The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans

by Simon Winchester

  Mr. Erlih’s testimony, given in a quiet courtroom on this ordinary warm spring day in a town that, beyond the courtroom, was bustling merrily with all the pleasantries of European café society, was heartbreaking. “Abuse and beatings took place on a daily basis,” this neatly dressed, dignified old Belgrade Jew told the court, “because every Ustashi officer had unlimited power, and the possibility to kill without being punished. Day after day I saw the women and children of Jasenovac going off to be killed. They knew where they were going, but they did not cry. They were singing.”

  And they were singing, too, in the cathedral, on the day we visited. A small chorus of nuns from a distant nunnery were rehearsing old compline psalms. There was still a line of housewives in front of the cardinal’s tomb, many of them carrying bags of fresh farm produce from the nearby Dolac vegetable market (to which Mrs. Thatcher had once been taken, as stall holders liked to tell me). Had these women any idea, I wondered but was unable to ask, what this man was really supposed to have done? Or had they thought the stories about him to be mere propaganda, dismissing any errors as those of a naive man with poor judgment? After all, there are some who believe that late in the war, when the scale of atrocities grew truly vast, Stepinac declared himself publicly against the Ustashis’ murderous campaigns. One biographer says that he harbored Jews in the cathedral grounds, another who interviewed him in the 1950s said that the old archbishop felt himself to be a victim, a cleric placed in an impossible position and forced “to suffer for his church.”

  Certainly the Vatican has been grateful for his stand against Communism; certainly the Holy See has sympathized with his stated aim of preserving Croatia as a civilized and Western-looking Catholic state, not allowing it to fall prey to either the hated Eastern ways of the Orthodox Church or to the even further Eastern ways of the Muslims. Pope Pius XII made him a cardinal in 1952, and if the Vatican then ever investigated his infuriatingly vague wartime record, which came complete with a diary with a large number of puzzlingly missing pages, it never said what it found.

  And then in 1998 Pope John Paul II came to Croatia and announced the formal beatification of the cardinal, and the possibility remains that he may yet be declared a saint. His standing now is very different from what it was when he died in 1962: He had been under house arrest then, accused of having collaborating with the fascists. But then again, in 1962 his country was Communist, and dominated by Serbs. Today it is Catholic, and dominated by his own. The legacy of Alojzije Stepinac is a clouded and confused affair, suffused with dreadful stories, and mired in the classic Balkan hatreds, ancient and modern.

  The criminality, or culpability, of the cardinal’s wartime role has yet be proved, and may never be; the terror inflicted by the Ustashi, by contrast, is admitted, and recorded, just as the Nazi crimes were, in stupefying detail. The historian Milovan Djilas painted an all-too-vivid series of descriptions of events he saw as a partisan fighter. He wrote, for example, of an incident in 1941 when a gang of Ustashi, together with some Muslim toughs who were along for the ride, rounded up all the Serbs in a village called Miljevina and slit their throats while hanging them over the edge of the community wine vat, so that their gushing blood would take the place of grape pulp. There are stories, too, of Ustashi thugs capturing Serb partisans and tying them down and cutting their heads off with saws—sawing their necks, back and forth, with deliberate and agonizing slowness.

  The common feature in all of these accounts, of course, is that the victims were Serbs. Which might beg the all-too-obvious question that had puzzled me long before I first came to the Balkans: What, if this was Croatia, were the seemingly very large numbers of Serbs doing there in the first place?

  The answer goes back to the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs, as so many of the trials of the region seem to do. I had my first proper explanation of it when we picked up a hitchhiker on the main road from Zagreb to a once-important little town called Karlovac, thirty miles to the southwest. She was a young student named Maria Oreskovic; she was twenty-three, a Croat, a Catholic, was studying economics, and when we picked her up, she was on her way home. I told her I knew that Karlovac had played some important role in Balkan history but confessed that I wasn’t sure quite what. Maria was only too happy to help. “I give directions,” she said. “I show you why my hometown matters.”

