On the occasion of 20th anniversary of the end of the civil war on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia (1991−1995) it is necessary to reassess the real causes and cardinal perpetuators of the process of Yugoslavia’s internal and external bloody destruction.
Introduction
In the western scientific literature the “liberal democracy” scholars (as journalists and policymakers) have, for the last 25 years a standard cliché which is that the cause of Yugoslavia’s destruction is the Serbs as a nation[1] and that Yugoslavia’s only destroyer was Slobodan Milosevic – the “Balkans butcher”.[2] However, the same scholars (and journalists and policymakers) paid no attention to other internal or external “destroyers” of the country. In the case of Croatia, the authoritarian and neo-Nazi (Ustashi) regime of Dr. Franjo Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union (the HDZ) played a central role.
To illustrate for example, Franjo Tudjman is not included into the anthology of the top-20th century South-East European strongmen, authoritarian rulers and dictators, edited by Bernd J. Fischer, however Slobodan Miloshevic is.[3] This text is to contribute more accurately to the dialogue on the reasons and causers of Yugoslavia’s death in 1991−1995, especially as relating to Franjo Tudjman’s Ustashi regime in Croatia.
The HDZ in Power
The HDZ took power in Croatia with a majority, after the spring parliamentary and presidential elections in 1990. The party (est. in 1989) had an absolute majority in Croatia’s Parliament (Sabor) with Franjo Tudjman as both Croatia’s President and the party leader – a fact which allows the HDZ to establish, in effect, a full scale dictatorship in Croatia for the decade to 2000. A direct consequence of such electoral results in Croatia, inspired also by the electoral results in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was election in Serbia of Slobodan Miloshevic and his Socialist Party of Serbia (the SPS) in December 1990. The election of Miloshevic and his SPS in Serbia was Serbia’s answer to the electoral results in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina – two Yugoslav republics in which the ultra-right political parties won power at the eve of the new civil war.
The majority of the Serbs in ex-Yugoslavia feared the Ustashi regime in Croatia, followed by the Islamic fundamentalist Party of Democratic Action (the SDA) of Alija Izetbegovic in Bosnia-Herzegovina. These were, largely, the driving forces for Serbia’s electorate voting for its own strongman and nationalist to protect their brethren Serbs in other Yugoslav republics (Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) fearing a continuation of the WWII Magnum Crimen against the Serbs.[4] For Croatia’s Serbs (the “Survivors” of the WWII Ustashi-led holocaust), especially in the Krajina region, Franjo Tudjman was a new Ante Pavelic (the WWII Nazi Croat leader) with the HDZ mirroring the WWII Nazi Croat Ustashi movement.[5]
HDZ’s authorities using the propaganda of creation of a Greater Serbia, soon succeeded in introducing a state-building at absolute odds with the idea of political liberal democracy and a society of multicultural and multiethnic coexistence. The party’s policy was mainly based on traditional Croatian clerical right-wing nationalism somewhat mirroring the extreme Croat national movement and rhetoric of the 1941−1945 Independent State of Croatia (the NDH). A German Nazi NSDAP salutation was even used in the Parliament in Zagreb by the HDZ’s members during the official parliamentary sessions.[6]
Nevertheless, in the HDZ’s Croatia a new political elite was much less interested in introducing of the Western liberal model of political democracy based on the rights and role of the Parliament in the national political system, free media and speech, than in continuation of the WWII policy of the “Final Solution” of the Serb Question in a Greater post-WWII Croatia with attempts to annex a greater part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In such political atmosphere the ultra-right and even Nazi ideologies found ground in post-socialist Croatia – a country directly supported by Vatican and Western democracies and primarily by Germany. Among all ex-socialism East European countries, Croatia was the best example of transition from a state socialism to quasi-democracy by brutal nationalism and exclusivism.
Creation of a new ideological foundation is essential in the process of making a new state. In the 1990s war-time Croatia, the new political leadership of the HDZ drawn on extreme nationalistic and ultra-right political-national ideology, broadly based on Serbophobia, in order to gain massive public support for their political goals.
