Split.It’s a fitting name for a town divided over the most important question:
What does history mean in the former Yugoslavia?There are many branches that shoot forth from this question -- the trunk of the tree that is post-war Croatia's search for an identity. Who are the villains in this story? Who is the damsel in distress? And why did she have to play her
own knight in shining armor? Why wouldn’t any good guys wearing blue helmets – or any color helmets, for that matter – come in to save her? Why did the world pay no attention for nearly three years as her cities and towns were being shelled, her people killed, and her future stained with the blood of the guilty and innocent alike?
Or are there any easy answers to these questions?
“Until 1993, no one gave a f***ing s**t about Croatia,” Zila, an antiques dealer with a closely cropped head of salt-and-pepper hair said from behind the counter within the old Dicoletian walls of Split.
“It was unbelievable. We are this close to Europe” – his fingers were less than an inch apart, his eyes squinting to be able to see if there was actually a gap at all –
“and nothing. Nothing! I was watching CNN one day in the early days of the fighting. In a town not far from here, Serbian artillery had dropped shells on a kindergarten. They killed 16 children that day. And what did it say on the news? On the bottom ticker, below the screen: ‘Ethnic misunderstandings in the former Yugoslavia today lead to some deaths in Croatia.’ ‘Ethnic misunderstandings.’” Zila stared into my eyes, the once laid-back, soft-voiced man all of the sudden remembering the realities of life in the Balkans.
“Sixteen children.”Zila, for all his anger over the lack of Western intervention in the war with Serbia that ended ten years ago with the signing of the Dayton Accords, was not from the hardline camp. He is not a nationalist. He didn’t even fight in the war, unlike most of the men his age.
"I used to be like all these right-wingers," he said.
"I would have fought, had the war been ten years earlier. But by the time it came, I had different priorities; I had a wife, a child. You want to know a funny story?" Of course.
"One day, during the war, I was sitting around the table with my friends and my ten-year-old son. They were all giving me a hard time, asking him, 'Why is your dad the only one that won't go and fight for his country?' You know what he said? He said, 'Are you crazy?! He could get killed out there!'" Zila flashed me a big grin. That was his rebuttal to the myth of nationalism.
In America, Zila would be labeled “soft on terrorism” or “an enemy of peace” by many on the right. In Croatia, he’s labeled a “Communist.”
"It's just like in America," he explained.
"There are divisions between the city centers and the rural areas. People in the cities, they are more liberal, more open-minded, like I am. They see this Croatian nationalism for what it is: Bulls**t. But the people in the countryside in Croatia? They are like your people in the Midwest, or in Texas.""Like where I'm from?" I had to smile as I interrupted.
"Haa, yes, perhaps. But yes, the country people; sure, they would tell you that I am not Croatian, that I am a 'Yugoslav' because I do not like what President Tudjman did in the 90's. But this man, he was f***ing crazy, I tell you. Absolutely crazy. I do not support him."One of the men in the shop -- Zila's friend, but clearly someone whom he had his fair share of disagreements with -- began to grumble in Croatian.
"What did he say?" I asked when he had finished.
"He says that I speak about President Tudjman as if I was a Serb.""Or a Communist?""Exactly," Zila said, smiling.
I had to admit to this man -- who had his name tattooed on his left forearm, as if he knew beforehand that I would have a difficult time spelling it -- that I not only knew nothing about this "Tooj-mon" guy, but I also knew next to nothing about the war that preceded him. Luckily, Zila knew plenty.
And he liked to talk, too.
"The Serbs had 20,000 tanks, 350 airplanes! What did we have? Nothing. Not until a few years after the war began ..." And with that, he went into detailed descriptions of battles; of generals; of deaths; of gathering along with the other townspeople of Split to watch their Croatian soldiers use their paltry anti-aircraft guns, to only partial success, against Serb planes; their paltry artillery, also to only partial success, against Yugoslav navy ships in the Split harbor.