  An hour later the three of us were standing in the courtyard of a curiously tall wood-and-stone structure that stood on a low and windy hill a mile or so out of town. The main tower was square, four storied, about sixty feet tall, and with what seemed to be an open viewing platform under the eaves. Thick brick walls surrounded the small court, and rising from two of its three corners were smaller towers, with galleries connecting them. The building was known generally as Dubovac Old Town, and it was where the Austrian border guards had kept watch over the vanguard sentries of the Ottomans—it marked the very edge of the Hapsburg Empire, and, just a few miles away, the beginning of what Alexander William Kinglake, in that most classic of travel books, Eothen (1844), called the “land of the Osmanlees.”

  The building, five hundred years old or more, is now run as a country inn. It was deserted, thanks to the war that was being fought just a few dozen miles away, and the manager was happy to give us coffee and then, after we expressed a keen interest in looking over the building, lunch as well. I climbed up through the galleries to the very top, and hoisted myself into what was indeed an old reconnaissance platform. It was from here, for three centuries or more, that the Grenzer, the frontier garrison chiefs of the Hapsburg armies, stood sentry duty to protect the outer reaches of their immense empire.

  Whatever Clemens von Metternich might have said about the Orient having its beginning at the Rennweg or the Ringstrasse or the Oststrasse, the undeniable truth was that the one empire ended here, and the other began here. The Old Town of Dubovac was military headquarters for that vexed artifice known as the Krajina, whose existence is the main reason that there are now, or have until recently been, so many Serbs inside the territory of Croatia.

  If the underlying crust of the earth in the Balkans is cracked and shifting along great tectonic fault lines, so the people on the Balkan surface are affected by the faulty lines made by man—and in this region, there is no more important fault line than the Krajina. The word is Serbo-Croatian, and it means “edge,” “boundary,” “border,” “frontier.” Officially the region was known as the Vojna Krajina, the Military Frontier District, and it was basically one huge exclusion zone. Outside, to the west and north, were the Hapsburg-held provinces of Croatia and Slovenia; inside, east and south, the Turkish-held statelets of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Serbia.

  The Krajina was probably not hugely different in its concept or nature from exclusion zones created by more recent Communists and Western governments, as barrier regions, or as buffer zones on one side or both of their more sensitive national borders. There used to be an infamous such zone in southern Bulgaria, for example, twelve miles wide: There could be no villages there, no people at all, in the last twelve miles before Bulgaria became Turkey. It was designed so that no Bulgar ever saw a Turk, nor was any Bulgar ever tempted to drop everything and make a dash for it. (The Turks, one suspects, would never want to anyway.)

  The Austrians created their Krajina in the last years of the seventeenth century as a direct response to the failed siege, since the throne had an understandable case of the jitters in case another Kara Mustafa might one day make another lunge for its city. In their making of the frontier, however, the Austrians incorporated one signal difference, one which has since made the word Krajina, in general Balkan terms, synonymous with the very worst kinds of violence, mayhem, and ethnic purging.

  What the Hofburg bureaucrats decided was that, rather than leave the border regions unpopulated, they would allow, and would indeed encourage, the settlement there of Slavs who were fleeing from the strictures of Ottoman rule. And not just Slavs: Serbs. Scores upon scores of thousands of Serbs.

 
; It was the Serbs in Serbia and Bosnia, after all, who were feeling the crushing weight of the Ottoman yoke. It was Serbs who were most violently opposed to anything and everything that the Turks might do. Who better, then—who more highly motivated?—than the Serbs, to ward the Turks away from Austrian territory. And so the Austrians were generous to a fault with the new settlers (especially since the land they were settling the Serbs on was not actually Austrian territory, but Croatian.)

