Preface

In 1992 Croatia joined the club of sovereign European states. It was, said President Franjo Tudjman, the fulfilment of ‘the Croats’ thousand-year-old dream of independence’. Few dreams have been fulfilled in such unpromising circumstances. Recognition of the country’s independence was enmeshed in controversy, for while Germany supported it, Britain and France were strongly opposed. And while Europe’s statesmen quarrelled over whether Croatia should be recognised at all, the country remained in the throes of a bloody war of independence against the Yugoslav army, the army of the Croatian Serbs and a variety of Serbian paramilitary groups. Fighting had devastated the country and left it effectively partitioned. From Karlovac in the north to the outskirts of Zadar on the Adriatic Sea, a long swathe of hilly territory had fallen under Serb control. Alongside two smaller chunks of land which the Serbs held in eastern and central Croatia, the Serbs had siezed almost a third of the republic’s territory.

The fighting had ruined the economy of what had once been the richest of Yugoslavia’s six republics. The main railway lines running east and south of Zagreb were cut; likewise the Autoput Bratstvo i Jedinstvo, the Motorway of Brotherhood and Unity, which ran in a straight line across the flat plains of Slavonia from Zagreb towards Belgrade. Oil pipelines, refineries, power stations and water supplies had been blown up, or had been put out of action, because they lay partly in Serb-held territory. The once prosperous tourist resorts on the Dalmatian coast had been abandoned by holidaymakers, their rooms now crammed with refugees. Most suffered from a chronic shortage of electricity. Even the ‘Pearl of the Adriatic’, Dubrovnik, had been badly damaged by Yugoslav army shelling. People had been driven from their homes. About 300,000 Croats had fled westwards from the Serbs to take refuge on the Adriatic islands, in deserted coastal hotels or in improvised camps. A smaller number of Serbs had gone east, either to Serb-held territory in Croatia, or to Serbia proper. Hundreds of villages had been bombed and burned beyond repair and recognition. On the banks of the Danube the eastern town of Vukovar ressembled a smaller version of post-war Dresden or Warsaw. The town had been pounded almost to the ground in a punishing three-month siege by the Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitaries, which ended only with the town’s surrender to the Serbs in mid-November 1991.

Warfare has been the lot of the Croats since they migrated south across the Carpathians and settled along the shores of the Adriatic in the seventh century. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the cities along the Dalmatian coast were ransacked and torched by the Venetians, while the wooden fortress-towns of Slavonia felt the pressure of the territorial ambitions of the Magyars. Union between Croatia and Hungary was compacted in 1102, but provided no defence against the Mongols who swept in from the east in the thirteenth century and devastated Zagreb, or against the Ottomans who reached Croatia in the fifteenth century and annihilated the country’s nobility in 1493. In the 1520s, as the Ottoman armies overwhelmed more territory, the Pope sent a message to the Croatian parliament, urging them to continue to resist the tide of Islam and referring to the Croats as the ‘Ramparts of Christendom’. This generous title availed them nothing. The Turks swept on, almost to the gates of Zagreb, destroying almost all the traces of the seven-century-old civilisation that they encountered.

Croatia is border land. It lies on the geographical border between Central Europe and the Balkans, and between the Mediterranean world and continental Europe. It lies also on a cultural and religious border, between Eastern, Byzantine Christendom and the Latin West. The very shape of the country reinforces the impression of a frontier. Nothing compact, square or secure. Instead the country curves round Bosnia in a narrow arc, in the shape of a crescent moon, or a boomerang. At no point is Croatia more than a few hundred miles wide: at most points it is much less. In the far south, both north and south of Dubrovnik it is only a few miles wide, hemmed in between the Adriatic Sea on one side and the mountains of Bosnia on the other.

The fate of border land is always to be precarious and frequently to move, shrinking and expanding across the generations to an astonishing degree. The fate of border land is also to be buffeted in one direction or the other, to be trampled on, crossed over, colonised, defended and abandoned in turn by stronger neighbouring powers.

The Croats are Slavs. But they bear the genetic footprints of countless invaders and settlers, and of those shadowy inhabitants of the land before the Croats themselves arrived. The blood of ancient Illyrians, Greeks, Romans, Serbs, Vlachs, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Jews and others flows in the veins of contemporary Croats. The results are marked physical differences between the peoples of different regions, and differences of temperament as well. The inhabitants of Dalmatia are for the most part tall, lean, dark-haired, tempestuous and somewhat combative: the people of northern Croatia and Slavonia are shorter, rounder, often blond-haired, and generally of a quieter and more reflective disposition.

Although a small country, there are stark contrasts in the look of the land. Northern Croatia and Slavonia are green and hilly, a land of woods, vineyards, fruit trees, prosperous farms and tidy villages. Imposing castles and baroque churches are just part of the legacy of centuries of Habsburg rule, which lasted from 1527 to 1918. The capital, Zagreb, has the cut and air of a grand, provincial Austrian city, and along these cobbled streets, in the high-ceilinged cafés, in the formal parks and on the imposing squares decked with solemn monuments the air is heavy with memory of the ordered, prosperous world of the Habsburg monarchy. South of the Gvozd mountains and across the wild moors of Lika one descends into a very different world. In Dalmatia the sunlight is strong and harsh, the hills barren and studded with olive groves. The cities are wholly Mediterranean in appearance, dotted with the remains of ancient Rome and of Dalmatia’s later rulers, the Venetians. A few miles inland, beside the eery and silent mudflats at Nin, rise the humble squat turrets of the churches of the first Croat settlers.

