Читать книгу Usable History? - Tia Sindbaek - Страница 30

A few months later, on the 9^th September 1946, another trial that was also to receive great publicity began in Zagreb against Erih Lisak, a prominent Ustasha official and police chief, Pavao Gulin, leader of the Slovene legion of Chetniks, and a number of Catholic priests and friars, some of them members of the Archbishop’s administration in Zagreb. Lisak was accused of mass murder and, together with the others convicted, of organising a conspiracy to overthrow the new regime. The prosecutor’s questions, according to Stella Alexander, were designed to point suspicion towards the Zagreb Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac.³⁵ On the 18^th September, the trial was interrupted and Stepinac was arrested the same day.

The trial was resumed on the 28^th, now with Stepinac among the indicted, being accused of collaborating with and supporting the Ustasha regime, collaborating in the forceful conversion of tens of thousands of Serbs, and participating in the conspiracy arranged by Lisak and others. Among the numerous witnesses for the prosecutor, Serbian villagers rendered gruesome testimonies of forced mass conversion.³⁶ On the 11^th October, Stepinac was declared guilty and sentenced to 16 years of hard labour. Lisak and Gulin were sentenced to death. The remaining indicted received prison sentences and two were declared not guilty.

That the trial to a large extent was intended as a public event is testified by the fact that extracts and reports were published in great detail in several Yugoslav newspapers, and that an official edition of the proceedings from the trial were published shortly after the verdicts were given.³⁷

The trial against the Archbishop of Zagreb followed a period of growing tension between the communist regime and the Catholic Church, who tended to criticise the new government harsher than they had ever spoken out against the Ustasha, at least in public. At the trials against Lisak and Stepinac, the very top of the church was linked to the Ustasha and their terror regime, and the church was held responsible for parts of the Ustasha crimes, the forced mass conversions in particular. Tito had also pointed to this connection in a public answer to regime critical statements made by the top of the clergy at a bishops’ meeting in September 1945. The bishops protested, among other things, against the persecution and harassments of priests and other representatives of the church and attacks on church privileges.³⁸ In his response, which was published on the front pages of Yugoslav newspapers, Tito criticised the bishops for spreading racial hatred when it was time to heal the wounds from the war. He also wondered why they had never issued such statements against the killing of Serbs in the NDH, and he reminded them of the many Ustasha leaders who had been educated in the Catholic seminaries in Bosnia and Herzegovina.³⁹

While members of the Catholic clergy had indeed assisted Ustasha crimes and thus deserved judicial prosecution, there is little doubt that this trial was also an official statement against the Catholic Church, aimed at de-legitimising a major ideological enemy of the communists.

A volume of documents and testimonies about crimes committed by parts of the Catholic clergy before, during and after the war was also published in 1946. In a chapter on the role of the Catholic clergy in the forced conversions of Serbs, the responsibility of the clergy was underlined, not only as necessary accomplices in the act of conversion, but many of them also as active members of the Ustasha movement and participants in crime.⁴⁰ The volume held numerous statements from Serb villagers, who explained how these conversions were conducted under threats and often accompanied by other acts of persecution. Four persons from the village Crkveni Vrhovci had signed the following account:

… in January 1942, an order was issued by the local authorities that whoever did not convert would be driven into a camp, so we had to come to Požega to be converted by the priest Pipinić, which meant that from our village Pipinić converted about 150 peasants. … But in spite of all assurances from Pipinić and the Ustasha that nothing would happen to us when we converted, our village was burnt down in 1943 by the Ustasha and the Germans and the people were driven into a camp. In all this, there was not one priest who reacted to this and protected us, but they stood cold-bloodedly observing everything that happened to us.⁴¹

Another chapter described the direct involvement of representatives of the Catholic clergy in the Ustasha massacres all over the NDH. In Herzegovina, it was claimed, priests and friars were inspiring bestial hatred against the Serb people, and they personally participated in persecution and killing.⁴²

It was to become political and historical dogma that the Catholic Church carried the main responsibility for the forced conversions of Serbs in the NDH, and that parts of the clergy had cooperated and participated directly in Ustasha massacres.⁴³ The issue of Catholic responsibility was to become one of the dominant themes in the historiography about the NDH and the massacres committed there.

There is hardly any doubt that these trials against representatives of the Chetnik, Catholic and Ustasha leaderships, while calling certain persons to account for the crimes of the war, were also planned as great public showdowns against the main enemies of the communists. The trials exposed and confirmed the official version of the history of the war. Despite the fact that war crimes and massacres received far less attention than the issues of national betrayal and anti-Partisan activity, they were openly mentioned and included in the testimonies and accounts of the trials. The ethnicity of victims was freely asserted. Yet in general descriptions, the victims were not specified as belonging to any particular group, but as the ‘people’ as a common totality without ethnic specification. Neither were the perpetrators, the Chetniks, Ustasha and members of the Catholic clergy, ascribed to any nationality, though in practice they obviously belonged respectively to the Serbian and Croatian side. In general, ethnicity was never thematized, and massacres were not described or defined as genocide.