Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

ethnic, religious, and racial hatred.” Yugoslav communists had gone so far
as to declare and put in school textbooks that the Partisans, socialism, and
federalism had “solved” the notorious Yugoslav National Question once and
for all. In reality, the opposition remained alive and the country vulnerable.
In the first Yugoslavia, only one of the two largest churches did not grant
legitimacy to the state; in the second Yugoslavia, both the largest churches
thought of the communist regime as illegitimate and sought revenge. In the
first Yugoslavia, the regime was challenged by only two revolutionary terrorist
organizations (the communists and the Ustasˇa). In the second Yugoslavia,
several dozen terrorist organizations, as I will show, worked against
the Belgrade regime.
28 balkan idols
War Continues: Exile Politics and
Warring Myths
After 1945, the Yugoslav government designated 3,764 persons, from over
30,000 exiled members of defeated factions, war crimes suspects, but only
a few of these were transferred to Yugoslavia and sentenced for war crimes. 42
According to Yugoslav sources, in the 1960s, there were several hundred
active anti-Yugoslav exile organizations publishing around 120 periodicals,
newsletters, and other propaganda material. 43 According to U.S. sources
published in the 1990s, at least several dozen anti-Yugoslav organizations
operated in the United States and Canada alone and were assisted by Western
intelligence services. 44 Some anti-Yugoslav groups carried out assassinations,
kidnapings, highjackings, sabotage, guerilla raids, bombings, and
attacks on Yugoslav embassies, consulates, and cultural outposts abroad. A
number of Yugoslav and foreign citizens lost their lives in those acts of
terrorism. 45 In the summer of 1972, a 19-strong Croatian guerilla force;
formed and trained in Australia and western Europe, penetrated into Bosnia
but was destroyed by the Yugoslav Army and police. 46 The Yugoslav secret
police, known under several different names (UDBA, or Bureau for State
Security, or SDB or SDS, Service of State Security), waged a perpetual war
against exile organizations and was most effective by turning them against
each other. Anti-Yugoslav nationalist organizations in exile were divided
along ethnic lines, linked with organized crime, and distrustful of one another
to such an extent that their leaders never succeeded in forming a
united anti-Yugoslav and anticommunist opposition front. 47 Yet several
groups occasionally succeeded in organizing terrorist attacks. During the
regime’s liberalization in the 1960s and 1970s, anti-Yugoslav groups intensified
deadly terrorist attacks or attempted such attacks. 48
Some foreign branches of Yugoslav religious institutions and individual
clergy abroad provided assistance to anti-Yugoslav exile organizations. According
to Western intelligence sources made public in the late 1980s, the
Croatian fuhrer Pavelić, along with many prominent Ustasˇa leaders, escaped