An ideological framework of anti-Serbism was the main ground on which the HDZ’s Government was building a new independent state of Croatia, creating a new army, security forces, institutional framework and promoting a “democratic and pro-European Croatia”. It is of extreme importance to stress that establishing a new order was essential in the chaotic atmosphere of the final collapse of the state socialism system with its own norms and values. Croatia’s declaration of state independence in June 1991 and the outbreak of the conflict against both the central authorities in Belgrade and Croatia’s Serb population who decisively opposed living in any kind of independent Croatia taking primarily into account their bloody experience from the time of the WWII NDH.
Furthermore, establishing a new normative order was important to legitimize political actions of the new authorities and to mobilize the ethnic Croats for the state-building process and above all for the “Final Solution” of the Serb Question in Croatia. Thus, the new Government succeeded in directing mass actions of the ethnic Croats in regime-approved ways: a war against the Yugoslav army and Croatia’s Serbs in the mid-1991 and finally the ethnic cleansing of majority of Croatia’s Serbs in the mid-1995. The ultra-right nationalistic ideology provided the biggest part of the content of the new Croatia’s order and values, with profound ethno-political consequences.
The pravashi
The Croat ultra-right nationalism and nationalistic ideologies are mainly based on the 19th century ideology of the Croat “state rights”, favored and maintained by the pravashi (the rightists). They and their groups and political parties espouse the same ethno-political goals as the leader of the 19th century extremist and racist strand of the same Croat national movement and Croatian Party of Rights (the HSP, est. 1861), Ante Starchevic. They appropriated the very essential elements of the HSP national ideology:
- A creation of a Greater Croatia with Bosnia-Herzegovina and some other South Slavic territories.
- An extermination of all Orthodox Serbs from a Greater Croatia or their Croatization.[7]
Ante Starchevic urged the creation of a Greater Croatia, not recognizing the existence of any other South Slavs except the Croats and Bulgarians.[8] His ideology and the HSP party’s program and narrative were markedly colored by anti-Serb tone. Consequently, both of them became the main ideological framework for the extermination of the Serbs on the territory of the NDH, 1941−1945 and for the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs by Tudjman’s regime in 1995 (the “Flash” and “Storm” military-police operations in May and August). In 1895, the even more radical and nationalistic Pure Party of Rights (the ČSP) was established, headed by Josip Frank whose members and ideological followers took active participations in the pogroms against the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during the WWI.[9]
The post-Yugoslav HSP, as the largest and most influential the extreme Ustashi party, was re-established in February 1990 by domestic and émigré Croat Nazi Ustashi followers. The party soon became relatively popular with a membership of approximately 100.000 by 1992, when the party received 7 percent of the vote for the national Parliament. However, the HSP became a “favorable opposition party” of the HDZ in the 1990s and as such, in reality, unofficial spokesman of the ruling HDZ. The coalition between these two ultra-right nationalistic parties resulted in the HDZ violating the Croatian electoral law in 1995 in order to permit the HSP to cross the statutory 5 percent threshold (5.1). After 1993 when the party leadership changed, the HSP became a tool of the ruling HDZ in Croatia’s political arena. In February 1996 the HSP was cleansed of all party leadership who opposed HDZ-HSP coalition and cooperation.
Different factional struggles within the pravashi bloc led to the creation of several new ultra-right political parties in Croatia like the HSP-1861, the Croatian Pure Party of Rights, the National Democratic League and the Independent Party of Rights. All of them, including unofficial groups and movements of the Croat extremists, trying to propagate their nationalistic messages through mass media almost totally controlled by the governmental HDZ. In these media efforts only those groups who had been “approved” by the HDZ (firstly the HSP) succeeded in sending their messages to the audience.
A “Herzegovinian lobby”
One of the most important features of Croatia’s political scene in the early 1990s was the fact that the HDZ itself was gradually passing to the hands of a “Herzegovinian lobby” (like Vladimir Sheks, Vice Vukojevic, Gojko Shushak) within the party leadership, which meant that the WWII Ustashi ideology and practice ultimately won against all other options in both the Central Board of the HDZ and the Government of Croatia.[10] However, the crucial point of this HDZ’s course was that the party and State leadership became crucially dependent on – even governed – by the Croat (Ustashi) émigré groups with whom the HDZ “Herzegovinian lobby” had extremely close relations, especially Gojko Shushak, a Minister of Defense, who was manager and owner of several firms in Canada before returning to Croatia in 1990 to become a member of the Central Board of the HDZ. Franjo Tudjman favored Gojko Shushak exactly for the reason that he was a key figure in maintaining contacts with a Croat diaspora which was giving substantial financial support for the HDZ’s policy.
