Mein Abkommen V

The Confession That Never Was.

Continued from Mein Abkommen – Part IV

The first time I explained the deal with Slobo to Stjepan was in 1991, shortly after the Karadjordjevo meeting and just before the war in Croatia. Stjepan looked at me, visibly surprised.

I mentioned how Milošević had personally given us Cazin Krajina – quite a large and nice area, with several towns, including the city of Bihać, right on the border of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.¹

Kljuić looked at me and said: “Mr. President, today I give you… I give you Sardinia.”²

This time I was the one staring at him.

He continued: “Well, Cazin Krajina belongs to Milošević no more than Sardinia belongs to me”.

I understood immediately that he definitely wasn’t the man for the job and avoided any further conversation with him. Motherf… ahem. Mother of God.

He was ruining everything. Mesić was there too. Another snake in the grass, Mesić, as I would learn much later.

Those stupid morons. They couldn’t understand that we had to protect our national interests, our national space, our Independent Croatia. Yes – Cazin Krajina – “the Turks’ Croatia” as Slobo called it – had a Bosniak… damn it, ugh! For Christ’s sake – a… an Islamized Croat majority. So what? That didn’t make it any less Croat anyway.

My dear. Some people are like that. You’ll learn that in life. They are simply “zločesti” men – very bad people. And they make Grandpa curse, as you can hear. Very “zločesti” guys. He took a breath as he adjusted his tie.

– Hey, you know that we Croats invented the tie, yeah? Hehe. Smart girl.

Grandpa had already emptied his second gemišt and continued while the butler was replacing his empty glass with another full one.

– Hvala lijepa – he said. Well, where were we?

Mesić asked me: So, what about the “Muslims”?

I told him – like our Croat representative Maček did when he made his deal to split Bosnia with the Serbs in 1939 – let’s pretend that they simply do not exist. It’s easier that way.

He looked at me; I should have known then that he was not really on my side either, that “zločesti” Mesić.

– Those are three million people, Mr President. We cannot pretend they are not there.

“We cannot pretend, mimi mimi mimi mi.” Whatever. I started preparing to replace Kljuić.

There was this talented guy – Boban. Mate Boban – a guy from Grude, a small town, almost a village, in Herzegovina. That guy! He understood everything and knew exactly how to organize our thing. Croatia would return to Herzegovina once again. I named him vice-president of my party in Bosnia. So he could start warming up the engines.

And then – after that meeting – the Serbs attacked us in Croatia. They had already been in rebellion since your Grandpa won the first democratic elections the previous year. Of course, they declared a so-called “autonomous region” then. Serbs always do that – as though we don’t know that they want to tear our beloved homeland apart. “Lijepa naša domovino” – Our Beautiful Homeland.

Grandpa stands up with tears in his eyes, gazing far into the sky through the window, and sings loudly with his right hand over his heart:

Lijepa naša domovino,

Oj! Hrvaaaatska zemljo miiiiila…

His granddaughter joins him, timidly at first, but soon they are both singing the Croatian anthem at the top of their lungs. They finish smiling, and finally embrace.

Oh, this wonderful Grandpa.

Another gemišt is already waiting for him.

– So. Grandpa continues the story after they sit back down.

– We won the first battle of the war at Plitvice. I sent the special police forces there because some Serb bandits were trying to put the area under the control of their “autonomous region”.

One of our guys died. One of theirs. We kicked their asses and arrested a lot of them, but there was still this Yugoslav Army and the Yugoslav Government – so we had to withdraw our forces from there as soon as they demanded it.

The Yugoslav Army made it look like they were separating the local forces and preventing a war, but they really were taking our territory. And that was part of Slobo Milošević’s game at the time.

Yes, that was the first day of the war in Croatia – March 31, 1991. Not even a week after my meeting with Slobo in Karađorđevo. Hehehe. What are you gonna do, heh?

The Serbs in Croatia, of course, knew that we were holding a referendum on independence on May 19. They knew that we would be victorious. Croatians didn’t want to live in the same country as the Serbs. Not anymore. That old communist movie was over, my dear.

But, as I told you, the Serbs in Croatia – heh – had been playing this SAO – Srpska Autonomna Oblast, “Serb Autonomous Region” – game for almost an entire year. At first, they blocked some of our roads with barricades – literally logs – to cut off access by our state authorities and police to some Serb-majority areas.

They called it the “Balvan Revolucija” – the Log Revolution. It wasn’t spontaneous, though they wanted it to look that way. With every tactical piece moved on the board, I could recognize Slobo’s hand and almost see his smirking face.

Very soon, his SDS proxies controlled almost a third of Croatia through their illegal police force. And of course, they refused to vote in our referendum.

Instead, they organized their own illegal referendum on seceding from Croatia and joining Serbia. They would hold it on May 12, just a week before our referendum. Slobo was good at this game.

In the Serb’s illegal mock referendum, 99% decided to join Serbia, but in the real referendum, 93% of the votes were cast in favor of an Independent Croatia. They couldn’t stop us. Just a month later – you already know this, from school, of course – on June 25, 1991, we proclaimed Croatia’s independence.

At the same time as us. Slovenia, our little neighbor to the north, decided the same. They didn’t want to stay in Yugoslavia either. Their good fortune was that they had hardly any Serb population.

Now, the Yugoslav Army at that time was already controlled by Slobo. It seemed as they fought a “war” against the Slovenian forces for about ten days. But really, all they wanted was to withdraw their weapons and equipment from their barracks in Slovenia and transfer it to the Serbs in Croatia.

That withdrawal from Slovenia was crucial – it confirmed what I had already learned from the man himself at Karađorđevo: Milošević had decided to create a “Greater Serbia” instead of using the military to keep Yugoslavia together. Of course, he still wanted to call it Yugoslavia – but that was only in name.

The transfer of more weapons to the Serbs in Croatia was obviously dangerous for us. I still didn’t have a proper army, and his mock referendum in SAO Krajina made it crystal clear that they wanted one third of Croatia.

We couldn’t fight the fourth-largest armed force in Europe with only the police. At that moment, though, organizing a military force and calling it the Croatian Army would have been a death wish. So I called it the “Zbor Narodne Garde” – National Guard Assembly. By the end of May, I had already proclaimed it the “seed of our future armed forces”.³

I gave the speech. It was wonderful, but the strength we displayed was merely a projection of our wishes. The project was ambitious. In time, we would have several brigades of professional soldiers in the ZNG, but at that point, we had no modern weapons, equipment, or even enough manpower to defend Croatia against the by-then almost entirely Serb Yugoslav Army.

But still, remember Karađorđevo – Slobo had promised me parts of Bosnia. That was an offer I couldn’t refuse, no matter how much that clown Kljuić talked nonsense about offering me Sardinia. Slobo had the military might to deliver on his promise at the time.

End of Part V

Continue to Mein Abkommen – Part VI

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