. 28 Dizdar, ‘Chetnik genocidal crimes’, 192, and Mihanović, ‘Welcome address’, 168. 29 According to a Serbian appeal to the international community, the Jasenovac memorial was vandalised by Croat paramilitary forces. See ‘Memorandum of the government of Yugoslavia on the crime of genocide in Croatia and the vandalising of the memorial at Jasenovac’, Belgrade, 31st January 1992, 78. Reprinted as ‘Memorandum Vlade Jugoslavije o zločinu genocida u Hrvatskoj i skrnavljenju Spomen-područja Jasenovac, 31.januar 1992’, in Milan Bulajić and Radovan Samardžić, eds., Ratni zločini i zločini genocida 1991‑1992., Belgrade, Srpska Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti, 1993, 117‑124. See also the report by historian and employee at the museum at Jasenovac, Jovan Mirković, ‘Skrnavl‑ jenju Spomen-područja Jasenovac i pitanje njegove dalje zaštite’ in ibid, 125‑136. Accor‑ ding to Croatian reports, on the other hand, the museum was damaged by shelling, and the contents taken to Republika Srpska. See e.g. the report ‘Spomen Područje Jasenovac u Vrijeme Domovinskog Rata’ on the website of the memorial area at Jasenovac: [http:// www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=5092]. 30 Biondich, ‘“We were defending the state”’, 70. 31 E.g. in a well-received new comprehensive history of the Ustasha state: Hrvoje Matković, Povijest Nezavišne države Hrvatske, Zagreb: Nakladna Pavičić, 2002 (2nd ex‑ panded edition, first published 1994), 180‑182, 238‑241; Though more balanced, the same pattern is recognisable also in a new comprehensive modern history of Croatia, written by the director of the Institute of contemporary history: Dušan Bilandžić, Hrvatska Moderna Povijest, Zagreb: Golden Marketing, 1999, 124‑125, 186ff. 32 Ivo Goldstein, ‘O udžbenicima povijest u Hrvatskoj’, in Hans Georg Fleck and Igor Graovac, eds., Dijalog povjesničara – Istoričara 3, Zagreb: Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, 2001, 15ff. 33 Hoepken, ‘War, memory and education’, 221‑222. 34 Suzana Leček, Magdalena Najbar-Agičić, Damir Agičić, Tvrtko Jakovina, Povijest 4. Udžbenik za četvrti razred (opće) gimnazije, Zagreb: Profil, 2004 (6th edition, adopted

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for use in Croatian gymnasia by the Ministry of Education and Sport, July 1999) 167f; Hrvoje Matković and Franko Mirošević’ Povijest 4. Za četvrti razred gimnazije, Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2001, 158f. See also Wolfgang Höpken, ‘Der Zweite Weltkrig in den jugoslawischen und post-jugoslawischen Schulbüchern’, in Höpken, ed., Öl ins Feuer?, 173f. 35 Ivan Vujčić, Povijest. Hrvatska i Svijet u xx. stoljeću. Udženik za četvrti razred gimnazije, Zagreb: Birotehnika, 1998, 143; Matković and Mirošević’ Povijest 4, 159; A bit more de‑ tail in Leček et al., Povijest 4, 167‑168. 36 Ivo Perić, Povijest za IV razred gimnazije, Zagreb: Alfa, 2003 (3rd edition, first published 1997, adopted for use in Croatian gymnasia by the Ministry of Education and Sport, March 1997), 151. 37 See also Biondich, ‘We were defending the state’, 73. 38 Vujčić, Povijest Hrvatska i Svijet u xx. stoljeću, 175‑176, 179‑180, witness account from Chetnik crimes, 180; Perić, Povijest za iv razred gimnazije, 176‑177, 180‑181, witness ac‑ count from Partisan crimes, 182; Matković and Mirošević’ Povijest 4, 195, 197‑198; Leček et al., Povijest 4, 206, 210. 39 E.g. Vujčić, Povijest. Hrvatska i Svijet u xx. stoljeću, 179. Also Zdravko Dizdar and Mi‑ hael Sobolevski, Prešućivani četnički zločini u Hrvatskoj i u Bosni i Hercegovini 1941.-1945. Zagreb: Dom i svijet, 1999, 21. 40 Vujčić, Povijest. Hrvatska i Svijet u xx. stoljeću, 229. 41 Perić, Povijest za IV razred gimnazije, 237; Vujčić, Povijest. Hrvatska i Svijet u XX. stoljeću, 228. More recent books, such as Leček et al., Povijest 4, seem more balanced on these issues, as well as when it comes to the propagandistic uses of wartime denotations such as Ustasha and Chetniks during the war in Croatia. See Leček et al., Povijest 4, 272f. 42 Leček et al., Povijest 4, 206, 272f. 43 Nicholas J. Miller, ‘A failed transition: the case of Serbia’ in Karen Dawisha, and Bruce Parrot, eds., Politics, power and the struggle for democracy in South-East Europe, Cam‑ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 160. 44 Eric Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999, 8, 21ff. 45 Vjeran Pavlaković, ‘Serbia transformed? Political dynamics in the Milošević era and af‑ ter’, in Sabrina Ramet and Vjeran Pavlaković, eds., Serbia since 1989, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007, 22. 46 Ibid, 23; Robert Thomas, Serbia under Milošević. Politics in the 1990s, London: Hurst, 1999, 161f. 47 On the scientific activities dedicated to the genocide against Serbs in the ndh, see e.g. the report on the work at the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade in the first half of the 1990s: ‘Rad Instituta za savremenu istoriju u periodu od 1991. do 1995.

