Mart Bax
Medjugorje—Religion, Politics,
and Violence in Rural Bosnia
Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1995; XIX + 139 pp.
Mart Bax is professor of political anthropology at the Free University
of Amsterdam. His speciality is the interrelation of secular and ecclesiastical
power, that is, their mutual striving for control over local populations.
At the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, he studied the interaction
of ecclesiastical and state power in the rural areas of Brabant in Belgium.
During the 19th century, this Flemish region was the scene of a series
of apparitions, which soon gave rise to particular types of devotion. Mass
pilgrimages started under the auspices of the local religious orders. Bax
noticed that this occurred at the same time as the foundation of the diocesan
organization in the region and that the local cults served as a weapon
in the conflict between local, convent dominated religious authorities,
which until then had controlled the majority of the rural parishes in Brabant,
and the new diocesan authorities, which were attempting to deprive them
of power. Similar to the Brabant situation, but somewhat earlier, the promotion
of the cult of the Virgin Mary in Mexico, Peru, and Ireland represented
an important part of the defensive strategy of a fairly informal religious
culture—which was being promoted by religious orders—against institutionalized
and hierarchical structures.
As a place where the Virgin Mary appeared as “late” as 1981, and therefore
suitable from the start for scrutiny of relevant processes, Medjugorje
was to serve Bax “only” to verify an already established theory. His research
was intended as standard ethnological field work with valuable insights
into a small autarchic community invaded overnight by hundreds of thousands
of pilgrims. From 1983 onwards, Bax spent several weeks every year in Medjugorje.
He finished his book in the second half of 1994, but the articles he continues
to publish in scholarly publications show that his original motivation
turned into a long-term professional interest. In this change, the key
role was played by the war in the 90s, when his previous conclusions about
the triangle which forms the subtitle of the book—religion, politics, and
violence—showed themselves in a new light.
For the Croatian reader, the book is additionally important because
it concentrates on a region—western Herzegovina—about which practically
nothing was known for many years apart from a few ideologically-biased
stereotypes. The authorities “knew” that this region had endemically retained
its “ustasha” character and must therefore be suppressed without mercy,
and the general public “knew” that it produced only primitive Gastarbeiter
and nationalistic Croats, who are best avoided altogether. During
the last seven or eight years, the label “Herzegovinian” became, for the
Croat public, a synonym either for the greatest national virtues or, again,
for national shame. In the past the Herzegovinian Croat generally bore
the stamp of a born terrorist, today he is branded a mafioso, the destroyer
of the Old Bridge at Mostar and the creator of the concentration camp of
Dretelj. The war appears only to have changed the type of stigma, leaving
everything else within the vicious circle of misunderstanding, prejudice,
and animosity.
Emphasizing that he by no means wishes to pronounce judgment on the
(non-) authenticity of the Virgin apparition, Bax carefully discussed the
“developmental dynamics of the social configuration of Medjugorje” on several
levels. He is convinced that he has succeeded in demonstrating that “on
the lower levels of integration, ocurrences that might be regular and explainable
on a high level become erratic, unpredictable, and dependent on random
circumstances and personal quirks.” He maintains that the attention of
those who aspire to a better understanding of the problems in today’s Bosnia
and Herzegovina must be “more intensely and systematically devoted to processes
and developments on the lower levels of social integration” (xix). It is
easy to subscribe to this, but Bax’s methodological errors can be identified
at precisely this point—which eventually results in an interpretation of
the recent war which is not only obscure, but also in direct contradiction
to the very sources that the author uses. Delving ever deeper into local
events and relationships, and describing complicated longue durée
processes, Bax obviously remained fascinated and confused by surface phenomena.
While he skilfully clarified some blind points, he also laid the foundations
for the emergence of other problems.
On the first level, Bax investigates the “management” of the religious
cult: the gradual metamorphosis of the seers into officials with a more
or less routine schedule of tasks in relation to the pilgrims. They have
even become religious entrepreneurs of a sort. His further research concerns
their complex relations with the Franciscans and the influence of the crowd
of pilgrims on the social and psychological life of the previously isolated
community. The logic of events followed the pattern familiar from similar
pilgrimage sites in Mexico, Portugal, Italy, and France. Medjugorje rapidly
came to experience the development of a sort of network of patron–client
relationships, not only between the friars and the seers, but also between
the Church hierarchy and acknowledged cults on the one hand, and the secular
authorities on the other. In Medjugorje, however, this pattern was characterized
by a greater complexity. First, the official Church did not acknowledge
the apparition and subsequently refused to integrate the cult into its
devotional system. Second, the state was communist and atheist, but gradually
turned a blind eye to the cult out of material interest, joining the profitable
system of “religious tourism.” All these events naturally remained hidden
to the million of pilgrims.
Bax follows the complex relationships and power games of the local
community with the secular authorities far into the past. This is especially
notable in the case of SŠipovac hill. Today this hill plays an important
role in the religious activities of Medjugorje, but until the fourteenth
century it was the site of a non-Christian cult which was then
(re-)Christianized by the Franciscans together with the entire region.
In brief, the story goes like this: 1) The Austrians settle some Serbs,
who in time grow stronger economically—after the foundation of Yugoslavia,
even politically—and at the end of the ’20s, they build a small Orthodox
church on the top of the hill as a symbol of their presence in this Catholic
region; 2) Croats respond in 1933 by erecting a fourteen-meter cross and
by renaming the top of the hill KrizŠevac—Hill of the Cross; 3) although
in opposition, the two symbols coexist until 1941, when the ustashas murder
or drive out the Serbs and destroy the church; 4) after the war, the communists
rename the hilltop Titovac and destroy the cross, at whose foot the population
is forced to construct a huge five-pointed star out of the stones of the
destroyed church; next to this star, the annual commemorations to the “national
heroes” and victims of the ustasha regime are held; 5) financially strengthened
after
the apparition, in the middle of the ’80s the Franciscans manage
to ensure that the local authorities “do not see” the demolishing of the
star, the hill-top is renamed KrizŠevac and integrated into the system
of Medjugorje devotion by weekly processions; 6) after the defeat of communism
in 1990, the Croat national emblem appears on the hill-top, frequently
accompanied by the letter U [ustasha]. Thus, the alternative processes
of sacralization and secularization present themselves as the tools of
a strategy aimed at establishing and strengthening power, as a long process
in the course of which every bearer of power, religious as well as secular,
imposes his own definition of the locality through ritual and symbolic
activities.
