The Croatia We Have, The Croatia We Need

Slavenka Drakulić on Croatia's failure to face up to her past. And also, inter alia, on the fact that, until the destruction of Yugoslavia, the only independent Croat state, ever, was the Nazis' Ustasha puppet one during the War.

The disastrous UDI of Franjo Tudjman's neo-Ustasha state in Croatia led to that state's war of Ustasha re-enactment (then, as in the Forties, on the same side as the jihadi) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as its removal of the constitutional recognition of the Serbs as one of Croatia's two founding peoples, leading to the largest ethnic cleansing in the entire break-up of Yugoslavia.

It gives me no pleasure to write any of this. I believe passionately, as any orthodox Catholic must, in the historic mission of the Croats as Antemurale Christianitatis, the Ramparts of Christendom. But they have been derelict in that duty twice in the last seventy years, and Christian charity includes the obligation to reproach the brethren when and where necessary.

They should have remained Antemurale Christianitatis within a multi-ethnic, post-Communist Yugoslavia, witnessing to Catholic Social Teaching both against nostalgia for the Communist past and against neoliberalism. Only ever having been a state as Hitler's plaything, and with no history of it, that is the Croats' true historic mission, as lived out within several preceding multi-ethnic entities.

That a people exists does not necessarily mean that it needs a state. On the contrary, that might very well be the last thing that it needs and (which is just as important) that others need of it. Inhabitants of this island, Belgium, the north of Spain, and elsewhere, take note.

But the Croats failed to bear witness. Until they repent - of the Ustasha from whom they took their inspiration, of their pro-jihadi war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, of the denial and attempted destruction of their Serbian compatriots (or, as Jesus would have put it, neighbours) -, then, at the very least, there should be no place for them in any Western forum.

Which is an almost incalculable shame, since every Western forum is crying out for the witness of Antemurale Christianitatis.