Just as some have tried to defend Pius XII, others have tried to defend Croatian Archbishop Stepinac. Stella Alexander (1979), in Church and state in Yugoslavia since 1945 makes her defense by referring us to a list of letters that Stepinac sent to Pavelic and others protesting the massacres and the forced conversions. But given the historical facts, including those documented by Alexander, it is difficult not to interpret these letters as a cover (just like Hitler’s remarks to Goering about the “fabrications” that people were making concerning death camps were a cover for the stenographer, ever present, to document). In the first place, Stepinac knew perfectly well who and what the Ustashas were—fascists and terrorists—before they even came to power in Croatia. France had condemned Ante Pavelic to death for the assassination of Yugslav King Alexander while the King was in French soil, so the entire world knew who he was, but the Vatican especially had better information than the rest of the world. And how did the good archbishop receive this murderer? With open arms: “After Germany invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, Pavelic led a pro-Nazi dictatorship that controlled a newly independent Croatia. The Archbishop of Zagreb [Stepinac], a fervent anti-Communist, initially embraced the Pavelic Government as ‘God's hand at work.’”[20]
Secondly, Alexander herself documents that the Catholic hierarchy in Croatia was deeply involved in the mass slaughter of civilians. And who was at the top of that hierarchy? Why, Archbishop Stepinac! The same NYT article from which the above quote comes says, “By 1942 he [Stepinac] began denouncing Ustashe excesses, once in a letter to Pavelic and, in 1943, in church homilies and letters to priests.” This is a very favorable (to Stepinac) way of putting it. A fairer rendering would be to say that not until 1942, not until after astonishing crimes that appalled even the German Nazis had already been committed, not until they had been committed for an entire year, did Archbishop Stepinac bother to stir. And in the entire year of 1942 he sent the grand total of one letter of complaint to Pavelic. Nothing came out of his mouth where people could hear it until the year 1943, two full years into some of the most astonishingly brutal atrocities humanity has ever seen, atrocities committed enthusiastically by Catholic priests under his authority. To construe one lonely letter to Pavelic, and complaints in homilies and letters to priests, as ‘resistance’ beggars even the most overflowing charity. Stepinac was the Archbishop: the highest local authority in the quasi-military structure of the Catholic Church that demands complete obedience as one of the vows of its inductees. Why should Stepinac whimper in a few letters to his subordinates when he is in a position to issue orders? Such letters have all the appearance of a cover—they hardly look like committed activism, let alone evidence that he assumed responsibility for what his own subordinates were doing.
The NYT goes on to say that “The Vatican and many historians credit him with saving hundreds of Jews and Serbs.” But what can it possibly matter what the Vatican says on this score? It has no credibility here, as established by all of the above, and especially given that it was beatifying Stepinac! We are also not told who constitutes this alleged multitude of historian apologists for Stepinac. Phrases such as “many historians,” “many scientists,” etc. are all too easy and should be abolished from journalism. Any unfounded claim can always be attributed to unnamed multitudes. But if such historians exist, they are probably to be found in the ranks of Croatian nationalists. As the same article informs us, “…Stepinac is a national hero to millions of Roman Catholic Croats, and to Croatia’s nationalist President, Franjo Tudjman.” Of course, the NYT has found one Croatian Jew to give a partial exculpation of the late Archbishop (as a weak man who was not up to it), and the man is quoted! Nobody is quoted for the more traditional, much better documented, and, on the face of it, much more plausible point of view: that Stepinac is guilty of willingly participating in crimes against humanity. But can we even believe that this lonely Jew has spoken his mind? He was interviewed when the repatriated Ustashas were again in power in Croatia (see below)—that is, when all Croatian Jews were again fearing for their lives.
Stella Alexander presents Stepinac as a man persecuted by the communists. This seems to rely on the popular Western image that any and all communists are the spawn of evil and therefore that anybody persecuted by them deserves our sympathy. But those communists allegedly ‘persecuting’ Stepinac were in fact seeking justice, which should never be confused with ‘persecution.’ Those communists were the ethnically dogmatically tolerant Partisans who fought for all Yugoslavs regardless of ethnicity or religion, and who paid with their lives to end the slaughters at Jasenovac that Stepinac so late, and so tepidly, ‘protested’ (if indeed we were to credit him with doing that).