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godine’, Istorija 20. veka, 1995, 2, 171‑175, and reports from other scientific meetings on the subject such as ‘Genocid nad Srbima u Drugom svetskom ratu’ held 23rd to 25th Oc‑ tober 1991, in Istorija 20. veka, 1991, 1‑2, 224‑227 and ‘Jasenovac – sistem ustaških logora smrti’, held 23rd April 1996, in Istorija 20. veka, 1998, 2, 211‑212. Furthermore, numerous books were published. Regarding publications on Jasenovac in the decade 1991‑2000, which apart from the 1980s was the most productive, see Mirković, Objavljeni izvori i literatura o Jasenovačkim Logorima, 297, 323. 48 On Serbian intellectuals’ attitude to the theme of genocide, see also Hoepken, ‘War, memory and education’, 210ff. 49 Mark Thompson, Forging War. The media in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, London: Article 19, International Centre Against Censorship, 1994, 71ff. 50 Quoted in Kuzmanović, ‘Media: The Extension of Politics by Other Means’, 95. See also Milan Milošević, ‘The Media Wars’ in Jasminka Udovički and James Ridgeway, Burn this house. The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, 112f; Agneza Božić-Roberson, ‘Words before the War: Milošević’s use of Mass Media and Rhetoric to Provoke Ethnopolitical Conflict in Former Yugoslsavia’, East European Quarterly, 38, 2005, 4, 404. For a discussion of Serbian enemy images with regard to the Ustasha past, see Ivo Banac, ‘The fearful asymmetry of war. The causes and consequences of Yugoslavia’s demise’, Daedalus, 121, 1992, 2, 141‑174. 51 Perica, Balkan Idols, 156f; Radić, ‘The Church and the Serbian Question’, 260. 52 Hayden, 178‑179; Also Katherine Verdery, The political life of dead bodies: Reburial and postsocialist change, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, 100ff and Milošević, ‘The Media Wars’, 111f. 53 ‘Memorandum of the government of Yugoslavia on the crime of genocide in Croatia and the vandalising of the memorial at Jasenovac’, 1. 54 Ibid, 5‑8. 55 Mladenko Kumović, Hrvatska. Jasenovac. Sistem ustaških logora smrti/Croatia. Jasenovac. The system of Ustasha death camps, Belgrade: Muzej žrtava genocida, 1997. 56 Bulajić and Samardžić, eds., Ratni zločini i zločini genocida 1991‑1992.; Milan Bulajić and Radovan Samardžić, eds., Sistem neistina o zločinima genocida 1991‑1993. godine, Belgrade, Srpska Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti, 1994. After Vladimir Dedijer’s death in 1990, Radovan Samardžić took over the chairmanship of the genocide committee. 57 E.g. Radomir Bulatović’s article on the similarities in the conduction of Genocide against the Serbs in the Second World War and during the years 1991‑1992: ‘Sličnosti o provođenju genocida nad Srbima u Drugom Svjetskom Ratu i tokom 1991‑1992. go‑ dine’, in Bulajić and Samardžić, eds., Sistem neistina o zločinima genocida, 111‑120. On the perception of repeated genocide, see also Sreten Jakovljević, ‘Novi genocid nad srp‑ skim narodom u konjičkom kraju’, in Bulajić and Samardžić, eds., Ratni zločini i zločini

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genocida, 225‑252; Luka Popovac, ‘Ponovni zločin genocid u Donjoj Neretvi 1991‑1992.’, in Bulajić and Samardžić, eds., Ratni zločini i zločini genocida, 253‑260. 58 ‘Drugo vanredno zasedanje 16. juli 1992. godine (jedanaesti dan radova)’ in Milan Bulajić, ed. Deset Godina Muzeja Žrtava Genocida, Belgrade: 2003, 481ff.. See also Jovan Mirković, ‘Izdanja Muzeja Žrtava Genocida i građa o ljudskim gubicima u izdanjima Muzeja’, in Hans Georg Fleck and Igor Graovac, eds., Dijalog povjesničara / istoričara 7, Zagreb: Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, 2003, 573‑59. 59 Kumović, Hrvatska. Jasenovac. See also Mirković, ‘Izdanja Muzeja Žrtava Genocida’, 581. 60 Kumović, Hrvatska. Jasenovac, 3, 6‑8, 10‑11. 61 On the status of the Holocaust in European historical culture, see Karlsson, ‘The Ho‑ locaust as a Problem of Historical Culture’, 15. For a discussion of the invoking of the Holocaust, see MacDonald, Balkan holocausts?, particularly p. 256ff. 62 Kumović, Hrvatska. Jasenovac, 14‑15, 3. 63 Ibid, 15. 64 Andrej Mitrović, Razgovor sa Klio. O istoriji, istorijskoj svesti i istoriorafiji, Sarajevo: Svjet‑ lost, 1991, especially 131‑135. 65 Obrad Savic, ‘Speed Memories’, Belgrade Circle Journal, 1, 1994. Also Obrad Savic and Mirko Gaspari, ‘Why the Belgrade Circle Journal’ Belgrade Circle Journal, 0, 1994. Avai‑ lable on the web at[ http://www.usm.maine.edu/~bcj/] On the Belgrade Circle, see also Obrad Savić, ‘Parallel Worlds: NGOs and the Civic Society’, Belgrade Circle Journal, 3‑4, 1995 / 1‑2, 1996. Available on the web at[ http://www.usm.maine.edu/~bcj/]. Re‑ printed in Obrad Savić, ed., The Politics of Human Rights, London: Verso, 335‑345. 66 ‘Apel svetu da zaštiti Srbe’, Blic, 22nd April 1997, 3. 67 Obrad Savic, ‘Speed Memories III’, Belgrade Circle Journal, 3‑4, 1995 / 1‑2, 1996. Avai‑ lable on the web at [ http://www.usm.maine.edu/~bcj/]. Reprinted in Savić, ed., The Politics of Human Rights, 346‑348. 68 A critical analysis of Serbia’s new textbooks produced in the early 1990s was published in 1994: Vesna Pešić and Ružica Rosandić, Ratništvo, patriotizam, patrijarhalnost, Belgrade: Centar za antiratnu akciju, 1994. See also Dubravka Stojanović, ‘Konstrukcija prošlosti – slučaj srpskih udžbenika istorije’, in Hans-Georg Fleck and Igor Graovac. eds., Dijalog povjesničara / istoričara 4, Zagreb: Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, 2001, 31‑44. 69 Nikola Gačeša, Dušan Živković and Ljubica Radović, Istorija 3/4 za III razred gimnazije prirodno-matematičkog smera i IV razred gimnazije opšteg i društveno-jezičkog smera. (3rd edition), Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva, 1994, 169ff; Nikola Gačeša, Dušan Živković and Ljubica Radović, Istorija 2 za II razred četvorogodišnjih stručnih škola, (14th reworked edition), Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva, 2003, 169ff; Kosta Nikolić, Nikola Žutić, Momčilo Pavlović, Zorica Špajijer, Istorija 3/4 za III razred gimnazije prirodno-matematičkog smera i IV razred gimnazije opšteg i društveno-

