Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  Defenders of the Croatian position insist that these fears were manipulated by Milošević. They certainly were, yet, in the broader context of the collapse of the inter-ethnic Yugoslav state, Serbs had reason to be afraid. War was the result of an interacting spiral of Serbian expansionism, Croatian independence, and Serbian ethnic paranoia in Croatia.

  The final explosion was detonated in the summer of 1991 by battles in Serbian areas of Croatia for control of the key seat of local power, the police station. In Serb villages like Borovo Selo in western Slavonia, when the Croatian state dismissed local Serbian policemen, they proceeded to arm and set themselves up as vigilantes. When the Croats tried to restore their authority in Serbian areas, they were fired upon and roadblocks were set up at the entrances to villages. With the Croatians unable to control Serbian areas of their state, the Yugoslav National Army stepped in, at first to restore order and then to smash Croatian independence. Croatia then had no option but to fight for its survival. After six months of tenacious resistance, it found itself, at the cease-fire of February 1992, with a third of its national territory occupied by the rump state of Serbian Krajina and its supply routes to the Dalmatian coast blockaded by the Serbian paramilitaries in Knin. Twenty-five thousand UN troops now keep the two sides apart at checkpoints scattered across all of Croatia’s main road networks. The war in Croatia has subsided into an armed truce, but the basic conflict between Serbs and Croats rages on south of the Sava River, as the two fight to divide Bosnia-Hercegovina at the expense of the Muslims.

  THE HIGHWAY OF BROTHERHOOD AND UNITY

  I began my journey where it used to begin every summer of my Yugoslav childhood, on the highway between Belgrade and Zagreb. This was the highway we traveled, in a magnificent black Buick with lots of fins and chrome, to Lake Bled in Slovenia. It was called the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity and it was built, with a typically Titoist mixture of genuine national enthusiasm and socialist forced labor, to link together the economics of the two central republics, Croatia and Serbia. For three hundred kilometers, it runs parallel to the Sava River, through the Slavonian plain, some of the flattest and richest farmland in Europe.

  I began by visiting Tito’s birthplace in Kumrovec, which is off the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity on the Slovenian border, in a hilly region of northeastern Croatia known for the sharp tang of its white wine and the disputatiousness of its people.

  Kumrovec was preserved as in one of the socialist newsreels I used to see in the Belgrade cinema in the 1950s. The sun was shining. The apple blossom was shimmering in the spring breeze. Peasants rolled through the village on hay carts. Outside the whitewashed farmhouse, there was a bronze statue of Tito as partisan hero, in his greatcoat, striding ahead, deep in thought. Inside the house where the great leader was born, to a Croatian father and Slovenian mother (the perfect Yugoslav parentage), I inspected the maize-filled mattress where he may have slept; his report card in an Austro-Hungarian school; his photograph as a Comintern agent during the 1930s; his fake Swedish passport used during the partisan war; his field glasses, his splendidly vain white partisan uniform, with red-and-gold epaulettes; the map of his wartime campaigns, which showed how much of the partisan campaign was fought where the Bosnian war rages now; his postwar “travels for peace” as head of the nonaligned movement: each capital visited was rewarded with a red star. Some places, like Cairo and New Delhi, had a dozen red stars each; other remote places, like Santiago, Chile, or Ottawa, Canada, only one.

  I was shown around by the local schoolteacher, a small, disappointed man with the red-rimmed eyes and broken veins of a drinker. When I asked his name, he made a small, nervous bow

  “Ivan Broz.”

  “So you are a relative?” Tito was a nom de guerre. His family name was Broz.

  “A distant cousin,” said Ivan, poker-faced. But later, when he was showing me the marshal’s partisan uniform, he whispered, “Once we took it out of the display case for a dusting, and I tried it on.” He looked about furtively, smiling and showing his stained yellow teeth. “It fitted perfectly.”

  Had he ever met Tito in person? Once, he said, when Tito took President Nixon to see his humble beginnings in Kumrovec. Ivan, then a schoolboy, was chosen to present a bouquet to Pat Nixon, while a girl was chosen to present flowers to the American President. For weeks, they were drilled in their bow and their curtsy, and then when the great moment came, it was over in a flash. “Afterward, the girl received a pen set and a signed autograph from the President. I got nothing. Such is life.”

