Thousands of Mixed Families Caught in Yugoslavia’s Bitter Ethnic Divide

As a Serb growing up in Croatia during the late 1940s, Milan Miric in many ways epitomized the goal of a post-World War II Yugoslavia as it worked to bury its many divisive ethnic differences.

He considered nationality more a matter of personal choice than ethnic inheritance, settled in this Croatian capital and eventually married a Croat at a time when the only real family concern was the fact that his bride was two years his senior.

It was an era of hope, when the country’s dominant political figure, Josip Broz Tito, was trying to bury nationalist enmity under a larger dream of communism.

But much as Yugoslavia itself, Miric, now a successful publisher here, never really escaped the ethnic divisions that today tear at the country’s heart.

The bubbling hatred between Serb and Croat that has brought Yugoslavia to the brink of civil war also brings a quieter turmoil and wrenching choices for the thousands of mixed families who find themselves on both sides of this ethnic divide.

For them, apparently simple events suddenly become dramas--such as the day earlier this year when the census-taker rang the doorbell and asked the nationality of Miric’s 25-year-old daughter, Danka.

Ten years before, as a teen-ager, she had flippantly declared herself “Zagrebian”--a citizen of Zagreb--and when the bureaucrat rejected that answer, they settled on the description “Yugoslav.”

But in the spring of this year, the question cut to the heart of her existence and her future.

A month before the census, Miric, his daughter and his wife, Sanja, held a family discussion on the issue.

It was a long meeting.

“She said she was not Serb because she wasn’t brought up in the Serbian spirit, but neither was she raised in any special Croatian tradition, and to say she was Yugoslav was difficult because that now describes something that’s nonexistent,” Miric recalled. “She suddenly said, ‘Dad, what I am to say?’ She brought me to the verge of tears.”

Much as any father whose instilled wisdom ends up leading a child into troubled waters, Miric now questions his own actions as a parent.

“Is there any sense in the fact I taught her by my own example--that this (nationality) is a simple matter of choice and not birthplace?” he asked, searching for reassurance.

The census-taker has come and gone, but Miric says he still doesn’t know what she finally decided.

“I never asked,” he said. “It was a question of decency not to.”

Certainly, Yugoslavia’s ethnic problems are nothing new to Miric, born 59 years ago in the Croatian provincial town of Karlovac, 30 miles southwest of Zagreb.

At the age of 11, his family was expelled to Serbia by the fascist Croatian puppet regime established by the Nazis during World War II. His father later died in a German massacre of Serbs.

But in 1946, his mother brought the four children back to Croatia.

Although conditions were different in Tito’s Yugoslavia--a time when mixed marriages such as Miric’s became common--barriers between Serb and Croat remained.

Miric recalls how, as a high school student, his closest friend once spoke emotionally of the close bond that had developed between them and how much that bond meant.

“I only regret you are Serb,” the friend said in conclusion.

By 1971, when nationalist emotions had heightened further, Miric’s mother worried for the first time if she might have erred in returning to Croatia and blessing the mixed marriages of all four of her children--three to Croats, one to a Slovene.

“I told her to look at her grandchildren and sons-in-law and consider if she could find better ones anywhere else,” he recalled.

Today, Miric finds himself shocked by the pace of events and emotions.

While Miric is convinced that sound mixed marriages can survive the present turmoil, he worries about his daughter’s future and counts it as a plus that her medical degree and research work offer the option of working abroad.