The next crucial aspect of the local relationships is the conflict
between the Franciscans and the secular priests. In Bosnia and Herzegovina
during the Ottoman period there was no Church hierarchy and the cure of
the souls of the Catholics was the business of the Franciscans. Immediately
after the 1878 occupation, the Austro-Hungarian authorities founded bishoprics
in cooperation with Rome, which also presupposed the establishment of parishes.
In Bosnia this relationship between the old and the new structures was
more or less settled without major conflicts, but in Herzegovina the conflict
continues right up to the present. According to the major historian of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Srec´ko M. DzŠaja, the tendency was often
not to promote and modernize the friars where necessary, but to subjugate
them completely, to suppress them and in time to liquidate them, to “abolish
one historical reality and install another.” Eventually, it is “sad” that
during these hundred and twenty years “so much energy was spent on remonstrating
and demonstrating who was the boss, and on mutual accusations, instead
of searching for a modern model of coexistence for of the established ecclesiastical
structures and the centuries-old non-established Catholic tradition in
Bosnia-Herzegovina.”1
Nevertheless, at the outbreak of the Second World War, the Franciscans
in Herzegovina—that is, in the newly founded bishopric of Mostar-Duvno—held
63 parishes of the 79, as well as considerable lands, and were in every
respect stronger than the diocesan structures. After the war, however,
nationalization deprived them of this economic basis of social power, and
in the middle of the 60s, the Holy See granted 33 additional parishes to
the diocesan clergy.
The Chaos of Violence and the Apparition
The most intriguing discovery of Bax’s book is the role of blood feuds
in the events described. Blood vengeance is the most obvious expression
of primary solidarity between the members of a group (all for one, one
for all). In the period before state formation, it substituted in some
ways for organized law, since every member was afraid that if he committed
an act of injustice he would raise blood. Therefore, blood feuds are not
simply “bad behavior,” and the status of those involved is not simply that
of evil-doers. The brotherhood carrying out the act of revenge automatically
becomes the target of the next act of revenge, so that it is not irrelevant
to ask whether the actors are victims, criminals, or both at the
same time. Blood vengeance is a complex phenomenon sui generis and it cannot
be absolutely abolished by individuals, however benevolent or strict they
might be; rather, it retreats only before economic and cultural development
and, of course, before the strengthening of the state authorities, which
crush the tribal system by the logic of their consolidation.
Mart Bax explains how in the Medjugorje region the apparition of Our
Lady served to limit the private use of violence on the part of men. In
this process, the crucial role was played by women and the Franciscans,
acting as the “interpreters of behavior and as ritual peacemakers” (p.
62). The constant interweaving of warfare, blood vengeance, and the policy
of power within and between the religious and the secular structures is
certainly displayed most vividly in the origins and development of the
religious cult in the neighborhood of Gomila and in the relationships of
the local brotherhoods.
The Scottish term “clan”, utilized by Bax, can be viewed as corresponding
to that of “brotherhood” in the system of the Dinara region. All its members
consider themselves brothers and sisters, since they originate or believe
they originate from a single ancestor. The brotherhood has common property
(forests, meadows, pastures, often a separate church and a cemetery) and
each brotherhood member is a co-owner. It is ruled by a collective sense
of responsibility, which is most strongly expressed in the institution
of blood feud. However, things are not that unambiguous. Since before the
appearance of the modern state there was no formal legal system, or it
was fragile, it was only this sense of responsibility that could give support
and safety to an individual. The sacredness of the given word substituted
for the formal legal system in a certain sense, and pride was a regulation
much stronger than any law. This ensured a degree of legal security despite
the lack of formal institutions.
Gomila comprises three brotherhoods, presented by the author under
pseudonyms: the Jerkovic´es are the oldest and the most respectable,
and were the first to settle there (around 1250), they have the best vineyards
and tobacco appreciated in Vienna and Istanbul alike, and at the local
cemetery theirs is the front row of tombs, which are the most beautiful
and the largest; the SŠivric´es occupy second place on the social
and economic scale, as well as in the cemetery; and the Ostojic´es
settled last, in the period of Turkish domination; their fields are of
inferior quality, rocksstrewn, and their tombs are in the last row. Originally
they were Orthodox, to the extent to which we can speak at all—in the modern
doctrinal sense—about systematic religious practice in the early period
of Ottoman domination.
In Ottoman times, the hayduks, small bandit groups understood
as popular opposition, made sporadic appearances in the region, as elsewhere
in the Balkans. Since it sometimes happened that a peasant was tortured
and betrayed their hiding places to the authorities, there was an eruption
of blood vengeance, which was put an end to in the pre-Ottoman period by
the consolidation of power of the local nobility. In 1512 the local spahi
(the horseman vassal of the Sultan ) invited the Franciscans to establish
order and secure regular tax-collection; in return, he exempted them
from taxes and granted them relative freedom in their activities. The Franciscans
started from the fact that all three brotherhoods—as participants in the
same popular culture—cultivated the cult of ancestors, so they arranged
a common cemetery with appropriately dedicated chapels. According to the
model of baptismal slava [a religious rite, related primarily to the cult
of ancestors], they organized common gatherings there, as well as mutual
godparenthood, and succeeded in interweaving the persons involved in blood
feuds in a “highly complex fabric of interpersonal control” (p. 85). Peace
was established, but Rome took a very unfavorable view of this Franciscan
pre-Christian-Catholic-Orthodox syncretism.
In 1878, when a Catholic hierarchy was established in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
the bishop of Mostar did everything in his power to prevent the gatherings
around the chapels of the ancestors and to bring religious life in line
with doctrinal guidelines in all respects. He built a parish church, which
no local ever entered; the members of brotherhoods continued to gather
for prayer at the cemetery, with the modification that the slava was amplified
by the prescribed communion.
The social compactness was broken up only in Yugoslavia, when the Croats
of Herzegovina, subjected to state repression, became politically radicalized.
In 1937, a group of cŠetniks from CŠapljina attacked some of the SŠivric´es,
and when the Ostojic´es discovered that their cattle had been killed,
they were convinced that it was the SŠivric´es who had taken revenge.