But it was this anecdote that I will never forget.
"There is a famous story about the war that we tell here in Croatia," he said. "There were two friends; one lived in Belgrade, the other in Dubrovnik. When the Serbians came to Dubrovnik, and began rolling through the city, shelling the city, with their tanks, this man called his friend in Belgrade. 'The Serbs are shelling our city!' he cried. But his friend, his friend would not believe him. 'This is propaganda!' he told him. 'Do not believe this...' But the man answered him: 'I am watching a tank with the words 'Yugoslav Army' on it crushing my flowers in my garden!'"
I got the sense that this story was a complete fabrication, a myth that has evolved into fact over the years. But that is immaterial. What is significant about this account is that, as Zila emphasized, Croats and Serbians are in a sense fighting a battle to this day. The violence may have ended in Dayton, but the war over how history will judge the guilty will be fought until all those who survived the fight are dead and gone.
"The Serbs? They lie," Zila, the non-Croatian nationalist told me. Even he, a man who had a self-professed "open mind," had hate in his heart. "Do not believe them. They will tell you that Dubrovnik was not shelled, that we painted the streets and buildings to make it look as so. They lie," he said with a resigned laugh.
Before I left, after buying an antique postcard of the Russian part of the Black Sea, Zila left me with words to remember him by: "I just want to emphasize this one last thing: If there ever was a just war, it was this war...on the Croatian side."
I shook his hand, and I left.
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When I first walked past the Caffe Bar Split my first morning in Croatia, I immediately marked it down in my mind as a place I’d go later, have a coffee, read my book, write in my journal. Tucked into the side of a mountain, overlooking the harbor on the Adriatic, it looked like a cozy, quaint little spot, unlike every other joint in this town.
I had no idea of who I would meet there.
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“So, did you grow up in Split?”
The young bartender who spoke impeccable English was fixated on the basketball game displayed on the large flat screen hanging on the opposite wall.
“No, I grew up behind those mountains.” Without looking, he simply waved his hand around his head, covering enough degrees to touch at least five of the seven continents. He cared more about the game between Split and some anonymous Russian club team more than he cared about chit chat.
I kept trying.
“Is basketball the No. 1 sport here, or is football?”
Only an idiot would ask that question. Or, a person who wants to get somebody talking.
“No, man,” he said with a laugh. “Football – soccer, sorry – is the biggest, by far. Actually, there’s a game tonight: Hajduk – that’s our team here in Split – is playing Vardeks. You should stay here and watch.”
“Are the fans as crazy here as they are in the big clubs?”
“Oh, yeah. This game is a blood match, man. There was a war here in the 90s, see? And what you have to realize is that all these men you see here, they all fought.” He pointed to the three grizzled, sullen-looking Croats sitting in the bar, smoking each cigarette to the filter, staring out the window onto the street below, completely oblivious to the game on the TV. “And it f***ed them up. So when they go to these football matches, they’re a little…”
I had seen it in their eyes already. I didn’t need him to finish his thought.
“Him, for example.” The bartender – a kid my age, but in a real man’s body – motioned towards Mr. Clean, sitting two tables down, stuffing his face with a hearty sandwich fresh out of the wrapper, using all seven teeth to break it down before swallowing. “He was in the Special Forces. He killed like 30 Serbs, man – some with a knife.” My friend was smiling, with a sort of pride that he could be associated with such a hero. “Crazy stuff.”
He was on a roll. Suddenly, the game wasn’t important.
“We didn’t even have weapons until 1993; we had to use house weapons. The Serbs? They had an entire army. Helicopters, guns, tanks, artillery. They had a plan, see? It was to wipe out every Croat; men, women, children…it didn’t matter who.”
Now he was lecturing.