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jezičkog smera, Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva, 2002, 180ff. See also Höpken, ‘History Education and Yugoslav (Dis-)Integration’, 118f. 70 Gačeša et al., Istorija 3/4, 173. See also 265. 71 Gačeša et al., Istorija 2, 173. 72 Gačeša et al., Istorija 3/4, 203‑205; Gačeša et al., Istorija 2, 192‑193; Nikolić et al. Istorija 3/4, 186f 73 Gačeša et al., Istorija 3/4, 1994, 192‑193; Gačeša et al., Istorija 2, 185‑186; Nikolić et al. Istorija 3/4, 166‑167. 74 Steven L. Burg, ‘Bosnia Herzegovina: A case of failed transition’, in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrot, eds., Politics, power, and the struggle for democracy in South-East Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 133f. 75 Martin Mennecke and Eric Markusen, ‘Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, in Totten et al., eds., Century of Genocide, 415‑430. 76 According to the conviction of Radoslav Krstić at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, icty, the massacre at Srebrenica was an act of genocide. See e.g. Mennecke and Markusen, ‘Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, 425. 77 For a comprehensive overview of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, see Steven Burg and Paul Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention, Armonk, New York: m.e. Sharpe, 1999. 78 The meeting is described in Duijzings, History and Reminders in East Bosnia, Chapter 5, Section 1, 6. 79 Mart Bax, ‘Mass Graves, stagnating identification, and violence: A case study in the local sources of “the war” in Bosnia-Hercegovina’ Anthropological Quarterly, 70, 1997, 1; Duijzings, History and Reminders in East Bosnia, Chapter 4, Section 1, note 1. 80 Quoted in Husnija Kamberović, ‘Upotreba historijskih mitova: Drugi svjetski rat i Balkanski ratovi koncem 20 stoljeća’, unpublished opening speech at the conference ‘Upotreba historijskih mitova: Drugi svjetski rat i Balkanski ratovi koncem 20 stoljeća’, Institut za Istoriju, Sarajevo, 10th-11th May, 2005, 4. 81 Dedijer and Miletić, Genocid nad muslimanima 1941‑1945. See also Milorad Radusinović’ review ‘Vlamir Dedijer i Antun Miletić, Genocid nad muslimanima’, in Istorija 20. veka, 1991, 1‑2, 232‑233; Ger Duijzings, ‘Commemorating Srebrenica: Histories of Violence and the Politic of Memory in Eastern Bosnia’, in Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms and Ger Duijzings, eds., The New Bosnian Mosaic. Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007, 149. 82 Duijzings, ‘Commemorating Srebrenica’, 149‑150; see also Rasim Hurem and Seka Brkljača, ‘Historiografska literatura o Bosni i Hercegovini u Drugom svjetskom ratu obavljena nakon 1980. godine u zemlji i inostranstvu’, Prilozi, 29, 2000, 143. 83 Imamović, Historija Bošnjaka, 531, and also Mehmedalija Bojić, Historija Bosne i Bošnjaka, Sarajevo: tkd Šahinpašić, 2001, 187. Imamović is a renowned professor of ju‑

