Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

126 WESTERN YUGOSLAVIA REACTS
In today’s independent Croatia of Franjo Tudjman, the historical myths do not
enter the picture as forcefully as they did in Ustaše times, but they are,
nonetheless, more strongly expressed than in any of the Croatian political
movements prior to the Second World War. They resulted, inter alia, in some
damage to relations with Istria and Dalmatia. The often penetratingly expressed
ideas of Tudjman and his adherents concerning the special role of Croatia and of
its “western” Christianity in history may be traced, on the one hand, back to
Tudjman’s personality and, on the other hand, to the special circumstances in
which Croatian independence had to develop. The communist regime in
Yugoslavia was, as a matter of principle, hostile to Croatian national
consciousness, being inspired by a mixture of communist, Yugoslav, and Greater
Serbian tendencies. The anti-national policy in Croatia after 1971, already
described (p. 17), worked especial mischief. It was the time when the Catholic
Church stepped forward as the only refuge for Croatian national feeling. One
could reproach the Church, if one wished, that it played on this to build up its
strength. The great convocations, which the Church organized in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, sometimes conveyed the impression that the direct activity of the
hand of God in Croatian history had to be revealed. 105 But one must consider
that the posture of political-spiritual combat had been forced on the Church and
that it made use of such weapons as it had at hand. I cannot remember any
religious manifestations from that time which were directed against another
people, for example Serbs. That the Catholic Church of Croatia was by no means
the tabernacle of all the wild ideas about the role of Croatia as “antimurale
christianitatis” was shown in the clarity with which Zagreb Archbishop Kuharić
criticized Tudjman’s Bosnian policy.
Certainly, the so-called forced conversions were a sad chapter in Croatia’s
history. Here, especially during the persecutions by the Ustaše in 1941–42, many
Serbs in the Krajina and other parts of the country, including Bosnia, were forced
to convert to Catholicism. On this point, one should say that the marked disunity
which characterizes Croatia in geographic, historical, and political terms also
made itself evident within the Church. That was Archbishop Stepinac’s big
problem. A second historical point was the difficulty of demarcating the Church
from an ideology which, by contrast with German national-socialism or Italian
fascism, inserted religion into the national mythos. The correct interpretation is
probably that at the beginning the upper clergy of the Church in Croatia,
Stepinac included, were rather taken by the idea of spreading Catholicism
eastward. 106 The Vatican had to underline that only voluntary conversions could
be accepted. 107 The same sources mention, however, that the Ustaše state had
treated the question of conversions from the start as an affair of state. 108 When
the first persecutions of Serbs became public, the problem took on yet another
dimension for the Church. Now conversions often seemed to afford the only
possibility of saving the lives of Serbs, as Maček also writes, 109 while, on the other
hand—and here, once more, the old differences were observable—especially in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, one still found a primitive missionary zeal.