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A colleague asked me last spring "How does it feel to see the country you have spent your lifetime studying fall apart?" I can't remember what I answered, but the question has stayed with me.
I am a historian who has worked in the field of Croatian and Yugoslav history since the late 1950's. My first book Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian Movement, described the development of Croatian and Yugoslav nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. I followed this with a series of articles on the spread of nationalism from the Croatian political and cultural elite to the peasantry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rise of the Croatian Peasant Party, and the life and thought of Ante Radic, the Party ideologist. These led me to my present topic, one which has occupied me for almost 15 years, namely the economic, social and political life of the peasantry in Croatia before World War I, the period in which the Peasant Party was founded. I am now completing work on the first volume of a history of the Croatian peasants from 1880 to 1914. It focuses on everyday peasant life, and is based, primarily, on ethnographic sources. The second volume will analyze the interaction between the modernizing programs of the Croatian urban elite and traditional peasant culture during the same period. My interests overlap with those of anthropologists and ethnologists, and I have collaborated on several projects with Joel M. Halpern: an English edition of Rudolf Bicanic's How the People Live, and a study of the Balkan travels of Emily Balch, author of Our Slavic Fellow Citizens .
I have lived a total of five and a half years in Croatia. My husband is Croatian. We met in Zagreb in 1960 when I was doing my dissertation research and married there. Therefore professional ties to Croatia are paralleled by ties of kinship and friendship. In addition to my first research stay in 1960-62, my husband and I and our two daughters spent our 1972, 1978-79 and 1985-86 sabbatical leaves in Zagreb, and our girls attended Croatian schools. We have made various shorter trips to Croatia as well. My last research visit was during the summer of 1988.
The events since June of 1991 in Croatia and now Bosnia-Hercegovina have come as a surprise and have remained a daily horror. My husband and I have become "news junkies" tuning in to BBC in the morning, Radio Zagreb at night, combing newspapers and journals for new information, printing out reams of e mail. Even with all of this information I cannot say I understand what has happened. Certainly this is not a war fought because of "ancient tribal rivalries" as American and European newspapers so charmingly describe it. It seems to be a strange combination of hard line communists trying to hold on to power and privilege, a powerful modern army left without a state falling into the hands of radical nationalists, an outdated nineteenth century push for national unification, and twentieth century racism. This is a lethal combination.
What right does Serbia have to the city of Vukovar? It has never been part of Serbia and it did not even have a Serbian majority. Why should the existence of a Serbian minority of 12.3% justify allowing a third of Croatia to be controlled by armed Serbs? Why should a minority of 33% in Bosnia-Hercegovina mean that 90% of that republic should "belong" to the Serbs? Why should the majority of the inhabitants of these Serb-controlled regions be expelled from their homes and deprived of their property at gunpoint in the name of "ethnic cleansing?" What a nice aseptic word to describe brutal evacuation of families from old settled communities to a life with nothing. Perhaps the refugees will go home once more, but to what? Whole villages have been leveled and property records destroyed. Elsewhere, others of the "proper" nationality have taken over the homes and farms of those who were forced to leave.
This is worse than a hurricane disaster, because there the victims are seen as everyone's neighbors and help flows in freely. But what happens when it is your very neighbors who have dispossessed you and killed or maimed members of your family in the holy name of motherland? Can Serbs and Croats, Serbs and Moslems and Croats ever live together peacefully again? The "German " minority problem in Eastern Europe was solved by the brutal expulsion of German speaking minorities after World War Two. Could this war not end in the same way, ultimately, with the expulsion of Serbs from regions in which they have lived for centuries as a minority.
Why did the world allow the senseless shelling of Dubrovnik and the intentional destruction of historic buildings, churches, mosques, hospitals, schools, factories throughout Croatia and, most recently, Bosnia-Hercegovina? How can any civilized person accept "ethnic cleansing." How can we remain indifferent to the plight of millions of refugees? This is a war fought not only around major cities, although these capture the headlines, but in the countryside, in provincial towns and villages. The Germans broke apart Czechoslovakia in 1938, in order to "protect" the German minority, which had in fact been well treated. Europe stood by and helped, muttering pious words about keeping the peace until it finally became clear that only force would stop Hitler and the Nazis. The European Community, the United States and the United Nations stand by now, making token efforts to stop the war, asking the victims to be patient, chiding them when they defend themselves. It is, after all, the "wild" Balkans.
