Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff Read Free Book Online Page B

Melbourne. And who were they? Old Ustashe.
    But the problem of confronting the past runs deeper than that. The wartime Ustashe state was Croatia’s first experience of independent nationhood. It has proved impossible for Croatian nationalists to disavow a nationhood that was fascist. Instead, Croatians evade the issue altogether, either by dismissing tales of Ustashe atrocity as Serbian propaganda, or by attempting to airbrush atrocity into crime by playing statistical sleight of hand with the numbers who died here. Finally, it appears, some Croats have dealt with Jasenovac by trying to vandalize its remains.
    It is always said that aggression begins in denial and that violence originates in guilt. A nation that cannot repudiate a fascist past may condemn itself to a fascist future. True enough. But there is another equally imprisoning mechanism at work. If your enemies call you a fascist enough times, you will begin to call yourself one, too. Take your enemies’ insults and turn it into a badge of pride. How many times in the weeks ahead do I meet Croats at checkpoints who say, “They call us Ustashe. Well then, that is whatwe are.” And likewise, the Serbs: “You call us Chetniks. Well, that is what we are.” The two sides conspire in a downward spiral of mutually interacting self-degradation And where does that spiral begin? In the most ordinary form of cowardice, the one everyone of us knows only too well—telling lies about the past.
    But that is not all. Jasenovac is not the whole suppressed truth either. It is not all there is to say about Croatia in wartime. If Croats cannot bear Jasenovac, it is not merely because of what was done in their name but also because of the partiality of what is remembered. At Jasenovac, Tito’s Yugoslavia remembered Croatians only as murderers, never as victims. Tito never built a memorial center at any of the mass graves of the thousands of Croatians massacred as they fled before his Communist partisans on the roads of northeastern Croatia and Slovenia in May 1945. The guilt of Jasenovac became unbearable, not merely because it was great, but also because it was unjust. At Jasenovac you begin to discern the lie about the past that eventually destroyed Tito’s Yugoslavia. The lie was that the Second World War was a national uprising against German occupation led by Tito’s partisans. In reality, it was a civil war fought among Yugoslavs. Postwar Yugoslavia never had enough time to heal the wounds of that war.
    Jasenovac is a place to make you ponder your inherited liberal pieties. Somewhere in my childhood, I must have been taught that telling lies eventually makes you ill. When Václav Havel said that people need to live in truth, he also meant that nations cannot hope to hold together if they do not come to some common—and truthful— version of their past. But there are nations with pasts so hard to share together that they need centuries for forgetting to do its work. To ask for truth, to ask for shared truth, might be to ask for too much. Yugoslavia might be such acase. Fifty years was not enough time to forget.
    Whatever the case, it is hard to continue believing in the healing power of historical truth when you stand in the middle of a vandalized museum. Some dark spirit, stronger than truth, was at work here. And it is at work on the road from Jasenovac as you drive away. Toward Novska, you pass Serb house after Serb house, neatly dynamited, beside undisturbed Croat houses and gardens. When you turn toward Lipik, it is the turn of all the Croat houses to be dynamited or firebombed, next to their untouched Serb neighbors. Mile upon mile, the deadly logic of ethnic cleansing unfolds. In village after village, they have ripped open the scar tissue over their common wound.
    CRY, GIRL, CRY
    I am in central Croatia now, in the heart of what was once one of the most complex multi-ethnic communities in Europe, shared between a Croatian