Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

epublic federation’s patriotic myths was questioned by authors, historians,
and journalists—nationalists as well as liberal communists. 73 One of keystones
of Titoist historiography of World War II, according to which the
Croat Ustasˇa NDH was an aberration in the history of the Croat people
and was imposed by fascist Nazi invaders, was challenged in the mid-
1980s by intellectual, cultural, and religious circles in Belgrade. A “new
Serbian history” was then in the process of being written, concurrent
with the unfolding ethnic nationalist mobilization of Serbs aimed at restructuring
the Tito federation. This “new history” was influenced by the
following fours factors and sources: (1) Serbian ethnic nationalist ideology;
(2) nationalism emanating from the Orthodox Church and church historiography;
(3) Serb émigré myths and propaganda; and (4) Holocaust and
genocide studies (according to which the Serbs identified themselves with
the Jews and the crimes against Serbs were perceived as equivalent to the
Holocaust). The influence of the fourth factor I have already noted and
will further elaborate hereafter, although a proper understanding would
presumably require from readers familiarity with Holocaust historiography
since the 1960s. 74
The “new” Serbian historians argued that the NDH was above all a very
efficient instrument of genocide against Serbs, conceived in Croatia several
centuries before the genocide took place. The NDH genocide, argued Serb
historian Vasilije Dj. Krestić, among many others, targeted the Serb people
for annihilation, while the idea of genocide is, allegedly, several centuries
old, one of the key peculiarities in the history of the Croats, and even a
remarkable idiom of Croatian culture, religion, and national character. 75 The
new Serbian historiography, to which both Church and secular historians
contributed, emphasized the role of religion as the key catalyst of Serbo-
Croat hatred, designating the Roman Catholic Church as the chief carrier
of hatred and inspirer of the idea of genocide against the Serb people. 76
After inaugurating this new history, the Serbian nationalist movement
moved on to argue that, allegedly, another independent state of Croatia was
in the process of reemergence in what was then the Socialist Republic of
Croatia (then still ruled together by Croat and Serb communists devoted to
Tito’s ideology of multiethnic “brotherhood and unity”). Serbs in Croatia
and Bosnia-Herzegovina were cautioned to be prepared for a possible repetition
of the genocide of 1941.
Croatian historians, nationalists and moderates alike, rebuked the genocide
thesis. 77 The nationalist historian Franjo Tudjman was one of the most
outspoken defenders of the Croats against the Serb “genocide thesis,” but
his proclivity to minimize Ustasˇa crimes and explain them as an overreaction
against the long Great Serbian pressure on Croats in Croatia and Bosnia,
especially during the interwar monarchy, fueled the anger from Belgrade so
that new genocide charges mounted. 78 Tudjman also used his scholarly skills
to write an apology for the Catholic Church and Archbishop Stepinac, designated
as accomplices in Ustasˇa crimes. 79 Monsignor Pave Z ˇ anić, who was
the second strife 147