Historical facts get tossed around in quite frightening ways. The number of Serbs who were supposed to have been killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp has risen from "a hundred thousand" to "hundreds of thousands" to "a million and a half." When Croatian scholars argue from documents that a total of 216,000 people perished in concentration camps, and of these only 79,00 were Serbs, and that 487,000 Serbs died from all causes in the war, they are attacked for defending fascists. Are the French still judged "fascist" because of the Vichy government? Are all Norwegians called "quislings?" In the war against Croatia, the shadow of World War II was evoked again and again, as if fifty years had not passed.
I wondered in l985-86 and again in 1988 at the frequency with which the term ustase was used by the Serbs when talking about present day Croats. The number of German troops held down by the Partisans also grows with the telling, especially when American and British military advisors are explaining why they should not send troops to keep or establish peace. The world seems afraid of the Balkans. New myths have been established by the Milosevic propaganda machine and American newspapers naively repeated them for a while: all Croats are ustase under the skin; the Serbs won both world Wars; only Serbs were Partisans; only Croatia had a puppet fascist regime; the Bosnian Moslems are Islamic fundamentalists, and so on and so forth. Perhaps one way historians can most be of use, to try to debunk myths, remind the world of certain facts, then finally to try to unravel what happened.
Historians "explain" things long after they have happened. Historical events such as those in Eastern Europe in the past three years, or in former Yugoslavia in the past year and a half, are like huge movements of the earth's surface which raise low places into mountains. We have lived with the existence of Yugoslavia as one lives with a well known landscape. The Yugoslavs seemed to have found a way to balance the nationalisms of small closely-related nationalities by forming a federated state of national republics. The "Yugoslav Experiment" during the Cold War offered an intriguing alternative to the highly centralized Soviet system with the Yugoslav path-breaking institutions of workers self-management and market socialism.
Although Yugoslavia may not have had as dramatic a growth rate as some of the Soviet bloc countries, her modernization was more humane, and she let foreign scholars come in and observe and record the process. The League of Communists offered an ideological alternative to nationalism, and Tito was an appealing leader who seemed to be able to adjust to the needs of the moment while keeping tight control. This small Balkan country was even, for a while, the leader of the non-aligned movement. Compare the number of books written by American anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists and historians on Yugoslav topics with those on Czechoslovakia or Romania or Bulgaria. For decades Yugoslavia had a significance in the world which vastly outweighed either her size or her wealth, and her growing prosperity seemed to prove that the system was viable. With the end of the Cold War she became marginalized.
I first visited Yugoslavia in the spring of 1956, eager for sunshine after a long cold Austrian winter. I was on a Fulbright fellowship that year at the University of Vienna taking courses in Habsburg and modern history, and studying Czech. I can't remember why I chose to learn Czech, it may have been the only non-Russian Slavic language offered. I remember that I did not particularly like the sound of Czech. It reminded me of teakettles whistling. I knew I wanted to go on in East Europe history, but still didn't know which region to choose for my concentration.
Austria in 1956 was just coming back to life after war and occupation and somehow seemed narrow, drab, and depressed. I had never been so cold as I was that winter. The University was unheated, my room was large and drafty, cafes and restaurants were not much warmer, the air was polluted by soft coal smoke, and the sky was often gray. A friend and I decided to go south to the Yugoslav coast for spring break. We were hungry for the sun, and the trip and accommodations were inexpensive. From first contact, Yugoslavia felt different. People in the train were friendly and good humored. I remember an old peasant woman who had brought an oversized watering can with her. It was new and shiny. She tried to stow it in the overhead compartment, and it kept tumbling down. The other passengers laughed, and kept putting the watering can back up on the rack for her. They passed around cigarettes, food, drink, and we conversed brokenly in a mixture of languages. People seemed to talk and move with energy. Yugoslavia felt like a young country, alive and vigorous, on its way up. It seemed immune from the self-pity so often met in Vienna where people looked back wistfully to "better" days.
We took the train from Vienna to Ljubljana and Rijeka, then went by ship to Rab and Dubrovnik, We traveled to Sarajevo by the little cog railroad, and back to Vienna through Zagreb. Our trip lasted 10 days. The physical beauty of the landscape stunned me, the diversity of cultures and traditions fascinated me, and the musicality of the language pleased my ear. This first trip merely whetted my appetite to see more of Yugoslavia.