The Vatican has gone one better than Stella Alexander. On October 4th 1998 Pope John Paul II beatified Alojzije Stepinac (beatification is the first step on the road to sainthood, according to the Vatican’s rules for proclaiming saints) as a martyr who suffered under communism[21] (has the Vatican sanctified any of the numerous Catholic Croats who defied the Ustashe and valiantly tried to protect the Serbs, Jews, and Roma in their midst, paying for this charity with their lives?). Earlier, Stepinac had already been made a Cardinal while he sat in a Yugoslav prison after the war.
Is the Catholic Church merely misled in this case? Is this a fluke? Hardly. This is consistent with the entire history of the Church towards those who oppress non-Catholics, especially when those non-Catholics are Jews (see Kertzer 2001). And things do not appear to have changed. To take just one example (in a very long list), consider that Pope John Paul II beatified Pius IX. Who was Pius IX?
"In 1867, he [Pius IX] canonized Peter Arbues, a 15th-century inquisitor famed for forcible conversion of Jews, and said in the canonization document, "The divine wisdom has arranged that in these sad days, when Jews help the enemies of the church with their books and money, this decree of sanctity has been brought to fulfillment." (…) Pius IX not only gave the Cross of Commander of the Papal Order to a man famous for a book endorsing the myth of Jewish ritual murders [the famous ‘blood libel’], but established the feast of a boy "martyr" who was supposedly the victim of such a rite. In 1871, addressing a group of Catholic women, Pius said that Jews "had been children in the House of God," but "owing to their obstinacy and their failure to believe, they have become dogs" (emphasis in the original.). "We have today in Rome unfortunately too many of these dogs, and we hear them barking in all the streets, and going around molesting people everywhere." This is the pope beatified by John Paul II in 2000. (…) A Catholic will especially wonder why John Paul II was so determined to beatify Pius IX. Determined he certainly was. The board of experts established to examine Pius IX's credentials did not include the man who knows most about him, Giacomo Martina, S.J., the author of the definitive three-volume life of him. Why was this? Probably because, when Kenneth Woodward of Newsweek asked Martina if, after decades of studying the man, he thought Pius IX a saint, Martina answered 'No, I do not.' "[22]
So it should come as no surprise that John Paul II has also led efforts to beatify Eugenio Pacelli—Pius XII—since the late 1990s.
Neither should it come as a surprise that, when Croatia illegally announced its secession from Yugoslavia, the Vatican, defying a United Nations resolution calling on member states to refrain from actions which might harm a peaceful solution of the Yugoslav crisis, very quickly recognized the claims of the new ‘state’.
And the Vatican was the first state to do so.
What was the Vatican in the process of so eagerly, so immediately, so unilaterally, and so recklessly recognizing? What was the Vatican rushing to ‘bless’ in defiance of the explicitly expressed wishes of the United Nations, and knowing that this could plunge the Yugoslav crisis into bloodshed? The answer, which beggars belief (and yet is perfectly consistent with the history of the Vatican), is that it was recognizing a political structure newly dominated by the repatriated Ustashas which formed the core of Franjo Tudjman’s nationalists!
"Many of the hardliners, previously grouped around the late defence minister Gojko Susak and now headed by Ivic Pasalic, Tudjman's key adviser, stem from Herzegovina or the diaspora - fierce anti -communists who fled Tito's Yugoslavia, or the offspring of old Ustashe families who escaped his revenge at the end of the second world war."[23]
The Yugoslav Jews could see the writing on the wall, and they were warning about it. This was reported by The Independent at the time of Croatia’s breaking away from Yugoslavia:[24]
Jewish leaders were holding a crisis meeting in Belgrade last night to discuss the situation of the Jewish community. They expressed particular concern for 1,500 Jews in the breakaway republic of Croatia, most of whom have not been in contact for two months or more as a result of a cut in communications with the rest of Yugoslavia.
Coincidence yesterday's events may have been, but Jewish leaders were unanimous in saying they saw worrying parallels between the Nazi and pro-Nazi massacres of 50 years ago and the unease of Jews in Croatia under the strongly nationalist regime in the breakaway republic [of Croatia] today.
A Jewish community centre and cemetery were damaged by explosives two months ago in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, and local Jews there have been subjected to death threats and other intimidation. Jewish sources revealed last night that several hundred Jews, mostly young to middle-aged, have recently fled Croatia to Israel, via Budapest.
As Yugoslavia's 6,500 Jews constantly remind visitors, Hitler set up a puppet regime of local Nazis in Croatia in 1941. That regime's forces, known as the Ustashe, executed hundreds of thousands of Jews, Serbs, gypsies and other ''undesirables'' in Croatia while German troops carried out parallel massacres in Serbia itself.