  But Tito?

  Ivan remembers the dictator’s eyes trained upon him. “He was a politician. You never knew what he thought.”

  Did people still come to visit here, I wanted to know. Oh yes, Ivan assured me. But the place was empty. There were no coaches in the parking lot, no families picnicking in the park, no one but me poring over the exhibits.

  In one of the cases, there was a photo of Tito at an international conference, sitting behind a little sign reading: “Yugoslavia.” Someone had violently scratched out the name of the country with a ballpoint pen.

  Why, I asked. Ivan shrugged his shoulders. “It is not a popular name now in Croatia” was all he would venture.

  “Did you always feel more Croatian than Yugoslav?” I asked him. “Always,” said Tito’s sad cousin.

  BACK ON THE HIGHWAY of Brotherhood and Unity, I soon became aware what an odd highway it is. First of all, the green destination signs have all been painted over. I stop at one of them and take a closer look. The highway sign says I am headed toward Lipovac, but when I peel back the Lipovac decal on top, the word Belgrade appears beneath. The highway still does go all the way to the Serbian capital, but as far as Croatia is concerned, that destination has disappeared. Officially speaking, therefore, I am on a highway to nowhere.

  About forty kilometers past Zagreb, the Croatian traffic begins taking the exits, leaving the highway to me. Soon I am the only civilian car on the road, besides the UN jeeps and lorries heading out from Zagreb to the checkpoints along the route. I have a superb four-lane motorway all to myself. I stop, get out, cross both lanes and back again. No one. Then I get into the car, take it up to 115 miles an hour, feeling full of adolescent elation. I roar up to a tollbooth, only to discover that its windows are smashed and the booths are empty, though the hazard lights continue to blink on and off. I back up and take the tollbooth at full speed.

  I have no company except for hawks, who circle above the deserted highway looking for field mice, and feral cats who prowl along the grassy uncut verges. But from time to time, I can just make out the flash of sunlight on the binoculars of Croatian spotter teams dug into the motorway exit ramps. They must be wondering what a civilian car is doing using this deserted stretch of motorway as a drag strip.

  I have Austrian plates on the car. With Croatian or Serbian plates, I couldn’t proceed beyond any of the checkpoints ahead. I am also equipped with a UNPROFOR pass, the essential passport for the UN protection zones I am about to enter. In the boot of the car are some canisters of extra petrol, to get me through the Serbian zones, which are under a fuel embargo. Besides the canisters, there is a flak jacket. I put it on once, and took it off immediately. It is ludicrously cumbersome and in practice useless. All you think about when you are wearing one is the parts of your body that remain exposed. Besides, the canisters have already leaked onto the flak jacket, ensuring that if I do get hit while wearing it, I will burst into flames.

  About seventy kilometers east of Zagreb, I spot the first signs of war: the guardrails on the central median strip have been chewed up and strewn about one of the lanes. Then I begin to feel the track marks left behind in the road surface by the passage of tanks and armored personnel carriers. Farther on, the road is pocked and pitted with mortar blasts. On one of the motorway bridges, I spot my first sign of the cross with four Cyrillic “C’s” in each quadrant, standing for the Serbian motto: “Only Unity can Save the Serbs.” On the next motorway br
idge, I see the “U” for Ustashe, together with the checkered flag, theŠahovnica. On my left a rusted and burned-out bus, lying on its side by an exit ramp, its roof sheared away by some form of incoming fire. I have reached the edge of the war zone.

  JASENOVAC

  At the Jordanian headquarters at Novska, seventy kilometers east of Zagreb, a UN jeep meets me and leads my car down a shell-pocked feeder road, over a pontoon bridge, and past the Serb and Croat checkpoints, and drops me off at a blasted and wrecked shell of a building that used to house the Jasenovac museum and memorial center.

