Nationalism and mythology
graves exhumed, in order that a public reburial could take place, often in the presence of both religious and political officials. Serbian radio reported that one ceremony entailed a line of coffins that extended for over one-and-a-half kilometres, such was the extent of the crimes committed against the Serbian people. 10 Importantly, the ceremonies were not just restricted to Serbia, with reburials taking place both in Bosnia and in the Croatian Krajina, the frontier region populated by a high concentration of ethnic Serbians, that would later see some of the worst fighting of the war. 11 The end product of this was to both remind the Serbian people that their nation and identity was constantly under threat, and had been since 1389 through to the Second World War and the modern era – leading to a swell in support for that same identity – but also to encourage a growth in negative patriotism, a distrust and hatred of those responsible for the historic injustices carried out against the Serbian nation. In Croatia, the rise of nationalist sentiments occurred along similar lines, with the emergence of a leader willing to utilize Croatian mythology for his own political purposes. Having won Croatia’s first multi-party elections, Franjo Tudjman embarked upon the implementation of a distinctly nationalist agenda, one that engendered Croatian cultural, historical and political exclusivity. As part of the push for Croatian independence the Yugoslav flagwas discarded, replacedwith a red and white checkerboard shield, the Sahovnica, that previously served as an emblem for the NDH, the Independent State of Croatia established during Nazi occupation. Alongside the Sahovnica, Tudjman re-established the Kuna as Croatia’s national currency, as it had been during the Second World War. 12 When combined with Tudjman’s claim during the election that the NDH had been an ‘ expression of the historical aspiration of the Croatian people for its own independent state ’ , it became even more obvious that his goal was to foster a rebirth of Croatian national spirit, at the expense of other ethnic groupings within Croatia’s borders. 13 Tudjman went further th an implicit acceptance of Croatia’s fascist legacy, though, as he sought to fold its more palatable elements into a wider scheme of Croatian nationalism, while at the same time minimizing and downplaying the worst excesses of the regime. Discussing Jasenovac, the site of the most brutal Ustasha death camp during the Nazi occupation, Tudjman wrote that the suggested severity of the regime’s actions there had been vastly overplayed. Rejecting both the Yugoslav government’s official figure of 700,000 deaths at the camp, and the figure of 200,000 put forward by independent academics, Tudjman claimed the correct number was in fact no more than 40,000 deaths; in summary, ‘ the fabled numbers of hundreds of thousands of slayings at Jasenovac are utter nonsense ’ . 14 I n conjunction with this, Tudjman sought to redefine Croatia’s material culture, and diminish the degree to which it could continue to serve as a reminder of the legacy of the Ustasha. Invoking Spanish Fascist leader General Franco, Tudjman suggested in one interview in 1991 that the monuments across Croatia dedicated to victims of the Ustasha should be replaced with more general ones, dedicated to the loss of all Croatians during the war. 15 Indeed, by the end of the conflict, an estimated 3,000 of the monuments dedicated to the victims of the fascist regime across Croatia had been deliberately removed or destroyed, amounting to around half of all such monuments in the country. 16 Jasenovac saw its status demoted from that of a memorial to a national park, while the
10 Denich, B. (1994). 11 Macdonald, D. (2002) .
12 Kinzer, S. (1993). 13 Denich, B. (1994). 14 Macdonald, D. (2002). 15 Milekic, S. (2017) . 16 Vladisavljevic, A. Balkan Insight .
94
Made with FlippingBook Digital Publishing Software