Southland Croats, Slovenians Hail Republics’ Independence

Father Felix Diomartich was in the rectory of the old St. Anthony’s Croatian Catholic Church in Chinatown when he heard the church bell ringing like crazy around noon on Tuesday.

As the retired 76-year-old pastor headed into the church to look for a naughty child, he bumped into his own associate, the diminutive, gray-haired Msgr. John Segaric, 68.

“It was me,” confessed Segaric, a sheepish grin on his face. “I heard the church bells were ringing in Zagreb. I wanted to ring with them!”

Every day since 1945, Segaric has said a prayer for the independence of Croatia. That prayer was answered Tuesday when the Yugoslavian republics of Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence.

“When I was ringing the bell, I kept visualizing all my own people back home and how happy they were,” he said.

Croatian and Slovenian immigrants in Southern California are celebrating the independence of a region barely familiar to many Americans. In San Pedro, where several thousand Croats settled in the 1920s and took up fishing as they had for centuries back home, elderly immigrants joined their children and grandchildren Tuesday night in assembling at Croatian Hall and parading around town, honking and cheering in an impromptu caravan.

“Everybody who’s Croatian, up to the third generation, still has relatives at home,” said Mirko (Mike) Volaric, a private investigator in West Covina and president of the Croatian National Assembly, an umbrella group of Croatian organizations in Southern California.

“I called my cousin in Zagreb to see if it was true. . . . Finally I reached a cousin who could scarcely hear me for all the celebration,” he said. “She just held the telephone up so I could listen to the cheers. It made my eyes water.”

Around Southern California, Croats are pulling out bottles of homemade plum brandy that relatives have brought them on visits.

“ Zivjela Croatia!” they toast. “Salute to Croatia!”

“I drank Courvoisier,” confessed Volaric. “That plum stuff is pretty strong.”

“We feel we have been promoting this since 1945, when Communists took over,” said Petar Radielovic, a Croatian language radio commentator. “Everybody is happy with full-hearted exuberance. Finally they will be able to achieve their own future.”

Members of Orange County’s Croatian community said this is a time of hope and fear: the hope that their homeland will be independent, the fear that violence will be needed to accomplish that dream.

“Croatia deserved to be independent a long time ago,” Radoslav Artukovic said. “I am glad it is happening, and I hope that it will happen with as little violence as possible. But that might be impossible because the situation is a Gordian knot, and it may be simply impossible to solve this situation without some force.”

A Los Alamitos businessman, Artukovic, 42, fought the Yugoslav and U.S. governments for many years over accusations that his father, Andrija Artukovic, was a Nazi war criminal. The elder Artukovic, a cabinet minister in the Nazi puppet regime that ruled Croatia during World War II, was extradited from this country to Yugoslavia in 1985, where a Yugoslav court found him guilty and sentenced him to death. He died in prison in 1988 before the sentence could be carried out.

Ilija Lipovac, 49, an Anaheim engineer who escaped from Yugoslavia in 1960 to come to this country, was in Croatia earlier this month to visit relatives, including his mother. He said the mood “is very tense.”

“The problem is some Serbs, not all Serbs, want to maintain the system, because they have had the best of the system and have been able to exploit Croatia,” he said.

Branko Choric, 42, the owner of an Irvine carpet store, said his family has been ecstatic at the possibility of Croatia’s independence. He said he hates using the word Yugoslavia because “it is so bad.”

“For Croatians all over the world, this is a great time,” he said. “Since 1918 we have lived under the dictatorship of first the Yugoslav king and now the Communists. We are a good people and we deserve democracy and independence.”

He said even though he left Croatia 23 years ago and has never returned, he said he would consider moving back if it gained independence.

“In my heart is Croatia,” he said.

Ever since Yugoslavia submitted to Communist rule after World War II, he said, Croats from outside the country have been raising money to send to their homeland. Immigrants from the United States and elsewhere sent money to support families, nationalist causes and, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, equipment for the cause, such as typewriters, facsimile machines, telephones and computers.

Croats, the second-largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia, have been at odds with the dominant Serbs repeatedly throughout their history.

Karmen Marasovich, 30, of Reseda is Slovenian, while her husband, Zeljko, 40, a musician, is Croatian. Such intermarriages are unusual in Yugoslavia, where languages and customs vary between ethnic groups.

When Karmen Marasovich saw on the news that Slovenia and Croatia had simultaneously declared their independence, she remembered the way she had felt when she and her husband first decided to leave their homes, get married and strike out on their own.

Though elated, she said she is also concerned, like others who have relatives in the two republics, about growing reports of violence. The reports, she said, led her to cancel a planned trip home this summer.

“What is going to happen next?” she asked. “Will there be violence? All we know is that this is not the end of the story.”