This “Herzegovinian lobby” succeeded in strengthening it’s own position within the HDZ, primarily by using regional identity as a basis for establishing necessary networks of power, influence, and favors (for instance, with Herzegovinian extremist Ivic Pashalic). The HDZ’s “Herzegovinians” are usually seen as the cardinal factor which firmed Tudjman as a dictatorial strongman in the party and the state.
Tudjman’s sympathy with and support to the “Herzegovinian” extremists is unquestionable, especially in authoritarianism on the domestic front and in dealing with Croatia’s Serbs. He was driven by his personal and his HDZ party’s “historic mission” to bring State independence for (a Greater) Croatia and to finally solve the Serbian Question within her borders. He shared the standpoint of the traditional Croat nationalists, that all aspects of the transition from State socialism to (quasi)liberal democracy and market economy have to be subordinated to the State-building process. Nonetheless, Tudjman was astute enough to project a “democratic” image abroad. This prevented many foreign observers and politicians from recognising the reality of his ultra-right views and politics, especially in dealing with Croatia’s Serbs.
A Rehabilitation of the WWII NDH
From the point of ideology of the extreme Croat nationalism, the cardinal goal of ultra-right nationalistic parties, groups, ideologists and politicians was to create, for the first time after 1102, an independent, as well as a Greater and finally “Serben-frei” Croatia. In the 1990s it was ultra-right nationalistic ideology that provided the main background for creation of the new order and values in the HDZ’s Croatia.
For all Croat ultra-nationalists, a crucial political reference in regard to the state-building process is the (1941−1945 created) NDH. They finally succeeded – with great support by Tudjman and his HDZ – to rehabilitate the NDH and even to recognize its contribution to the Croat State-building efforts. This was achieved mainly by a brutal falsification of historical facts and self-interpretation of historical events and the role and deeds of the Croat Ustashi personalities. For the HDZ’s Croatia there were at least four reasons for praising the Ustashi WWII state:
- The NDH gave a political-historical foundation for the post-Yugoslav Croatia’s statehood.
- It annexed majority of Croat claimed South-East European territories and as such became a kind of historical realization of a Greater Croatia projected by Pavao Ritter Vitezovic in 1700.[11]
- The Ustashi regime showed a way of solving the “Serb Question”, thus, in regard to this historical process, became a blueprint for the coming generations of the Croat “patriots”.
- The existence of the NDH provided a necessary link of a self-imagined “proof” of the so-called “Thousand-year-old” legal continuity of the Croatian statehood.
All political parties and organizations in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina of the “Croatian rights” openly propagated their direct connections with the NDH and its führer (poglavnik) Ante Pavelic who himself was a member of the “Croatian Rights” party.[12] Here is worth to notice that Franjo Tudjman, during the WWII, fought for several months in the Ustashi uniform – a fact which gave a huge credibility to him in the eyes of any Croat extremist despite his Communist past.
It seems obvious that the ultimate ethno-political goals of both the pre- and WWII Ustashi movement and post-Yugoslav “Croat Rights” are identical including the concept of “solving” the “Serb Question” in a Greater Croatia. This was largely the case with the re-established HSP in 1990. Originally this party defined its program exclusively in relation to the NDH and the WWII Ustashi movement widely using various NDH symbols and iconography. Nevertheless, an original 1990 HSP’s leader, Dobroslav Paraga, never accepted any fascist or Nazi face of the NDH even claiming that the State was anti-fascist.[13]
For all Croat extremists, including Tudjman himself, the NDH represented democratic wishes of overwhelming majority of ethnic Croats for their own independent state (from Yugoslavia as a “Greater Serbia”) and was legitimate continuation of the independent Kingdom of Croatia which became incorporated into the Kingdom of Hungary in 1102. Furthermore, all of them deny any engagement of the NDH’s regime in any systematic and organized persecutions or genocide committed on the racial, confessional or ethnic grounds. Moreover, the HSP insists that the Ustashi terror against the Serbs in 1941−1945 was provoked by the Serbs themselves, i.e. by the Partisan uprising in July 1941 against the legitimate and internationally recognized NDH[14] neglecting the fact that the Ustashi genocide against the Serbs started three months before the outbreak of the Serb-(Partisan and non-Partisan) revolt in the NDH.