I went back in July for a month, this time to Macedonia, as an assistant to an American ethnomusicologist. She was heading for the village of Galicnik to record traditional wedding music, and wanted a traveling companion who could help her transcribe the music. Since I had a good grounding in theory and composition, I got the job. The American Embassy in Belgrade warned us that we would be totally on our own, for few Americans traveled in Macedonia those days. We spent a week in Ohrid as tourists, and the second week recording wedding music in the mountain village of Galicnik. It sometimes felt as if we were no longer in the twentieth century or even in Europe. The hills looked like pictures from my Bible-donkeys were the major form of transportation, older Moslem women had veils draped under their chins, and men wore woolen trousers which seemed to sit precariously on their hips.
I remember the silence on the mountain as we climbed up to Galicnik. It was midday, and all we could hear was our footsteps and breath, the tinkle of bells from grazing sheep and an occasional melody from a shepherd's flute somewhere in the distance. The weddings started that evening. For centuries, the men from Galicnik had left the village at the end of the summer for work in the lowlands, and returned the next spring or summer. Village weddings were held one week in July each year. We followed one wedding party through five or six days of ceremonies in a big old zadruga house high up on the mountain. The men leapt as they danced, the women moved sedately, the older women wore necklaces heavy with gold coins. Day and night our ears were haunted by the pound of drums, shrill wooden flutes and cry of bagpipes from the gypsy bands hired for the weddings.
We spent the last two weeks in Skopje. My companion had become ill, so as she rested, I explored the city. I went to the peasant market, talked with students from the University, wandered through the crowded narrow streets of the old town. The students spoke to me about the recently recognized Macedonian nationality and the Macedonian language, a language so new that I found the official dictionary and grammar were still in preparation when I asked to buy them in a bookstore. When I asked people what they were, after talking to them a while about other things, they would almost always identify themselves as Bulgarian, Serbian, Turk, Greek, or Albanian.
By the time I returned to Vienna after this second trip, I had decided to work for a Ph. D in history with a concentration on Yugoslavia. The next year I enrolled at Columbia University in the Program for East Central Europe.
Yugoslavia was an "exception" in East European studies. It was not part of the Soviet bloc, so it often got left out of courses on contemporary Eastern Europe. I discovered that it was also much more complicated to study than I had originally thought. Yugoslavia fell into two historical regions: that of Byzantium and Turkey and that of Catholic Central Europe. Although small, it had three official languages: Serbo-Croatian, Slovene and Macedonian, not to mention two alphabets. In those days few universities offered courses in Serbo-Croatian, and Slovene and Macedonian were almost impossible to find. Since I already knew German and had a background in Habsburg history, I decided to focus on the Catholic Southern Slavs, and chose the Illyrian Movement for my master's and doctoral research. I studied Serbo-Croatian at Columbia for two years, and learned enough to do research. As most of us in the field, I really "learned" the language while doing research in Zagreb, and there are still parts of the grammar which elude me to this day.
Most American historians focus on one Yugoslav nationality in their research. There are many reasons for this. Few of us have time to master more than one of the major Yugoslav languages, though we may have reading knowledge of the others. Each historical region requires other languages as well: Latin, German, Hungarian and Italian for Slovenia and Croatia; Turkish, Greek and Old Church Slavonic for Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, Macedonia. In addition, each nationality or republic has its own historiographical tradition which helps frame our own work, and few of us few have time to become familiar with all of these. Finally, academic exchanges between Yugoslavia and the United States have usually been with each national republic separately. While it has not been impossible to receive permission to do work in more than one of the republics, it certainly is more difficult. Thus, I became a Croatian specialist within the larger specialty of Yugoslavia, reaching out with one hand to Habsburg history and the other to Balkan history. It is ironic that our professional associations in this country have fractured along national lines as well. We attempted to form a Southern Slav Association in the early l970s under the AAASS umbrella. It soon broke up into Slovene, Croatian, Serbian and Bulgarian components.
I have watched Croatia and Yugoslavia go through many changes since l960. Let me speak first of living standards. I have seen them rise dramatically, peak, then decline. Since Zagreb has been my home every time I lived in Yugoslavia, I will draw on it for the bulk of my observations. In 1960 most people I knew lived in crowded apartments with grandparents, married children or lodgers. Hot water was a luxury, and early morning trams smelled of unwashed bodies, cigarettes, slivovitz. No one I knew had a refrigerator, wash was boiled in huge copper pots in the cellar and dried outside on lines or up under the eaves. Milk and cream were delivered to your doorstep by peasant milkmen. The first sounds in the morning were the pad of horse hoofs, bicycle bells, clang of milk cans. The streets were cleaned by street sweepers with twig brooms. Peasants brought live chickens and geese to market, fresh eggs, cottage cheese, cornbread, vegetables, fruit, flowers, and peasant women often carried huge loads balanced on their heads. There were no supermarkets, but many small stores. Items were not prepackaged in throwaway plastic or metal. Fruit juice and soft drinks came in returnable bottles, and tomato paste was doled out at the market on a large wooden spoon, weighed and put on a piece of paper. Most people still had their clothing made by seamstresses and tailors. In the fall, apartment windows would be filled with big jars of apricot preserves, and ripening cherry brandy. Housework took a lot of time with the daily shopping, water to be heated, clothes to be cooked, parquet floors to be buffed. Everyone who could, hired a "girl" from a village to help with the work. To get places you walked or took the tram. I lived near the center of town and there was only one car on our street in 1962, a small Fiat.