  Between 1941 and 1945, trains drew up at the railhead ramp on the other side of a vast, low, marshy field that slopes down to the Sava River. Jews and Serbs, Gypsies and Croatian Communists were herded out of the sealed wagons and pushed down the ramp to the rows of barracks behind the barbed wire. They were put to work in the brick factory, and when they were used up they were burned in the brick ovens or shot in the back of the head and then dumped in the Sava River.

  No one knows exactly how many people died in the bare field behind the museum where the barracks and barbed wire once stood. Serbs and Croats cannot even reach agreement about this. Serbs maintain the figure is 700,000. There isn’t a Serb village in central Croatia that didn’t lose someone in this place. Croats insist that the number is no more than 40,000. Independent researchers have put the total number of people exterminated at Jasenovac in the region of 250,000, but no one can be sure.

  It seems nearly as difficult to come to terms with what happened only two years ago, when the war of 1991 reached Jasenovac. For I am walking into a museum that has been systematically destroyed. Every book in the library has been ripped up and tossed onto the floor. Every glass exhibit case has been smashed. Every photograph has been defaced. Every file has been pulled out of every drawer, every table and chair has been upended, all the curtains have been cut to ribbons, all the windows have been smashed, and all the walls have been daubed with excrement and slogans. Some quite amazing hatred of the past has taken hold of the people who did this: as if by destroying the museum, they hoped to destroy the memory of what was done here.

  Several thousand Croat militia were billeted in the museum in October 1991, and it is likely that they vandalized the place, although the walls have also been defaced with graffiti left behind by the Serbs who shelled the center and retook it from the Croats.

  I wade through rooms shin-deep in ripped books and torn photographs, and with these I can struggle to piece together what the exhibits might have been like. On the floor, a picture of a crowd of prisoners waiting at the barbed wire lies beside a photograph of a young woman, her hair in plaits, leaning on a fence. Next to that a photo of a prelate shaking hands with an SS officer lies on top of a pile of ripped-up prisoner’s files, and beside that, shredded portraits of Tito. The whole history of Yugoslavia seems to lie amid the shattered glass and filth at my feet.

  I can see how the children struggled to understand what they were told by the museum guides, because their drawings lie scattered all over: barbed wire, barracks, and guards in bright watercolors, the walking skeletons at the brick-works, as seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old trying to understand.

  Among the shards of glass and masonry I find scraps of film, ripped from the projectors in the museum cinema. Bending down in the filth, I hold the frames up to the light through the shattered windows open to the sky. In one strip of film I see frame after frame of an old man weeping; in another, a starved woman tottering down the road; in another strip of film, eighteen frames of a headless corpse.

  Light streams through a gaping shell hole in the roof of the lecture theater, and a lectern is all that remains standing in the burned-out wreckage of seats and cinema screen and wall paneling. On the front of the lectern there are the words, in Serbo-Croatian, that mean: Lest We Forget.

  I walk out into the field behind the museum, now strewn with artillery shell casings, toward the railway cars, their ventilation holes sealed with barbed wire. I ask myself how such a place can ever be drained of its capacity to poison the living.

  After 1945, Tito had the camp bulldozed in the hope that Serbs and Croats might forget. Then, in the 1960s, when Tito supposed the wounds had healed, the memorial center was opened. But after all the school visits and lectures and film showings, Yugoslavia never came to terms with what happened here. The past remained unmastered and unforgiven.

  If the new Croatian state, proclaimed in May 1990, made one central mistake on the road to war, it was its failure publicly to disavow the Ustashe state and what it did at Jasenovac. The President of free Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, fought the Ustashe as a young partisan, but in the euphoria of independence he tried to unite all of Croatia’s tortured past into what was called a national synthesis. So he never came to Jasenovac. He never got down on his knees, as Willy Brandt did at Auschwitz. If he had done so, Serbs and Croats might have begun the process of ending the past, instead of living it over and over. Because Tudjman did not come here, Serbs in Croatia were manipulated by Belgrade and by their local leaders into believing that the new Croatia was the fascist Ustashe come again.

  Serbs scoff when you say Tudjman should have atoned for Jasenovac. “Are you crazy?” they say. His party was financed by Croatians abroad, in Toronto and Melbourne. And who were they? Old Ustashe.