HSP’s political cynicism even indulged absurd claims that many of the massacred Serb civilians had, in fact, been killed by the Serb-Chetniks or Partisans dressed in the Ustashi uniforms. Nevertheless, a common issue among all Croat extremists regarding the “Serb Question” is the WWII practice of creation of an Autocephalous Croatian Orthodox Church as a bridge toward the final Catholization and Croatization of Croatia’s Serbs.
The excuse for Ustashi violence in the NDH is usually followed by the claim that the Nazifascist feature and iconography of the NDH were forced upon the Ustashi authorities by Germany and Italy, that the Ustashi Government did as much as possible to protect the Jews within the NDH, and finally, and of the crucial importance, that the real number of murdered Croatian Serbs is very much overestimated by the pro-Serb Yugoslav authorities after the WWII.
For instance, instead of 700.000 killed people in the death camp of Jasenovac (“Yugoslav Auschwitz”, of whom 500,000 were the Serbs) today official Croatia recognizes just 86.000. In the other words, Jasenovac is a great Serbian falsification and political propaganda: a myth projected by the supporters of an idea of a Greater Serbia.[15] For the Croat extremists, among the victims of Jasenovac the largest number have been the ethnic Croats but not the Serbs.[16] The Croat rightists as apologists for the Ustashi movement claim that the NDH is falsely represented for pure political reasons and therefore the picture of the NDH has to be repainted. However, such repainting or rewriting of the NDH’s history is at odds with historical sources and scientific account of non-partisan historiography. Finally, Dr. Franjo Tudjman himself, as a professional historian, in his most important book (Wastelands of Historical Reality) sought to minimize the crimes of the Ustashi regime in the WWII against both the Serbs and the Jews.[17]
A rehabilitation of the legacy of the NDH and Ustashi ideology with the NDH’s iconography was, however, only a formal problem for Franjo Tudjman and his HDZ who have been officially ambivalent toward it. Tudjman knew very well that any close association with the NDH and Ustashi ideology and iconography will cause many problems for Croatia’s image abroad especially among the cluster of the Jewish communities and political lobbies. However, on the other hand, for Tudjman the NDH was giving the State-building example, as Croatia for the centuries did not have any experience of a real and internationally recognized statehood. For that reason, for the HDZ’s ideologists the NDH became a crucial element for completing the main party’s task – to unify within the umbrella of the HDZ all different strands of Croatness.
In addition, the NDH was giving a link to Vatican as the main supporter of both the Ustashi and the HDZ regimes and ideology.[18] Subsequently, the HDZ’s authorities did not and do not openly endorse the Ustashi movement and the NDH, as it is the case with of “Croat rightists”, but on the other hand both Tudjman and his HDZ had avoided any clear denunciation of the NDH’s Nazi, totalitarian, genocidal and above all Serbocide aspects. Moreover, the HDZ’s Croatia adopted all important symbolic and iconographic aspects of the WWII NDH (like kuna currency, state insignias, etc.) and dedicated streets, squares and monuments in Croatia to the Ustashi WWII officials. Tudjman himself as a President of Croatia nominated, for instance, two ex-WWII Ustashi officials to high state posts: Ivo Rojnic – Ustashi commander in Dubrovnik who became Croatia’s ambassador in Argentina and Vinko Nikolic – an official in the Ministry of Education of the NDH who gained a Parliamentary seat. With the rehabilitation of the Nazi NDH, Tudjman’s Croatia was also rehabilitated as was the WWII Croatian Roman Catholic Church headed by an Archbishop of Alojzije Stepinac who directly collaborated with the Ustashi regime.[19]
A linguistic nationalism or purification of the official standardized Croat language in the public usage, but mainly from the Serb language based lexemes was an agenda of the Croatization of Croatia by Tudjman regime.[20] However, a lexical purification of the Croatian language in Tudjman’s Croatia was executed, basically, according to the NDH’s pattern. One of the first steps in the process of Croatization and purification of the Croat language by the new HDZ’s authorities was to make a clear difference between the Croat and Serb languages from lexical, orthographic and grammatical points of view. This was undertaken in a set of scientific editions by the linguists and philologists who have been at the same time trying to present and a “proper” history of the Croat language. The ultimate aim was to prove that the Croat and the Serb always have been two different ethno-national languages and of the most importance, that the Shtokavian dialect was always the Croat national language, not only the Serb.[21] The final ethno-political consequence of the HDZ’s policy of linguistic nationalism was that the Serb ethnic name was expelled from the official name of the standardized language and its orthography in Croatia and likewise everything in connection with the Serbs in regard to the Croat language.[22]
Nevertheless, as the best means to hide its de facto support for the Ustashi ideology and the WWII NDH’s legacy, Tudjman’s regime officially supported the “anti-fascist” Josip Broz Tito’s Partisans from the WWII[23] with the political rhetoric of the post-Yugoslav Croatia building her own Statehood, the “anti-fascist” People’s/Socialist Republic of Croatia, post 1945.