Zagreb was a city of students. Education was free for those who were able and it was the way up in this new society. New modern university buildings were going up, a clear sign of priorities, and there was an attractive student center. Desks in the university library were filled from opening to closing time, and bookshops and cafes were favorite hangouts.I was impressed by the number of women who were professors at the university and who held important positions in other professions. During my entire time at graduate school at Columbia I did not have one female professor. But in Yugoslavia women worked and had families and seemed to manage quite well, especially with the maternity leave benefits, and retirement which came ten years earlier than at home.
Zagreb, as all Yugoslav cities at the time, was a city of migrants from villages and small towns, and as it grew it absorbed surrounding villages. We could look out the windows of the new Faculty of Philosophy building and see an old woman grazing her cow. Some streets near the university did not yet have running water. Cookbooks included a section on etiquette, which told you how to set a table for guests, dress ( e.g. you should not receive guests in your bathrobe), and play hostess city-style. The new migrants were learning the signposts of a different culture.
I had no difficulties doing research in 1960-62. The archives were open to me and well organized, and the archivists were helpful. There were no photocopy machines, so I took detailed notes and had some material microfilmed. Winter was hard. The university library archives were poorly heated and not well lighted, but conditions were about the same as in Vienna. The libraries allowed me to borrow books, and second hand bookshops were packed with important and affordable books. Croatian scholars were friendly and interested in my work. It was an ideal time for scholars.
Yugoslavia was Communist/ Socialist- yes - but it was different from the East Bloc countries and the Soviet Union. I realized this most clearly after a month at a seminar in the Soviet Union in the summer of l960. When I returned to Zagreb I felt I had arrived back in Western Europe. People spoke their minds, political jokes abounded, the art galleries displayed interesting new art, bookstores carried books from other countries and cultures, and there were lots of foreign tourists.
Sometimes I glimpsed steel behind the pleasant facade, parts of town where I was not supposed to walk, objects I could not photograph. There were many men in uniform, police, bureaucrats, soldiers. I met Communists of many different kinds: careerists, believers, those who still wanted to believe. Most people I knew were not in the Party. Coming from the other side of the Cold War I was embarrassed at first to talk about Communism, for it was what separated us. I remember, early in my stay, going to Maximir Park with a Jewish colleague (now a friend of many years) who had spent some years in a German concentration camp during the war. She was a believing Communist. As we walked along, she pointed to an area of mass graves. I asked, "Who is buried here," waiting for some standard explanation. She answered, "We all are." Her answer stays with me. She left the Party in 1972.
There was always a barrier between the way foreigners were treated by officials and the treatment of Yugoslav citizens. It was when we sought permission to get married that I pushed past that barrier. The Yugoslav government delayed permission for almost three months. I remember being interrogated at the Ministry of the Interior headquarters by two uniformed men, one at each end of a large room. They asked many questions and never once raised their heads to look at us. I remember the Ministry as long bleak corridors reeking of cigarette smoke, reams of forms to be filled out, waiting and waiting, and men everywhere in uniforms.
Things were quite different in the 1970's. The peasant milkmen had disappeared. You bought your milk in plastic containers at the local supermarket or grocery. Many families had hot water heaters, washing machines and refrigerators. It was harder to find a servant, for wages were higher in factories, but the appliances helped a bit and there were good day care centers. Some food was already prepackaged, you could buy cleaned poultry, and tomato paste and condiments came in tubes. The twig brooms of the street cleaners had been replaced by trucks. Litter now appeared everywhere - fruit juice containers, straws, paper bags, candy wrappers. Most of our colleagues and friends lived in their own apartments and, as professionals, earned good salaries. By the late 70's people we knew took long summer vacations on the Adriatic, went skiing in Austria and shopping in Italy, bought summer cottages, and cars. Tourism had tamed the gruffness of the bureaucracy, at least in the sections that showed. And the offices of the Ministry of the Interior where I had to apply for permission to stay in the country to do research, were attractively decorated, and staffed by women in civilian clothes.
