In the early evening of 24 June 1981, six children of Medjugorje in western Hercegovina returned from the hillside where they tended sheep and claimed to have seen a great light and the Virgin Mary. Next day the four girls and two boys, whose ages ranged from eleven to seventeen, went back to the hillside and, once more, said that they saw the Virgin. This time their report was taken seriously by the adults of Medjugorje and, in particular, by the Franciscan friars whose number included the parish priest. The date of this second sighting, 25 June 1981, is now the accepted start of the Medjugorje apparitions, and ten years later it was chosen for the announcement of an independent Croatia, the act that started the civil war.
On the third day, a crowd of thousands of curious locals gathered to climb the hillside with the six who, once more, said that they saw Our Lady. News of the apparitions spread through western Hercegovina, quickly reaching the ears of the civil and church officials in Mostar, capital of the province. The police arrested and later imprisoned two of the friars, while the six young seers were questioned at length by doctors, psychiatrists and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Mostar, Monsignor Pavao Žanić. When the authorities stopped the meetings on the hillside, the six young people met instead in a small side chapel of Medjugorje’s new and hideous twin-towered church.
All six described seeing a beautiful woman in her early twenties, wearing a blue dress and white veil, with pale cheeks, blue eyes and dark hair, crowned with stars, which is how she appeared in the wax statuette which was made for the parish church. It is a poor work of art, resembling Snow White in the Walt Disney film and still more closely the girl in the advertisements for the local Sarajevo beer. However, unlike Saint Bernadette, who detested the famous statue in the grotto at Lourdes, the seers were pleased with it.
Soon the witnesses also heard the voice of the apparition, who described herself as ‘the Blessed Virgin Mary’ and sometimes as ‘the Queen of Peace’, always speaking in ‘pure Croatian’ rather than Serbo-Croat. Once she appeared with the infant Jesus in her arms and on other occasions the witnesses touched her dress. According to Dr Rupčić, a sympathetic chronicler of the apparition, one of the girl witnesses saw the Devil. ‘He promised me something very nice. When I answered “no” he vanished. The Virgin then told me that he always tried to lead astray true believers … When Joseph [the parish priest] was in prison, the Virgin showed him to us. It was like the films. We saw heaven and hell … just flames and people there weeping, some with horns or tails or four legs. God help them.’1 Two of the six told Dr Rupčić they planned to adopt a cloistered life; three were uncertain and one girl said that she intended to marry, as later she did. At the end of his book, Dr Rupčić added a list of fifty people who claimed to have had a miraculous cure after a visit to Medjugorje. A former sufferer from multiple sclerosis even expressed her feelings in verse:
From Zagreb to Lipik Spa,
Without the Virgin I was not cured.
At Medjugorje Church with two towers,
There one must go and pray!
Virgin of Peace I thank thee for all!
I had been ill since childhood,
The Virgin of Peace has healed me.2
When I visited Medjugorje in April 1984 it had not yet won the international fame that later turned it into a place of pilgrimage second only to Lourdes. Our party of twelve assembled at Heathrow Airport without the chanting of hymns and wearing of badges normal with pilgrims to Lourdes or Fátima or Jerusalem. We had read reports published by earlier pilgrims that groups had been turned back from Yugoslav airports when it was found they were heading for Medjugorje, that hotel and tourist agency employees might denounce us to the government, and that in Medjugorje itself we should ‘beware people who look out of place in or around the church and ask a lot of seemingly friendly questions’. These warnings were justified, though it has to be said that the Yugoslav government was behaving no more harshly at Medjugorje than had the French at Lourdes or the Portuguese who dynamited the church at Fátima.
Since we were being discreet on a flight of the Yugoslav airline JAT, our party of pilgrims did not make each other’s acquaintance until Dubrovnik, where we were spending the night. The party included a lively group of Irish from Bedford, three middle-aged ladies from Guernsey and Peter, a serious and ascetic Indian whose father had been an Anglican clergyman. ‘He was broken-hearted when I converted to Roman Catholicism,’ Peter told me, ‘and since than I have known sorrow and misfortune in a temporal sense, but I have never for one moment regretted conversion.’ As Chaucer had understood so well, any group of pilgrims is bound to include, besides the pious, the tourists such as the Wife of Bath, who spent the money left by her husbands on journeys to Canterbury, Rome and even Jerusalem.