However, at the same time, the HDZ created a clear atmosphere in Croatia in which the victims of the Ustashi terror (primarily the Serbs) are regarded as the national enemies. To illustrate, to January 1996 around 3,000 “Partisan” monuments were destroyed or removed in Croatia.[24] Tudjman launched an initiative to transform the memorial centre to the Jasenovac death camp (on the Sava River on Croatia’s side) from the “victims of fascism” to the “victims of the civil war” – an initiative which also camouflaged association with the NDH, which pleased all Croat extremists.
Even before the beginning of the civil war in Croatia in 1991 the Croat security forces heavily structurally damaged the Jasenovac museum building and a large part of documentation and torture evidence simply disappeared. The monument itself was not destroyed or damaged since it is composed by four Ustashi “U” letter-symbols.
Franjo Tudjman, a Ph.D., in history, ran in to conflict with the Yugoslav Communist authorities in the mid-1960s when he started to refute the official number of murdered ethnic Serbs in Jasenovac as too high, accusing at the same time the Yugoslav Communists for deliberately falsifying the truth on Jasenovac. It cost him dismissal from the post of a head of the Institute for the History of the Workers Movement in Croatia (in Zagreb) but this action marked the beginning of the process of Tudjman’s transformation from a Partisan General, to the Croat nationalist and extremist. Nonetheless, his cosmetic political moves, as removing a prominent Ustashi extremist Tomislav Merchep from the HDZ’s Executive Committee at the Third General Convention of the HDZ in October 1995, could not hide the HDZ’s infatuation with the Ustashi iconography, ideology, legacy and ethno-political goals.
Conclusions
Tudjman’s and HDZ’s preoccupation with Croatia’s state-building and solving the “Serb Question”, rather than establishing liberal-democratic political systems and institutions, meant that the NDH’s legacy continued to play very important role in the HDZ’s strategy and policy of creation of the new order and values. In the other words, the political-ideological mainstream of the HDZ’s Croatia was and is grounded in the NDH’s legacy.
Today, as a result of the HDZ’s policy of extreme ethno-confessional nationalism, Croatia is, since mid-1995, “more ethnically homogeneous than ever was in the historic past”.[25] The Serb population on the present-day territory of Croatia fell from 24 percent in 1940 to 12 percent in 1990 and 4 percent in 1996 with the practice of its everyday assimilation (Croatization) and emigration from Croatia.
Notes:
[1] T. Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth & the Destruction of Yugoslavia, New Haven−London: Yale University Press, 1997.
[2] S. L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War, Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1995.
[3] B. J. Fischer (ed.), Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian Rulers of Southeast Europe, London: C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd, 2006. For the matter of clarification, Slobodan Miloshevic was a Montenegrin, probably even born in Montenegro in the village of Ljeva Rijeka. At the wartime of the 1990s, as today as well, Serbian political scene was and is completely occupied by the persons who are either not Serbs, not born in Serbia or by those whose origin is out of Serbia living in Serbia as the first generation of immigrants. Many of them even did not learn properly to speak Serbia’s Serbian language of the Ekavian dialect. On the sociolinguistic aspect of the destruction of ex-Yugoslavia and Serbian national question, see [В. Б. Сотировић, Социолингвистички аспект распада Југославије и српско национално питање, Нови Сад−Србиње: Добрица књига, 2007].