  So when in the late seventeenth century the Orthodox patriarch of the Kosovan cathedral town of Pec led thirty thousand of his faithful to escape the wrath of the Turks, and brought them to sanctuary in the Hapsburg borderland, the Austrians gladly acquiesced. They gave the refugees territory, religious freedom, hope. They apportioned them land, they helped them build farms, they allowed them to reconstruct their Orthodox churches and schools and to write their language, they gave them a degree of autonomy the Croats and the Slovenes did not enjoy—and they permitted them, most significantly of all, to arm themselves, to become a territorial defense force.*

  By doing so, the Viennese thought, they would spare the haughty and dignified Austrian Grenzer the grubby business of ever battling with the Muslims. The closest they might wish to get to the sharp end of the situation was the fortress on top of the hill by Karlovac. “Let the Serbs do our fighting for us,” said the smooth and powdered officials at the Hofburg. “They have suffered already, they know what it is like, and they have their dander up.”

  So, without the very Germanic and thus very foreign Austrians ever quite realizing what they had done, without ever quite foreseeing the implications of their strategy, they succeeded with one stroke of a courtier’s pen in sowing the seeds for centuries of ethnic division.

  For from the early seventeenth century onward, and fermenting quietly on the margins of what would one day become the overwhelmingly Catholic Republic of Croatia, the Austrians created a land of prosperous farmers and merchants who, rather than looking westward across the Adriatic to Venice and Rome, and rather than owing political loyalty to the House of Hapsburg and any intellectual connection to the West, were a people facing resolutely East. The people of the Krajina owed their loyalties instead to Byzantium and Athens and, indeed, to Moscow, and (to underline this point) they wrote and read in Cyrillic script, and would, in this century, become natural ultimate vehicles for the expansion of Marxism. And then again today, when Croatia wanted its independence from Yugoslavia, these, the people of the Krajina, were the people whose loyalty was not to Croatia at all but to Serbia and Belgrade—which loyalty held them back, made them rebel, made them suspect, made them fight.

  For each and all of these reasons the hundreds of thousands of independent-minded, well-armed, and very different people who inhabited the long and scythe-shaped Krajina, which stretched from the Serbian border along north Bosnia and down the Dinaric Alps to where Dubrovnik stands today, were to become victims of the Croat slaughter, and, in due course, were to retaliate in kind. On what was considered sacred Croatian soil, a million miseries—and all because of what the Austrians so airily created and ran from their fortress high on a windy hill.*

  Maria still had a little while before she was due to go home to baby-sit her younger sister. “Why not come into the Krajina?” she smiled. “To see what it means.” And so we drove down from the hillside, and into lush springtime countryside with fields and fat cows and tall grass, and which could for all the world have been Oxfordshire or Connecticut. The flyblown suburbs of Karlovac soon faded in the mirror. Ahead were some low hills, and beyond them, the frontier proper and Bosnia. In between, according to the map, were a couple of slow rivers and a number of villages. Indeed, there was a scattering of houses in a fold in the hills ahead—but houses that, when we first came close enough to see, were all ruined, all smashed, all burned and roofless and wrecked. It was my first sight of the wreckage of this war, and I stared, open-mouthed, at what I could barely believe.

  “You get used to it,” said Maria, still smiling. “Part of the landscape here. I guess you can say it’s part of our history now.”

  This must once have been a Croat village, on the outer edge of the Krajina itself. There was a small Catholic church, ruined too. The damage must have been done, and probably back in the early nineties, by Serbs who made forays out of their own villages close to the border, just to bloody the Croats’ noses, to show them who was master. On some of the walls inside the more spectacularly wrecked Catholic houses I could see the most potent of Serb symbols, a cross with four Cyrillic Cs (signifying S ), the two on the left facing backwards, giving the device perfect bilateral symmetry. The letters stand for Samo Sloga Srbina Spasava, or “Only Unity Can Save the Serb.”

  In other circumstances it might have been a rather pleasing, rather elegant device—but before long, and after seeing it a thousand times on wrecked houses and torched cars and on mutilated victims, painted or carved or burned onto their stomachs or faces, it came only to represent hatred and horror, like a swastika. Ovo je Srbija was scrawled on many houses here too, lest anyone forget: “This is Serbia.”

  But of course it wasn’t then, and it isn’t now. We were still very much in Croatia, and the ruins past which we were driving were simply the scars of a recent war. The Serbs had lost this piece of territory, had been beaten back, had been forced back into Bosnia across the frontier, or far away into Serbia itself, or into Kosovo or Montenegro. At least that’s what I thought.