(Bax is not explicit, but one can gather from the context that the Ostojic´es
became Croat Catholics over generations; however, they remained aware of
their ties with some Serbian Orthodox brotherhoods east of the Neretva
river, and kept in contact with them; in times of political tension, this
fact made them suspect.) A local friar tried to organize a conciliatory
slava, but on the eve, one of the SŠivric´es, who had become an organized
ustasha in the meantime, desecrated the sacred place of the Ostojic´es—the
chapel of their ancestor. When the tombs of the Jerkovic´es and the
SŠivric´es suffered a similar fate, they accused the Ostojic´,
but until 1941 the conflict remained at the level of mutual infliction
of material damage. However, when the first victim fell in the ustasha-cŠetnik-partisan
triangle, the chain of blood vengeance erupted once more, stretching into
the postwar decades. From 1963 to 1980, the local courts registered at
least sixty cases related to blood feuds.
This time the Franciscans did not have the power to intervene, since
they were exhausted by the conflict on two fronts: with the communist authorities
and with the bishop of Mostar. In 1975, when the Holy See ordered them
to cede five more parishes to the diocesan clergy, and precisely those
that had provided the majority of novices over the centuries, it seemed
that their very existence was in danger. However, as an elderly Franciscan
said to Bax, “God’s salvation was at hand” (p. 13), and according to the
words of an old woman, “there was something extraordinary in the air, we
all felt it.” (p. 14) In 1981, after vespers on June 24, six children announced
to their friar that they had seen the Virgin Mary on the hill. The news
spread like lightning and pilgrims started to come from all parts. The
state repression and the refusal of the ecclesiastical authorities to acknowledge
the apparition only gave an additional impetus to the revived acts of devotion
and lent the Franciscans the aura of (political) martyrs.
The messages and instructions of the Virgin most frequently propagated
peace, prayer, fasting, and contrition. Nevertheless, parallel to these
general messages, there were those intended only for the local population,
which the Franciscans concealed from the wider circle of pilgrims. The
book on the Apparitions of Our Lady in Medjugorje (1983), written by Pater
Ljudevit RupcŠic´, who kept records of all the messages from the
beginning, included both categories. It was banned by the state authorities
immediately after its publication and the author was arrested. The second
edition by René Laurentin, published in French the following year,
omitted the messages directed to the local population. Thus, one was not
able to see what was clearly visible in the first edition: that from the
very beginning the Franciscans supported and promoted the Marian movement,
with the twofold aim:
One […] was the prevention of further diocesan encapsulation, and the
international pilgrim circuit could help them achieve this. The other aim…
was internal pacification. Unlike in Turkish times, it was no longer possible
for them to enter into a coalition with the secular authorities for this
purpose. (p. 96)
Two of the children stated that the Virgin insisted in particular that
the hostile brotherhoods should restore the old sanctuary at the cemetery,
as well as that they should revive the practice of slava. The American
relatives of one donated the money, and after some time, the county authorities
of CŠitluk gave official permission and even material aid. Under the leadership
of the Franciscans and according to the instructions of several old men,
who remembered what the place had looked like before, the peasants went
to work. At the instigation of the seers, other neighborhoods joined in.
Working together like this, discussing, consulting, involving emigrated
relatives in the project, had an extremely beneficial effect on a community
that had been torn asunder for so long. “Whenever I had some free time
I would help with the work,” Petar SŠivric´ said. “One evening Janko
of the Ostojic´es—who was working on his row behind me—asked me whether
I still knew who were in the graves next to his parents. Without a moment’s
hesitation, I started drawing in the sand with him (tracing genealogy).
Together with a few other people, we found the answer. I suddenly realized
I had helped the man who had probably taken revenge on my father’s brother.
I told him what I had just realized. Weeping, he fell to the ground. Father
Jozo came over. We fetched some young tobacco from the fields, which he
blessed and then placed on our hramovi (small temples of the clan founders).
Father Jozo said that the war had made us all blind. After that I said
hello to Janko when I saw him, and our wives took the cattle to drink at
our well together, because it gives good water.” (p. 97)
In 1985, the great common slava was held at Gomila with official permission.
It was the first since 1937, and many relatives from abroad came to join
the celebration. Soon afterwards the Virgin appeared for the last time
to those two children, telling them that their task had been accomplished.
The slava was then held regularly until 1991, and throughout this period
not a single act of personal revenge was registered. In addition, a “spectacular
decrease” of crime in the entire region was recorded. The mass pilgrimage
imposed new rules of behavior and directed the population towards economic
activities. As Bax could frequently hear from the peasants, “since Gospa
[Our Lady] came here for the first time, vendettas have stopped and families
are reunited, we are all happy and well-off, and we try to be friendly
and hospitable. That is also what Our Lady teaches us: we must be an example
for the world.” (p. 22)
Even though after 1985 the slava was no longer indispensable, the Franciscans
continued to perform it. This achieved two things: first, they strengthened
their own connection with the population (since in places of mass
pilgrimage it often happens that the parochial priest and the parishioners
are mutually alienated); second, they symbolically demonstrated their opposition
to episcopal dominance, at least because the cult of ancestors was not
a part of official church doctrine.
As for the economic prosperity that accompanied the rise of the new
cult, the Ostojic´es benefited most. Since they had always been the
poorest brotherhood, they had the largest number of Gastarbeiter, which
in the changed circumstances meant having the largest initial capital.
They built the only two “real” hotels and obtained the most taxi licenses;
their network provided their own transportation to meet groups of pilgrims
at the airports of Mostar, Split, Dubrovnik, and Zagreb. Although they
were making a considerable profit themselves, the Jerkovic´es and
the SŠivric´es watched with envy how they were being overtaken by
the Ostojic´es, who had been “stone-eaters” until only recently.
However, this all came to an end with the Serbian rebellion in Croatia,
especially with the ravages of the “reservists” of the JNA, the regular
army of Tito’s Yugoslavia, in Mostar. The population fell increasingly
into debt and only the Ostojic´es still kept doing transportation
business of some sort, owing to bribery and good connections. Other brotherhoods
considered it “unfair” and demanded that they share between them all “what
was still left”. The Ostojic´es refused. On August 15, 1991, three
hundred pilgrims they had brought started out for the Hill of the Cross,
but a group of masked men chased them away, shooting into the air. The
CŠitluk police arrested some of the Jerkovic´es. Several days later
thirty-two taxis belonging to the Ostojic´es were demolished, and
some forty Jerkovic´es and SŠivric´es disappeared from the
village.