[4] On the holocaust of Serbs (Magnum Crimen) in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941−1945, see [V. Dedijer, The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, Prometheus Books, 1992; B. M. Lituchy (ed.), Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia: Analyses and Survivor Testimonies, New York: Jasenovac Research Institute, 2006; V. Novak, Magnum Crimen: Half a Century of Clericalism in Croatia, I−II, Jagodina: Gambit, 2011; E. Paris, L. Perkins, Genocide in Satellite Croatia, 1941−1945: A Record of Racial and Religious Persecutions and Massacres, Literary Licencing, LLC, 2011].
[5] On the WWII Nazi Croatia, see [S. Trifkovic, Ustaša: Croatian Fascism and European Politics, 1929−1945, The Lord Byron Foundation, 2011; R. McCormick, Croatia under Ante Pavelic: America, The Ustaše and Croatian Genocide, London−New York, I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2014].
[6] See the USA documentary movie [Truth is the Victim in Bosnia, 1992 at https://youtu.be/fNqHfIugmaU].
[7] For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see [В. Крестић, Геноцидом до Велике Хрватске. Друго допуњено издање, Јагодина: Гамбит, 2002].
[8] On Croatian national identity, see [A. J. Bellamy, The Formation of Croatian National Identity: A Centuries-Old Dream, Manchester−New York: Manchester University Press, 2003].
[9] On the ideology of the Croatian Party of Rights, see [M. Gross, Povijest pravaške ideologije, Zagreb: Institut za hrvatsku povijest, 1973; M. S. Spalatin, “The Croatian Nationalism of Ante Starčević, 1845−1871”, Journal of Croatian Studies, 15, 1975, 19−146; G. G. Gilbert, “Pravaštvo and the Croatian National Issue”, East European Quarterly, 1, 1978, 57−68; M. Gross. A. Szabo, Prema hrvatskome građanskom društvu. Društveni razvoj u civilnoj Hrvatskoj I Slavoniji šezdesetih I sedamdesetih godina 19. stoljeća, Zagreb: Globus nakladni zavod, 1992, 257−265]. On historical account of the political parties’ ideologies in Croatia, see [Ј. Хорват, Странке код Хрвата и њихова идеологија, Београд: Политика, 1939]. On the pogroms of Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Great War, see [В. Ћоровић, Црна књига: Патње Срба Босне и Херцеговине за време Светског Рата 1914−1918, Удружење ратних добровољаца, 1996].
[10] The Herzegovinians are traditionally considered as the most belligerent and confrontational mental group within the territory of ex-Yugoslavia. On mental and cultural characteristics of the Yugoslavs, see [В. Дворниковић, Карактерологија Југословена, Београд: Просвета, 2000].
[11] P. R. Vitezović, Croatia rediviva: Regnante Leopoldo Magno Caesare, Zagreb, 1700.
[12] On Pavelic’s biography, see [B. J. Fischer (ed.), Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian Rulers of Southeast Europe, London: C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd, 2006, 228−271].
[13] For instance, see, interview with Paraga in [Danas, Zagreb, 1991-03-5].
[14] The NDH was recognized by Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Japan, Spain, National China, Finland, Denmark and Manchuria. It existed from April 10th, 1941 to May 15th, 1945 [S. Srkulj, J. Lučić, Hrvatska Povijest u dvadeset pet karata. Prošireno i dopunjeno izdanje, Zagreb: Hrvatski informativni centar, 1996, 105].
[15] On Tudjman’s Croatia’s dealing with the population losses in the NDH and the rest of Yugoslavia, see [V. Žerjavić, Population Losses in Yugoslavia 1941−1945, Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 1997]. Compare with [С. Аврамов, Геноцид у Југославији у светлости међународног права, Београд, 1992].
[16] See, for instance, Election Declaration of the Croatian Party of Rights in 1992 [Izborna deklaracija Hrvatske stranke prava, Zagreb, 1992, 3].
[17] F. Tudjman, Bespuća povijesne zbiljosti, Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1989.