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ridical and state history and the faculty of Law, University of Sarajevo. By 2001, 20,000 copies of his book had been sold. See ‘Intervju Dana’, Dani, 2nd March 2001, at http:// www.bhdani.com/arhiva/195/intervju.shtml. Bojić was a Partisan army veteran, former officer and military diplomat. 84 Imamović, Historija Bošnjaka, 535, 541; Bojić, Historija Bosne i Bošnjaka, 189ff. 85 Imamović, Historija Bošnjaka, 537ff; Bojić, Historija Bosna i Bošnjaka, 205ff. 86 Zijad Šehić and Indira Kučuk-Sorguč, Historija 4. Udžbenik za četvrti razred gimnazije, Sarajevo: Sarajevo Publishing, 2004, 120‑121. See also Zijad Šehić and Zvjezdana MarčićMatošović, Historija 8. Udžbenik za osmi razred osnovne škole, Sarajevo: Sarajevo Pub‑ lishing, 2004, 95. 87 Šehić and Kučuk-Sorguč, Historija 4, 123ff; Šehić and Marčić-Matošović, Historija 8, 96ff. 88 E.g. Šemso Tucaković, Srpski zločini nad Bošnjacima-Muslimanima 1941.-1945., Sarajevo: El Kalem, 1995, especially p. 174. See also Faruk Muftić, Foča. Ponovljeni zločin i hronologija zločina 1941/1945 – 1992/1995. godina, Sarajevo: Des, 2001, 180‑182; For accounts ar‑ guing for continuation of Serbian crimes against Muslims, see also Imamović, Historija Bošnjaka, 571; Ibrahim Pašić, Od Hajduka do četnika (stradanje i genocid nad glasinačkim Bošnjacima od najstarijih vremnena do 1994. godina), Sarajevo: Ljiljan Bemust, 2000, 19, passim. The idea of repeated crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was also the theme of the already mentioned Bosnian/French film Remake, which cross-clipped between an Ustasha prison in the 1940s and a Chetnik detention in the 1990s and bet‑ ween killing in the Ustasha camp of Jasenovac and in a Chetnik concentration camp near Sarajevo. See the introduction of this thesis. 89 The loss of trust in historiography still seemed to characterize Serbian historical culture in the early 21st century. See Predrag J. Marković and Nataša Milićević, ‘Serbian histo‑ riography in the time of transition. A struggle for legitimacy’, Istorija 20 veka, 2007, 1, 145‑146. 90 I borrow this phrase from Robert G. Moeller, ‘War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany’, The American Historical Review, vol. 101, 1996, 4. On Germany’s search for a usable past, see also Omer Bartev, ‘Germany’s Unforgettable War: The Twisted Road from Berlin to Moscow and Back’, Diplomatic History, vol. 25, 2001, 2.

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Conclusion

The devastating occupation and war for liberation, the internal civil war and the mass killings and war crimes that characterised Yugoslavia’s Second World War left the country ruined and deeply divided. How were Yugoslav histo‑ rians and politicians to manage this history of mutual massacres among the Yugoslav peoples? The strategy deployed by Yugoslav politicians and historians in the Titoist period was one of thematizing the common struggle of the Yugoslav peoples and downplaying internal bloodshed. This did not mean that massacres and war crimes were silenced, but that these issues were described as external of the Yugoslav peoples, instigated and arranged by the occupying fascist powers and realised by pro-fascist Yugoslav bourgeoisie and collaborators. Thus, the Yugoslav ethnic and political conflicts that were an essential element of the war were largely overlooked. While this made sense within a class based history of Yugoslav communists and patriotic peoples, it nevertheless left out decisive aspects, which had also been essential to the agents and parties during the war. This way of writing history, obviously, left voids in the official narrative of the war. And since the nature of history writing is also to retell history, exploring and filling such voids, exactly these elements were to be addressed later on. To what extent, then, was the issue of the victims of massacres taboo? As this book has shown, Second World War massacres were indeed present in Titoist historical culture. Detailed and poignant accounts of massacres and war crimes were included in the major show trials at the end of the war, and crimes and massacres were represented in numerous ways, very directly and emotionally, and at times almost on individual levels in more popular represen‑ tations of history, such as poetry, novels and memoirs. The accounts, however, were always in accordance with the major narrative framework of the war. The truly hidden crimes were those that countered that heroic narrative, i.e. the massacres committed by Partisans at the end of the war and, to a lesser extent, in 1941‑1942. The writing of all 20th century history, and the Partisans’ National Libera‑ tion Struggle in particular, was profoundly subordinated to politics. In the first post-war decades, most history of the war was written by Partisan veterans

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and high-ranking communists. It adhered, needless to say, to the narrative promoted by the communist top at the end of the war. National perspectives on history were carefully downplayed, and historical discussions of national issues remained sensitive throughout the Titoist period. Historians were criti‑ cised, corrected and at times removed from the public eye if their views were regarded as destabilising for the national equilibrium, as was most famously the case with Franjo Tuđman. From the 1970s, however, the ethnic tensions and political conflicts that were among the main causes for the internal Yugoslav massacres committed during the Second World War – but which had remained largely backgrounded in the patriotic all-Yugoslav accounts of the first post-war decades  – were gradually written into wartime historiography. Detailed academic studies of the ndh and its policies of persecution and mass murder were published, not least from the side of Zagreb-based historians. The word genocide, or genocid in Serbo-Croat, which had been known since 1948 as a term denoting international war crimes but rarely used in a Yugoslav context, was now used to describe Second World War crimes in Yugoslavia, both those committed by occupiers and by Yugoslavs. This tendency was accompanied by a growing interest in wartime massacres within spheres of popular culture such as songs and films. The incitement for addressing wartime massacres and the question of geno‑ cide became greater as the distance in time grew; survivors and witnesses were disappearing; and the Second World War was becoming history rather than the immediate past. The readdressing of wartime history was facilitated by a gradual loosening of the tight mythological narrative of the Partisan war, initiated from the very political top, when Tito in 1972 admitted that the National Liberation struggle was also a civil war between communists and anti-communists, who were often widely supported by the people. At the same time, hitherto written historiography of the Partisan war was criticised by academic historians for its blank spots and unscientific standards. Yet, the rewriting of history clearly had its limits, as was visible from the severe critique of Rasim Hurem’s study of the crisis and violent class war politics of the Partisan movement. During the 1960s and 1970s, Yugoslav historiography was both profession‑ alized and ethno-nationalized. New generations of Yugoslav historians were educated at universities and trained in academic methodological standards. At the same time, the historians’ environment was significantly enlarged, and, parallel to the federalization of the Yugoslav state, each republic established its own institutions of researching and teaching history. This facilitated a gradual development of republican, and thus often national, historians’ environments,