''What worries us is that those in power in Croatia now are largely the same as during the Nazi era,'' said Dr Klara Mandic, a senior Jewish community leader at yesterday's ceremony. ''In some cases, they are exactly the same people, now in their seventies and back from exile under the Communists. In other cases, they are the children of the Ustashe. They wear the same black shirts, the same black trousers, many carry the same ''Serbo-seks'' knives for the Serbs. Tudjman the Croatian President would not dare touch Jews now that we have our own state to protect us. But he has prepared an atmosphere similar to that at the start of the Second World War and the fact is that many of the Croatian groups are out of his control. We are extremely worried about Jews in Croatia. They are afraid to get in touch with us. We have had messages reaching us underground from them, saying 'It is safer that we don't try to call or write. The police are watching and listening and we know we could be killed'...''[25]
And it was well known to the Vatican and everybody else what kind of person Franjo Tudjman was.
President Tudjman of Croatia, unlike Mr. Milosevic, was never shunned by the international community, despite his racist views and his territorial ambitions... In 1993, he was given a visa to attend the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington even though he had written that estimates of the number of Jewish victims in the Holocaust were vastly inflated and that the main characteristics of Jews were "selfishness, craftiness, unreliability, miserliness, underhandedness and secrecy." (He has since apologized for his anti-Semitic views). Last year, Mr. Tudjman was welcomed to the White House and lauded as a man of peace by President Clinton after he agreed to join a federation with the Bosnian Government against the Serbs. No matter that Mr. Tudjman has boasted of his own expansionist intentions regarding large swaths of Bosnia and Herzegovina.[26]
This, then, is the new state that the Vatican rushed to bless. This is no exaggeration: if the Croatian Catholics who formed terrorist organizations and slaughtered countless members of other faiths and ethnicities had been Muslims, they would have been called “radical fundamentalist Islamists”, and the US State Department would list the Vatican as a “state sponsoring terrorism.”
Anybody familiar with the sequence of events in Croatia cannot but find the light in which the Krajina Serbs have been portrayed—as ‘aggressors’, as ‘rebels’—a very strange one. Franjo Tudjman’s nationalists, among many other troubling signs, adopted the same flag that the quisling Ustashe state had used in WWII; they repatriated the former Ustashe diaspora and their families and peppered them in the posts of the highest authority; and, within months of illegally announcing their secession, they were eagerly recognized by—of all states—the Vatican! Can the Krajina Serbs be blamed for fearing a return to the atrocities of the fascist/Catholic clerical state that was the Independent State of Croatia in WWII? After all, they were witnessing an alignment of forces that recalled exactly that which had slaughtered them in WWII (the next state to rush into recognizing Croatia—also unilaterally, and this time without consultation in the European Union—was Germany; Italy soon followed). “The rewritten Croat constitution of 1990…described not a state for the people of Croatia—but a state of Croatian people.”[27] Tudjman’s nationalists were not shy about making public statements that Croatia should be a ‘pure’ Croat state. It was entirely reasonable for the Krajina Serbs to conclude that they were in danger if they were left stranded inside a secessionist Croatia.
It is important here to note that it was before Croatia ever succeeded in breaking away from Yugoslavia that the Krajina Serbs made it clear that they wished to remain citizens of the state that they were already citizens of: Yugoslavia.
But the Vatican did not rush headlong, tripping over its skirts, to endorse that.
And the international community did not show much sympathy for the cause of the Krajina Serbs either, and prevented Serbia from assisting them, even though, of course, they were not aggressing but reacting. In spite of the general anti-Serb slant in all of the mainstream media, The Independent conceded, “Certainly, the non-Communist Croatian government helped to trigger the Serb rebellion, which began only a few months after the elections last year.”[28] That would be, as they say, an understatement, which adds a nice Orwellian touch by describing the virulent Croatian nationalists and fascists as “non-communists”, and the Krajina Serbs, who merely wanted to remain in their own country, as staging a ‘rebellion’. To picture how the Krajina Serbs felt, try the following ‘empathy thought experiment’:
It is the 1990s. You are a Jew living in an ethnically homogenous (or almost) region of Germany that was left over from WWII, where mostly Jewish peasants live and farm the land (forget for the moment that no such thing ever existed, this is a thought experiment). Since West Germany became a post-war ally and was nursed to normalcy, it was negotiated after the war that this Jewish enclave should stay within the borders of Germany because, after all, it had some Germans in it, and the Jews were all German-speaking. But here now comes German unification. And as Germany unifies, people start talking about the 4th Reich, and a new flag is adopted, which has a big swastika in the middle. The ominous eagle is back in force. Large rallies are held and up goes the cry of “Sieg…heil!” What do you want to do? Secede, of course.
