Reviving Yesterday’s Enemies in Herzegovina

In this Croatian nationalist stronghold marooned between craggy ridges of the Dinaric Mountains, young men strut in the high-collared black uniforms of World War II-era fascists.

Police patrolling the grenade-pocked streets sport buttons bearing the likeness of Ante Pavelic, the native son and Nazi quisling who directed the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Serbs half a century ago.

“Long Live the NDH!” graffiti on walls and fences proclaim, lauding the Independent State of Croatia created in 1941 to carry out Adolf Hitler’s heinous ethnic policies in the Balkans.

While Serbs have provoked the current conflict by fabricating reports of an impending genocide, a visit to this hotbed of Croatian extremism in remote western Herzegovina gives one pause to wonder how much of what the Serbian propagandists say is true.

International attention and outrage have focused on the civilian slaughter unleashed in Sarajevo by Serbs opposed to Bosnia-Herzegovina’s independence. The rebels have been indiscriminately shelling the capital since early April to drive out Muslims and Croats so Sarajevo can be added to huge areas of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina already conquered for a Greater Serbia.

The radical leader of Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, points to the Serbian people’s tragic fate during the last war to justify the deadly “ethnic cleansing” his forces are carrying out today. Serbs must live alone, he insists, to be free of fears that they are again endangered.

Karadzic asserts that newly independent Croatia is a re-creation of the Nazi puppet state and that Bosnian Croats want to join it. He also contends that Bosnian Muslims are bent on establishing an Islamic fundamentalist regime.

The fundamentalist charge is dismissed as nonsense by the Slavic Muslims, who eschew veils, temperance and other Islamic traditions in favor of a more indulgent European way of life.

But the accusations of latent Croatian fascism have been self-fulfilling in isolated, backward reaches like western Herzegovina, where a history replete with violence nurtures irrational fear, encouraging extremism and atrocities and whetting appetites for revenge.

In this predominantly Croatian corner of Bosnia-Herzegovina, home-grown and imported militants are providing new grounds for hatred by driving Serbs out of villages they have inhabited for centuries.

The aggression has been provoked by Serb-led Yugoslav air force attacks on the region, which shattered windows, tore up pavements and gave a new spin to the vicious cycle of retaliation.

Like the Serbs who are seeking to build a Greater Serbia from Yugoslavia’s broken pieces, Herzegovina Croats now openly concede that they are fighting for an expanded Croatia.

The territorial aspirations of Serbs and Croats overlap in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where none of the three main ethnic groups--Muslims, Serbs and Croats--can claim an overall majority. With both Serbs and Croats ignoring the Muslim desire for an integrated and independent state, the frightening specter has emerged of a deadly, protracted three-sided fight.

Clashes have already been reported in some areas between Croats and Muslims, ostensibly allied against the rebellious Serbs. They promise further escalation in the republic in the ethnic bloodletting that has claimed at least 7,400 lives in less than three months and left 35,000 missing, many of whom are feared dead.

With modern weapons in the hands of some forces and an ancient hatred refreshed by the past year of war, confrontation in western Herzegovina could explode to the level of violence that made this region the most infamous Balkan killing field of World War II.

In nationalist wellsprings like Ljubuski, even those too young to have experienced the last war seem intent on confrontations that threaten to cause local history to repeat itself.

“We fight because we have no work,” says Zeljko Lauc, a local gunman in nationalist regalia who serves in one of Croatia’s most renowned guerrilla units. “In the former system, we couldn’t get jobs. Now we are fighting for freedom from the aggressors.”

He blames four decades of communism for the economic catastrophe of western Herzegovina. The local people, mostly Croats, lost their land in postwar collectivization and saw their Roman Catholic faith suppressed by the officially atheist Yugoslav state.

Agrarian traditions also eroded during the Communists’ quest for industrial prowess. Today, with factories idle because of inefficiency and the disruptions of war, Herzegovina Croats with a mystical attachment to a bygone lifestyle blame historic enemies for their misfortune. They brand Serbs as the purveyors of Communist evil because the Belgrade leadership still nominally embraces that ideology. The savagery against Sarajevo provides a convenient justification for matching extremism in kind.

“For me, personally, and for a lot of people in this area, the war is against neo-Bolshevism,” says Theo Ljubic, an unemployed 25-year-old who wears a swastika on the arm of his black tunic. His uniform is a replica of those worn by Croatian fascists during Pavelic’s fanatic Ustasha regime, which drew many of its most ardent supporters from this poor and isolated region.

Ljubic was a member of the Croatian national guard in his native city of Split until the ultra-right HOS militia of the Croatian Party of Rights moved into this area two months ago to recover it for Croatia. Bosnia-Herzegovina was wholly annexed to Croatia in 1941 and remained under fascist rule until World War II ended.

The Herzegovina offensive is being led by Mile Dedakovic, a nationalist guerrilla leader known as “the Hawk” who put up fierce resistance during a three-month federal army assault on the eastern Croatian city of Vukovar last fall.

Dedakovic makes no apologies for his fighters’ quest to seize Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“This territory was, is and always will be Croatian,” he says, lumping the republic’s 44% Muslim population with the Croats who account for only 17%. “We control all of western Herzegovina now. Last week our forces also liberated several villages on the eastern side of the Neretva” River.

By “liberated,” Dedakovic means that Bosnian Serbs opposed to having their communities annexed to Croatia have been forced out, along with Serbian guerrillas and Yugoslav federal troops.

“Everyone who has bloody hands must leave,” the Croatian vigilante insists. “Every neighbor knows who is guilty and who is not. That is why most of the Chetniks (Serbian nationalists) have fled as we have advanced.”

Nationalist Croats like Dedakovic contend that Slavic Muslims, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s largest ethnic group, are really Croats, forcibly converted to Islam during five centuries of Turkish rule. They gloss over Muslim objections to any division of the republic, contending that Muslims will be “welcome” and treated fairly in the new Croatia.

It remains unclear to what degree irregular militias like the HOS forces are controlled by the Croatian government in Zagreb. Like the Serbian guerrillas and army renegades holding two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Croatian irregulars maintain an appearance of autonomy. But HOS organizers ferry in weapons and reinforcements with Croatian national guard vehicles, and some guerrilla leaders, like Dedakovic, appear to have command over Croatian republic soldiers.

The rejuvenation of Croatian extremism here and the recent offensive against Serbian positions has contributed to the wave of Yugoslav war refugees now numbering more than 2 million.

It has also complicated international efforts to negotiate a solution to the Bosnian crisis, because any future cease-fire or political agreement will require the commitment of each local guerrilla faction.

“As long as the conflict in Bosnia was a clear Serbian campaign to grab territory at the expense of the other groups, there was a chance for resolution (of the war) and reconstruction of the republic,” says a Western diplomat who closely monitors Bosnia-Herzegovina. “But the Croats are now definitely on the offensive in western Herzegovina and even in some parts of eastern Herzegovina, which has seriously compromised any chance of finding a solution acceptable to the Bosnian Muslims.”

The Zagreb government has been evasive in its reaction to Western accusations that it encourages the ethnic dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina. That is probably because HOS territorial conquests salve the wound to Croatian nationalist pride inflicted by last year’s loss of one-third of Croatia to Serbian forces.

But Croats who are not nationalists have been angered by the extremists’ aggression and the blind eye President Franjo Tudjman has turned to his countrymen’s land grab.

“Even if we could peacefully annex the Croatian areas (of Bosnia-Herzegovina), I can’t understand why anyone would want to. It’s just a pile of rocks,” says a 30-year-old Zagreb resident. “But no one is going to ask us. They’ll just do it in the name of Croatia.”