It was a pleasant journey by private bus from Dubrovnik to Mostar, where we were all staying for five days. The party exchanged good Irish jokes, recited Hail Marys and capped each other’s adventures:
In France, as we were on the way to Lourdes, we were in a natural disaster after a flood of sixteen inches of rain. There were cars piled up like garbage cans with cocks of hay on top of them … In the Holy Land we went to Masada, the place where the Israeli officers go to swear their oath of allegiance, like the Nazis in the 1930s … Last year we were in Garabandel in Spain. It’s much more primitive than here in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Did you see the film on Garabandel? It’s only an amateur job but you see the children flying through the air … Of course there’s no hardship these days in a pilgrimage. It’s not like it was for Saint Malachy who went down twice to Rome.
Only a few months earlier, the media had given enormous publicity to the Winter Olympics at Sarajevo but none to events at Medjugorje. Remarking on this, one of the Irish pilgrims exclaimed, ‘Doesn’t it show that Satan controls the media, which made such a fuss of the Games when the Queen of Heaven’s appearing just down the road?’
From Mostar I made several visits into the harsh and virtually treeless district round Medjugorje (the village’s name means ‘between the mountains’). The six young witnesses were always described in the press as shepherds and shepherdesses but, as I knew from my travels in eastern Hercegovina, sheep were no longer important in agriculture. For anyone with the energy to remove the surface rock, there is plenty of good red earth round Medjugorje for growing the vines, tobacco and fruit for which the region is known. However, the major providers of wealth are the thousands of men who have gone to work in Germany, Sweden or Belgium, then come back to set themselves up as ‘independent’ mechanics, electricians, lorry drivers or café keepers, always with a plot of land on the side. ‘We don’t live badly at all at Medjugorje,’ said one of the several motor mechanics, then grinned to show that they lived very well. Three miles away at the town of Čitluk there were banks, a department store, a hunters’ club and fine new villas.
Because the authorities wanted to discourage pilgrims, in 1984 Medjugorje had no hotel or even a boarding-house, while the only amenities were a bar, a hot-dog stall and one public lavatory consisting of three sheds with doors that did not shut and three holes in the earth surrounded by flies and excrement. Although they were not allowed to exploit the pilgrim trade, the people of Medjugorje were in the grip of a building boom, as could be seen from the half-finished villas and farmhouses, the higgledy-piggledy piles of bricks and stone, and hundreds of yards of drainpipe waiting to be laid.
Even if we had not been warned of the tension at Medjugorje, our group of pilgrims would soon have noticed the police cars, the helicopter chattering overhead and the surly plainclothes men. We gave a lift to a woman whose brother, the parish priest at Medjugorje, was still in prison for ‘harmful political activities’. His sentence was halved when Bishop Žanić of Mostar reached an agreement with the authorities to stop pilgrims going to the hillside where the Virgin first appeared.
In spite of the Bishop’s injunction, our group went straight to the slope of boulders and jagged stones which even Saint Malachy would have had to admit was heavy going. The children who first saw the apparition felt they were ‘carried up’ the miraculous hillside. To me it was hard work, though not as bad as for those who had to be hauled to the spot where the Virgin appeared. To add to the penitential character of the hillside, the witnesses or the friars had let it be known that staring into the sun was an aid to godliness, or so it was thought by some credulous pilgrims. Yugoslav newspapers rightly warned of the danger of eye damage and sunstroke.
On the way back from the hillside, an eighty-two-year-old woman begged for money because, so she told me, she and her husband had never had children. Begging like this is almost unheard of in Yugoslavia, especially in a village as rich as Medjugorje. A little later another old woman offered delicious red wine from her vineyard, then rather pointedly asked us to pay for it; this, again, is unusual in Yugoslavia.
The six young witnesses did not accept gifts of money or anything else. When an Italian pilgrim asked to buy an intercession one of the friars answered caustically that the Virgin Mary did not answer requests; she merely demanded prayer, fasting and penance. According to the witnesses, the Virgin had asked for a rosary of seven Our Fathers, Hail Marys and Glory Bes, as well as the Creed, amounting to three and a half hours, almost all of which was spent by the congregation on their knees. Apart from those who had found a pew with a padded rail, the pilgrims knelt throughout on the stone floor of a church whose atmosphere is generally cold and damp. At times the Protestant voice in me would ask if Roman Catholics ever got off their knees. What with the clambering over boulders, the rain and the constant kneeling, I left Medjugorje feeling less fit than when I arrived. One of the Irishmen said that the spicy mixed grill he had eaten in Mostar had made every bone in his body ache.
