The Triumphs and Trials of Courageous Little Croatia

 

                Croatia is one of those small Balkan countries that often seems to be overlooked. This is largely due to the fact that the recent history of Croatia is one of domination by neighboring powers. After so many years as part of Austria-Hungary or Yugoslavia there are probably some people who have no idea that Croatia is even a country. Given this, it is no wonder that the Croats were referred to as ‘the nation ready to defend its home and rights’. Yet, it is a country and a people with a long and proud history and it has for many centuries been one of the small but brightly shining jewels in the crown of Christendom. The region of modern Croatia was known as Illyricum by the Romans and control of the area passed from Roman to Hun to Goth to Byzantine masters in their turn before the Croats, a Slavic people, arrived in about the seventh century. They had previously fought against the Avars and when these same people assaulted them again the Croats joined forces with their new neighbors to repel them and the result was the establishment of the first Croatian state under the leadership of a Ban; the title of the Croat ruler.

                Originally the Croats were pagans and though Christianity already existed when they arrived in their new homeland, they resisted accepting at first however that began to change with their first alliance with Pope John IV who began the work of evangelization. When the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius abandoned his provinces in the Balkans it opened up new opportunities for a Croatian state. Duke Trpimir I led the first major expansions and founded a dynasty that was to reign over Croatia for some time to come. Conflict was further incited by the warring of the Serbs and the religious division that was already being felt between the Latin Croatians and the Greek Serbs and Byzantines. In 879 Pope John VIII recognized Branimir as the Duke of Croatia and he came to the throne with papal support, promising to keep Croatia Catholic and resist the encroachment of the Greek Orthodox. This was done and in spite of all the turmoil of the region over time, Croatia has remained firmly Catholic.

                Contact between Croatia and the new Roman Empire in the west came with the arrival of the Emperor Charlemagne who expanded into some Croat lands. A Croatian dignitary was sent to attend his coronation in Rome in 800 when he became Emperor of the Romans. However, trouble ensued during the reign of Emperor Louis the Pious. Corrupt favorites of the Emperor oppressed the Croatians and a war for independence ensued which resulted in the Croats electing their champion Tomislav their king before the cathedral at the field of Duvno in 925. He was later officially crowned King of Croatia by a legate acting for Pope John X. King Tomislav remains a legendary figure in Croatian history, not only for repulsing the Hungarians as duke, securing the independence of the country and uniting it as a single kingdom, but defeating the Bulgarians and expanding it as well. The Kingdom of Croatia came to be bordered by the Danube and Drave Rivers to the north, the Drina River to the east and the Adriatic to the west and south. Certainly his greatest achievement was in defeating Tsar Simeon the Great of Bulgaria, a man of such ability he led Bulgaria to rival even the Byzantine Empire.

                In the years that followed the Kingdom of Croatia reached its peak of power and prestige, particularly under King Kresimir the Great though after his death things faded rather quickly and after the death of King Peter Svachich the Croatian crown was offered to King Coloman of Hungary under the stipulation that the Hungarian monarch respect the laws and constitution of Croatia, would rule only when present and allow no Hungarians to settle in their territory. Originally this agreement worked and Croatia was under the reign of the Hungarian king but not part of Hungary itself with the Ban ruling for the most part in the name of the King of Hungary. Eventually though, Hungarian rule came to be more strongly felt, even in the functioning of the Church which had flourished under Croatian rule as did literature and the arts. Feudalism also entered Croatian life under the Hungarians, which was not very well received.

