Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

treating pro-Axis groups in May 1945 at the town of Bleiburg on the
Yugoslav-Austrian border. Architects of this myth, such as the former Ustasˇa
high officials Ivo Omrčanin and Vinko Nikolić, argued that 550,000 Croats
(including soldiers’ families) were massacred at Bleiburg and tortured to
death on long marches through Yugoslavia (i.e., the Way of the Cross),
which Omrčanin called the “Holocaust of Croatians.” 56 Yet, according to the
independent Croat analyst the demographer Vladimir Z ˇ erjavić, the total
number of all quisling troops (including Ustasˇas, Četniks, and others) in the
retreat 1945 was around 50,000, and far fewer than that number were
captured or killed in May 1945. 57
The Bleiburg myth (the “Bleiburg Tragedy of the Croatian People”) became
a Croatian equivalent to the Kosovo myth. The myth built a martyr aura
around the NDH and fueled self-pity and a lust for revenge among nationalistic
Croats. In the 1960s, exile Croat organizations founded the so-called Bleiburg
Platoon of Honor, a paramilitary unit that paraded at annual commemorations
at Bleiburg. In July 1972, a 19-man-strong Ustasˇa guerilla unit, the
Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood (HRB) penetrated Bosnia-Herzegovina
and launched a popular uprising of the oppressed Croats against the “Serbocommunists.”
The group believed that the time was ripe for Croatian rebellion
in the aftermath of Tito’s crackdown on the massive post-1945 nationalist
movement (the so-called Croatian Spring of 1971). The leader of the group,
Adolf Andrić, wrote a booklet, the manual for Croatian revolutionary struggle
(which included instructions for making explosive devices), entitled “Avengers
of Bleiburg.” The booklet was found with Andrić, who was killed by Yugoslav
military police at Mount Radusˇa in southwestern Bosnia. 58
Thanks to the anticommunist mobilization in the West in the 1950s and
the active Catholic Church’s role in it, perhaps the most effective among the
Croatian nationalist myths was a new history presented as martyrdom of
the Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac. On the occasion of the
papal promotion of the jailed Stepinac to a cardinal in 1953, Croatian émigrés
published the first apology of the cardinal, written by a Catholic priest
who had been close to the wartime Ustasˇa state. 59 Croatian exile propaganda
centers in Buenos Aires, Rome, London, Melbourne, and elsewhere issued
numerous volumes on Stepinac. These publications allegedly cited authentic
Stepinac wartime sermons that testified to his humanitarian work and condemnation
of repression. 60
All in all, the Yugoslav ethnic strife unfolding in the interwar kingdom
and escalating during World War II continued both at home and through
the new exile politics. The communists, in fact, imposed a cease-fire or
merely limited the scope and intensity of the struggle. Yugoslavia remained
vulnerable and imperiled by the domestic and exiled opposition. If there had
not been communism but some other system, the conflict would have probably
continued, too. If the common Yugoslav state had not been restored
and several new states had emerged via partition, the conflict would have
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