The war was approaching, the tension grew, and all men were fully armed.
Parallel with the “great war” a local “little war” started in Medjugorje
around Christmas, and several hundred men from all brotherhoods took part.
Until the beginning of July 1992, “when the Croatian army imposed peace
upon the western part of Herzegovina” (p. 101), 140 of about 3,000 inhabitants
were murdered, 60 disappeared, around 600 escaped, and many houses were
damaged or demolished. The victims came from all brotherhoods, and the
Ostojic´ disappeared without a trace: some ran away, others were
killed, and the place where their graves stood was turned into an empty
hole. Their houses were later repaired, but appropriated by the Jerkovic´es
and the SŠivric´es.
Forgetting or Remembering
In the final chapter, entitled “SŠurmanci’s Secret: A Never-Ending Story?”,
Mart Bax explains another local process of longue durée. In the
late autumn of 1992, Bax heard a loud explosion, but his Medjugorje host
Franjo assured him that it was nothing of importance, and the day after
he answered all questions with stubborn silence. Towards evening, however,
Franjo took Bax to SŠurmanci, to the place above the Neretva river where
the results of the explosion could be seen on the plateau, which could
be reached by steps. “Comrades blew up this blasted cŠetnik monument!”
exclaimed Franjo with a torrrent of curses. He spit with contempt on the
remains and returned to the car. For a long time he ignored Bax’s questions,
but then he erupted in a torrent of words: “Why, why, why… you always
want to know why!” Hadn’t I ever noticed that people didn’t want to answer
my questions about SŠurmanci? (I had.) Hadn’t I ever noticed that no taxi,
or anyone at all, ever wanted to go to SŠurmanci? (I had.) Hadn’t I ever
noticed that the people here all acted as if SŠurmanci didn’t exist? “Look
at the road… There are no signs telling you the way to SŠurmanci. At the
church, all the hamlets are listed on the big stone tablet—not SŠurmanci.
In all the guidebooks for tourists, the hamlets here are described—not
SŠurmanci. You can buy postcards and slides of almost every spot around
here—not of SŠurmanci… To us here, SŠurmanci is dead… we want to forget.”
(p. 120)
Gradually, with the help of Pater Leonard, who never missed the opportunity
to mention that “here every village has a secret like that,” Bax reconstructed
this complicated story. During the Ottoman period, small garrisons, called
“gatekeepers” (vratari), were built along the trade route from the coast
to Mostar, in order to control the communication between the mountain villages
and the trading centers along the Neretva river. In these posts the garrisons,
supervisors, and toll collectors were Muslims. One such village was ZŠitomislic´,
which controlled almost the entire region of Brotnjo—a fertile plateau
on which Medjugorje is situated—and collected the profit from the village
vineyards. Eventually, taking advantage of the general confusion which
accompanied the decline of the Ottoman rule, the rich village of ZŠitomislic´
was attacked by Serbian rebels from Montenegro, obviously a strong uskok
or hayduk band from what was called Old Herzegovina. They murdered or chased
away the inhabitants, and then they appropriated their houses.
In an attempt to “pacify and incorporate the mainly Croat peasant population,”
the new Austro-Hungarian authorities “were only too happy to use the militant
Montenegrin Serbs”. Thus, for Croats, ZŠitomislic´ became—and remained—the
symbol of Serbian repression. In Yugoslavia the situation became even worse:
ZŠitomislic´ became a base from which the cŠetniks from eastern Herzegovina,
under the protection of the de facto Serbian authorities, pillaged and
raped all over western Herzegovina, cut down vineyards, destroyed water
tanks and burned down houses. In a conversation with Bax, an old man from
Medjugorje compared these events to what was happening in 1992: “Nothing
has changed… only the horses have become tanks.”
The peasants of Medjugorje gradually started to respond to the terror,
and during the Second World War “this regional violence formation was incorporated
into a war figuration of national proportions.” (p. 122) Towards the end
of the summer of 1941, the ustashas of Medjugorje, SŠiroki Brijeg, CŠapljina,
and Humac surrounded ZŠitomislic´ and collected all the Serbs they
could find—including women, children, and old people—took them to SŠurmanci
in lorries, slaughtered them and threw them into a pit. At the end of the
war and in the postwar years, reprisals followed: the new authorities and
their repressive bodies killed almost half of the Medjugorje population
and destroyed a large part of the parish. Some members of the Stojanovic´
brotherhood had survived because they had not been in ZŠitomislic´,
and since in the meantime they had become partisan officers or influential
members of the Communist Party, they had the main say in the postwar acts
of vengeance; at the same time, they accepted the task of reconstructing
ZŠitomislic´—and received financial support for this. By the early
60s, the village was completely rebuilt and was occupied by relatives of
the victims.
According to Bax, who refers to the inhabitants, at the same time,
Brotnjo was divided into a number of unofficial “counties” ruled by “distinctive”
Serb partisans—but separated from the regular administrative division.
Each house which had some relation to the ustasha movement—that is, all
Croat houses—had to pay “reparations” to these parallel authorities. Those
who refused were persecuted, so that almost all the young men of Brotnjo
spent some time in the prisons of Mostar or Sarajevo. Bax claims that in
a wider area, until the middle of 1994, he identified “sixteen similar
configurations of Serb power centers and Croat communities dominated by
them,” that is, “ethnically based antagonism between pairs or clusters
of village communities.”
Without any intention of refuting Bax’s respondents, at least two factors
should be mentioned which raise doubt regarding the existence of the described
parallel authorities. First, the communists simply did not need them, since
they had absolute control over the regular system of authority or repression,
so that within this system they were able to reward the “distinguished”
and punish the “subversive” without limit. Second, in the “politically
unreliable” areas the rule was not to create “parallel counties,” but to
reshape the borders of the existing ones or to move the county center—which
meant both state investment and political power—to a “reliable” place.
This was done according to the principle that the leading persons, naturally
communists, were formally of the same nationality as the majority of the
population, and if such cadres were not to be found on the spot, they were
brought in from the vicinity. This form was strictly kept, and the fact
that the form was presented as the content belongs to another story. Exceptions
from this principle were possible, but they must be investigated and documented
in a far more convincing way than Bax has done.