Because they inhabit the rim, or the ramparts, never the middle, the people of border land are not relaxed about their heritage or culture. There is always the lurking danger that the rest of Europe may forget about them or – worse – confuse them with the people to the east and south. Pick up any recent publication by the Croatian authorities, even a tourist brochure, and count the number of times such words as ‘Western’, ‘Catholic’, ‘Central Europe’ or even ‘civilisation’ appear. Or try dropping the word ‘Balkan’ into a conversation with a Croat and wait for the inevitable protest: Croatia is not part of the Balkans, but part of the West!

The people of the border land are always aware that beyond their narrow boomerang of territory, beyond that river, on the other side of that mountain, their world stops and that of the Eastern Orthodox Serbs, or the Muslim Bosnians, begins. When I asked a seminarian in Zagreb in 1991 what the fall of Vukovar to the Yugoslav army in November 1991 meant to him, he referred to it not as a human tragedy, though he surely felt it, but as a civilisational defeat. ‘It means that the East has advanced into the West,’ he answered.

Croatia has often but not always been at war. After the Habsburgs’ historic victory over the Ottomans in the 1690s, northern Croatia enjoyed the benefits of peace and orderly government with few interruptions until the First World War. The twentieth century has undone those gains. The last three generations have known warfare on a scale not seen since the Middle Ages. After the carnage of the First World War, there followed the disastrous ‘Independent State of Croatia’ in 1941, a poisoned chalice, tainted with a Fascist ideology and an alliance with Hitler’s Germany. The result was to plunge Croatia into civil war between left-wing Partisans and the Fascist Ustashe. And, after emerging into independent statehood once again in the 1990s, the Croats have continued to be dogged by the legacy of the past. The fighting of the 1940s and the mass killings of Croatia’s Serb community came back to haunt the country fifty years on.

Croatia remains virtual terra incognita to most English-speaking people. Although a great deal of literature has been published on the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, most of the new books have dwelled on Yugoslavia as a whole, or on the war in Bosnia, which followed so quickly on the conflict in Croatia and which soon eclipsed it in terms of material devastation, the scale of atrocities and the forced movement of peoples. The betrayal of Bosnia’s secular Muslims is a subject that will long continue to haunt the West, and the very nature of the war in Bosnia, between a government committed, at least nominally, to a multi-ethnic society, and the forces of ethnic and religious totalitarianism, made it a more attractive cause for Western liberals than Catholic Croatia, a country tagged with a peculiar reputation as having been ‘pro-Hitler’ in the Second World War. Indeed, the prevailing impression of Croatia in Britain and France was encapsulated by President François Mitterrand of France, who, at the height of the Yugoslav army’s savage assault on the town of Vukovar in November 1991, could only comment: ‘Croatia belonged to the Nazi bloc, not Serbia.’

It was out of a desire to remedy a certain gap in our understanding of the former Yugoslavia, and from a conviction that Croatia warrants study on its own, and not as a bit-player in a wider drama, that I attempted a brief account of the war in Croatia in 1991. But it was impossible to write about the war in the 1990s without referring to the war of the 1940s, and impossible to write about that without referring to the first Yugoslavia and the political climate of the 1920s and 1930s, which then threw me back to the national awakening of the 1840s. In the end I decided to start with the first Croat principalities in the Dark Ages.

The attempt to cover such a broad canvas with a few brush strokes lays me open to the charge of missing out an enormous amount. It must also be made clear that this is not a book about Croats but about the country of Croatia. I am aware that the complaint may be raised that talk of Croatia is anachronistic – an attempt to read back into past centuries a country whose borders were only fixed finally by Tito in 1945. Of course this is true in part; Croatia has shifted like ectoplasm across the board of south-eastern Europe. But the school of thought, taking its cue from Belgrade, which holds that modern Croatia was simply ‘invented’ by Tito as a part of an anti-Serb conspiracy does not commend itself to me. Nor does the nationalist Croat school which holds that povijesna Hrvatska – historic Croatia – must be always be understood as Croatia at its greatest extent. By Croatia I mean the Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia, which formed the core of the early Croat kingdom from the ninth to eleventh centuries, to which virtually every parliament and ban (viceroy) of Croatia laid claim from the Middle Ages till 1918, which were united in the autonomous Croat banovina shortly before the Second World War and then incorporated (with various additions and subtractions) into the Republic of Croatia at the end of the war.

Of all the countries which have emerged after the collapse of Communism and the second ‘springtime of nations’, Croatia has perhaps the richest, most tangled and most turbulent history. The country’s strategic position, as well as its cultural and artistic heritage, should not be ignored. Along with the Serbs, the Croats hold the keys to peace in Bosnia and to the future stability of the Balkan peninsula. It is important to know more about the Croats. Theirs is a controversial and compelling history.

There are several people who have been key figures in the writing of this book. I would particularly like to thank Branko Franoli, without whose help and comments at every stage along the way this book would never have been written. Thanks also to Mike Reid for travelling round Croatia with me and taking many of the photographs; to Chris Helgren for supplying photographs from his own coverage of the war; to Dessa Trevisan, for her unrivalled knowledge of Yugoslavia; to Tim Judah and Inès Sabalic, for making many useful corrections to the manuscript and arranging copyright for the photographs; and to Branko Magaš, Rosa Grce, and Mark Hayman for the maps.