It was no longer difficult for most people to get to get permission to leave the country. Thousands of Croats worked abroad as Gastarbeiter (guest workers), free to come and go as they pleased. The majority of them came from villages. Few returned as farmers. Some became taxi drivers with their modern German cars, other set up garages, or small roadside cafes and restaurants. The Gastarbeiter transformed the face of rural Croatia. Huge houses, German and Austrian style, lined village streets, three story houses which often took years to build.
The peasant migration to Zagreb was still in full force. It was quite common to see a peasant couple loaded down with baskets enter a modern apartment house for a family visit, or a student in blue jeans arm in arm with her aunt in traditional peasant dress who was up from the village for market day. At the main Zagreb market peasants offered antique folk costumes for sale to meet some family financial crisis. Craft shops were filled with brightly colored hand-woven linen tablecloths, dainty lace, hand embroidered blouses, carved wooden implements and figures, and beaten copper Turkish coffee pots. I remember the first time we saw Smotra Folklora in Zagreb in the summer of 1972. This was a huge celebration with dance groups from villages throughout Croatia, as well as the other republics and abroad. Zagreb citizens crowded the streets to see the official opening procession, laughed at risque song lines, shouted and clapped and called out to relatives or people from their villages, and went to free performances which were held day and night in open spaces all over town.
Nineteen seventy-one was the year of the Croatian "Spring" and 1972, the period of repression. The Croatian Communists who had led the demand for more economic autonomy within Yugoslavia were punished, as were the students and intellectuals who supported them. Matica Hrvatska which had spearheaded the national literary renaissance was closed, then turned into a publishing house. It became dangerous to claim that Croatian was a separate language, to be any kind of a Croatian nationalist. Prospects for a better political life within Yugoslavia seemed glum, but a successful economy smoothed the edges of despair. Phones were tapped, people spoke carefully, and a man at our bus stop shook his fist as Tito drove by in a closed car on the way to his villa.
Research in the 1970s and l980s became, on the one hand, easier because of technical improvements - Xerox machines, better microfilm facilities, better card catalogues. On the other hand, it was harder as the government began to put more restrictions on what and how and where work could be done.
By the second half of the l980s, standards in general were on the downward slide. In 1985-86 we rented a loft apartment, and discovered that Zagreb was packed from cellar to ceiling. Drying and storage areas were, often illegally, converted into needed apartments. and when we looked out we saw windows in every roof. Although traffic seemed as bad as ever, we knew many who had given up their cars because they were too expensive to run. The stores were packed with all kinds of goods, domestic and imported, but people bought carefully. Our friends worried about whether their children might have to go abroad to find work. Inflation was rampant, prices sometimes changed from day to day. Shopping was a challenge, for there were recurring shortages of meat, oil, coffee, gasoline. Fuel shortages led to occasional brownouts, which meant cold and dark homes and schools, closed factories. Magazines reported that hard times forced people to skimp on soap and toothpaste and deodorant. Old people collected discarded vegetables and fruits from under the tables at the market to eke out their pensions. Buildings, except in the center of town, and trams and busses looked shabbier.
There were few books of value in the used book stores, and the new books were terribly expensive. A university librarian and others were caught selling rare books from the collection at the University and National Library. Corruption seemed to grow. Colleagues expressed the feeling of being cut off from normal professional life, as subsidies for travel abroad, and money to buy foreign books and journals for research libraries disappeared. Yet the cafes were full, new boutiques appeared each month, and streets were crowded with cars. Perhaps the most secure in those days were people who earned a wage or salary in town, but lived or had family in a village. They could always be assured of food, and enough cash for basics.
The countryside looked prosperous in the mid l980s. Peasants brought their goods to markets in cars and trucks and busses. There were many small tractors. Children abounded but there were not many young people. A Slavonian peasant told us "In my nine hectares I grow more than my father did with sixty. But what good will it do me? One son is a tailor and the other wants to be a hair dresser. Neither wants to farm., and their wives want to live in town." I heard similar stories again and again.
Traditional handicrafts were dying out. The young people were too busy to learn the intricate stitches and weaving patterns. Tourists had bought up most of the peasant folk costumes, and what remained were sold piece by piece by dealers. The craft and tourist shops in cities were stocked with polyester tablecloths with machine embroidery, hand knitted sweaters and tourist kitsch- plates which said Zagreb, wooden plates with stylized pictures of peasant girls, little dolls you could hang from the mirror of your car.