Within the system of these alleged parallel authorities, the Stojanovic´es
obtained Medjugorje, Bijakovic´i, and SŠurmanci, and the inhabitants
were compelled to build a large monument above the pit under police surveillance.
It was solemnly unveiled in 1973, and from that date a commemoration was
held on every April 27. The Croats felt that this was a humiliation, the
more so because they knew that many of the victims did not have as clean
a past as they claimed. Before and after those gatherings, which abounded
in slogans about brotherhood and unity, local Croats were forced to repair
potholes in the road and to remove the garbage. An ever greater national
animosity was created, which abated only in the mid-80s, “thanks to the
power of the Mother of God,” according to Pater Leonard, that is, “thanks
to the economic boom in Medjugorje from which the authorities benefited
as well,” according to the majority of inhabitants. Whatever the case,
the authorities stopped the ceremonies in SŠurmanci. Seven years later,
the hated monument was blown up, “but the memory lives on—on both sides,”
as Pater Leonard lamented (p. 125).
Lost in Time
Bax’s study is remarkable in its ethnological, investigatory aspect,
but before I comment upon its basic error—which stems from his belief,
arising under the impact of war, that in his local model he discovered
the stone of wisdom applicable to the understanding of wider processes—I
must list some banal, and therefore hardly understandable mistakes.
Bax mentions that in 1512, the spahi of Medjugorje invited the Franciscans
from the convent of ZŠivogosŠc´e “on the northern border of Bosnia”
(p. 84), whereas this convent is situated in the diagonally opposite
part of Bosnia—on the coast near Makarska, in a region which at that time
belonged to Ottoman Bosnia and which was in charge of the pastoral care
of the Mostar region. During the centuries-long Habsburg-Venetian-Ottoman
wars, the Croat population from the mountain Hinterland of the Adria did
not migrate “southeastward”
(p. 103), which would mean further into the Ottoman Balkans, but in
the opposite direction—towards the north and north-west. It is also rather
odd to state that it was motivated to do so by a “sense of adventure.”
The Austro-Hungarian Empire did not annex Bosnia and Herzegovina “a decade”
after the occupation (p. 86), but three decades later, namely in 1908,
and the anarchic months preceding the entry of the Austrian army can hardly
be characterized as the “short moments of the flush of freedom.”
Even if these are minor errors, there is another, which greatly influences
our understanding of the described processes. According to Bax, the first
bishop of Mostar, whose name he does not mention, was “Hungarian” (p. 87).
In fact it was Pater PasŠkal Buconjic´, a Croat, previously the custodian,
and later the vicar of the Herzegovinian Franciscans. Such incorrect data
in the analysis of a crucial historical moment can easily lead to the conclusion
that there was (also) an ethnic element at the basis of the Franciscan–episcopal
conflict, that is, precisely the element which played no role whatsoever.
The greatest problem, however, is the presentation of the events after
1918, especially everything connected with the ustashas, who seem to fascinate
the Dutch ethnologist in a peculiar way. Describing the events of 1929,
after King Alexander’s proclamation of a dictatorship, Bax calls the Croatian
Peasants Party (HSS), which by that time had existed no less than a quarter
of a century, a “newly founded party,” (p. 71) in which “a part of the
hard core” was formed by the ustashas (p. 72), and that can mean only one
thing: that the ustasha movement was created—horribile dictu—within the
HSS or at least collaborated in its foundation. However, thirty pages further
on, the author claims that immediately after 1918, the Croats of Bosnia
and Herzegovina, responding to the terror, “organized armed gangs called
ustasŠe, who kidnapped Serb leaders and were likely to murder them as well”.
(p. 104) When, however, “the tension spread [from Bosnia and Herzegovina]
to other regions and the country became ungovernable, the king disbanded
parliament and instigated a wave of terror”. (p. 104), which, again, can
only mean that the king was innocent until 1929, whereas the ustashas
had sowed the roots of all evil ten years earlier. Presenting the period
between the wars, the author does not mention at all the event which was
crucial for the direction of later developments—the assault on Stjepan
Radic´ in Parliament in 1928!
The truth is that the HSS condemned violence from the very beginning
and that it distanced itself from Pavelic´, even expelling those
who established contacts with the ustashas, for example, a group from the
Lika region in 1938. Violence between the wars, in which Bax with good
reason sees the roots of much of the later evil, is presented as some sort
of guerilla movement of mass proportions composed of the ustashas, and
present above all in Bosnia. The reality, however, was different: state
terror showed itself in arrests and beatings, and shooting at religious
processions and non-violent protest demonstrations, whereas ustasha terror,
beginning with 1931/32, with the exception of so-called “Velebit
insurrection,” took a form which could be compared to the early actions
of ETA or the IRA. They placed time bombs: in Zagreb, Split, and on the
railway tracks. The targets were the symbols of the state power and repression
(the seat of the ban of the Sava banovina, the military headquarters, gendarme
stations, the centers of anti-regime unions such as Young Yugoslavia in
Zagreb), the attacks were carried out on symbolic dates such as Unification
Day or the King’s birthday. This terrorism (altogether ten to fifteen explosions)
could not have been different or of greater proportions because of the
number of organized ustashas: Bogdan Krizman listed around five hundred
names in emigration, and Fikreta Jelic´-Butic´ estimated their
number in Bosnia and Herzegovina at two thousand, with some increase immediately
before the war.
In his presentation of the war period, Bax states that the NDH, the
Independent State of Croatia, was created by Germany and Italy in their
own interests. He adds, however, that the “real power” was held by Pavelic´
and the ustasha organization, which is contradictory. Further ambiguity
is created by his formulations that the NDH “did everything” to eliminate
the Serbs “with the help of the vicious and pugnacious ustasŠa organization”
(p. 104), that is, “with the help of the para-military ustasŠa organization.”
