Tito and the Croats
Richard West
My colleague Auberon Waugh, who normally writes this column (and we all here wish him a quick recovery from his illness) is less well-known as the chairman of the Anglo-Croatian Society, an odd post, one might think, until one remembers that Evelyn Waugh served in Croatia in 1944 and was afterwards turned down for the job of British consul in Dubrovnik. Most of the Croats are Roman Catholic and tend to resent the Orthodox Serbs who ran Yugoslavia for its first twenty years as a state after the first world war. Many Croatian Catholics and most foreign Catholics like Evelyn Waugh, also opposed the Communist Tito regime which took power after the Second World War. I suspect that Bron may have a certain sympathy for the Croat separatists who last week hijacked a plane from Chicago to Paris, scattering leaflets on London en route, so it is really rather unfair of me to fill up his page with what he will surely consider Serbian, Titoist propaganda. I prefer to call it an analysis of the Croat question.
Most of the Yugoslays that one meets on holiday will be Croats for they occupy almost all the Dalmatian "Coast as well as much of the northern hinterland. The Slovenes of North-east Yugoslavia are Catholics like the Croats but get on better with the Serbs. The main differences between the Serbs and Croats are cultural and historic: the Serbs were ruled for hundreds of years by Turkey and the Croats by Austria-Hungary with the result that the Croats regard the Serbs as Balkan boors and the Serbs think of the Croats as pretentious, snobbish and pro-German. When Yugoslavia was formed in 1919 as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the King was a Serb with an arrogant attitude to the Croats.
Since neither the Serbs nor Croats are very pious, the religious difference is largely a pretext for national hatted. Nor is the language problem real for Serb and Croat are rather less different than Yorkshire and Lancashire, the main distinction involving the way to pronounce the vowel `e' and to spell the word for vagina which is 'pichka' in Serb and `pizda' in Croat. The word is used in an oath that punctuates almost every sentence in the conversation of many Yugoslays. The Croats also like to use Slav words for foreign usages, say:glazba for music and nogomet for football, where the Serbs say muzika and futbol. The more elaborate Croat coinages are mocked by Serbs who say that the Croat word for a belt is strip-of-leather-to-put-round-yourtrousers-to-stop-them-falling-off. Although these differences may seem trivial to out
siders, they are still of keen interest to the Yugoslays so that nowadays, by law, the language has to be called Croato-Serb as often as it is called Serbo-Croat.
Yugoslavia between the wars was beset by all kinds of national problems. The Italians had seized the Dalmatian coast as far down as Rijeka (Fiume); the Bulgarians claimed all Macedonia, whose own terrorist group, the I M RO blew up a whole churchful of dignitaries in Sofia; the Hungarian, Albanian and Rumanian minorities all claimed independence from the new Yugoslavia. The Croats were the most serious problem only because they formed the second largest group after the Serbs.
The Croat terrorist gang, the Ustashi, sprang up in the 'twenties and won international ignominy by murdering King Alexander and the French foreign minister at Marseilles. The Ustashi leader Ante Pavelic came to power in 1941, after the conquest of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers, and promptly began a massacre of the Serbs and Jews in Croatia and Bosnia. They wiped out whole villages at a time, usually by crowding the Serbs into their church, setting fire to it and machine-gunning those who tried to escape. The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte has described how Pavelic, after being interviewed, proudly showed him a bKket full of recently gougedout eyes brought back by the Ustashi from one of their expeditions.
These massacres were carried out in the name of the Catholic Church and to some extent with its connivance. The Bishop of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, publicly praised the Ustashi for their 'crusade'; the Croatian Cardinal Stepinac made no firm protest; nor did the Papacy, which before the war had broken diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia. Not surprisingly, all Croat Catholics, including those who disliked the Ustashi, suffered retaliation attacks from the Serb Chetnik guerrillas and from the Communist Partisans. The latter have always received most support from the Serb and eastern part of the country, although Tito himself is a Croat. After the war Tito had Cardinal Stepinac locked up in the same prison where he himself had served a sentence before the war but the loathsome Pavelic escaped the execution he so richly deserved, settling in South America where he died a few years ago.
For the first ten years or so of the Communist government, the police had the power to crush right-wing extremists, indeed all opponents. But by the 'sixties, the atmosphere of the country had much relaxed; Yugoslays could travel freely abroad and indeed hundreds of thousands went to work in West Germany, Belgium and Scandinavia. Anti-Serb if not actually separatist feeling was once more voiced in Croatia, especially in the universities and within the Croatian Communist Party. Hostility to the Serbs was focused on one man, the Interior Minister Alexander Rankovic, who was both a Serb chauvinist and the head of the secret police. He is indeed a disagreeable character: once when Khrushchev was paying a state visit to Yugpslavia, the two leaders, with Rankovic, were invited to watch a display of rollerskating by schoolgirls in Slovenia. One of the girls slipped and fell down heavily on her bottom, a mishap watched by Tito and Khrushchev with diplomatic gravity. But the hatchet features of Rankovic burst into a broad smile of unmistakable happiness, the only time I have seen him smile in public.
During the mid-'sixties, Ustashi exiles from South America and West Germany began a series of terror attacks inside Yugoslavia. Bombs were left in cinemas in Belgrade; Yugoslav diplomats were assassinated; the Yugoslav airline was first to institute security checks on baggage. In spite of this an Ustashi bomb destroyed a plane over Czechoslovakia, killing everyone but an air hostess who fell 33,000 feet but miraculously received only slight injuries. Anti-Croat feeling flared in Serbia, where Rankovic won new and surprising popularity. Shortly after Tito sacked him, in 1968, Rankovic was clapped on entering a restaurant in Belgrade.
Nevertheless Tito was proved wise in dismissing Rankovic, for since then SerbCroat relations have proved more amiable. It is a credit to the Yugoslav security troops and police that they have managed to stop the Ustashi terrorists inside Yugoslavia without re-introducing the full rigours of a police state. The failure of the Ustashi inside Yugoslavia indicates that they get little support, which is why they have to resort to hijacking a plane in Chicago in order to further their cause. Nor can the Croats claim to be fighting a holy war, for Tito has made an ally, indeed a friend of the Pope—which Bron Waugh would no doubt regard as final proof of his infamy.
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