                Eventually Paul Shubich, Ban of Croatia, declared his support for Charles Robert of Anjou, nephew of the Norman King of Naples, and Charles was crowned King of Croatia, Bosnia and Dalmatia in Zagreb in 1301, supported by Pope Boniface VIII. Charles was an absolute monarch and introduced a great deal of French style government, laws and military organization. The House of Anjou reigned over Croatia until 1386 when civil war ensued between the local nobles, the royal claimants and various factions. However, the Kingdom of Hungary and all of its affiliated lands were soon faced by the greatest threat yet seen which was the invasion of the Ottoman Turks. Eventually Constantinople fell and the Turks advanced as far north as Bosnia before the Croats were able to hold them off. This standoff lasted until the ruthless Pasha Yakub of Bosnia invaded Croatia in 1493 and defeated the Croat army and the flower of their nobility under Ban Derenchin at Krbava. Things turned around though when a fighting cleric, Ban Bishop Peter Berislavich, defeated the Turks in 1513 and was given a blessed sword by a jubilant Pope Leo X. Sadly, the bishop was later killed at Korenica in 1520 when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was unable to aid his beleaguered forces. In the wars that followed, instigated by Sultan Suleiman II, the Turks were defeated but many Christians were taken prisoners and forced into the Turkish army or enslaved. In revenge, the pashas of Bosnia raided Croatia, ravaged the countryside and massacred many Christians.

                A new era for Croatia came in 1526 when King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia was killed at the battle of Mohacs. Anxious for help against the Turks from the most preeminent monarchy in Christendom, the Hungarians offered the crown of St Stephen to the House of Hapsburg. The Croatian nobles also agreed and so it was that Ferdinand of Austria became king and Croatia became part of the Hapsburg Empire. The added assistance could not have come too soon and the Turks soon pressed north to besiege Vienna, where they were finally halted. Only a small portion of Croatian land remained free of Turkish control but later counterattacks were successful and all of the country was regained save for the Bosnia region where traces of Muslim rule have remained ever since. In the years that followed, Croatia earned a glorious reputation in the Hapsburg wars in defense of Catholicism.

                After so long a history of such fierce struggle against the Muslims, the outbreak of Protestantism must have seemed tame in comparison by the rough and tough Croatians. When the Protestant doctrines began to be preached in Croatia they found no fertile soil among the solidly Catholic Croatians and the ruling Ban vowed that he would separate from the Kingdom of Hungary rather than ever accept any new religious creed should it come to that. In the struggle that followed the Austrian Emperor made good use of the resilient Croatian soldiers against both the Protestants and the Turks. When the Thirty Years War erupted especially the Croatians earned a formidable reputation among their Protestant enemies. Their needs became legendary and their soldiers renowned for their courage and ferocity in both Catholic and Protestant areas. Their name was spoken with the same awe among Protestants as that of the Vikings was once spoken by the Christians of the north. To this day in a Protestant church in Aachen there is an inscription of a prayer, once common in Lutheran Germany, which said, “God save us from hunger, Croats and plague!” Undoubtedly the Catholics of Croatia would have taken this as a compliment and the Muslims could certainly have sympathized with the Protestants, having tasted the fanatical fighting spirit of Catholic Croatia themselves for quite some time.

                In the years that followed, Croatia met the Muslims in battle many times again and won stunning victories. In fact, a crushing division of Ottoman lands in the Balkans was only prevented by the intervention of King Louis XIV of France, a Catholic king, but one who sided with the Muslims and Protestants when it helped his agenda to replace Austria as the preeminent power in continental Europe. Nonetheless, the combined Hapsburg forces were ultimately successful in liberating all of Croatia and Hungary which the Muslims had earlier taken. Their ruler was nominally the Holy Roman Emperor but since the outbreak of Protestantism and the rise of Prussia as a military power, the focus fell on Austria. When Emperor Charles VI, who had only his daughter Maria Theresa to succeed him, tried to secure her succession with the Pragmatic Sanction, the Croatians signed and pledged their loyalty to Maria Theresa as their future Queen and Empress. Unlike many in the empire who did the same, the Croats actually kept their word and fought in defense of the pious Empress Maria Theresa in the War of Austrian Succession. As a result of this show of fidelity, the Croats always a friend in Maria Theresa.