In 1988, Smotra Folklora was held in large performance halls, except for the formal celebratory procession which wound its way through town. The Zagreb inhabitants did not seem particularly interested. Young people probably preferred to attend the Rock Concerts which blasted through the city on the hot summer nights. I noticed than many of the Croatian participants were "folk dance groups" with matching costumes. Folk dancing had become a relic to be preserved carefully by amateurs. Many of the "real" peasant performers were quite old. I remember a Slavonian group of old men and women who sang of young love and performed courting rituals - spinning bees, dances.
I traveled throughout Croatia in 1985-86, and I am so thankful that I could. The most valuable sources for my study of peasants were studies of villages done in the years 1895-1914 . These studies were framed by "Osnova" the questionnaire devised by Ante Radic, editor of Zbornik za narodni zivot i obicaje Juznih Slavena (ZNZO)(Journal of Southern Slav Folk Life and Culture) which was published by the Yugoslav Academy in Zagreb. Each was written by a member of the village studied: a literate peasant, the local schoolteacher, the priest, a secondary school or university student. The village studies range in length from ten pages to three thousand. Some were published in full or in part in ZNZO, but most remain in the Academy archives. I wanted to see the villages, study and copy parish records, look at cadastral maps, talk with old people and those interested in the history of their village. These plans were soon modified, for the Yugoslav government had erected all kinds of barriers against foreigners doing research in villages. I had seen anthropologists turned away again and again, only folklorists seemed to be granted permission to work in provincial and rural areas. Yet I imagined that a historian would be treated differently, since the villagers I studied were dead. The permission finally granted me by the authorities to conduct research on my topic "Croatian Peasants 1880-1914" had specific limitations: 1) I was to travel with a local scholar; 2) I was not to reside, even overnight, in any of the villages visited for reasons of research; 3) I was not to conduct research, even more specifically not to ask questions, in the village. In other words I could go as a tourist, and take nice pictures. I never was granted access to the cadastral map collection, which was under the control of the Army, although the maps I sought were from the 1890s.
I was most fortunate to find a colleague at the Jugoslav Academy who was willing to travel with me, and my husband came with us as chauffeur. Systematically, region by region, we traveled to the villages which had been studied for Zbornik. We walked through the villages, talked with people we met, looked at the local church and cemetery, visited local museums, and took hundreds of photographs, especially of houses which remained from the beginning of the century. There were, in fact, few old houses left. Smooth macadam roads linked village to village to town, big new houses lined village streets, larger villages had modern supermarkets. Some villages were not even in their original sites but had moved down to the road. I looked for the outlines of the past in the newly refurbished villages, noted how they fit into the topography, marveled at the diversity of architecture and type-the crowded little villages of the Croatian Zagorje with green fields going all the way to the top of the hills, the dispersed villages of Lika-houses huddled against stark mountains, the neat rows of houses lined by long side porches in Slavonia, the upland villages of Gorski Kotar almost hidden by dense forest, stark villages built of stone on the Dalmatian coast, the old wooden houses of Turopolje with turkeys guarding the gates, and villages which no longer existed, swept into the nearby town or city. We stayed overnight in little provincial towns, in hotels which ranged from luxurious to rustic. I began, in separate trips, to visit provincial archives and libraries, and spent a week in Osijek.
I visited other villages that year as well with friends and colleagues who knew I was interested. This were informal visits. I could ask questions then, for I was a guest. I still have many pictures in my mind from these trips, I do not know what remains.
Does Croatian history help to explain what is happening?
Croatia was an independent kingdom in the early middle ages. Her territory included what is today Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia and some of Bosnia. She lived the next eight centuries as a political unit with special rights first within the Hungarian Kingdom, then, as well, within the Habsburg Empire.