When I got back from Medjugorje, I felt unable to say if the apparitions were genuine. It was clear that pilgrims such as the cheerful Irish people with whom I travelled got spiritual benefit from the experience. From what I saw of the six young witnesses, both at Medjugorje and in a later video film, they struck me as normal, frank and, in several cases, engaging personalities. However, they could have been under the influence of the friars, who gave a bullying, brutal impression. One of them, in my presence, scolded a peasant woman for saying that I spoke Serbo-Croat: ‘There’s no such language!’ I knew that the friars and the witnesses had irritated the secular clergy of Hercegovina as well as the Bishop of Mostar, Monsignor Žanić.
By the end of the 1980s, the Medjugorje phenomenon was attracting millions of pilgrims, especially from Ireland and Italy and even such distant countries as the Philippines and Mexico. Although most visitors trusted the seers, a few were critical of the character of the friars. For instance the English writer Richard Bassett, a Roman Catholic who has lived in Croatia and speaks the language, noticed the interest of the monks in attractive female pilgrims. One friar, who had begged off meeting a pious enquirer because he was ‘going to Mostar’, spent that evening closeted with an Austrian lady for what the boarding-house keeper described as ‘two hours of spiritual instruction’.3
The main opposition to the Franciscans at Medjugorje came not from the Communist government but from the diocesan clergy. Since 1950, the Bosnia-Hercegovina Franciscans had fought off attempts by the Church to take back parishes held by the Order for hundreds of years. The apparition at Medjugorje was widely seen in the Church as one more ploy in the old Franciscan struggle for power and patronage. A small minority of the Franciscans themselves, the overwhelming majority of the diocesan priests and above all the Bishop of Mostar, Pavao Žanić, denounced the Medjugorje seers as frauds, liars or dupes of the friars. In the pamphlet Medjugorje, published in Mostar in 1990, Bishop Žanić says that at first, when the Communists were persecuting the friars, the ‘seers’ and even the pilgrims, he defended them but never believed in the apparitions. He accuses one Franciscan, Tomislav Vašić, of masterminding the seers and getting ‘the Virgin’ to utter attacks on himself and messages of support for Vašić and two sacked Franciscans. One of those friars was Ivica Vega.
Due to his disobedience, by an order of the Holy Father the Pope, he [Vega] was thrown out of his Franciscan religious order OFM by his General, dispensed from his vows and suspended ‘a divinis’. He did not obey this order and he continued to celebrate Mass, distribute the sacraments and pass the time with his mistress …
It is unpleasant to write about this, yet it is necessary in order to see who Our Lady is speaking of.
According to the diary of Vicka [Vicka Ivanković, the leading seer] and the statements of the ‘seers’, Our Lady mentioned thirteen times that he [Vega] is innocent, and that the Bishop is wrong. When his mistress, Sister Leopolda, a nun, became pregnant, both of them left Medjugorje and the religious life and began to live together near Medjugorje where their child was born. Now they have two children. His prayerbook is still sold in Medjugorje and beyond in hundreds of thousands of copies.4
In the summer of 1990, the Bishop of Mostar took his pamphlet to Rome to try to convince the Pope of the fraudulent nature of Medjugorje. However, by then the Croats had voted to power a government loyal to Medjugorje and its Croatian Virgin. The declaration of independence on 25 June 1991 was timed for the tenth anniversary of the apparitions. This coincidence later became the proudest boast of the Medjugorje Franciscans.
Few foreign pilgrims to Medjugorje realised the long Franciscan connection with Bosnia-Hercegovina. The friars first went there in 1260 to stamp out the Bogomil heresy. After the Turkish conquest of 1463, the Franciscans signed an agreement by which, in return for helping to keep down the troublesome Orthodox Christians, they were exempt from poll tax and also given the right to carry arms. During more than four centuries of Ottoman rule, the Franciscans were the auxiliaries of the Slav Muslim ruling class, and lived in some kind of harmony with the other two religions. In 1877 the Manchester Guardian correspondent Arthur Evans saw a friar joining the Orthodox peasants in one of their village revels: ‘I was a little surprised and not a little amused to see his Reverence bustle out, form a ring for the national “kolo” dance, seize two buxom lasses by the waist, and join as lustily as his ecclesiastical vestments would allow, in the merry-go-round.’5 From The Red Knight, the volume of Serbian women’s songs collected by Vuk Karadjić in the nineteenth century, we learn that Orthodox women sometimes regarded Franciscans as more than dancing partners:
The friar tripped on a sod and fell.
