At Srbrenica, following its fall to Serbian army forces under Ratko Mladic in July 1995, 8,000 unarmed people were shot dead. As to the atrocity of the act, there is no more doubt as to its truth.
That understood, other conclusions should be resisted. The idea of Serbs as the altogether villains of Yugoslavia speaks mighty ignorance of Balkan history. The state created at the Versailles settlement was the dream of an enlightened Roman Catholic Bishop, Dr Josip Strossmayer. If Calabrians and Milanese could create Italia Unita, why not the people between Bulgaria and the Adriatic? Actually, Italy never did unite much. “South of Rome”, says the Northern League, usually in cabinet, “lies Africa”. Never mind. South Slavs (what Yugoslavia means) are ethnically one race. Unity should flow naturally. The division, however and quite as bitter, involved culture and confession: Croats and Slovenes – Catholics, Serbs and Montenegrins – Orthodox, and many in Bosnia Herzegovina – Muslims. Catholics looked to Vienna, Orthodox to Russia, the Muslims wherever minorities look.
While Slovenes were largely moderate, Croatian nationalism became ferocious – the Ustashe of Ante Pavelic. They murdered King Alexander at Marseilles in 1934 and with him Georges Barthou, French Foreign Minister, least likely to appease Adolf Hitler. In 1941, rewarded by Hitler with a Greater Croatia, the Ustashe embraced the Nazis and sometimes surpassed them. They took Croat Catholicism as a mark of cultural supremacy and the clergy cheered, the Archbishop of Sarjevo proclaiming a crusade against Serbs. Incidentally, the Ustashe’s pink and blue colours form modern Croatia’s flag and football shirt.
Actions were specific. In the disputed Croat-Serb border region, many Serbs lived in mixed villages. In 1941 and 1943, Pavelic’s government sent advocates/missionaries to such villages and invited the local Croats to kill the local and obvious enemy. The best study of the figures reckons on the killing of 339,000 Serbs. The Croatian Ustashe were also eager expellers of Jews to the Final Solution.
Apart from a group of officers in Belgrade under General Milan Nedic who made their peace with the Nazis, the Serbs – conservative and communist, Chetniks and Partisans – fought Hitler, although they would fall out bitterly toward the end of the Second World War. The Muslims were caught – piggy in the middle. Some joined resistance movements; others inside Greater Croatia kept onside with the Ustashe, and a couple of Bosnian brigades of volunteer recruits, went to the Eastern Front. When the war ended, the leaders who had ordered and celebrated the massacres largely escaped. Notably, they were protected by emissaries from Pope Pius XII, a man of God startlingly blind to evil, creating rat-runs to take them clear of trial and firing squad. Naturally enough, many went to the Spain of Francisco Franco (another mass killer). In 1956, Pavelic died in Madrid. The Republic of Ireland, then the theocratic state of Eamon de Valera and Archbishop John McQuaid, also reached out and a colony of Ustashe sat out justice in Limerick.
The farther past does not absolve the near past, but an elaboration of roots, memories and hatreds is essential history.
