Milosevic Read Free Page A

Slovenia and the northern Serbian province of Voivodina.
    Although Yugoslavs spoke the same language – Serbo–Croat, as it was known – they were divided by culture, religion and ethnic identity. Istanbul’s Balkan possessions were known – and viewed in the west – as Turkey–in–Europe. For much of the nineteenth century the Serbian capital Belgrade was the northernmost point of Turkey–in–Europe. The main division was between the eastern and western Christian churches dating from the schism of 1054, when the eastern (Orthodox) church was based in Byzantium and the western (Catholic) church in Rome. This division, which cut across the Yugoslav lands, was broadly reflected in the frontier between the Ottoman Empire in the east and the Habsburg Empire in the west. From the sixteenth century until 1878, the western frontier of the Ottoman Empire was roughly the present border between Croatia and Bosnia–Herzegovina.
    Yugoslavia was a constitutional monarchy, but not a very solid one.In an attempt to forge a centralised state in 1929 King Aleksandar Karadjordjevic abolished parliament and seized power. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (also known as Royal Yugoslavia). It was not enough to guarantee the state’s or his survival. Five years later King Aleksandar was assassinated in Marseilles by a Macedonian linked to an extreme Croat nationalist party, known as the Ustasha.
    After its collapse in 1941 Yugoslavia’s irredentist neighbours greedily helped themselves to its territories. Hungary immediately annexed Voivodina. Bulgaria took Macedonia and parts of southern Serbia. Slovenia was divided between Italy and Germany. Italy also took much of the Croatian coast and its islands in the Adriatic. The Nazis placed Serbia under direct military rule, implemented with customary brutality. The German High Command ordered Wehrmacht units to execute one hundred prisoners for every soldier killed, and fifty for each one wounded. With Italian and German help the Ustasha set up their Independent State of Croatia (NDH) under the leadership of Ante Pavelic, with the support of the Catholic church. The NDH encompassed Croatia and Bosnia–Herzegovina. The NDH’s strategy for dealing with over two million Serbs on its territory was simple: ‘Kill a third, expel a third and convert a third.’
    Not surprisingly, many Serb villages demanded to be converted to Catholicism. Catholic priests presided over these mass conversions. But Croat promises of baptism were often a trap. In the village of Glina, in 1941, hundreds of Serbs were locked into a church and burnt alive. Fifty years later, when Croatia again declared independence, Glina was one of the first places to come under attack from Serb paramilitaries. Many of the Yugoslav army generals whose forces attacked Croatia, and later Bosnia, were from families whose members had been killed by the Ustasha. The father of General Ratko Mladic, the military leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was killed in 1945 while leading a partisan attack on Ante Pavelic’s home village.
    For many Serbs, the NDH’s brutality was summed up in a scene from the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte’s account of his wartime experiences,
Kaputt
. Malaparte interviews Pavelic, and is joined by the Italian ambassador Raffaele Casertano:
    While he spoke, I gazed at a wicker basket on the Poglavnik’s [Leader’s] desk. The lid was raised and the basket seemed to befilled with mussels, or shelled oysters – as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly in London. Casertano looked at me and winked,
    â€˜Would you like a nice oyster stew?’
    â€˜Are they Dalmatian oysters?’ I asked the Poglavnik.
    Ante Pavelic removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jelly–like mass, and he said smiling, with that tired