Croatians greeted German peacekeepers with the offensive “Sieg Heil,” (Newsweek 6 June 1997- with no outrage from the media nor from the US Congress).
“The HDZ (current ruling party of Croatia) adopted the old symbols of the fascist Ustasha (Nazi) regime from World War II. The new Croatian authorities have chosen as the state symbol the same checkered shield.” – Mechen Shelah, Israel Historian, University of Haifa.
“What worries us, is that those in power in Croatia are largely the same as in the Nazi era. In some cases, they are exactly the same people, now in their seventies and back from exile under Communists. In other cases, they are children of the Ustash.” (Croatian Nazi Party). – Jewish leader, scholar and historian, Dr. Klara Mandich, The London Independent.
“But you can understand Croatia best by saying flatly that if there is one place in the world where a statue of Adolph Hitler would be revered, it would be in Zagreb (the capital of Croatia)”. Edward Pearce, the [London] Evening Standard, 7 August 1995,
“Croats will ‘kill people for the color of their skins.” – U.S. Colonel Fontenot, Commander of NATO forces in North Eastern Bosnia
INTRODUCTION: Julia Pascal is a playwrite and director who took a Jewish play to Croatia and asked some questions about the Yugoslav war. This was of course unwise, especially (in Croatia, the “Jewel in the Vatican’s Crown”) choosing a theme based on the Roman Catholic persecution of Jews! The ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Jews by NATO’s friends the Kosovo Albanians has of course not been reported by the BBC or the British press. Ms Pascal, like most people, cannot be expected to know that thanks to NATO and in particular the German, British and American Governments the meticulously planned 1999 war against Yugoslavia was designed – like the European Union itself – to re-create the fascist, German imperialist Europe of the 1940s, a system in which Croatia and the Vatican played such a disgraceful role.
How well German Europe has succeeded! – as demonstrated by this report of everyday life in Croatia – and by the book Fascist Europe Rising (see Publications on this site). Even in Croatia today the ubiquitous “U” sign, standing for the murderous war-time fascist Ustashe in which the Roman Catholic Church played a very prominent role, is openly displayed. Here is Julia Pascal’s report which appeared in The Guardian on July 14th 2003.
“I take my actors to the Sibenik International Children’s Theatre Festival. 0n the idyllic Croatian coast, we pass burned-out Serbian villages. This is a clear message to any Serbs planning to return.
We are to perform The Golem. This Yiddish Frankenstein story comes from medieval Prague and, in my version, the monster created to defend ghettoised Jews from Catholics, is a metaphor for the conflict between self-defence and violence. Most importantly, it is about minority culture. The contradiction between what we are presenting and what we are seeing soon becomes apparent. U signs are common graffiti. This is the U of the fascist Ustashe, the puppet Nazi state of the second world war which still has underground support.
We give theatre workshops to teenagers. War talk is taboo at home but with us, they feel safe enough to reveal childhood memories of bombings and tanks. Our workshop leader asks, “What is the U painted on the walls here?” The next day I am hauled into the theatre programmer’s office and ordered to keep politics out of the festival. “Parents have been complaining,” she
says. “You mustn’t talk about war and certainly never mention Ustashe in the theatre.”
Another theatre board member proclaims that my troupe are “not English, they’re Jews”. Before our performance, we give a synopsis of The Golem in Croatian for non-English speakers. The translation is scrupulously checked to ensure it contains no Serbian or international vocabulary. Language, as well as people, must be ethnically cleansed. Minorities have got the message. The few remaining Serbs and Bosnians here are fast changing their names and converting to Catholicism. (The terror of straightforward Catholic bigotry is therefore as effective as the guns of the war-time Ustashe who forced orthodox Yugoslavs at the point of a gun barrel to convert to Roman Catholicism)
I meet a 40-year-old Serb married to a Croatian. He was drafted by the Croatian army to fight Serbs in l99l. His reward was being thrown out of his flat for being a Serb. I meet J, a 76-year-old Croatian who, at 15, ran to the partisans. This war heroine fought Ustashe, Italians and Germans and still has a body full of shrapnel fragments. President Franjo Tudjman withdrew the partisans’ pensions for six months during the 199l war and her husband, once Tito’s bodyguard, starved to death. 0thers committed suicide at the humiliation of being transformed from heroes to pariahs.
Today, J’s pension has been cut in half, the stolen 50% going to the Ustashe fascists who attacked her in the 40s. I tell her joining the EU will rebalance this injustice, but I might as well be talking about flying saucers. All around I find suspicion of European solutions. Croatia is isolated and traumatised. J cries at the death of Tito’s dream of a multi-ethnic Yugoslavia. “I am a Yugoslav,” she insists. “I spent my whole life fighting nationalism (a better word might be ethnicism, given that the cross ethnic Yugoslav State was a nation before German planning, Vatican intrigues and NATO bombing destroyed it). And it was all for nothing.”
Back in the Solaris Hotel I talk to a Croatian waiter, a former Gastarbeiter (guest worker) in Germany. We discuss Berlin. “Sheisse,” (Shit) he spits. “Berlin is Sheisse. Too many Turks. Just like the Bosnians. I hate Muslims, I want to go to Iraq and fight Muslims (sic!).” On the last night of the festival, our driver, who is the son of a theatre secretary, is to return us to Solaris. His drinking mate, a six-foot giant, sandwiches me in. I am crushed between the two drunks who scream with laughter and hardly look at the road. “Calm down,” I tell the driver who ignores me. When our Croatian actor/translator intervenes, he yells at her, “Fuck off, you. And your Jews.”
It is our last day and we chill out. One of the actors starts a jamming session on the beach. The Hotel Solaris Animation Team join us. These local musicians are paid to entertain the mainly German guests. Tonight is a Caribbean evening. The singers are wearing rasta wigs and have blacked up. I tell them, “You know this would be seen as offensive in Britain.” “Look,” they say in surprise, “we are not racist. We don’t even dislike black people. We just hate Serbs.””
Julia Pascal’s last play Crossing Jerusalem is published by Oberon Books