The situation for the Krajina Serbs was actually worse than this. First, they did not suffer less than Jews did in World War II even though the world has chosen to ignore the Serbian Holocaust. After all, remember that the systematic slaughters of the Croatian Ustashe appalled the German Nazis (it takes a lot to shock a German Nazi), and the special ‘enemy’ of the Croatian Ustashe were the Serbs (in the same way that the Jews were an ‘enemy’ of the Germans). The decision to include the Krajina within the borders of the constituent republic of Yugoslavia that got called ‘Croatia’ was an administrative one by the Tito regime. There was nothing sacred about the Krajina being part of Croatia, and there is no historical basis for the idea that Zagreb should have any claim to the region, which had been continuously inhabited by Serbs for hundreds of years. This area was a province—‘The Military Frontier Province’ (‘Krajina’ means ‘frontier’)— established by the Hungarian empire in 1578 when large numbers of Serbs fleeing the Ottoman empire were allowed to settle there as soldier peasants to act as a buffer against the Turks. The lands had been expropriated from the same Croatian nobles who in the year 1526 had chosen to submit to the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand, and they were also lands that had been depopulated by the advances of the Turkish armies (Nyrop 1982:9). 1578 is a long time ago, before most of the United States had been settled by Europeans, who today think of themselves as living in their own country. Zagreb’s claims to this territory were not in the name of the expropriated nobles or their descendants, nor could they be even in principle since the expropriating authority no longer exists. Mexico City has a much better claim to Texas than Zagreb had to the Krajina.
What happened in Croatia was that Tudjman’s nationalists started talking about an independent Croatia, and started denying that so many people had been killed in the Holocaust and that, in particular, at Jasenovac (the main system of Ustashe death camps), the numbers of dead had been wildly exaggerated (if these had been Germans fresh into the highest office of a unified Germany, and talking about Auschwitz, they would have been excoriated as ‘Holocaust deniers,’ and everybody would have been properly horrified that Nazis could come back to power in force). These Croatian nationalists also began saying that Croatia was a state for ‘pure’ Croats (in other words, if they coveted the Krajina, it was surely the real estate—they did not evince much sympathy for its population). Then they unfurled the proposed flag for an independent Croatia. This is a flag that had been seen before but not one with a long history: it was the Ustashe flag. Naturally, under these circumstances, the Krajina Serbs feared for their lives, and as it became clear that Tudjman would seek Croatian independence, they declared their wish to remain in Yugoslavia.
Again, this point must be emphasized: the declaration by the Krajina Serbs to wish to stay in Yugoslavia took place before Croatia managed to break away with the help of the Vatican and Germany. It took place before Croatia unilaterally and illegally announced its independence. The mainstream media has portrayed the Krajina Serbs as ‘aggressors’ and ‘rebels,’ but what happened in Krajina is clear: as the symbols and signs of a reinstated Ustashe government crept all around them, and as the noises calling for Croatian independence from Yugoslavia became louder and louder, the Krajina Serbs let it be known that, if Croatia seceded, they wanted to stay in Yugoslavia.
"The Serbs who dominate the area around Plitvice, which they call Kninska Krajina, have declared independence from Croatia and say they want to remain in Yugoslavia if Croatia's nationalist government carries out its threats to secede."[29]
It is this fact that exposes how much propaganda there has been about the Krajina Serbs. We have been told over and over again that they were ‘rebels.’ By what stretch of the definition of the word ‘rebel’ can we make it describe a population that is an ethnic majority in its region and which states its wish to remain in its own country as opposed to joining a breakaway province that is seceding illegally? That would indeed be a new definition of ‘rebellion’! A definition worthy of Orwell. But perhaps we should ask the mainstream Western media to explain themselves. Here follow two representative excerpts:
BELGRADE (Special) - Yugoslavia's internal borders underwent a striking change yesterday after leaders of Croatia's rebellious Serb minority announced the secession of Krajina from Croatia.
The declaration by leaders of the self-styled "Serbian autonomous region of Krajina," which is populated by 250,000 Serbs and based in Knin, stripped Croatia of almost a third of its territory.
The move was in reply to proclamations passed by the Croatian and Slovenian parliaments last week calling for the two republics to secede from Yugoslavia. Milan Babic, the leading politician in the breakaway government, said Serbs did not dispute "the right of the Croatian people to leave Yugoslavia," but only on their own "ethnic territory."