“Once we got weapons – immigrants from the U.S., they sent them to us – then we pushed back, went on the offensive. But you know what the f***ed up thing is? That man over there” – his finger aimed across the bar, at a yellowed newspaper clipping showing a color photograph of a military officer in full uniform – “he was fighting, in self-defense, against the same Serbs who attacked us, and they put him in prison. He’s in The Hague now. And for what? Nothing, man.”
My new friend was pointing at a picture of General Ante Gotovina, the same man whose face I had seen on a black-and-white t-shirt for sale at a vendor’s stall by the bus station that very morning. Underneath his face on that shirt was one word: “Heroj.”
My friend wasn’t finished. Like most people I have encountered on this trip, he suddenly could not contain himself at the prospect of being given a paintbrush and being asked to go to town on the white canvas he saw as my mind.
“Now the Serbs are coming back, and they’re saying they want government housing, sort of like American blacks, who want welfare and all that shit.” His eyes were brimming with hate, burning a hole in the back of my sockets as he made sure he had my attention for this most important of facts. “But we don’t wanna f***ing hear it.”
“Do people here like to talk about the war?”
“Old people – the ones who fought – they don’t like to talk about it,” he said; his English words may as well have been Chinese to the men sitting all around us, about whom he spoke. “But the young people – we talk about it all the time.”
I got the sense that this kid, who had clearly never seen a battlefield, had fallen victim to the dangerous aroma of nationalism, a plague of mankind that will never be cured. Sure, as a kid who had been raised in a country brutalized in a war no one in the West cared to hear about for its first two years, he had legitimate reason to harbor such illusions of national glory. Who feels it, knows it. Who was I – an armchair intellectual whose biggest trial in life was breaking two arms in one soccer season my sophomore year in high school – to judge him?
But the irony of the kid’s words hadn’t hit me yet. That came later, after the football game was over (Hajduk scored three unanswered goals after going down on a questionable PK in the 11th minute, rolling easily to a 3-1 victory), when I met my friend’s mother – the owner of the place.
“Excuse me for asking,” I said, “but can you tell me how your English accent is so amazing?”
The woman sounded like she had lived in the northeastern United States her entire life.
“Well, we’re from New York,” she said matter-of-factly. “He didn’t tell you that?”
No, “he” did not. Her son, whose name Joanne finally told me – Jure (pronounced yer-uh) – had most definitely forgotten that part of his story.
“Yeah, we only moved here from Greenwich three years ago. My husband is Croatian, and my parents were first-generation immigrants, so Jure grew up speaking the language. But yeah, he most definitely has an American passport.”
What was all this “we” business, then?
Jure was Croatian, he assured me. Joanne, who clearly felt disillusioned enough with America to leave the land of her birth for the one of her heritage, rolled her eyes nonetheless.
It wasn’t that he was embarrassed of his birth land; he just had a rep to preserve. He didn’t want to broadcast it to a room full of men – Croatian war heroes – whom he worshipped, idolized, lionized. They clearly had accepted him as one of their own – Jure scruffed up the hair of one of the men’s ten-year-old kid, he made jokes which everyone laughed at, he bummed cigarettes without having to ask – and none of them, Jure assured me, knew where he was really from.
He wanted to keep it that way.
“We’ve been coming here to visit since the summer of ’93,” Jure, whose cover had now been blown out of the water by his mother, said to me with a tone of defiance. His voice, his conviction, they carried a message along with the spoken words: Don’t think I’m some sort of wannabe. I am Croatian. I’m not some sort of cherry picker who hides my nationality from you to make it seem like I lived through the war. I did live through the war, and don’t you think otherwise for one second.
Everything Jure said – when it involved Croatian people, government, sports or history – he had used the word “we.” It didn’t seem that significant to me until I learned the truth from Joanne, but all of the sudden, that fact stuck out in my mind more than any other I had observed in my interaction with this towering, baby-faced Croatian-American bartender.
“Do you have any books I could read, books in English? I am embarrassingly ignorant of everything that has ever happened in this country.”