conclusion

leading to national historical cultures within a general Yugoslav historical culture. During the 1980s Yugoslav, not least Serbian, historians with far greater enthusiasm than earlier engaged in scrutinising questions of victims, concentra‑ tion camps, massacres, and genocide of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Genocide was thematized, initially mainly within Serbian historiography and popular representations of history, but later in other places as well. In the late 1980s, Croatian historical culture, which had remained largely faithful to communist dogma until then, reacted to Serbian genocide thematization, at the outset by questioning its validity and later by thematizing national counter-narratives. Among the main causes for the Croatian counterreaction to Serbian genocide history were undoubtly Slobodan Milošević’s Serbian nationalist rhetoric and unconstitutional tampering with Yugoslavia’s political system and power balances. After the breakdown of the socialist Yugoslav federation, the national his‑ torical cultures of independent post-Yugoslav states in many cases emphasised and elaborated the theme of their national victimisation of genocide. At the same time, crimes that could be ascribed to members of the historians’ own nation was significantly downplayed or ignored. Dominated by the wish for usable national histories, Second World War history was often as selective and ideologically invested as had been the case under Titoist communism. The thematization of genocide in the 1980s and 1990s was characterised by a number of features: firstly, it contained important elements of critique of the communists and the Yugoslav system, and of the unravelling of communist mythical narratives. The early part of this thematization process must be situ‑ ated within the broader tendency of a revision of history and political values in the first half of the 1980s. The growing interest in genocide history in Yugo‑ slavia was accompanied by a gradual implosion of established historiography. In the early 1980s it became clear that certain elements of 20th century history had been significantly doctored during the communist period in order to suit political and ideological needs. The public realisation that Yugoslav Stalinism, which included the concentration camp system at Goli Otok and elsewhere, had been far from humane; and the point that the relationship between Chet‑ niks and Partisans was probably less clear and evident than had been hitherto stated, contributed to the undermining of communist historiography. Later, particularly in Croatia, the rediscovery of crimes committed by the Partisans at the end of the war had the same effect. Secondly, the refocusing on the massacres and atrocities of the Second World War took a clearly national perspective. In the thematization of geno‑

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cide, the very focus on victims of particular nationalities rather than just victims was outspoken. The national aspect was less relevant in the case of the Partisans’ crimes, which were directed primarily against political enemies. But since the focusing on these crimes occurred in the nationally polarised political context of the early 1990s, and since many of the victims were soldiers fighting on the Ustasha side, this could not possibly be seen as a shared suffering of Serbs and Croats. Instead, Croatian historical culture would increasingly regard these victims as Croatian and the Partisan perpetrators as representatives of Serbian suppressors. It thus became a competing national victim history. Thirdly, most cases of genocide thematization argued that the crimes in question were overlooked or deliberately silenced. While founded on moral in‑ dignation and common human wishes to remember, this argument also draws on the sensational effects of breaking taboos, or claiming to do so. Yet, while elements of Second World War history were indeed silenced in communist Yugoslavia, Partisan war crimes being the most obvious example, it is difficult to argue that the crimes of the Ustasha, Chetnik, and other anti-Partisan forces were ever ignored or silenced. However, compared to the heroic narrative of the Partisan war these crimes were not a main theme of Titoist historical culture. Furthermore, they were not thematized as genocide before the 1970s. Thus, to a certain extent, the issue of victims and genocide was indeed disregarded by Yugoslav academic historiography before the 1970s. Fourthly, the thematization of genocide was in some cases characterised by what we may call myth-making in the forms of one-sided histories around a simple narrative matrix. Included herein are attempts to reach the largest possible number of victims, at times even reaching the very improbable, and suggestions of continued national victimisation and permanent threats of genocide from other Yugoslav nations. There were several causes of the thematization of genocide that began in Serbia in the 1980s. One must be sought in the broader political framework of economic, political, and ideological crisis in Yugoslavia in the 1980s. While issues of the theme of genocide were becoming objects of growing scholarly interest already in the 1970s, the focus on internal massacres and genocide fit‑ ted well into the broader ‘iconoclastic’ intellectual culture of the early 1980s. Furthermore, the crisis of Yugoslav communism also led to de-legitimization of Partisan history which left more space for other histories. A second cause, which is also linked to the breaking down of Partisan history, is the disintegration of a common Yugoslav historians’ culture and the establishment of national research environments, focusing more on national history, and thus also on the national aspects of the war. A third cause, or maybe rather a precondition,

