The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

used the memory of the Jasenovac extermination camp, in which the
Croatian Ustaša had killed thousands of Jews, Roma, Serbs and antifascists.
The Croatian nationalists used the memory of Bleiburg, where
partisans had killed thousands of their opponents after the British had
prevented their flight to the west. Like a boomerang, the suppressed
stories returned and fostered the thirst for revenge.
The ideational connection which had arisen as “fraternity and unity” in
the common partisan movement, the link connecting the Yugoslav
peoples which transcended all historical and everyday barriers, was thus
broken. The last threads broke when the same massacred corpse was
shown at the same time on the television news in Belgrade and in Zagreb
– as the victim of Croats and of Serbs, respectively. Planned murders,
often of moderate, peace-oriented and sensible people, spread
fear which increased to panic. The tension produced the feeling of hav -
ing to defend oneself and one’s own people, as the partisans and the
other earlier heroes had done. In coloured uniforms obtained from a variety
of modern armies and adorned with Cetnik ˇ
and Ustaša decorations,
the insanity of the civil war of the Second World War era was revived.
The calls to “defend hearth and home” returned as the terror, the suppressed,
the unspoken, to the new generation. And the nerves of the
people were stretched to the breaking point.
Tito and his army
Such a development would have been unthinkable while Tito was alive.
Tito was the epicentre of the state, he as a person played a decisive
role, both internally and abroad. To the outside, he was a powerful friend,
the people saw him as their patriarchal unifying leader, later even as an
immortal super-father. At the same time, during his period, the country
developed from an agrarian state to an export-oriented industrial nation
in which life had gained in quality. It had become a matter of course that
all children attended school and got an education, that medical care was
available to all, and that there were no more beggars. Due to their history,
the Yugoslav peoples had no developed political culture, so that the
personality cult took on mythical proportions, even during Tito’s lifetime.
The feeling prevailed that after his death, nothing fundamental would
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