"The Serbian people in Croatia have no reason to cut themselves off from the Yugoslav state and reject the Croatian parliament's resolution on leaving Yugoslavia," he said. [The Toronto Star, March 2, 1991, Saturday, SATURDAY SECOND EDITION, NEWS; Pg. A3, 343 words, Rebel Serb region opts out of Croatia, The Independent News Service, BELGRADE]
Notice that at this date Yugoslavia is still whole and these Serbs are expressing their desire to remain Yugoslavs. We are told exactly what the reasoning was: “The Serbian people of Croatia have no reason to cut themselves off from the Yugoslav state.” In other words, they wanted to stay in their own country. But the title of the article is still “Rebel Serb region opts out of Croatia”—that is, it opts out of an illegally seceding breakaway province so that they can remain in their own country! How are they ‘rebels’?
Policemen and rebels [my emphasis] fought for control of a rebel-held [my emphasis] national park in the Yugoslav republic of Croatia today, and at least 1 person was killed and 13 were wounded.
The clash was the worst between Croatia's rebellious Serbs and the republic's authorities since the Serbs took control of Krajina, an area of Croatia with a mostly Serbian population, in August. [The New York Times, April 1, 1991, Monday, Late Edition - Final, Section A; Page 3; Column 1; Foreign Desk, 816 words, Deadly Clash in a Yugoslav Republic, By CHUCK SUDETIC, Special to The New York Times, BELGRADE, Yugoslavia, March 31][30]
Henceforth the Krajina Serbs were always referred to as ‘rebels’ even though they had stated their intentions very clearly: they had no objection to Croatia seceding from Yugoslavia if it wanted to, but they themselves wished to remain. Given the systematic representation of the Krajina Serbs as ‘rebels’, which in light of the facts clearly betrays a propaganda animus, one is forced to wonder how many of the allegations of atrocities committed by them—allegations by the same media that, in defiance of all reason, called them ‘rebels’—are really true.
Fighting of course did break out in the Krajina, but that would not have happened if Tudjman had not resorted to force in order to crush the Krajina Serbs, to whose land he had no legal claim. The entire world chose to ignore History, Yugoslav law, international law, and the democratic and human rights of the Krajina Serbs, who understandably feared for their lives in a resurrected Ustashe state. Were they exaggerating? Hardly. They were completely cleansed from the Krajina region, something the original Ustashe was not able to achieve when it first tried it, in WWII. The new, totally successful cleansing of the Krajina Serbs was the culmination of a Croat offensive that, without provocation, broke a year-long ceasefire in 1993, and just at the moment when a comprehensive peace plan (the Vance-Owen plan) was being negotiated.[31] The Serbian government, in an act of good faith, did not come to the aid of the Krajina Serbs because they were foolish enough to believe that a show of restraint would help, since they were trusting the good intentions of the Western powers who were supposedly brokering the peace plan. In the Western media, this restraint was characterized as ‘cunning diplomacy’ designed to make the Croats look bad![32] (even when the Serbian behavior can be observed by all, unfiltered by the Western media, the same media forcers an interpretive filter on it so that everybody knows what the ‘real intentions’ of the Serbs are, and these are always made out to be evil; it is interesting to note that Franjo Tudjman’s unprovoked breaking of the cease fire was consistently described by the same media as a diplomatic “blunder”).
The cleansing of the Krajina Serbs took place under the watchful eyes of the ‘benevolent’ Western powers who did not bestir themselves to prevent a genocide (even though later they would sanctimoniously invoke precisely this principle to bomb Serbia). It was also under the watchful eyes of the same ‘benevolent’ Western powers that the conditions for this genocide were laid. In an act of good faith, the Krajina Serbs had largely met the conditions of the cease-fire and turned in their heavy weapons to the UN for monitoring, or else packed them to Bosnia to avoid giving them up. The Croatian army, on the other hand, had little trouble getting around the arms embargo that was supposed to apply to all of Yugoslavia. When attacked, the Krajina Serbs broke into the UN-monitored warehouses and recovered what they could of the stored weaponry in order to defend themselves, but much of the recaptured hardware had not been maintained for months and lacked fuel and ammunition.[33] They were eventually butchered.
This is why the second Ustashe succeeded where the first failed: the first had Hitler for an ally, but Hitler was fighting enemies. The second Ustashe, on the other hand, had the combined support of the West.
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