He broke the prick that f…s so well.
Married or betrothed, the women
gathered round and stared at him!
‘Oh, our c…s’ pride, oh holy friar,
Is this a sign of heaven’s ire!’6
Relations between the Franciscans and the Orthodox turned sour during the twentieth century. After the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, some of the friars encouraged the hanging of Serbs by Catholic lynch mobs, though Bishop Mišić of Mostar called for toleration. When Stepinac was made Archbishop-Coadjutor of Zagreb in 1934, he applied to join the Franciscan Third Order. The General of the Order, Father Leonardo Bello, visited Zagreb in September of that year to assist at the celebration of the 700th aniversary of the Franciscans in Croatia. On 29 September, in the presence of a large congregation in the Franciscan church, he vested the new Archbishop-Coadjutor with the scalpel and girdle of the Franciscans, ‘a public witness of Stepinac’s desire to identify himself with the ideal of poverty and to assume the burdens of his office in the spirit of patience and humility which St Francis typified’.7
It was partly out of respect for the Order that, both before and during the Second World War, Stepinac tried to promote the canonisation of Nikola Tavelić, a fourteenth-century friar who had served in Bosnia-Hercegovina, trying to stamp out heresy. Archbishop Stepinac was also very attached to belief in the Virgin Mary as ‘Queen of Croatia’, and leader of its crusade against heresy and schism. His colleage Ivan Šarić, the Bishop of Sarajevo, linked the name of the Mother of God to his own Ustasha brand of religious nationalism. Soon after the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia, his diocesan paper Katolički Tjednik (11 May 1941) said in a leading article:
Above the new, young and free Croatia, the image of the Virgin Mother, the beautiful shining image has appeared in the heavens as a sign – signum in cielo. The Lady comes to visit her Croatia, within her maternal mantle she wishes to enfold her young, reborn Croatia exactly in the thousandth year of the Catholic Jubilee. Again she descends on the flags of our freedom to occupy her ancient place; in order to protect us and to defend us as she did at the time when our Bans and Princes went into battle under the flag bearing her image.8
In two earlier chapters of this book, I have tried to convey the enormity of the crimes committed during the Second World War by members of the Franciscan Order. Some of the very worst took place in western Hercegovina, close to Medjugorje. In the astounding letter to Archbishop Stepinac written in August 1941, the then Bishop of Mostar described among other atrocities how the Ustasha had brought ‘six waggons full of mothers, girls and children under eight to the station of Surmanci, where they were taken out of the waggons, brought into the hills and thrown alive, mothers and children, into deep ravines’.9 Those ravines are less than two miles from Medjugorje. We do not know if the friars at Medjugorje took part in the murder but three of them, all sworn Ustasha, died fighting alongside the German SS at Široki Brijeg near the end of the war. The names of the three Franciscan Ustasha from Medjugorje are now on a plaque in honour of those who died fighting the Communists.10
Mostar itself was the epicentre of horror in Bosnia-Hercegovina from 1941 to 1945, as it was to become once more half a century later. It was during a fortnight in Mostar during the summer of 1991 that I came to see the love and veneration of Tito among those who longed for the preservation of Yugoslavia. It is there that I bring to an end the story of Tito’s triumphs and ultimate, tragic failure.
Even before reaching Mostar during an overland journey back from Albania, I met many Yugoslavs who did not join in the nationalistic madness. As ever, the Montenegrins took an Olympian view of everyone living closer to sea level. The young woman who showed me round the museum at Cetinje, pointing out with pride the flag riddled by 396 bullet holes, said: ‘We were the first independent state in the Balkan peninsula, the first one with links with Europe. We were the only one that Europe had even heard of. Now we’re the only part of Yugoslavia that is calm. We don’t want to go into the army reserve. My husband says he would go right away if Yugoslavia was attacked by the Germans or the Albanians, but he doesn’t want to fight the Croats or Slovenes. Only a few years ago he was in the army with these people. He ate and drank with them. Why should he fight them?’ She showed me a photograph in the museum of some Montenegrin Chetniks, once vilified as Fascists and collaborators: ‘Some people now say they were right all along. I don’t know about that. Personally I have always been a great admirer of Josip Broz Tito. And the greatest day of my life was two years ago when they brought back the body of King Nikola, our king.’