(p. 122) Out of this it follows logically that in the NDH power was in
the hands of a third—from the context we can presume, a Croat—political
party, with respect to which the ustashas were only a para-military organization
in charge of the dirty work. Thus, it becomes less and less clear who represented
the actual power in the NDH: Germany and Italy, the ustashas, or that unnamed
third party. But what really happened during the Second World War in Bosnia
and Herzegovina was that in its central and southern part, “guerilla groups”
were active, namely, the ustashas, the cŠetniks, and the partisans, whereas
in the north there was a clash of the German armies with the Allied forces
(p. 91). The most awkward fact is that in these passages Bax refers to
first-class literature: the books by I. Banac, J. Tomasevich, F. Jelic´-Butic´,
and B. Krizman. Therefore, only two conclusions are possible: either he
read them at random and inexcusably superficially, or he used other sources
and mentioned these as widely acknowledged authorities. Some of his insights
are indeed precise, thus, for example, that the postwar vengeance acquired
such large dimensions because towards the end of the war, the partisans
unselectively accepted people who had been cŠetniks the day before. Still,
the cŠetniks of Mihailovic´ are for Bax “activists of the resistance
movement,” and the whole confusion is crowned by a nonsensical statement
that in Bosnia and Herzegovina “in the early seventies, groups of armed
young men who called themselves ustasŠe began to gather in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
targeting government institutions, the region’s numerous arms depots, party
officials, and villages dominated by Serbs.” (p. 105)
It seems that this statement is based upon the case of the Bugojno
group of the summer of 1972, an episode, which is still mysterious and
unsolved. These nineteen emigrants entered Yugoslavia with the intention
of starting a “liberating insurrection,” but were discovered and liquidated
by the secret police and JNA before they managed to do anything. Naively
believing that they were expressing their courage and perseverance in the
resistance against communism, Bax’s hosts wove long stories and boasted
about some non-existent guerillas, and he, uncritical and uninformed as
he is, blindly believed anything they said. One could call it a textbook
example of what emerges when local wishful thinking and an ignorant field-worker
meet.
Another example of an unscientific approach is Bax’s usage of two crucial
terms, for example when he says that there were many “guerilla bands of
Hajduci, UstasŠe and CŠetnici” (p. 103) or “small gangs of Hajduci or UstasŠe”
(p. 83) in Bosnia and Herzegovina during Ottoman rule. The term hayduk
is certainly unambiguous, but the usage of the two other terms in the context
introduces confusion and suggests that there was an organizational and
ideological continuity in the ustasha and cŠetnik movements between the
fifteenth and the twentieth centuries, that is, that the policies that
these groups are necessarily associated with in Croat–Serb relations—to
which Bax rightfully pays great attention—were formed five centuries ago.
The terminology is not established once and for all, but experiences
shifts in meaning through historical development. In South-Slav circumstances
this sometimes leads to a touch of black humor. UstasŠ or ustasŠa
is an old term for an insurrectionist, a rebel, so that even folk epic
poetry tells that “the ustasŠe attacked them [the Turks] / burned down
the houses around town.” At the end of the nineteenth century, Vasa Pelagic´
writes about the courage of “the ustasŠe of Karad/ord/e” in Serbia of 1804,
and a document on committal activities in Ottoman Macedonia, printed in
1906 in Belgrade, is entitled “Fight of Serbian ustasŠa-heroes of Old Serbia
and Macedonia.” Nevertheless, after 1945, this term, in colloquial speech
as well as in scholarly writings, both Yugoslav and foreign, was definitely
reduced to the meaning adopted in the interwar period and in the Second
World War. The same is true of the terms cŠetnik or cŠetenik, in
their general meaning soldier in a cŠeta (military unit), synonyms until
the semantic separation, which was precisely a consequence of the new historical
and political situations. Thus, the term cŠetenik is used in its original
context by ethnology and folklore studies, in order to preserve its semantic
precision.
It is logical to presume that the misinterpretations and errors mentioned
here arose when the author was induced, by the recent war and as an aside
to his original intention, to incorporate his research in Medjugorje into
that wider context and even offer it as a clue to the understanding of
considerably more complex and all-encompassing historical processes. Perhaps
he was also led by an understandable wish to gain wider resonance for his
specialized study. It is however obvious that in the very short time at
his disposal he did not manage to study in detail the historiography and
other literature necessary for such a radical conceptional and interpretational
turn. The term Bosnia in the subtitle could be an attempt to take advantage
of the interest it arouses in the media, since the author knows very well
that Medjugorje is located in Herzegovina.
This motivation is also reflected in the fact that the book does not
even mention the war between Croats and Bosnian Muslims although it happened
in its entirety in front of Bax’s eyes. Since he had come there in order
to investigate a Catholic Croat region, he was relatively quick in grasping
the relationships to the Serbian-Orthodox element. However, he appears
to have lost impetus when a third protagonist entered the game, moreover
a non-Christian one, so he simply decided to ignore him, afraid—and with
good reason—that the entire construction could collapse. Namely, his argumentation
about the longue durée hatred between Serbs and Croats becomes useless
when it comes to the turn of 1993, when this allegedly fatal chain of mutual
extinction turns overnight into a “Christian alliance” against “Islamic
fundamentalism,” and when the HDZ (the party in power in Croatia since
1990) begins to use the same “anti-Turkish” rhetoric against the Bosnian
Muslims that was developed in the 80s by Serb nationalists and launched
into operation by the SDS of KaradzŠic´ [Bosnian Serbian Democratic
Party].
Striving to give greater value to an entirely localized historical
perspective, Mart Bax’ study became an exemplary illustration of a long
and by no means simple dispute of social macrohistory and anthropological
microhistory. Attempting, as an ethnologist and sociologist of religion,
to deal methodologically with the military and political nightmare in which
he was caught, he obviously leaned towards those tendencies of social history
which abandon the research of social structures and processes in favor
of units of small space, in favor of the “microscopic”, everyday experience
of people living on a confined area. Subsequently, these anthropological
case-studies, by adducing a large number of single cases, are supposed
to create an image of a larger entity, and there are even opinions that
a certain case alone can be representative for an entity. According to
Mirjana Gross, such authors refer back to the or “field research,” to the
traditional way of work of an ethnologist who lives for a period of time
among the members of a “primitive” social group and attempts to “understand”
it with empathy. These writers are convinced that they can understand the
researched world of certain human groups exclusively through their own
interpretations of reality, through their “inborn theories”. Therefore,
they believe that perhaps there is a direct way to historical truth based
on the stories of those who have lived it. […]The history of “everyday
life” has no concept for the synthesis of individual stories of human experience
and shares the attitudes of ethnologists. They, again, seek to solve the
foreign culture and the way of life of its members on the basis of their
symbolic and ritual activities.[…]The problem of theories is thus substituted
by the “dense description” of details, in which the ethnologist expects
from his object of investigation to speak for himself, in the same way
as historicists and positivists believed that a historian must let the
sources speak for themselves. […]Critics are of the opinion that it is
impossible to reconstruct historical reality exclusively “from the inside,”
on the basis of what people think of themselves, to renounce upon general
notions and not to raise the question of the representativity of the results
achieved in “microhistory”.2
Bax reproached the anthropologists and all those who investigated Yugoslav
society for having begun very late to see that “the present-day hatred
and atrocities are predominantly continuations on a larger scale of processes
at the grass-roots level that were concealed behind the official communist
rhetoric.” (p. 126) It is certainly easy to agree with the last part of
this formulation as well as that in every war “regional violence formation
is incorporated into a warlike configuration of national proportions” (p.
