Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

ishop of Split-Makarska, Marin Barisˇić, the bishop of Lika province, Mile
Bogović, and the chief military vicar, Juraj Jezerinac. 56
President Mesić also angered the HDZ and the Church by publicly condemning
the “new Croatian history” written during the Tudjman regime,
criticizing its policies of minimizing Ustassˇa crimes and taking pride in the
World War II Croatian antifascist legacy. Mesić traveled to Israel and publicly
apologized there for Ustasˇa crimes against Croatian Jews. (Croatian state TV,
in which nationalists still maintained strong influence, did not show this
news among top stories of the day.) In Israel, the Croatian president praised
the partisans, often mentioning Josip Broz Tito and other Croatian communist
leaders. The Jewish community of Zagreb thanked President Mesić
for his support of the publication of an objective historical study about the
Ustasˇa genocidal assault on Zagreb Jews during World War II. 57 It is worth
mentioning that no Croatian Catholic church dignitary attended the 6 November
2001 promotion of the new book, Holocaust in Zagreb, by two eminent
Croatian-Jewish authors, Ivo Goldstein and Slavko Goldstein, who were
also known as outspoken critics of the Tudjman regime. It is difficult to say
whether the Church was more irritated by the fact that prominent Zagreb
Jews such as the Goldsteins and the historian Mirjana Gross were outspoken
Tudjman critics or by the fact that all had been members of the League of
Communists of Yugoslavia during the Tito era.
In spite of Western support for the government, the leaders of the Catholic
Church in Croatia did not discourage the antigovernment offensive
launched by the far right after the 2000 elections. On 9 November 2001 the
national conference of bishops released the strongest antigovernment indictment
hitherto, entitled “Croatian Bishops’ Message about the Current
Social Situation in Croatia.” The ultranationalist Croatian clergy’s gift for
political maneuvering was combined with a bitter, deep-seated hatred
against all Croats who were not faithful ethnic nationalists “appointed” to
govern the state by the Catholic bishops. Taking advantage of the harsh
consequences of the new Račan government’s liberal economic transitional
policies (i.e., “shock therapy,” as successfully tested earlier in Poland, Hungary,
and the Czech Republic), imposed on this government by the European
Union and the West, the bishops’ message targets the government’s social
policies. The prelates attacked the low pensions for the retired, the dramatic
rise of unemployment, the alleged lack of state support for families with
many children, the alleged mistreatment of the veterans of the 1991–95
“War for the Fatherland,” the Račan administration’s alleged liability for
corruption, and the exodus of thousands of young Croats to foreign countries—although
all of these problems had arisen and gained momentum
under Tudjman. The bishops’ message cynically uses leftist rhetoric and
socialist arguments to attack a left-center government hated by the bishops
as such (because some of its members are former communists who did not
earlier join Tudjman and HDZ and moderate nationalists who disliked HDZ).
the twilight of balkan idols 199