Croatia lies on the northern edge of a historical fault line which crosses the Balkans. On the Croatian side was the western Roman Empire, Roman Catholicism, Central Europe. Over the border was the eastern half of the Empire, the Orthodox world, and Islam. This fault line moved north and east at the height of Turkish power in the fifteen and sixteen century, as Dalmatia, the original center of the Croatian Kingdom, fell to Venice, and its hinterlands, Slavonia and most of Croatia, was taken by the Turks. What remained of the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia was divided between tiny Habsburg-controlled civil Croatia and the Croatian Military Frontier which policed the Turkish border. In the late 17th century this fault line moved south once more as Croatia and Slavonia were freed from Turkish rule. The depopulated formerly Turkish held lands of Croatia and Slavonia were resettled and divided between Habsburg and Hungarian Civil and Military authorities. In the 1870s and 1880s the Military Frontier was abolished and the territory was returned to Croatia, doubling her area and population. On the threshold of World War II, Dalmatia joined the rest of Croatia in the semi-autonomous Croatian Banovina, and remained within the Republic of Croatia in the new Yugoslavia. If the Croatian parts of Bosnia-Hercegovina should be added, the process would be complete. This last is supported, I believe, by the extreme nationalists, though not by most Croats.
The Turkish war of invasion, Turkish occupation and retreat changed the ethnic map of Croatia, for it brought large numbers of refugees from Turkish areas into Croatian lands, and lost many Croats to safe areas in Austria and Hungary. Once the conquered areas of Croatia and Slavonia were regained from the Turks, they had to be repopulated. Settlers poured in from Bosnia, Hercegovina, Dalmatia, Croatia, Hungary, the Holy Roman Empire. Although an enlarged Military Frontier was set up all along the new border with Turkey, it was a permeable membrane, and settlers kept coming in. Orthodox Christians made up the largest minority. Croats and Serbs within the Croatian lands were differentiated primarily by religion: Croats were Catholic and Serbs Orthodox.
When the Illyrians, the Croatian nationalists of the 1830s, decided on the form of the modern Croatian literary language, they chose the dialect most widely spoken in the historic Croatian lands, stokavian instead of kajkavian, the dialect of Zagreb, the Croatian cultural and political center. Stokavian was also the Southern Slav dialect spoken by the Serbs of the Turkish Empire. Therefore, instead of establishing a separate literary language as the Slovenes did, the Illyrian leaders created the Croatian variant of Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. The Illyrian leaders were aware that Catholic and Orthodox stokavian speakers in Dalmatia , Slavonia and the Military Frontier might reject kajkavian. The Illyrians wanted support against the Magyar nationalists who claimed Slavonia as their own. This would have left only the three small counties of Croatia to constitute the entire Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia.
The modern Croatian and Serbian literary languages evolved a little differently over the next 150 years, but they were generally perceived as a common language with regional particularities, somewhat like English and American. In the mid- 1970s, Croatian linguists and intellectual leaders pressed hard to have Croatian recognized as a separate language, and a compromise was finally reached in which the language could be called Serbo-Croatian, Croato-Serbian, Croatian or Serbian. Language has often be used as the symbol for the whole Croatian national struggle, when political debate is impossible.
Until the late 19th century the form of the literary language had little impact on the peasants, the vast majority of the population of the Croatian lands. They still lived in oral culture, and spoke many dialects and sub-dialects. This began to change when elementary education became widespread, literacy opened the villages to newspapers and popular literature, and young men from the village were exposed to the literary or standard language during their military training.
Before World War I, Serbs and Croats lived together peacefully in the mixed large villages of Slavonia, and the ethnically separate villages of the former Croatian Military Frontier. The village studies show that the peasants of Slavonia had only a regional identity before World War I, whereas those in Croatia were more aware of being either Croats or Serbs. The Serbs found their identity in the church, and their homeland in Croatia. Although the urban political parties had began to divide along Croatian and Serbian nationalist lines, the Croatian Peasant Party, founded at this time, emphasized the communality of being peasants , and reached out to both Serbs and Croats. Since few peasants were able to vote, we have no way of judging which party they would have supported.
The situation changed after World War I when Croatia became part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. She lost her traditional autonomy and saw her historic lands divided into meaningless administrative units in this new Serb dominated multinational kingdom. When the Croatian lunatic fringe, the Ustase, was put in power by the Fascist invaders in 1941, it turned on local Serbs. It is essential to remember that the Ustase regime was very narrowly based. Many more Croats fought on the side of the Partisans against the Ustashe.
I really didn't know who was a Croat or a Serb when I lived in Zagreb, and never asked. Croatia has assimilated settlers of many different origins. I have known Croats who are descended from Czechs, Hungarians, Italians, Germans, Serbs, Slovenes, Turks. Read the history of any village or town and note how diverse were the origins of the settlers. The Turkish wars, serfdom, re-population, urbanization in recent years, all have contributed to the underlying ethnic mix which is modern Croatia, although Catholic Croats are clearly in the majority.