122), but if the problem is to be grasped in a truly analytical manner,
we must inevitably raise a series of questions which the author avoids.
Are all these “regional violence formations” typologically and generically
identical? Are they all based on the ethnic principle? Do they all incorporate
in the same way and with the same speed to make up the “configuration of
national proportions”? Through which channels and mechanisms, communicational
and social, is this incorporation performed? Who has the normative and
the operative control over these mechanisms?
The relationship between the “lower” and the “higher” levels is rather
ambiguous. There is no “local violence formation” which could be extrapolated
to a higher level and could be treated as paradigmatic as, after all, there
is no such all-encompassing “national configuration” which would be able
to absorb everything, not even most of the “local formations,” impregnated
by various social and historical experiences. The everyday experience of
the people living on a narrow strip of territory is valuable, but with
the proviso that one always keeps in mind the processes responsible for
a large part of their fate.
In every reconstruction of historical phenomena, we establish a continuity
between a certain part of the past and our own possible judgments, that
is, the identity and the meaningful context of a social phenomenon in our
presentation. However, this approach conceals dangers[…]Therefore, the
historian’s skill consists, among other things, in the rational application
of the concepts of continuity and discontinuity in the research of historical
movements.3
For this reason it appears important to study precisely the methods
and mechanisms of incorporation, for—as Bax himself says—a small war “can
be a side-effect of organized warfare on a larger scale, but is not equivalent
to it”. There is no doubt that “the small-scale local wars have become
closely interwoven with the far larger ones” (p. 116); but the notion of
“interweaving” does not tell us anything either about causal relationships,
or about the possible prevalence of one element or another—especially in
the early phases of the conflict; about the entire large territory—social
and in relation to communications—between an autarchic village and what
one might call a national level; or about the chronology of events. These
aspects cannot be apprehended from a narrow local perspective.
Besides, it is precisely Bax’s analysis that suggests that in the couple
ZŠitomislic´-Medjugorje, demonstrated as a paradigm of the Serbian-Croatian
conflict, the fatal “configuration of the center of power and community
under its domination” was certainly not triggered by some ustasha or cŠetnik,
but by the acknowledgedly modern and administratively perhaps best organized
European state of that period. In some other place the situation was certainly
different, and to a very great degree.
The ethnographic material presented clearly shows that conflicts in
Medjugorje were not determined by ethnic but by kinship loyalties, but
Bax does not offer any modern example which could show that blood feuds
of the sort he describes in western Herzegovina were common elsewhere in
Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, he mentions one on the war in Croatia—pretentious,
drawn out of context and based on a dubious source, the book The Fall of
Yugoslavia. The Third Balkan War (Penguin, 1st ed. 1992, 2nd ed. 1993)
by the English journalist Misha Glenny. Among the instant-interpreters
of the bloody disintegration of SFRJ [Socialist Federate Republic of Yugoslavia]
one could discern from the very beginning two “schools”: one asserted that
Tito’s Yugoslavia was a multicultural idyll in which a seed of evil was
planted by sinister nationalist politicians, KucŠan just as much as MilosŠevic´;
the other considered it a land of endemic tribal hatred in which the latest
war was a logical continuation and the final episode of earlier ones. Glenny
was among the first in the West who promoted the second hypothesis, which
is suggested in the subtitle of his book.
He is quoted by Bax twice, once as early as the introduction, when
Bax says that during his stay in Herzegovina he was convinced that this
was the region where “the most primitive branches of the Serb and Croat
tribes live” (xvii), which is a formulation of Glenny’s. The second time
is towards the end of his book, where he refers to Glenny’s presentation
of the events in the Osijek and Vukovar area in the late spring and early
summer of 1991. According to Glenny, the relations between Serbs and Croats
there were “traditionally very good, even under the ustasŠa regime,” but
then “something happened that disrupted that harmony in eastern Slavonia”.
That something was a large number of newcomers—Croats from western Herzegovina
and Serbs from Knin—who settled after the Second World War in the abandoned
German and Hungarian farms in Vojvodina and Slavonia. Glenny was supported
in this conclusion by a journalist from Vreme from Belgrade, MilosŠ Vasic´,
with his statement that “communists took the most ardent fighters from
the civil war and placed them in the middle of eastern Slavonia, through
which they achieved that the hatred of war, after it was dug out again
in 1991, spread also to those areas which had until then not been infected
by it”.4
Subscribing uncritically to such views and insisting on his own a prioris,
Bax is easily able to explain how the war began and whose fault it was
that Vukovar ended as it did. Eastern Slavonia was settled by the “children
and grandchildren of former ustasŠe who had emigrated from the region [western
Herzegovina], so that in 1991, one could clearly see the “vengeful mentality
of these emigrants in their battle against Serbs in East Slavonia—who also
came from Herzegovina…” (p. 118).
Bax presents rather well the attitude of the Yugoslav communist authorities
towards western Herzegovina, and already at that point he makes it clear
how impossible it was for these authorities to give the land in the Podunavlje
region, belonging to Volksdeutscher who had been driven out, to any Croat
living there. It is true that there were some Croats who migrated from
Herzegovina, but they were not included within the state colonization like
Serbs (and also Croats from other regions), but came individually, at their
own expense—mostly savings earned as Gastarbeiter abroad—and much later.
The majority of Serbian colonists were not from the Knin region—according
to Glenny—or from eastern Herzegovina—according to Bax, who simply substituted
Glenny’s Serbs from Knin with his own Serbs from Herzegovina. Certainly,
if one took into account all these facts, there would be no place left
for regional stereotypes and a prioris which produce a “scholarly” alibi
for MilosŠevic´, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and all
those who systematically prepared conquests and dislocation of peoples
long before 1991. Because, according to Bax and Glenny, it was actually
a local settling of accounts by wild settlers, something like an all-round
shoot-out in some Wild West saloon.