After five days in the most tranquil part of Yugoslavia – there was even a Montenegrin pacifist movement, almost a contradiction in terms – I took a bus down the coast to Dubrovnik in Croatia. When I had first gone there during the off-season of April 1954, as Yugoslavia was just beginning to open its doors to the West, the city was busy and cheerful in comparison with what I saw in July 1991, when I encountered no other foreigner. On that first occasion a smiling young woman had come up and asked me to marry her, so that she might live abroad. Now the whole population was facing exile. Even the physical safety of Dubrovnik depended on maintaining the ‘open city’ status granted by Tito in 1968, the year he closed the naval and army bases there. A few weeks later, the Croat military rearmed Dubrovnik, which then came under attack from the Yugoslav Navy and Serb forces inland. At my favourite café-restaurant near the market, I saw that they still had Tito’s portrait instead of the red-and-white chequerboard flag and other Croatian insignia. The manageress explained that they were ‘Orthodox from Bosnia’.
A Bosnian journalist in the café in Dubrovnik told me that Pavao Žanić, the Bishop of Mostar, was still incensed by the friars at Medjugorje but now had to hold his tongue for fear of the Tudjman regime. Only the day before, the Croats had flown the Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, to pay his respects to the ‘Queen of Peace’ at Medjugorje, a visit that doubtless helped to stiffen the Roman Catholic vote back home. Going by bus from Dubrovnik to Mostar and heading upstream along the River Neretva, I looked with a feeling of horror towards the limestone hills of western Hercegovina, the scene of the Medjugorje apparitions, and tens of thousands of murders fifty years ago.
Seven years earlier I had stayed in the Bristol Hotel on the right, or western, bank of the river, but this time I took a room in the Neretva Hotel, on the other side of the green torrent. Only now did I understand that the river divided Mostar as the Wall had once divided Berlin, with Roman Catholics making up approximately one-third of the western side but a mere 5 per cent of the largely Muslim, but partly Orthodox, east. Western Hercegovina, with its abundance of red-and-white chequerboard flags, its Ustasha graffiti and rabidly anti-Serbian press, was ready and eager to join a Greater Croatia. The Orthodox in the countryside of eastern Hercegovina were just as keen to get the help of Serbia and Montenegro. Already the Bosnian Serbs were engaged in a shrill propaganda campaign against the elected President, Alija Izetbegović, branding him an Islamic fundamentalist. Although Izetbegović was a pious Muslim, I could not believe that this sensible man could hope to enforce Koranic law on his easy-going countrymen. He feared and detested both Milošević and Tudjman, comparing the choice between them to that between leukaemia and a brain tumour. The confrontation in Mostar was so intense and so depressing that I decided to stay only one or two days, but on the first evening I stumbled and broke an ankle, so I was stuck there for a fortnight.
Since it was nearly two weeks before I could hobble even as far as the bridge, my impressions of Mostar this time were limited to the Neretva Hotel. It was the hottest month of the year in the hottest town in Europe; however, a clump of trees and a gurgling fountain created an impression of coolness at the outdoor café. At least twice a day, jets of the Yugoslav air force buzzed over the town and the Croat positions to the west, and several times at night I heard automatic fire. Throughout the time I was there, I half expected the start of the civil war that broke out the following April, first with a Serb bombardment and then a prolonged Croat assault on the east bank.
The café of the Neretva was the meeting-place of a number of middle-aged or elderly Muslim gentlemen, joking over their coffee, brandy or fresh lemonade. One of them, let us call him Murat, spoke to me as the nearest muezzin bellowed the midday call to prayer: ‘You mustn’t get the impression that we’re like your Bradford Muslims. We don’t burn books, we marry women from other religions, and many of us are drunk from morning till night.’ Murat detested Milošević and the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić: ‘He’s a Montenegrin psychiatrist. What more can you say against a man?’ He dreaded a repetition of 1941, when the Croats murdered the Serbs and the Serbs revenged themselves on the Muslims: ‘My uncle had his throat cut by a Chetnik, who later became a Partisan National Hero. In fact he’s living only a few doors from me now.’ However, Murat acknowledged that all the Bosnians were one people and raged against those Westerners who talked about ‘ethnic’ differences: ‘It’s rubbish to say we’re three nations here in Bosnia. In all the old families here in Mostar you have Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics together. We’re just three different kinds of the same shit.’
