CROATIA

CROATIA. Newly independent in the north of the former Yugoslavia (q.v.), with its capital at Zagreb, it was dominated from the 14th c. first by Hungary and then by Austria-Hungary. Croatians joined the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes under the Serbian crown in 1919. Restive under Serbian domination and divided from the latter by its profession of Roman Catholicism, Croatia broke from Serbia during World War II and under German patronage. During this brief “independence,” the country was ruled by a party of homegrown fascists, the Ustasha. They sought to rid Croatia of its large Serbian minority by, in the words of one of the party’s spokesmen, “converting one third [to Catholicism], forcing one third to emigrate, and killing the rest.” Mass killings did ensue and included Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies as their targets. Estimates vary, but to say that more than half a million Serbs alone were systematically put to death would probably not be far off the mark. The recent revival of Croatian independence after the Tito years, together with that country’s use of symbols and rhetoric from the period of the Ustasha, go far toward explaining the violent Serbian reaction in both Croatia, beginning in 1991, and in Bosnia (q.v.), beginning in 1992.