                Things changed under the reign of her son, Emperor Joseph II, whose efforts to bring the Church under state control met with resistance in many of the more devout parts of his empire. The drive to impose uniformity was met in Croatia by a concerted effort to protect the local languages in the Church and in schools and inadvertently led to a rise in Croatian nationalism. Following the French Revolution and the French conquests across Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte established the Kingdom of Illyria out of the Croatian lands and this served to further inflame nationalist feelings which lasted long after the Little Corporal met his end at Waterloo. Over the years the growing hunger for Croatian freedom would only become stronger, especially with met with opposition rather than honest efforts at compromise. In the years that followed political consensus remained a problem though the Croats continued to distinguish themselves within the empire. After the rebellion in Hungary in 1848, suppressed only with Russian assistance, and the creation of the Dual Empire of Austria-Hungary, Croatian autonomy was also destroyed even though the energetic Ban, Count Joseph Jelacic, aided in fighting the Hungarian rebels. He also abolished serfdom which many considered long overdue. When Austria went to war with Italy in 1866 Croatian Generals Vukasovich and Davidovich earned names for themselves and in 1878 Croatian regiments occupied Bosnia under Generals Francis and Joseph Philoppovich.

                When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in 1914 the Croatians were outraged at the criminal actions of the Serbian government and joined the protests across the Austro-Hungarian Empire that action should be taken. The Croatians were to play an important part in the coming conflict. During World War I certainly the most famous Croatian was the highly effective Field Marshal Svetozar Boroevic who came from a Serbian Orthodox family in Croatia. He was instrumental in numerous actions on the Russian front and also defeated several offensives on the Italian front and was the first non-Austrian to be promoted to the rank of Field Marshal. He was left homeless however when the southern Slav states formerly part of Austria-Hungary were merged with Serbia by the victorious allied powers into the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs which later became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, under the Serbian monarchy. This was seen as payment to the idea of pan-Slavism that had, in part, been responsible for the outbreak of World War I, but as everyone was soon to learn, it would not work and the Croats especially were incensed by the fact that, after hearing so much allied propaganda about freedom for the various peoples of the Hapsburg Empire, Croatia had effectively been given to the Serbians.

                Croatians were further aggravated by the massive centralization of power carried out by Serbia in 1921 and the loss of their traditional boundaries which were all seen as a massive attack on their nationality. As a result, the dominant Peasant Party under Stephen Radic shunned the Serbian government and Croatians were further outraged when Radic was killed by a Serbian politician in 1928. This action also helped lead to the founding of Ustashe, a pro-independence Croatian movement which began with the youth and later expanded as a political effort to, in their words, promote human rights, political freedom and national independence. The following year the Serbian King Alexander took absolute power and renamed the country Yugoslavia, further infuriating Croatian nationalists.

                As a result of this, it is not surprising that the Ustashe was one of the groups implicated in the assassination of King Alexander in France in 1934. In the years that followed, as years of repression created an ever more radical brand of Croatian nationalism, the Croatian government began to be friendlier with Germany and Italy rather than the western democracies. This movement culminated in 1939 with the formation of a Croatian Parliament and a restored Ban holding sway over what is today Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1941 Yugoslavia was conquered by the Axis powers and the Ustashe allied with the Nazis to create the new Independent State of Croatia under the leadership of Ante Pavelic who held the title of Leader. All the years of repression erupted under the Ustashe regime in a campaign to eliminate the Serbian and (because of the Nazi connection) Jewish presence in Croatia.

                In the agreements between Hitler and Mussolini much of southern Europe was placed under the Italian sphere of influence and because of this the Italian Prince Aimone of Savoy, the Duke of Spoleto, was elevated to the position of King of Croatia, taking the name of the Croatian national hero as King Tomislav II. In accordance with the example of Italy the new King reigned while Pavelic ruled and Tomislav II was never very involved in Croatian affairs and was considered to be only a symbolic figure within the wider Italian Empire Mussolini was building under the triumphant name of the New Rome. Still today though the Independent State of Croatia remains a controversial subject. Accusations have been widely spread about the involvement of the Catholic Church in support of the Ustashe regime. Claims have been made that as many as 200,000 people, judged enemies of the state, were killed by the Ustashe as well as accusations that the Church helped harbor Ustashe leaders after the war was over. Much of this is simply anti-clericalism, however, some is also true but the situation is more complicated than many like to believe.