conclusion

is the fact that it was at all possible to work with these issues. This was not a smooth development. Some publications, particularly fictional ones, were banned, and others received severe criticism from the political side. However, mainly in the second half of the 1980s a lot was published. The considerable intellectual and artistic freedom of Serbia in the early 1980s, as well as the na‑ tionalist political turn in that republic from 1987, facilitated both the revision of history and the national approach to it. Yet, more international or, if you will, universal aspects of genocide history are also at play here. As has been argued earlier in this book, it seems a com‑ mon international tendency that holocaust and genocide was not thematized as such during the first decades after the Second World War. Focus was on the war on a larger scale, on geopolitical developments, and on the suffering of states under German occupation. Thus, genocide and holocaust research are relatively new in the rest of the world as well. They developed, together with the theme of genocide, in the 1970s, and have flourished since the 1980s. Yugoslav, initially Serbian, thematization of genocide is not that different from a common international thematization of genocide, holocaust and ethnic and civilian victims. In fact it may well have been inspired from abroad: Yugoslav historical culture was not isolated from international trends, and particularly not so from the 1960s onwards. Furthermore, several of the most vocal pro‑ moters of Serbian genocide history were well aware of – or even participating in – genocide discussions and research outside Yugoslavia. What made Yugoslav genocide history particularly problematic were the specific circumstances surrounding the thematization of genocide in that country. Because Yugoslavia was a state system of delicate national balancing, these issues, once they were widely addressed and evoked, were bound to stir strong feelings and influence national relations. The sharp historical polem‑ ics surrounding the thematization of genocide served to further polarise the national historical cultures. Furthermore, the thematization of genocide ran parallel and eventually converged with rising national and nationalist politics in the republics. That the theme of genocide became a powerful source of discursive ar‑ mament for nationalists was essentially a consequence of the political devel‑ opments surrounding historiography: the thematization of genocide meant something quite different at the beginning of the 1980s than at the end of the 1980s. At the beginning of the decade it should be associated with a revision of communist history, a turn to genocide history not very unlike international tendencies, and a legitimate wish to explore ethnic and national aspects of Yugoslav history, which were hitherto only superficially investigated. At the

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end of the decade, however, the thematization of genocide was much closer to nationalist politics and nationalist mobilisation. This, however, should not necessarily be blamed on Yugoslav genocide historians, who were not – at least not generally – working for a nationalist propaganda project. Fundamentally, they wanted to draw attention to an important and problematic aspect of Yugoslav history that had not been em‑ phasised in the Partisan history of the previous decades. Historical addressing and thematization of the history of the massacres of Yugoslavia’s Second World War was bound to stir strong emotions and influence relations among Yugoslavia’s nations. Was Yugoslavia’s history then ‘unmasterable’ in the famous phrase used by Charles Maier to characterise Germany’s struggles with its past? Or perhaps Yugoslavia’s history was in fact mastered to mutilation through the excessive and crude use that was made of it first by communists and later by nationalists. From 1945 to 2002 the history of Yugoslavia’s Second World War mas‑ sacres was used in numerous ways, serving various needs and interests. In most cases, more than one type – or many types – of “use”, in the sense of Karlsson’s terminology, were combined in the communication of the history of the massacres. In the Titoist period, the history of these issues, though subordinated to the selective master narrative of heroic Partisan fighting, was used politically and ideologically to emphasise the inhumanity of the Partisan’s opponents and thus underline the greatness of the Partisan victory. It thereby contributed to legitimising communist rule and justifying the reconstruction of a Yugoslav state based on common Yugoslav patriotism. At the same time, however, the addressing of wartime massacres, particularly within memoirs and popular culture, constituted moral and existential uses, based on fundamental needs to remember and confront the past. As Yugoslavia’s communist regime faced crises and disintegration, the public realization of the communists’ selective and utterly instrumental use of history discredited established historiography as flawed and manipulated. Thus, the trustworthiness of Yugoslav historiography was fundamentally shattered already in the last decade of communism. Yugoslav historical culture was therefore characterised by a vacuum of legitimacy, in spite of the numerous examples of high quality academic research and publications. The ideological and historiographical void allowed dominant parts of ini‑ tially Serbian, but later other national historical cultures also, to revise the history of Yugoslav Second World War massacres from overtly national and often purely emotional and sensation-seeking approaches. The history of the

conclusion

massacres was often explicitly linked to the present and used as a mirror in which the current situation was reflected. It thus served as a way of under‑ standing the present, supplying people, as it were, with an idea about what to expect of the world around them. The widespread thematization of national victimisation as unrecognised, unreconciled and unrevenged, obviously con‑ tributed to national polarisation and enmity. In the 1980s, the thematization of genocide reflected both existential and moral uses, based on indignation and focused on the wish and need to inves‑ tigate the deliberately overlooked or insufficiently investigated dark parts of history. But at the same time, the thematization of genocide in Second World War history was used politically and ideologically; initially to challenge and revise communist historiography, and thereby the communist system itself, and later to promote a version of history focused on national victimisation, and thereby to mobilise national senses of identity and loyalty, at times in fierce opposition to other nations. In the 1990s, new ways of communicating Second World War history, the‑ matizing genocide and victimisation of the nations of the new post-Yugoslav states, served to revise and de-legitimise the history of a common Yugoslav past. The new exclusively national histories were used politically, ideologically and existentially, both to explain the breakdown of the Yugoslav order and the warfare that followed it, to legitimise the establishment of the new states, and to grant a sense of naturalness and identity to the new states and their citizens. However, while the thematization of genocide was unquestionably used for national mobilization in the late 1980s and 1990s, it was not a main cause of the wars in the 1990s. Yugoslavia was destroyed by the lack of consensus on how to reform the state, and by the fact that political projects were founded on national rather than common or civil interests. Within an atmosphere of national antagonisms, the debates about how to interpret and write the history of Second World War massacres became tense and inflamed. Thus Yugoslavia’s dramatic political developments in the late 1980s and its destruction in warfare in the 1990s influenced history writing and historical culture far more than the other way around. This does not, however, liberate historians from responsibility. Much of the Second World War history written and presented in Yugoslavia between 1945 and 2002 served political and ideological demands by explaining and naturalising political constructions and power structures. Historians and other presenters of history at times gave rather selective accounts and accepted halftruths and claims not quite substantiated at the cost of recognising historical

