The Fracture Zone (7 page)

The most egregious example of Stepinac’s alleged tyrannies had to do with both conversion and killing. He is said to have directed, and on occasion presided over, the forced conversion to Catholicism of tens of thousands of Orthodox Serbs at the infamous Jasenovac concentration camp, seventy miles away from Zagreb. The conversions were given, or forced, just moments before the camp’s Ustashi thugs set about the men with hammers and axes, killing them in such numbers and with such viciousness that even the Nazi Germans—who had taken industralized killing to high art—were hard put to outdo. They were made Catholics, the Croatian church leadership later explained, to ensure that after their deaths they could go to heaven.

By chance a trial concerning the horrors of half a century
ago at Jasenovac was going on in the Zagreb county court on the day we arrived. A former camp commander named Sakic was being prosecuted for mass murder and war crimes—an effort by the eight-year-old Croatian state to make some amends for, and come to terms with, events that had taken place in the name of its people. On the days that we spent in the city, a Jewish former inmate named Josip Erlih had been brought in from Belgrade to testify: He told gruesome stories of men being machine-gunned to death because they were Jews, or of Serbian farmers being beaten to death with mallets, axes, and picks, or of the hanging of large groups of Chetniks, the most prominent and active of the Serb partisan fighters.

Some 350,000 prisoners had been killed at one camp, he said—40,000 of them alone Gypsies. Anyone who departed from the Croatian Catholic norm—Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, gay men—was regarded as beneath contempt. “There was so much killing. The Ustashi tried to burn the bodies in the incinerator but gave it up because of the terrible stench. They tried to make soap from the prisoners’ corpses, but gave up that effort, too, because the bodies were so frail and there was not enough fat in them for that.”

Mr. Erlih’s testimony, given in a quiet courtroom on this ordinary warm spring day in a town that, beyond the courtroom, was bustling merrily with all the pleasantries of European café society, was heartbreaking. “Abuse and beatings took place on a daily basis,” this neatly dressed, dignified old Belgrade Jew told the court, “because every Ustashi officer had unlimited power, and the possibility to kill without being punished. Day after day I saw the women and children of Jasenovac going off to be killed. They knew where they were going, but they did not cry. They were singing.”

And they were singing, too, in the cathedral, on the day we visited. A small chorus of nuns from a distant nunnery were rehearsing
old compline psalms. There was still a line of housewives in front of the cardinal’s tomb, many of them carrying bags of fresh farm produce from the nearby Dolac vegetable market (to which Mrs. Thatcher had once been taken, as stall holders liked to tell me). Had these women any idea, I wondered but was unable to ask, what this man was really supposed to have done? Or had they thought the stories about him to be mere propaganda, dismissing any errors as those of a naive man with poor judgment? After all, there are some who believe that late in the war, when the scale of atrocities grew truly vast, Stepinac declared himself publicly against the Ustashis’ murderous campaigns. One biographer says that he harbored Jews in the cathedral grounds, another who interviewed him in the 1950s said that the old archbishop felt himself to be a victim, a cleric placed in an impossible position and forced “to suffer for his church.”

Certainly the Vatican has been grateful for his stand against Communism; certainly the Holy See has sympathized with his stated aim of preserving Croatia as a civilized and Western-looking Catholic state, not allowing it to fall prey to either the hated Eastern ways of the Orthodox Church or to the even further Eastern ways of the Muslims. Pope Pius XII made him a cardinal in 1952, and if the Vatican then ever investigated his infuriatingly vague wartime record, which came complete with a diary with a large number of puzzlingly missing pages, it never said what it found.

And then in 1998 Pope John Paul II came to Croatia and announced the formal beatification of the cardinal, and the possibility remains that he may yet be declared a saint. His standing now is very different from what it was when he died in 1962: He had been under house arrest then, accused of having collaborating with the fascists. But then again, in 1962 his country was Communist, and dominated by Serbs. Today it is Catholic, and dominated by his own. The legacy of Alojzije Stepinac is a clouded and confused affair, suffused with dreadful stories, and mired in
the classic Balkan hatreds, ancient and modern.