Another regular at the café was a former UDBA, or secret police, chief, a rugged ex-Partisan from a Muslim family, a man with a good sense of humour, but now pessimistic:
The situation is worse now than it was before the war started in 1941. Before the war we all lived together OK. Then the Ustasha came and took many Serbs. The rest were saved by the Communists. About 30 per cent of the Muslims here became Communists, especially the children of good families. About 80 per cent of the Serbs joined the Communists; the rest may have joined the Chetniks. About 5 per cent of the Croats were Communists, others were Ustasha, but most of them concentrated on just surviving. After the war, the Serbs and Croats at first did not come back to Mostar. Now the Croats are back in force, about 20,000 of them, almost all in the north-west of town.
Twice I met the Oslobodjenje correspondent Mugdim Karabeg. In spite of his Muslim name, he had passed through an ecumenical childhood, typical of a generation caught up in the Second World War:
I was first brought up as the only Muslim child in a Roman Catholic village in Slavonia, where the priest befriended me, taught me the catechism and gave me the first-name Slobodan. Then I went to school in Trebinje, in eastern Hercegovina, where they were mostly Serbs. When I came back to my place of origin, Mostar, the Muslims gave me the name Mugdim. Until about five years ago, nobody bothered what religion you were.
The newspaper Oslobodjenje was now the moderate voice of the largely Muslim centre parties, opposed to the Croat as much as the Serb fanatics. Both Christian extremist groups hated Oslobodjenje and tried to prevent its sale. They gave a hard time to its correspondent Mugdim, as he recounted to me:
For months there have been three or four barricades on the road to Nevesinje – that’s the Serb town east of here. These barricades are manned by youngsters with automatic weapons and slivovitz on their breath. They insist on searching my car and insult me because of my Muslim name. The Serbs there are cutting down the forests and stealing quantities of wood but the Serb police won’t prosecute … When I go to the Croat towns and villages in western Hercegovina, the people there say they want to hang Milošević and Marković, that’s the best politician we have. [Ante Marković, a Croat, was federal Prime Minister, striving to hold the country together.]
Mugdim talked with deep emotion about the Ustasha massacres in 1941:
The Ustasha, including Franciscans, came over from Italy in 1938 and 1939, to draw up a plan for the massacre of the Serbs, as soon as they came to power. They examined which were the deepest quarries and crevices in which to throw them.
In the first wave, starting on Vidovdan, 28 June 1941, they killed at least 10,000 Serbs round here. They ripped open the wombs of pregnant women, caught babies on bayonets, gouged people’s eyes out … Unfortunately there were some Muslim rabble (ološ) who joined in killing the Orthodox so that many Serbs in eastern Hercegovina took a terrible revenge, massacring Muslim villages … Some of the worst Chetniks came from Hercegovina … We are a people here of the hot sun and the dry rocks, a mountain people, a people who have lived for centuries only praying for rain, an irrational, mythic people … What is happening in the Krajina and Slavonia is nothing compared to what will happen in Hercegovina if the fighting starts …
Do you know the worst thing? That the Roman Catholic Church has never admitted what happened in 1941, and never apologised for the things that were done by the Franciscans. For throwing people into ravines. How could they do those things? To babies, to beautiful young girls, to old women? The Roman Catholic Church, the Pope, should now make an apology but they have said nothing.
The following weekend, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Pavle, came to Hercegovina to give a Christian burial to the remains of the many thousands murdered fifty years earlier, including the women and children hurled screaming over the side of a precipice near Medjugorje. One of the few survivors, now a university lecturer, blamed the crimes partly on ‘Croatian separatists wanting to break away from their brother Yugoslavs’, and partly on ‘a large and universal Church, which wants to further spread its power, the number of its believers, and the territory it controls’.11
The following week, I wrote about this for a London Sunday newspaper, quoting as well the Bishop of Mostar’s terrible letter of 1941 and the verdict of Carlo Falconi in The Silence of Pius XII: ‘Only in Croatia was the extermination of at least half a million human beings due more perhaps to hatred of their religion than of their race, and was sacrilegiously bound up with a campaign for rebaptism.’ As Hubert Butler found when he wrote of these things in Ireland, forty years earlier, ‘nobody in the British Isles … ever commented on it, quoted from it, or wrote to me to enquire how I had secured it’.12
In so far as the English newspapers mentioned the massacres fifty years earlier, they tended to blame the Serbs for ‘raking up the past’. One correspondent seemed to think that the victims were Roman Catholics. In the Spectator a woman remarked sarcastically that the Serbs were now so paranoiac, they even believed that the Vatican was against them. A few weeks after my article, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Zagreb, Cardinal Kuharić told the London Times that only a ‘handful’ of Serbs were killed in the Independent State of Croatia.