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complexities and contradictions. In doing so, they certainly contributed to simplified understandings of history that were vulnerable to manipulative uses. Some actively set out with an agenda to raise public attention on the issue of genocide from a perspective of exclusive national victimisation, narrow‑ ing the understanding of history and framing it to inform and influence the understanding of the present. In this way, they legitimised and strengthened oppressive regimes, and, at least in the Serbian case, supported politics of criminal warfare.

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Bergholz, Max, ‘Među rodoljubima, kupusom, svinjama i varvarima: Spomenici i grobovi nor-a 1947‑1965. godine’, in Husnija Kamberović, ed., 60 godina od završetka drugog svetsskog rata – kako se sjećati 1945. godine’, Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2006 Bilandžić, Dušan, Hrvatska Moderna Povijest, Zagreb: Golden Marketing, 1999 Biondich, Mark, ‘“We were defending the state”’, in John R. Lampe and Mark Mazower, eds., Ideologies and National Identities. The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe, Budapest: ceu Press, 2004 Biondich, Mark, ‘Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the Ustaša Po‑ licy of Forced Religious Conversion, 1941‑1942’, Slavonic and East European Review, 83, 2005, 1 Bitka na Neretvi, directed by Veljko Bulajić, Yugoslavia: Udruženi jugoslovenski producenti, 1969 Blažević, Jakov, ‘Predgovor reprintu’ in Novak, Magnum Crimen, 1986 Boban, Ljubo, Kontroverze iz povijesti Jugoslavije 2, Zagreb: Školska Knjiga, 1989 Boban, Ljubo, Kontroverze iz povijesti Jugoslavije 3, Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1990 Boban, Ljubo, ‘Jasenovac and the manipulation of history’, East European Politics and Societies, 4, 1990, 3 Boban, Ljubo, ‘Barbarstvo u ime nauke’, Danas, 14 February 1989 Bogdanović, Dimitrije, Knjiga o Kosovu, Belgrade: sanu, 1986 (first published 1985) Bogosavljević, Srđan, ‘The Unresolved Genocide’, in Popov, ed., The Road to War in Serbia Bojić, Mehmedalija, Historija Bosne i Bošnjaka, Sarajevo: tkd Šahinpašić, 2001 Bonacci-Skenderović, Dunja and Mario Jareb, ‘Hrvatski nacionalni simboli između negativ‑ nih stereotipa i istine’, Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 36, 2004, 2 Borović, Dobrila, ed., Jasenovac 1984. Okrugli stol. (Materijali s rasprave), Spomen područje Jasenovac, 1985 Borović, Dobrila, ‘Zašto okrugli stol o “Jasenovcu”?’, in Borović, ed., Jasenovac 1984. Bosnić, Sava, ‘The political career and writings of Franjo Tudjman’, South Slav Journal, vol. 14, no. 1‑2, 1991 Bosworth, R.J.B, Explaining Auschwitz & Hiroshima. History Writing and the Second World War, 1945‑1990, London: Routledge, 1993 Božić, Ivan, Sima Cirković, Milorad Ekmečić, Vladimir Dedijer, Istorija Jugoslavije, Beograd: Prosveta, (second edition) 1973 Božić-Roberson, Agneza, ‘Words before the War: Milošević’s use of Mass Media and Rheto‑ ric to Provoke Ethnopolitical Conflict in Former Yugoslsavia’, East European Quarterly, 38, 2005, 4 Bracewell, Wendy, ‘National histories and national identities among the Serbs and Croats’, in M. Fulbrook, ed., National histories and European history. Brčić, Rafael, ‘O knjizi Mladena Colića’, Časopis za suremenu povijest, 4, 1974, 3

