Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

“European” as many times as the terms “Croatia” and “Croatian” and insisted
on Croatia’s image as a Western country. 3 The new secular myth was
adjusted to the central church myth of “Thirteen Centuries of Christianity
in the Croat People” (see chapter 4). Tudjman insisted on the continuity
between the ancient Western Christian Croatian principalities and the three
modern Croat states (Tudjman included the communist-era Croatian republic).
The key national institution—a national council or assembly known
long ago under the common Slavic term sabor (assembly, diet) adopted the
World War II title Hrvtaski Drzˇavni Sabor (the Croatian State Sabor). The new
currency was called the kuna, a currency coined by Croatian medieval rulers
and again put in use during the World II in the NDH. Symbols were changing
in the new Croatia. Memorials were erected in honor of and streets
named after World War II Ustasˇa leaders. Old Ustasˇas, as well as Croatian
nationalists who were associated with emigre terrorist groups during the
cold War, returned to Croatia. Many of them assumed high posts in the
government and prominence in political life. Their principal targets became
ethnic Serbs, former members of the League of Communists who had not
joined HDZ, and symbols of alien cultures and of the communist era.
Neo-Ustasˇas dynamited thousands of memorials to the World War II antifascist
struggle. 4 The Partisan memorial at the Zagreb Mirogoj cemetery
was dynamited. An explosive was found near Josip Broz Tito’s bronze statue
in his birthplace of Kumrovec. In the midst of a right-wing rally, a HDZ
official urinated publicly on the local Partisan memorial at Veljun in Istria;
and so forth. Concurrently, HDZ activists in some cities were “cleansing”
politically or religiously incorrect books from schools and city public libraries.
Primary targets were books written in the Cyrillic alphabet (after 1990
no longer taught in Croatian elementary schools) and books written by leftwing
authors, Serbs, or pro-Yugoslavs, such as Ivan Cankar, Ivo Andrić,
August Cesarec, and Branko Ćopić, and even foreign authors guilty of socialism,
atheism, and homosexuality, such as Jack London, Mark Twain, and
Oscar Wilde. 5 Public discourse in postcommunist Croatia was permeated
with ethnic slurs targeting Serbs, Muslims, Jews, Russians, Greeks, Africans,
and countries that criticized the Zagreb regime. President Tudjman himself
opened the barrage (“I’ve been blessed by the fact that my wife is neither a
Serb nor Jewish”). The leader was echoed by returning old Ustasˇa emigres
and leaders of right-wing parties who insulted Serbs, Jews, leftists, and other
in speeches, articles, and interviews. Militant neo-Ustasˇa groups attacked
opposition leaders, disrupted opposition rallies, and physically attacked
union leaders and antifascists who commemorated the World War II Partisan
resistance.
The Tudjman regime inaugurated a new history that minimized Ustasˇa
crimes. An international commission established to supervise the new Croatian
school history courses in high schools found that new textbooks minimized
World War II Ustasˇa crimes (barely mentioning the Jasenovac camp)
while magnifying the number of victims of communist repression and
188 balkan idols