                One of the things to be considered is that the primary forces opposing the Independent State of Croatia were communists under the leadership of Josip Broz, better known as Tito. He and his communist guerillas waged an ugly war against the Ustashe regime with their only other real opposition being a few scattered royalist partisan groups which attracted little support among the Croatian populace who saw the Yugoslavian royals as symbols of Serbian domination. The long years of Serbian harassment should be taken into account when trying to understand Croatia under the Ustashe and the fact that their enemies were communists explains why some people in the Catholic Church were willing to help anyone who stood between their country and communist dictatorship. As the war turned against the Axis Tito and his red rebels began receiving aid from the Soviet Union and by 1943 had taken control of much of the countryside through their typical methods of terrorism and intimidation.

                In 1945 the Soviet Red Army gave Tito the final push he needed to defeat the Ustashe and take complete control of Croatia. Many Croatians were forced to flee to Austria where they were interned and, according to the terms of the alliance with Stalin and the Soviets, were returned to Croatia where the communists simply massacred them for being associated with the Ustashe regime. Whatever one thinks of the Independent State of Croatia, it came to a sudden end with the end of World War II and the country was again united to Serbia in a reconstituted Yugoslavia, this time as a communist state under the dictatorial rule of Tito.

                Reconstruction started with Tito becoming known as something as a maverick for refusing to become a subservient satellite state of the Soviet Union. A new constitution was put forward in 1963 but despite talk of greater Croatian autonomy it was little more than window dressing in a communist dictatorship where no one was free. Communist oppression led to a Croatian student mass protest in Zagreb in 1970. The government responded as all communist governments do to demands for greater liberty; with military force and greater oppression. The demonstrations were suppressed and the leaders were arrested. However, as often happens, the more the Communists tried to crush dissent the more opposition they spawned. For freedom loving Catholic Croatians, atheistic communism was something they could never learn to live with, nor with what was seen as the continued Serb dominance over their country.

                The pot began to boil over after 1980 with the death of the dictator Tito. The unified Yugoslavia invented by the World War I allies was coming apart at the seams. Not only were the Croatians eager for freedom, but so were almost every other ethnic group within the Slav republic. The Yugoslav (later purely Serbian) communist dictator Slobodan Milosevic could not stem the tide of independence movements throughout the country and certainly not the increasingly extreme demands and actions on the part of Croatia. This was especially the case after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union. Finally, under internal and external pressure, free elections were finally held in 1990 with Franjo Tudjman of the Croatian Democratic Union coming to power with the stated goal of increasing Croatian autonomy in Yugoslavia.

                However, the future was not to be a peaceful one of political negotiation, especially after a rebellion by Serb militants in Croatia. The uprising would have been easily dealt with by Croatia were it not for the intervention of the Communist Yugoslav army (dominated by the Serbians) who supported and protected the rebels even though they were technically enemies (separatists) of the tottering Republic of Yugoslavia as a whole. Politics was pushed aside in what became increasingly ethnically based violence between the Croatians, seeking their independence, and the Serbians who still clung to the last vestiges of the Greater Serbia they had envisioned since before the First World War. Yet, there was still excitement in the air for the Croatians who felt the coming of a new era while Serbia was trying to hang on to past glories. Finally, on June 25, 1991 Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. From that moment, open conflict with Serbia became a certainty and the Croatian War for Independence had begun.

                Following this declaration, the Croatians were immediately met by massive Serbian retaliation. Communism had finally collapsed with the dictator Milosevic renouncing communism and declaring himself a socialist. However, to many Croatians this was a distinction without a difference and many other brutal communist officials had done the same thing in an effort to carry on their political tyranny after the fall of their parent Soviet Russia. What was still being upheld as Yugoslavia was really nothing more than an effort to keep the territory of Greater Serbia though it would take a little bit longer for Yugoslavia to formally die. At the time though, Serbian forces began attacking Croatian cities which only served to embitter the populace and push the new Croatian government into totally severing all connections with Yugoslavia in the fall.

                Serbian military aggression caused a massive exodus of Croatian civilians as they sought to escape the cruelties of the Serbian army. Those who remained behind were often forcefully expelled as many years of antagonism were let loose. Charges of ethnic cleansing were leveled against the Serbs, but these mostly fell on deaf ears. The chaos in the former Yugoslavia was not something most outsiders did not understand nor did many really care to. It would have brought up uncomfortable truths about the role Britain, France and America played in patching together the unnatural country in the first place. The only exception was the Catholic Church which tried to draw attention to the sufferings of embattled Croatia; a small and often persecuted Catholic nation under attack by Eastern Orthodox and, even more so, former communist atheists who sought to destroy them.