  And then we turned left off the main road, and up a winding country lane, under a bower of apple blossoms, where a beautiful young girl stood holding a brown cow by a string through its nose. We drove into the grassy courtyard of a small farm. Two men sat at a rough oak table, smoking and talking quietly in the early spring sunshine. I stopped the engine, and one of the men got up and walked over to us, smiling and extending a welcoming hand. I introduced myself, Maria doing the translating.

  We were in a hamlet called Cerovac, this farmer was called Duro Relja, and he was forty-seven. He had lived on this farm all his life. The girl with the cow was his only daughter, a Maria too. There was his wife—he pointed at a darkened doorway, where a shy middle-aged woman in black stood, playing idly with a large pig. His friend here was Milosan Obradovic—“come on over, Milo! Don’t be so lazy. How often do you get to meet a man from England!”—and he had come up that day before from Montenegro, an eight-hour drive. Would I care for a glass of rakija, plum brandy? His wife bustled over with a bottle. “Homemade,” she said in English. “I hope you like.”

  We raised our glasses—Zivjeli! I was taught to say—and talked long into the warm afternoon, while the cow noisily cropped the long damp grass, the lambs bleated on the hillsides across the valley, and the blackbirds sang. His was a hard life, he said: He had a couple of dairy cows, maybe thirty sheep, he sold apples from his orchard, he had a field set to potatoes. He made only a modest living. And then—and at this point Duro Relja rose, and beckoned for me to follow him around the back of his house, the side that faced the valley—there was this.

  The back of his farmhouse was wrecked, the walls smashed by a direct hit from a shell, the room inside, the bed still lying there in pieces, blackened and scarred by shrapnel. It had been in 1995, when the Croat forces had occupied the Krajina, and most of the Serbs had been forced out. He pointed to where he thought the gun emplacement had been. He thought he knew the man who had fired the shot. “Some Ustashi bastard,” he said.

  Wait a minute. Come again?, I thought. A Croat gunner firing at a Croat? What was going on? “But you’re a Croat, right? A Catholic, right?” Dura Relja and his friend and Maria laughed. “No, no!” he said. “You never asked us. We are not Croats at all. We are Serbs. We are Serbs who stayed here. They tried to get us out—but here on this side of the valley, everyone likes us. Yes, there was some bastard of an artilleryman who wanted to force us out. And he was only following orders from some politician in Zagreb. I think I know who the gunner was. I know him. I’d s
ee him at the market. I think I could meet him again. But anyway, the neighbors here,”—and he pointed to another farm, which looked relatively unscarred, set on a hillside nearby—“they told us to stay on, if we could bear to. They helped us repair the house a little. They were Croats, and yet they didn’t see us as the enemy.

  “And of course, we’re not. We’re all Slavs here. You must have been told that. We’re the same people. And there are some places, like this village, thank God, where people think like that still.

  “But my God, it was so much easier when it was all Yugoslavia. So much easier. But anyway,”—and his wife filled the glasses again, and emptied the bottle of the colorless, fiery liquid—“let’s drink to better times. Zivjeli!”

  We got up to go. Overhead there was a low rumbling, and I looked up into the violet evening sky. There were four, five, six vapor trails, the thin gossamer traces of a squadron of highflying jet planes. They were close together, heading east.

  “Bombers,” said Duro Relja, tensely. “Off to attack Belgrade. The Americans. You English too. Off to kill some Serbs.” He pounded his fist on the old oak table, angry now. “It is such a pity. Why can’t everywhere be peaceful, like this village here? In Cerovac it all seems so simple. But why is the world going so mad?”

  We took Maria home, to a neat house back in the Karlovac suburbs. Her father was mowing the lawn, taking care not to disturb a plastic gnome who fished patiently in a small artificial pool. We turned the car around by a wrecked bridge, one almost destroyed, said Maria, in the 1991 fighting, and which, like Mr. Relja’s wrecked farm, no one had found the money to repair.