The criminality, or culpability, of the cardinal’s wartime role has yet be proved, and may never be; the terror inflicted by the Ustashi, by contrast, is admitted, and recorded, just as the Nazi crimes were, in stupefying detail. The historian Milovan Djilas painted an all-too-vivid series of descriptions of events he saw as a partisan fighter. He wrote, for example, of an incident in 1941 when a gang of Ustashi, together with some Muslim toughs who were along for the ride, rounded up all the Serbs in a village called Miljevina and slit their throats while hanging them over the edge of the community wine vat, so that their gushing blood would take the place of grape pulp. There are stories, too, of Ustashi thugs capturing Serb partisans and tying them down and cutting their heads off with
saws
—sawing their necks,
back and forth,
with deliberate and agonizing slowness.

The common feature in all of these accounts, of course, is that the victims were Serbs. Which might beg the all-too-obvious question that had puzzled me long before I first came to the Balkans: What, if this was Croatia, were the seemingly very large numbers of Serbs doing there in the first place?

The answer goes back to the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs, as so many of the trials of the region seem to do. I had my first proper explanation of it when we picked up a hitchhiker on the main road from Zagreb to a once-important little town called Karlovac, thirty miles to the southwest. She was a young student named Maria Oreskovic; she was twenty-three, a Croat, a Catholic, was studying economics, and when we picked her up, she was on her way home. I told her I knew that Karlovac had played some important role in Balkan history but confessed that I wasn’t sure quite what. Maria was only too happy to help. “I give directions,” she said. “I show you why my hometown matters.”

An hour later the three of us were standing in the courtyard of a curiously tall wood-and-stone structure that stood on a low and windy hill a mile or so out of town. The main tower was square,
four storied, about sixty feet tall, and with what seemed to be an open viewing platform under the eaves. Thick brick walls surrounded the small court, and rising from two of its three corners were smaller towers, with galleries connecting them. The building was known generally as Dubovac Old Town, and it was where the Austrian border guards had kept watch over the vanguard sentries of the Ottomans—it marked the very edge of the Hapsburg Empire, and, just a few miles away, the beginning of what Alexander William Kinglake, in that most classic of travel books,
Eothen
(1844), called the “land of the Osmanlees.”

The building, five hundred years old or more, is now run as a country inn. It was deserted, thanks to the war that was being fought just a few dozen miles away, and the manager was happy to give us coffee and then, after we expressed a keen interest in looking over the building, lunch as well. I climbed up through the galleries to the very top, and hoisted myself into what was indeed an old reconnaissance platform. It was from here, for three centuries or more, that the
Grenzer,
the frontier garrison chiefs of the Hapsburg armies, stood sentry duty to protect the outer reaches of their immense empire.

Whatever Clemens von Metternich might have said about the Orient having its beginning at the Rennweg or the Ringstrasse or the Oststrasse, the undeniable truth was that the one empire ended here, and the other began here. The Old Town of Dubovac was military headquarters for that vexed artifice known as the Krajina, whose existence is the main reason that there are now, or have until recently been, so many Serbs inside the territory of Croatia.

If the underlying crust of the earth in the Balkans is cracked and shifting along great tectonic fault lines, so the people on the Balkan surface are affected by the faulty lines made by man—and in this region, there is no more important fault line than the Krajina. The word is Serbo-Croatian, and it means “edge,” “boundary,” “border,” “frontier.” Officially the region
was known as the Vojna Krajina, the Military Frontier District, and it was basically one huge exclusion zone. Outside, to the west and north, were the Hapsburg-held provinces of Croatia and Slovenia; inside, east and south, the Turkish-held statelets of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Serbia.

The Krajina was probably not hugely different in its concept or nature from exclusion zones created by more recent Communists and Western governments, as barrier regions, or as buffer zones on one side or both of their more sensitive national borders. There used to be an infamous such zone in southern Bulgaria, for example, twelve miles wide: There could be no villages there, no people at all, in the last twelve miles before Bulgaria became Turkey. It was designed so that no Bulgar ever saw a Turk, nor was any Bulgar ever tempted to drop everything and make a dash for it. (The Turks, one suspects, would never want to anyway.)