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Mijatović, Anđelko, ‘Proslov / Prologue’, in Mijatović, ed., Bleiburg 1945.-1995. Miletić, Antun, ‘Logor Jasenovac’, in Dedijer, Novi prilozi za biografiju Josipa Broza Tita Miletić, Antun, Koncentracioni Logor Jasenovac 1941‑1945, dokumenata, volume 1‑3, Belgrade: Narodna Knjiga, 1986‑1987 Miletić, Antun, ‘Pet pitanja, pet odgovora o koncentracionim logoru Jasenovac’, in Smreka, ed., Okrugli stol “Jasenovac 1986” Miller, Nicholas J., ‘A failed transition: the case of Serbia’, in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Par‑ rot, eds., Politics, power and the struggle for democracy in South-East Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 Milošević, Branislava, ‘Presentacija spomen-područja-muzeja koncentracionih logora’, in Smreka, ed., Okrugli stol “Jasenovac 1986” Milošević, Milan, ‘The Media Wars’, in Jasminka Udovički and James Ridgeway, eds., Burn this house. The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997 Milovojević, Marko, ‘The role of the Yugoslav intelligence and security committee’, in John B. Allcock, John J. Horton and Marko Milovojević, Yugoslavia in transition, New York: Berg, 1992 Milušić, Anto, ‘U povodu najnovije zbirke dokumenata o Jugoslaviji’, Časopis za Suvremenu Povijest, 18, 1986, 1 Mirković, Jovan, ‘Skrnavljenje Spomen-područja Jasenovac i pitanje njegove dalje zaštite’, in Bulajić and Samardžić, eds., Ratni zločini i zločini genocida Mirković, Jovan, Objavljeni izvori i literatura o Jasenovačkim Logorima, Belgrade: Muzej Žrtava Genocida, 2000 Mirković, Jovan, ‘Izdanja Muzeja Žrtava Genocida i građa o ljudskim gubicima u izdanjima Muzeja’, in Hans Georg Fleck and Igor Graovac, eds., Dijalog povjesničara / istoričara 7, Zagreb: Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, 2003 Mitrović, Andrej, Razgovor sa Klio. O istoriji, istorijskoj svesti i istoriorafiji, Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1991 Moeller, Robert G., ‘War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany’, The American Historical Review, vol. 101, 1996, 4 Morača, Pero, ‘O jednoj interpretaciji razvitka nop-a u BiH krajem 1941. i početkom 1942. godine’, in avnoj i Narodnooslobodilčka borba u Bosni i Hercegovini (1942‑1943). Materijali sa naučnog skupa održanog u Sarajevu 22. i 23. novembra 1973. godine, Belgrade: Rad, 1974 Moses, A. Dirk, ‘Genocide and the Terror of History’, Parallax, 17, 2011, 4 Muftić, Faruk, Foča. Ponovljeni zločin i hronologija zločina 1941/1945-1992/1995. godina, Sara‑ jevo: Des, 2001 Myhre, Jan Eivind, “Den Norske Historiske Kultur. Om sammenheng og fragmentering i norsk historieforskning”, Historisk Tidsskrift (Oslo), 1994, 3

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Ramet, Sabrina, Balkan Babel. The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the War for Kosovo, Boulder: Westview Press, 1999 Redžić, Enver, ‘Riječ redakcije’, Prilozi, 1, 1965, 1 Redžić, Enver, Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Second World War, New York: Frank Cass, 2005 Remake, directed by Dino Mustafić, Bosnia-Herzegovina/France 2002 Reparaciona komisija pri vladi Federativne Narodne Republike Jugoslavije, Ljudske i materijalne žrtve Jugoslavije u ratnom naporu 1941‑1945, Belgrade, 1945 Roksandić, Drago, ‘Globalna istorija i istorijska svest’, Marksistički misao, 1983, 4 Rothkirchen, Livia, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Wyman, ed., The World Reacts to the Holocaust Rowse, A.L, The use of history, London: English Universities Press, 1947 Rüsen, Jörn, ‘Gescichtskultur als Forschungsproblem’, in Klaus Frölich et al., eds., Geschichtskultur, Jahrbücher für Geschichtsdidaktik, 1991‑1992, Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus Verlagsge‑ sellschaft, 1992 Rüsen, Jörn, ‘Was ist Geschichtskultur? Überlegungen zu einer neuen Art über Geschichte nachzudenken’, in Klaus Füßmann et al., eds., Historische Faszination. Geschichtskultur heute, Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1994 Rusinow, Dennison, The Yugoslav Experiment 1948‑1974, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977 Savic, Obrad, ‘Speed Memories’, Belgrade Circle Journal, 1, 1994 Savic, Obrad and Mirko Gaspari, ‘Why the Belgrade Circle Journal’ Belgrade Circle Journal, 0, 1994 Savić, Obrad, ‘Parallel Worlds: ngos and the Civic Society’, Belgrade Circle Journal, 3‑4, 1995 / 1‑2, 1996 Savic, Obrad, ‘Speed Memories III’, Belgrade Circle Journal, 3‑4, 1995 / 1‑2, 1996 Savić, Obrad, ed., The Politics of Human Rights, London: Verso, 1999 Schöpflin, George, ‘The Ideology of Croatian Nationalism’, Survey – A journal of East and West studies, 19, 1973, 1 Shoup, Paul, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question, New York: Columbia Univer‑ sity Press, 1968 Silber, Laura and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, 2nd edition, London: Penguin, 1996 Simić, Sima, Prekrštavanje Srba ze vreme drugog svetskog rata. Titograd: Grafički Zavod, 1958 Simić, Sima, Vatikan protiv Jugoslavije, Titograd: Grafički Zavod, 1958 Simić, Sima, Prekrštavanje Srba za vreme drugog svetskog rata, (2nd edition, first published in 1958), Belgrade: Kultura, 1990 Sindbæk, Tea, ‘Det Serbiske Videnskabsakademis Memorandum. Et dokuments omskiftelige karriere’, Den Jyske Historiker, 97, 2002 Sindbæk, Tea, ‘Anden Verdenskrigs massakrer og folkedrab og genopdagelsen af ofrene – ten‑ denser inden for det socialistiske Jugoslaviens historiografi i et internationalt perspektiv’, Den Jyske Historiker, 112, 2006.

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