                A particularly brutal battle was the fight for Vukovar. For three months vicious urban warfare was waged and by the time the Serb forces had captured the city virtually the entire Croat population had been killed or forced to flee. The suffering of Croatia, the ethnic cleansing and the massacres of civilians finally prompted the United Nations to get involved and a cease-fire was arranged. This was likely only possible because warfare was starting to flare up in the former Yugoslav province of Bosnia and the Serbian military was needed there. However, the fighting did not though it was diminished. Small units from both sides continued to clash and in the years that followed Catholic Croatia also had to deal with hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Muslims fleeing from Serbian forces in their local war. Catholic sympathy around the world was on the side of Croatia though her struggle was largely ignored by the United States and the major European powers. Many Catholics, prominent and otherwise, noted that when the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait was invaded by hostile Iraq a huge coalition united to take action whereas Croatia was largely left alone to defend itself in a desperate battle for survival. Adding insult to injury was that Catholic Churches in Croatia had been purposely targeted by the Serb forces, resulting in the loss of almost all of them.

                By 1995 the Croatian army was prepared to deal with the Serbian rebels in their own country whose actions had originally sparked the conflict back in 1990. They had even managed to obtain some support, under the table, from the United States. Starting in August the Croatian and Bosnian armies together launched Operation Storm to drive out the Serbian rebels and liberate the remainder of Croatia from dissidents loyal to a foreign government. Lasting only four days, the operation was a total success with minimal losses to both sides. The rebels naturally appealed to Serbia for help but although Slobodan Milosevic condemned the operation he would not come to the aid of the rebels who his own government denounced as aggressive and militaristic. Attempts to drum up international sympathy for the Serb rebels never gained much ground, especially when Croatian forces discovered mass graves holding the bodies of thousands of the countrymen who had been massacred by the Serbians in the previous war. A peace agreement was finally reached by both parties meeting in Dayton, Ohio and as Milosevic turned his attentions southward, Croatia had finally achieved the peace and independence she had sought for so long.

                A new era had begun and there was a widespread sense of zeal and planning for the future in Croatia. Given the era in which independence occurred though, naturally there have been problems and setbacks to deal with as well. Although the wave of secularization that swept the west did not hit as hard in Croatia it has been increasingly felt. Probably the most assistance in keeping the faith alive came from Pope John Paul the Great who made three visits to Croatia during the later years of his reign. A bigger problem, but one shared by the rest of Europe, has been the increasing dominance of liberalism in government, and mostly sold to the public as essential for economic recovery. With the years of war moving farther into the past Croatia has also become a more prominent tourist destination for those seeking something off the beaten path, mostly to visit the unspoiled beaches of the Adriatic. Also in recent years Croatia has begun to seek admission into the European Union. The effort stalled for a time over the search for General Ante Gotovina, complete with allegations that the Vatican was keeping him in hiding –which should give the Croatian Catholics an idea of how much good will there is between the EU and the Church; but since his capture there have been no major obstacles. Perhaps delaying EU entry was the last service General Gotovina did for his country.

                Looking back at the life of the Croatian people, we can see a nation that has illustrated the moral lesson about rising after each fall. It seems that, as a country, Croatia has always been on the front lines; between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, between Islam and Christianity and between freedom and communist tyranny. So many centuries of bitter struggle, of hanging on to their culture and national identity through sheer determination they became a nation of devout faith and hardened warriors; forged in fires that more traditionally powerful countries have not survived. Emerging from the ashes of the Roman Empire, Croatia has survived barbarian invasions, the Great Schism, the onslaught of the Ottoman Turks and earned a fearsome reputation in the Thirty Years War. The break up of Austria-Hungary brought subjugation rather than the liberation they would have had and the struggle for survival and eventual independence really goes all the way back to when the Great War allies invented Yugoslavia. World War II, the Cold War and the final liberation have all been campaigns in the larger struggle for a free, Catholic Croatia. Small but steadfast and battered but brave, Croatia can be proud of having earned the final victory in their ancient struggle.