The Austrians created their Krajina in the last years of the seventeenth century as a direct response to the failed siege, since the throne had an understandable case of the jitters in case another Kara Mustafa might one day make another lunge for its city. In their making of the frontier, however, the Austrians incorporated one signal difference, one which has since made the word
Krajina,
in general Balkan terms, synonymous with the very worst kinds of violence, mayhem, and ethnic purging.

What the Hofburg bureaucrats decided was that, rather than leave the border regions unpopulated, they would allow, and would indeed encourage, the settlement there of Slavs who were fleeing from the strictures of Ottoman rule. And not just Slavs: Serbs. Scores upon scores of thousands of Serbs.

It was the Serbs in Serbia and Bosnia, after all, who were feeling the crushing weight of the Ottoman yoke. It was Serbs who were most violently opposed to anything and everything that the Turks might do. Who better, then—who more highly motivated?—than the Serbs, to ward the Turks away from Austrian territory. And so the Austrians were generous to a fault with the
new settlers (especially since the land they were settling the Serbs on was not actually Austrian territory, but Croatian.)

So when in the late seventeenth century the Orthodox patriarch of the Kosovan cathedral town of Pec led thirty thousand of his faithful to escape the wrath of the Turks, and brought them to sanctuary in the Hapsburg borderland, the Austrians gladly acquiesced. They gave the refugees territory, religious freedom, hope. They apportioned them land, they helped them build farms, they allowed them to reconstruct their Orthodox churches and schools and to write their language, they gave them a degree of autonomy the Croats and the Slovenes did not enjoy—and they permitted them, most significantly of all, to arm themselves, to become a territorial defense force.
^*

By doing so, the Viennese thought, they would spare the haughty and dignified Austrian
Grenzer
the grubby business of ever battling with the Muslims. The closest they might wish to get to the sharp end of the situation was the fortress on top of the hill by Karlovac. “Let the Serbs do our fighting for us,” said the smooth and powdered officials at the Hofburg. “They have suffered already, they know what it is like, and they have their dander up.”

So, without the very Germanic and thus very foreign Austrians ever quite realizing what they had done, without ever quite foreseeing the implications of their strategy, they succeeded with one stroke of a courtier’s pen in sowing the seeds for centuries of ethnic division.

For from the early seventeenth century onward, and fermenting quietly on the margins of what would one day become the overwhelmingly Catholic Republic of Croatia, the Austrians created a land of prosperous farmers and merchants who, rather than looking westward across the Adriatic to Venice and Rome, and rather than owing political loyalty to the House of Hapsburg and any intellectual connection to the West, were a people facing resolutely East. The people of the Krajina owed their loyalties instead to Byzantium and Athens and, indeed, to Moscow, and (to underline this point) they wrote and read in Cyrillic script, and would, in this century, become natural ultimate vehicles for the expansion of Marxism. And then again today, when Croatia wanted its independence from Yugoslavia, these, the people of the Krajina, were the people whose loyalty was not to Croatia at all but to Serbia and Belgrade—which loyalty held them back, made them rebel, made them suspect, made them fight.

For each and all of these reasons the hundreds of thousands of independent-minded, well-armed, and very different people who inhabited the long and scythe-shaped Krajina, which stretched from the Serbian border along north Bosnia and down the Dinaric Alps to where Dubrovnik stands today, were to become victims of the Croat slaughter, and, in due course, were to retaliate in kind. On what was considered sacred Croatian soil, a million miseries—and all because of what the Austrians so airily created and ran from their fortress high on a windy hill.
^*

Maria still had a little while before she was due to go home to baby-sit her younger sister. “Why not come into the Krajina?” she smiled. “To see what it means.” And so we drove down from
the hillside, and into lush springtime countryside with fields and fat cows and tall grass, and which could for all the world have been Oxfordshire or Connecticut. The flyblown suburbs of Karlovac soon faded in the mirror. Ahead were some low hills, and beyond them, the frontier proper and Bosnia. In between, according to the map, were a couple of slow rivers and a number of villages. Indeed, there was a scattering of houses in a fold in the hills ahead—but houses that, when we first came close enough to see, were all ruined, all smashed, all burned and roofless and wrecked. It was my first sight of the wreckage of this war, and I stared, open-mouthed, at what I could barely believe.