Bax’s material convincingly demonstrates that local communities have
their own ways to suppress violence based on their own motivation and their
own system of values, and their own ways to create relatively durable,
socially and psychologically productive forms of cooperation and tolerance.
In this respect, the study offers a good insight into the “civilizing or
pacifying role of religion” (p. 99). It also clearly shows that economic
progress reduces and eliminates social tensions, but that they reawaken
under the influence of external violence. This violence need not have a
political or ethnic motivation, nor always come from the “national level”.
The fact that the non-ethnic motivation is often perceived as ethnic is
a consequence of wider social psychoses and mobilization schemes, which
are not produced by these small communities; they can only acquire them,
apply them more or less brutally, and in the final account become, as they
often are, their greatest victim.
All local communities have felt certain “exceptional” existential security
in some historical situation and this situation lives in their social memory
as a sort of golden age. If Bax had not been so fascinated by the ustashas
and so ready to take every word of his hosts for granted, he would have
been able to notice very easily in conversation with them that their ustasha
attitudes were often—which is unreasonable, but historically explainable—reduced
to irresponsible parading and spiteful negation of Yugoslavia, to pre-political
perception of those four years as the only period in which they were “asked
about their opinion” and when they could “freely declare themselves as
Croats and Catholics” instead of being mere game for hunting. The
same motivation can be recognized behind the uncritical cult of Yugoslavia,
the first rather than the second, of many Serbs west of the Drina river,
and the idealization of the Turkish vakat in the historical memory of Bosnian
Muslims. The actual basis of their tragedy, of which they are hardly ever
conscious, rests in those who glorify such politically and morally unreasonable
attitudes and incorporate them into ideological “configurations of national
proportions”. (A recent example of such conscience and its manipulation
was presented by the 4th congress of the HDZ: the presiding speaker read
a telegram of greetings from a senior citizen in Zagreb, who, although
hungry with only 800 monthly Kuna in her pocket [less than $150], was “happy,
because she can finally freely speak of herself as a Croat”—which was followed
by deafening applause.)
Resistance of small communities and their non-established cultures
against dominant institutional systems can easily win sympathy. When such
resistance is combined with resistance to an objectively repressive state
such as Yugoslavia was, especially during the time of Rankovic´ (chief
of the secret police during a part of Tito’s presidency), it may even inspire
active solidarity. However, such solidarity will be hypocritical and counterproductive
if it refuses to see that the resistance has another face, and that it
is formulated in a way that makes it inevitable that the hunted one should
accept the logic of the hunter and respond to the latter’s reduction of
reality by an equally fatal reduction of his own.
As long as they were arrested for public exposure of Croatian national
symbols and for singing Vila Velebita—a song forbidden since it was considered
nationalist—Herzegovinian Croats were strengthened in their opinion that
the only criterion of freedom was to expose those symbols and sing that
song, and since during the ustasha rule you could indeed do that till you
dropped, the NDH appeared to them as the only alternative to the repressive
state of Yugoslavia: and at this point all critical thinking stopped. The
communist regime was certainly responsible for the fact that, by criminalizing
Croat identity and its symbols, it brought about the relativization of
the truly criminal outbursts of chauvinism and radicalism. The Herzegovinian
Croat would end up with more or less equal treatment at the police station
both for singing Vila Velebita and a ganga, a Herzegovinian folk-song which
honors a pathological ustasha killer à la Luburic´.
Nevertheless, the list of the guilty is not exhausted by the communists
or the Serbs. The non-established structure that represented the only authority
to the singer during those 45 years and enjoyed his unconditioned trust
bears its share of responsibility for the fact that the ustasha ideology,
whether boastful or real, became the only model of resistance to communism,
that general political consciousness was paralysed and the horizon of cognizance
narrowed down to the choice between Yugoslavia and the NDH. Thus, political
autism and moral relativism were encouraged—with fatal consequences. First,
the NDH was turned into a myth which concealed the responsibility of its
leaders for betraying the legitimate Croatian fight for a state of their
own and for the evil that even the Croats themselves suffered (not to mention
the Serbs and Jews). Second, at the time of the fall of communism western
Herzegovina was in the state of mind in which it was practically inevitable
that it should once more rush after a false prophet and his gang of political
converts including returned emigrants of dubious past, and that, in a war
with “the Turks” 115 years after the retreat of Turkey from the region,
it should become the heir of another legacy that would postpone political
and social emancipation for a long time to come.
Local communities, while entering various pacts with higher-level authorities
at various points in time, were not always conscious of the network of
relations in which they were being entangled or of the consequences. Sometimes
they would be compelled by a sheer instinct for self-preservation, at others
by pre-meditated calculations as to how to obtain privilege. It is
not difficult to see the responsibility of those who offered such privileges
or protection according to confessional, ethnic, or “class” criteria. Nor
is it difficult to condemn those who agreed to receive them, although they
knew that they were obtained at the cost of their “subversive”, neighbors
of the moment. Still, it is difficult to deny the fact that the recipients
had good reason, confirmed by experience, to believe at least two things:
first, that society was clearly divided into rulers and ruled, and second,
that their neighbors would not have hesitated themselves if circumstances
happened to bring in a different government which would offer the same
privilege to them.
Vera Erlich wrote as early as 1965: “There is an obvious interdependence
between the fate of a people and its dominant values. National values influence
the course of history and historical events strengthen the values and goals
which had come into being earlier in time. However, if we look for the
beginning of this circle, we will confront a mystery”.5 Mart Bax committed
only one error, but a substantial one: he started to believe that blood
feuds offered him a clue to the mystery called Herzegovina, and the “revengeful”
Herzegovinians the clue to the war as a whole.
1 Croatica Christiana Periodica, 34/1995, p. 191.
2 Mirjana Gross, Historiography Today. Zagreb: Novi Liber, 1996. pp.
291–92
3 Mirjana Gross, ibid., pp. 374–75.
4 Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War. Penguin,
1992 (1993) pp. 107–108.
5 Vera St. Erlich, “Ljudske vrednote i kontakti kultura” (Human Values
and Contacts between Cultures). Sociologija VII, 3, (1965), p. 39.
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