Seven years earlier, when I stayed in the Bristol Hotel on the western side of the river, I could see on the mountains opposite the slogan: ‘Tito, We Love You’ (‘Tito, Volimo Te’). I found it absurd and rather disgusting. Now I saw that someone had added the word ‘Peace’ (‘Mir’), and somehow I found the slogan pleasing. Like most of the regulars in the Neretva café, Murat spoke with affection of Tito, both as a man and as a politician: ‘You’ll hear young people say how much better off they were under the Communists, and it’s true. In England, you may have a very big salary but you’ll still have to choose between taking a beach or a skiing holiday. Here even a primary school teacher could take both, and have a car and second home. Of course it was all on credit and came from borrowing from the international banks. But people lived well, especially if they had relatives in the country.’
When the Italian army went back into Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1941 to stop the Ustasha persecution, thousands of Serb women and children gathered in Mostar to offer a posy of flowers to the Italian commander, begging him for continued protection. Fifty years later it seemed once more to be the women and young who wanted peace and toleration. The girl receptionist at the Neretva Hotel, who had worked in London and Rome but hoped to continue living in Mostar, kept lecturing me on the views of the young as opposed to those of people of my generation:
You hear people say how awful it was under the Communists. It was wonderful under the Communists! The hotels were full. Everyone could travel around the country or go abroad.
People of different religions were friendly with each other. My father is Serb and my mother is Croat. My best friend is Muslim. My nearest neighbours are Muslims, and next to them are Serbs. Why should I fight these people? Like most of my friends, I only wish the Communists were back!
During my second week in Mostar, the children started collecting signatures for peace, either on sheets of foolscap paper or in their exercise books. Since there were more collectors of signatures than there were people to sign, the very few customers in cafés like the Neretva were much in demand. There was a solemn little Croat girl in a bonnet who asked me so many times that I started to sign the names of my friends in England. Some of the male Yugoslavs muttered that ‘peace is for women and children’, but nevertheless they signed.
On the day before I was ready to leave, tens of thousands of young people and children marched to a Mostar sports ground to hold a rally for peace. Some came on foot, some by car, scooter or bicycle, but almost all of them carried the two symbols of peace: the red, white and blue flag of Yugoslavia superimposed by a Communist red star, and Tito’s portrait. The memory stays with me of one platoon of boys and girls, scarcely old enough to be born when Tito died, who carried his picture above their heads as they solemnly marched, their little arms swinging and little knees rising to stamp the roadway; and as they marched they chanted and piped the old cry of the Partisans: ‘Tito is ours, and we are Tito’s’ (‘Tito je naš i mi smo Titovi’). The slogan that forty years ago I had found repulsive and totalitarian now charmed and moved me. In all the years I had known Yugoslavia under the rule or influence of Josip Broz Tito, I never dreamed I should live to see him leading a children’s crusade. Watching that pitiful, doomed procession, I felt overwhelmed by dread of the coming disaster.
Notes
1 Ljudevit Rupčić, Gospina Ukazanja u Medjugorju (Samobor, 1983), pp. 45–6.
2 Ibid. p. 117.
3 Richard Bassett, Balkan Hours (London 1990), p. 90.
4 Pavao Žanić, Medjugorje (Mostar, 1990). This pamphlet was published in English.
5 Arthur Evans, Illyrian Letters (London, 1878), p. 66.
6 Vuk Karadjić, The Red Knight, trans. Daniel Weissbort and Tomislav Longinović (London, 1992), p. 53.
7 Stella Alexander, The Triple Myth: A Life of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac (Boulder, Colo., 1987), pp. 26–7.
8 Edmond Paris, Genocide in Satellite Croatia, 1941–45 (Chicago, 1961), p. 64.
9 See Ch. 5.
10 Information from Andrew Brown of the Independent, who visited Široki Brijeg in 1993.
11 Oslobodjenje, 5 August 1991.
12 ‘Yugoslavia needs the Pope’ and ‘Christian foes kept apart by Muslims’, Sunday Telegraph, 11 August 1991.