Serbs have claimed that Croats will disenfranchise them in a Croatian nation state. Their fears were sparked by memories of World War II and Belgrade propaganda. The new Croatian constitution of 1990 protects minorities and grants a great deal of cultural autonomy. If the Milosevic regime in Belgrade had not stirred up and armed the Croatian Serbs in areas where they are concentrated, the transition to independence might have gone smoothly. Serbs are diffused throughout Croatia, with only a few scattered majority enclaves.
Yugoslavia has been in decline for at least a decade. When Tito died in 1980, observers predicted trouble, but nothing happened. The Yugoslavs discovered that Tito had left them with huge foreign debts, and the International Monetary Fund stepped in with loans and regulations. Tito's picture still hung in stores and public buildings, and a picture of him as an old man graced the new 5,000 dinar bill, nicknamed the "dead one." In the mid l980s Yugoslav teenagers still ran relay races across the country in the name of Tito. The young people in Zagreb joked about the "relay for a ghost" and, released from school to take part in the formalities, melted away to sit in cafes and chat. The Slovene university students said it was ridiculous to spend so much money on the Tito Relay, and suggested the funds be used to help unemployed youth find jobs.
The Soviet brand of socialism was highly centralized, the Yugoslav brand was increasingly decentralized. It is not surprising that the Communists themselves devolved into national parties, and that in a struggling economy, they sought to protect the interests of their own republics. Croatia and Slovenia complained that they carried an unfair economic burden within Yugoslavia. They earned the bulk of the foreign currency, but most of it was drained off to subsidize the south. The Party, besides breaking up into national components, was losing popularity. As Communism regimes collapsed one by one in Eastern Europe, it is not surprising that the same things happened in most of Yugoslavia. Slovenes and Croats were the first to demand and have multi-party free elections. The Communist nationalists still dominated Serbian politics. The newly elected non-Communist governments of Croatia and Slovenia sought a reorganization of the federation, one which would make it a confederation with looser ties. This was not acceptable to the Serbs.
The only institution which seemed to be holding together well was the army. The Yugoslav army was composed of draftees and a professional politically reliable officer corps. It was a large army for such a small state, armed with expensive modern weapons to protect the Cold War border. The draftees were young, dressed in baggy khakis, usually stationed far from home. During the Tito years there was a concerted attempt to make the citizens feel it was their army. When our girls were in elementary school in Zagreb, the whole school went one day to have "lunch with the soldiers" at the nearby base. The children carried their own metal dishes and cups, ate beans with the soldiers. The officers, on the other hand, were a privileged caste. They lived in greater comfort than ordinary people, with high salaries and special privileges. They were of course politically loyal to the regime and a number disproportionate to their percentage in the population of the Croatian Republic, were Serbs. The Croatian Communists, Security Police and regular police also had a heavy infusion of Serbs.
In addition there was the Territorial Defense Force. Yugoslavia was dotted with caches of arms to be used against the Russians and their allies if they invaded. I remember seeing an exercise in 1985 entitled "We will Not be Surprised." Zagreb streets and parks were filled with armed citizens in uniforms. Hospitals, schools, factories had closets full of weapons and high school students had regular paramilitary instruction. The Slovenes held on to their Territorial Defense weaponry as Yugoslavia began to pull apart, but the Croats and citizens of Bosnia-Hercegovina were disarmed by the Yugoslav Army before the beginning of hostilities. Once Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in June of 1991, war began, the war of a modern army, air force and navy, against unarmed or poorly armed citizens.
Independence came easily for the Slovenes. Their war against the Yugoslav army took place when the world had little else to watch on TV, it was beautifully publicized, not very bloody and over quickly. The Slovenes had their own language and territory, did not share a common border with Serbia, and did not have a Serbian minority. The Croatian war has been long and bloody. Bosnia-Hercegovina is now burning as well, and the pundits wait for the next outbreak in Kossovo, in Macedonia, Sanjak, Vojvodina. Croatia now has millions of refugees, thousands dead, an infrastructure in ruins, irreparable ecological damage, and large belts of territory under Serbian occupation.
The end is not in sight as I write. There are already too many victims. It will take decades before the areas wracked by war recover. I think back to our trip to Slavonski Brod in 1986. My husband pointed out where he had lived as a child, talked of being bombed out, of going to school in wartime, of corpses on the main square and hunger. The past seemed long ago as we walked the streets of that charming industrial town on the river across from Bosnia. Tonight I will turn on the radio and listen to the news and hear of the new shelling of Slavonski Brod. This will also become history, but now it is too close to fully understand.
Posted:12/24/96
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