“You can’t read books,” Jure retorted. “Books are full of bulls**t. To really learn about what happened, you’ve got to talk to the people who know, the people who fought. The ones who lived it.
“They say the fighting began in ’91; that’s not true” – he shook his head and half-laughed at such a Western media-type view. “The real fighting began in the 80’s, before the collapse of Yugoslavia. And we fought without weapons, against a people who had everything. And what do they say now? That Gotovina – a man who was acting in self-defense – is a war criminal. It’s not true, man. It’s not true.”
Now we were going in circles, but not really penetrating the heart of the matter. I wanted to see what would happen if I sharpened my questions; would Jure’s balloon pop, full of hot air? Or would it explode with the shrapnel that had torn through those 16 children in that kindergarten in Croatia, the “ethnic misunderstanding” that Zila had read about on the CNN ticker.
“But there has to be a reason for why Gotovina is in prison, right? What happened?”
“Have you heard of Knin?” I shook my head. “Oluja?” Same. “Operation Storm?” Not getting any warmer.
“In the early part of the war, the Serbs invaded and occupied Knin – that’s only an hour’s drive from where we’re standing right now, here in Split.” Jure pointed to the ground, bringing it home for me that this happened in real life, that it involved real suffering, that history is not something you read in a book, but something you feel and taste and smell. “They attacked first. They were on Croatian soil. And we fought back. Gotovina led ‘Oluja,’ which means ‘Operation Storm.’ And he drove the Serbs out.” Jure’s eyes had gone from “they” and filled with hate to “we” and twinkling with a pride so intense, I thought he might well up with tears. “He’s a hero, man.”
“But…” I began.
Jure knew he had to explain why it was that “they” put him in The Hague.
"Sure, there were people living there, in Knin -- Serbs. And Gotovina, he burned houses. Many people died. But it was war, man. War. Things happen in war." He shrugged his shoulders, a bewildered look on his face asking me simultaneously why international treaties should get in the way of national liberation. "But it's no different from what the Serb forces had done to our people first."
Jure wasn't lying. In his heart, I know what he feels: He is Croatian.
"Come, I want to show you something." He led me behind the bar, to another faded newspaper clipping. "My uncle, he was a terrorist," he said with a laugh, knowing that 'terrorist' is a word 'they' use to oppress the 'we.' "They say 'terrorist,' but he wasn't really. All he did was, with this guy, they hijacked a plane, and they wanted to fly it over Serbia and drop bombs on them."
"This guy" was the one on the newspaper clipping; it was an issue proclaiming the good news, that Zvonko Busic had been released from prison. He committed the crime in 1976. This war did not begin in the 90's.
"You can't say 'uncle,' Jure!" I heard his mother exclaim. "Godfather! He is your godfather."
"Fine, godfather, whatever," Jure said, rolling his eyes, as he does often when Joanne speaks. I could tell Jure was pretending he just didn't remember the word, but he spoke such good English, I knew he just wanted me to believe his relative was a true Croatian hero.
A hero like Gotovina, who Zila had not very much respect for.
"Are you here for some kinda newspaper or something?" Joanne asked suddenly, after I had pulled out my reporter's notebook for the second time to make sure I got the right spelling of all these Slavic names and towns.
"Me? Nah," I said with an aww, shucks chuckle. "I'm just an American trying to learn."
"That's good," Jure said, vouching for the stranger who he had just referred to as "his friend" only a few moments before. "Everyone needs to learn about history."
More importantly, everyone needs to learn how others view their own history. Jure is right: Books aren't enough. Only when we live something, or ask those who lived it, can we really begin to learn.
Needless to say, I didn't mention the blog.
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*Note: All of these facts, dates, names, etc., are based on the testimonies of the people I interviewed. I haven't double-checked them. I don't know if what they said is true. But that's not what is important. What is important is that they believed these things to be true. And that is what history is all about. Because, like Bob Marley always said, "Who feels it, knows it."
