Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

“source of strength” and example of integrated national and religious ideals.
In a similar vein, General Milan Nedić, soon to become the “Serbian Petain”—head
of the World War II Serbian pro-Nazi puppet regime at Belgrade—wrote
in a Belgrade newspaper about Yugoslav peoples’ “return to
Kosovo—the Serbian Jerusalem.” 16 Yet, as far as the Croats are concerned,
their religious leaders had already made the decision to develop a Croatian
equivalent to the Kosovo myth. In 1939, the Catholic Church in Croatia
announced the beginning of the nine-year jubilee entitled “Great Novena—
Thirteen Centuries of Christianity in the Croat People.”
The Catholic episcopate responded to the grand Serbian jubilee by showing
Croat pride via commemoration of the evangelization of the Croats,
which took place, according to Church historians, in 641, that is, much
earlier than the Serbs became Christians. The Croat jubilee-in-preparation
featured large parish and diocesan “Eucharistic congresses,” emphasizing
the role of the Church in the preservation of Croatian ethnic identity and
desire for statehood-nationhood. The nine-year sequence of Croat Church
festivals and pilgrimages was solemnly opened in September 1941 but soon
halted by the collapse of the Yugoslav kingdom the Axis occupation, and a
civil war. 17
Civil War and Communist
Revolution, 1941–1950
After the April 1941 invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia by the Axis
powers and their allies (Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania, etc.), Yugoslavia was
divided into several occupational zones and pro-Axis satellites states. The
civil war that soon erupted was accompanied with massive massacres of the
civilian population, first started in spring of 1941 by Croat Ustasˇas and later
also carried out by other ethnic factions. This first Yugoslav civil war was a
proof that the Yugoslav question could not be managed either by a centralized
state or by partition. In fact, partition seemed to be worse than any
form of unity. Initially the strongest among domestic warring factions were
the Croatian radical nationalists or native fascists, the Ustasˇas. These were
led by the lawyer Ante Pavelić, an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini. The
Ustasˇas, backed by the Axis powers, founded a state in Croatia and Bosnia-
Herzegovina named “the Independent State of Croatia” (NDH). Mussolini’s
Italy, which aspired to annexation of the northern tier of the Adriatic coast
and weakening of the Yugoslav state, wholeheartedly sponsored the NDH. 18
In return, Pavelić ceded Istria, Dalmatia, and the isles to Italy. As a consequence,
many Croats hated the NDH, formed resistance combat units together
with Serbs, and joined the communists who fought against fascism
for a Croat republic within a Yugoslav federation.
The second strongest among the domestic warring factions was the
communist-led multiethnic “Anti-fascist People’s Liberation Front” (also
the first strife 21