  But the problem of confronting the past runs deeper than that. The wartime Ustashe state was Croatia’s first experience of independent nationhood. It has proved impossible for Croatian nationalists to disavow a nationhood that was fascist. Instead, Croatians evade the issue altogether, either by dismissing tales of Ustashe atrocity as Serbian propaganda, or by attempting to airbrush atrocity into crime by playing statistical sleight of hand with the numbers who died here. Finally, it appears, some Croats have dealt with Jasenovac by trying to vandalize its remains.

  It is always said that aggression begins in denial and that violence originates in guilt. A nation that cannot repudiate a fascist past may condemn itself to a fascist future. True enough. But there is another equally imprisoning mechanism at work. If your enemies call you a fascist enough times, you will begin to call yourself one, too. Take your enemies’ insults and turn it into a badge of pride. How many times in the weeks ahead do I meet Croats at checkpoints who say, “They call us Ustashe. Well then, that is what we are.” And likewise, the Serbs: “You call us Chetniks. Well, that is what we are.” The two sides conspire in a downward spiral of mutually interacting self-degradation And where does that spiral begin? In the most ordinary form of cowardice, the one everyone of us knows only too well—telling lies about the past.

  But that is not all. Jasenovac is not the whole suppressed truth either. It is not all there is to say about Croatia in wartime. If Croats cannot bear Jasenovac, it is not merely because of what was done in their name but also because of the partiality of what is remembered. At Jasenovac, Tito’s Yugoslavia remembered Croatians only as murderers, never as victims. Tito never built a memorial center at any of the mass graves of the thousands of Croatians massacred as they fled before his Communist partisans on the roads of northeastern Croatia and Slovenia in May 1945. The guilt of Jasenovac became unbearable, not merely because it was great, but also because it was unjust. At Jasenovac you begin to discern the lie about the past that eventually destroyed Tito’s Yugoslavia. The lie was that the Second World War was a national uprising against German occupation led by Tito’s partisans. In reality, it was a civil war fought among Yugoslavs. Postwar Yugoslavia never had enough time to heal the wounds of that war.

  Jasenovac is a place to make you ponder your inherited liberal pieties. Somewhere in my childhood, I must have been taught that telling lies eventually makes you ill. When Václav Havel said that people need to live in truth, he also meant that nations cannot hope to hold together if they do not come to some common—and truthful— version of their past. But there are nations with pasts so hard to share together that they need centuries for forgetting to do
its work. To ask for truth, to ask for shared truth, might be to ask for too much. Yugoslavia might be such a case. Fifty years was not enough time to forget.

  Whatever the case, it is hard to continue believing in the healing power of historical truth when you stand in the middle of a vandalized museum. Some dark spirit, stronger than truth, was at work here. And it is at work on the road from Jasenovac as you drive away. Toward Novska, you pass Serb house after Serb house, neatly dynamited, beside undisturbed Croat houses and gardens. When you turn toward Lipik, it is the turn of all the Croat houses to be dynamited or firebombed, next to their untouched Serb neighbors. Mile upon mile, the deadly logic of ethnic cleansing unfolds. In village after village, they have ripped open the scar tissue over their common wound.

  CRY, GIRL, CRY

  I am in central Croatia now, in the heart of what was once one of the most complex multi-ethnic communities in Europe, shared between a Croatian majority, a Serbian minority, and several other groups—Germans, Italians, and Hungarians— besides. The 1991 war tore these villages apart, and now they are divided between Croatian and Serbian sectors, with UN checkpoints in between.

  On all the roads that lead north from the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, there is a continuous swath of devastation wherever you look: roofless houses, with a cascade of roof tiles and roof beams strewn about the deserted, weed-filled rooms; fire-edged window and door frames, brick walls pierced with tire-sized artillery blasts. Some houses have been raked by so much automatic-weapons fire that the plaster has been completely torn away, leaving only the pitted brick, the tree trunks outside the houses wearing a glittering jacket of metal slugs. In the ditches lie small Yugoslav Zastava cars, riddled with bullet fire or twisted into rusted sculpture by a tank’s treads.