[18] On direct links between the NDH and Vatican, see [Tajni dokumenti o odnosima između Vatikana i ustaške NDH, Zagreb, 1948; V. Dedijer, Vatikan i Jasenovac. Dokumenti, Beograd, 1987; D. Živojinović, D. Lučić, Varvarstvo u ime Hristovo. Prilozi za Magnum Crimen, Beograd, 1988; M. Bulajić, Misija Vatikana u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj, I−II, Beograd, 1992; М. А. Ривели, Бог је с нама: Црква Пија XII саучесника нацифашизма, Никшић: Јасен, 2003; Д. Р. Живојиновић, Ватикан, Католичка црква и југословенска власт 1941−1958, Београд: Просвета−Терсит, 1994, 11−127].
[19] On Stepinac’s case, see [A. Benigar, Alojzije Stepinac hrvatski kardinal, Rim, 1974; S. Alexander, The Triple Myth. A Life of Archbishop Stepinac, New York, 1987; М. А. Ривели, Надбискуп геноцида: Монсињор Степинац, Ватикан и усташка диктатура у Хрватској 1941−1945, Никшић−Јасен, 1999].
[20] A linguistic nationalism was a common issue in all former East European countries after 1990 as the language was and still is understood as the main identifier of the (ethno)nation. On the linguistic nationalism in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, see [S. Barbour, C. Carmichael (eds.), Language and Nationalism in Europe, Oxford−New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 221−239].
[21] On this issue, as examples, see [V. Brodnjak, Razlikovni rječnik srpskog i hrvatskog jezika, Zagreb, 1991; M. Moguš, Povijest hrvatskoga književnoga jezika, Zagreb: Globus nakladni zavod, 1993; M. Kačić, Hrvatski i srpski. Zablude i krivotvorine; Zagreb: Zavod za lingvistiku Filozofskoga fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 1995; M. Lončarić, Hrvatski jezik, Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski – Instytut Filologii Polskiej, 1998]. Compare with [П. Милосављевић, Срби и њихов језик. Хрестоматија, Приштина: Народна и универзитетска библиотека, 1997].
[22] M. Okuka, „O osamostaljivanju hrvatskog književnog jezika“, А. Кюннапа, В. Лефельдта, С. Н. Кузнецова (ред.), Микроязыки, языки, интерязыки. Сборник в честь ординарного профессора Александра Дмитриевича Дуличенко, Тарту, 2006, 231. On the Serbian point on the Croat, Serb and Bosnian languages, see [B. Tošović, A. Wonisch, (eds.), Die serbische Sichtweise des Verhältnisses zwischen dem Serbischen, Kroatischen und Bosniakischen, I/4, Novi Sad: Institut für Slawistik der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz−Beogradska knjiga, 2012].
[23] For the matter of historical accuracy, the Partisans of Josip Broz Tito (half Slovene and half Croat) during the WWII have not be fighting against the Germans, Italians and Ustashi forces if they are not attacked by them. Moreover, during the whole war the Partisans collaborated primarily with the NDH regime and its armed forces but with the Germans as well. Therefore, the “anti-fascist” aspect of Tito’s Partisans and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (the KPJ) is falls and invented by the Yugoslav communists themselves. On this issue, see [М. Самарџић, Сарадња партизана са Немцима, усташама и Албанцима, Крагујевац: Погледи, 2006; В. Б. Сотировић, Кривотворине о Јосипу Брозу Титу, Брозовим партизанима и Равногорском покрету, 1941. г.−1945. г., Виљнус: Југославологија – Независни истраживачки центар за југословенске студије, 2014]. About Josip Broz Tito, see [В. Адамовић, Три диктатора: Стаљин, Хитлер, Тито. Психопатолошка паралела, Београд: Informatika, 2008, 445−610; П. Симић, З. Деспот, Тито: Строго поверљиво. Архивски документи, Београд−Службени гласник, 2010; П. Симић, Тито: Феномен 20. Века. Треће допуњено издање, Београд: Службени гласник, 2011; J. Pirjevec, Tito in tovariši, Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, 2011; V. Dinić, Tito (ni)je Tito. Konačna istina, Beograd: Novmark doo, 2013].
[24] Vreme, Beograd, 1996-01-15.
[25] S. Barbour, C. Carmichael (eds.), Language and Nationalism in Europe, Oxford−New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 228.
