National identity-building and the “Ustaša-nostalgia” in Croatia: the past that will not pass

Abstract

Most scholarship on post-Communist Croatia claims that the first Croatian president, Franjo Tuđman, intentionally rehabilitated the legacy of the World War II (WWII) Croatian Ustaša and its Nazi-puppet state. The rehabilitation of the Ustaša has been linked to Tuđman’s national reconciliation politics that tended toward a particular “forgetting of the past.” The national reconciliation was conceptualized as a joint struggle of both the Croatian anti-fascist Partisan and the Croatian WWII fascist Ustaša successors to achieve Croatian independence. However, the existing scholarship does not offer a comprehensive explanation of the nexus between national reconciliation and the rehabilitation of the Ustaša. Hence, this article will present how “Ustaša-nostalgia” does not stem from Tuđman’s intentions, but rather from the morphological gap occurring in Tuđman’s nation-building idea. Namely, Tuđman’s condemnation of the entire idea of Yugoslavism and Yugoslavia eventually brought about the perception that any historical agent advocating the idea of an independent Croatia is better than any form of Croatian Yugoslavism. Finally, the article will present how contemporary Croatian society is still seeped in “Ustaša-nostalgia” due to the hesitation of the post-Tuđman Croatian politics to come to terms with the legacy of his national reconciliation politics.

Keywords:

• Franjo Tuđman
• national reconciliation
• Ustaša
• Partisans
• forgetting the past

Notes

1. The number of victims stemmed from the very inept 1946 calculations. Namely, the calculation of the demographic number of victims amounting to 1,700,000 was immediately turned into the number of actual victims for the purposes of reparations that Socialist Yugoslavia tried to squeeze out of the Federal Republic of Germany. Automatically, the number between 500,000 and 700,000 was derived as the number of the Jasenovac death-camp victims. Since the camp represented the very symbol of the Ustaša-committed mass-scale terror, the Communist authorities hesitated to correct the obviously distorted number. In turn, the number represented the grounds to forge a sub-official narrative on a kind of “Croat guilt,” hence placing a huge burden of memory onto the Croatian nation. The first excavations done on the site of the camp in 1964 reached the number of about 60,000 victims. The number was immediately banned from publication (Škiljan 2009). As a high-ranking party member, Tuđman was acquainted with the excavation results. His intention to publish these results contributed to his fall in the regime ranks (Mujadžević 2011).

2. The Catholic Church challenged the Communist government with the 1975–1984 jubilee celebrating the “Thirteen Centuries of Christianity in the Croat People.” The jubilee was devoted to celebrating various anniversaries that symbolized Croatian belonging to the Catholic and Western civilization. For more on the Church's national identity-building activities, see Spremić (2011), Perica (2002), and Hudelist (2008a, 2008b).

3. About 13.7% of HDZ voters originated from Partisan-siding families, and 12.4% from Ustaša-siding families (Šiber 1998, 66–67). The biggest proportion (33.2%) of the HDZ electorate originated from the families drafted to the regular army of the Croatian Nazi puppet state called the home guard (domobranstvo). Thus, it cannot be taken for granted that the home guard troopers were supporters of the Ustaša-regime, especially as the great majority of Croats in the interwar period voted for the Croatian Peasant Party.

4. On Andrija Hebrang see Banac (1988).

5. The “Bleiburg Massacre” was named after the small village of Bleiburg in southern Austria, where various south-Slavic quislings accompanied by thousands of mostly Croatian civilians surrendered to Tito's Partisan army on 15 May 1945. During the next three weeks, the prisoners were executed on a mass scale during the “death marches” through Slovenia and northern Croatia.

6. The most controversial parts in The Wastelands are those in which Tuđman laments the allegedly privileged position of the Jewish prisoners in the camp, as well as his elaborations on the nature of Jewish national identity, which were on the verge of anti-Semitism. Since The Wastelands raised various protests both in Croatia and abroad, Tuđman revised the book by dropping out the most controversial parts. The revised version was published in English in 1996 under the title Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy. For a more comprehensive analysis of the controversies of The Wastelands, see Goldstein (2001) and Dulic (2009).

7. The total number of Croatian Bleiburg victims as determined by the late 1980s, according to the calculations of Croatian demographer Vladimir Žerjavić, amounts to around 50,000. Moreover, Žerjavić calculated the total number of Jasenovac death camp victims to be around 80,000 (1992, 69–79). Žerjavić's calculation on Jasenovac victims has been confirmed by the recently released individual list of the victims done by the Jasenovac Memorial Centre, which counted a total number of 83,145 individual victims (List of Individual Victims of Jasenovac Concentration Camp 2014). Thus, Žerjavić's calculations have nowadays been almost universally accepted.

8. Tuđman's plan for Jasenovac provoked a heated public debate soon after Tuđman announced it in 1996. Eventually, it was abandoned due to protests by the Croatian Jewish community, the league of the Partisan veterans, and by several liberal intellectuals, as well as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The reason why the policies of Jasenovac came into play so late was because the Jasenovac memorial site was occupied by rebel Serbs and subsequently demolished (Čulić 1999, 103–127; Banjeglav 2012, 107–108).

9. The so-called “Šakić Case” emerged in 1998, when the Simon Wiesenthal Centre unveiled the identity of the former commander of the Jasenovac Death Camp Dinko Šakić in Argentina, and subsequently forced the Croatian Government to request Šakić's extradition. Šakić was eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison in Zagreb in 1999. The prosecution, as well as the judiciary, was quite unwilling to pursue a trial following Tuđman's statement that “after fifty years, the Šakić Case was forced onto us, he was returned to Croatia precisely to provoke us into treating him in a negative way” (Tuđman in Mijatović 1999, 2005). For the best accounts of the Šakić Case, see Ivančić (2000) and Primorac (2000).

10. The Committee for the Identification of the War and the Post-War victims, called Vukojević's Committee after its head, was established in 1991 by the HDZ émigré far right. The agency of the Committee was highly dubious, since it openly sought to rehabilitate the Ustaša and revisionism toward Socialist Yugoslavia. The most notorious product of the Committee was its 1999 Final Report that stated, inter alia, the number of the Jasenovac death camp victims to be 2238. On the activity of the Committee see Čulić (1999).

Additional information

Funding

This article stems from research done in the scope of the project Politics of National Identity and Historical Breaks at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Zagreb. The work was supported by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports.