In the Yugoslav historiography (1918–1941; 1945–1991) Lj. Gaj’s decision to choose a Illyrian name and the štokavian dialect for the Croatian national revival movement was politically explained by his wish to culturally and even politically unite all the South Slavs, believing that this was an ancient common name for all the (Balkan) Slavs, because he like the other leaders of the Illyrian Movement considered the ancient Balkan Illyrians (or Illyrs) as the South Slavic and even Slavic ancestors. However, this decision had much deeper roots and totally different purposes than it was officially presented by the Yugoslav historians. An undisputable fact is that Lj. Gaj chose the Serbian literal language (based on the people’s spoken language) for the literal language of all Croats. Gaj by himself recognized that the Croatian leaders of the national revival movement accepted exactly the Serbian literal language, which was reformed by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, for the literal language of the Croats [...]
Posts tagged as “Osijek”
Lj. Gaj and his followers required that the Croatian national language has to be accepted as an official-bureaucratic medium of correspondence in the Triune Kingdom (Dalmatia-Croatia-Slavonia) within the Habsburg Monarchy instead of the Hungarian, Latin or German [...]
The NDH consisted of modern-day Croatia and most of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as some parts of modern-day Serbia and Slovenia. The regime targeted Serbs, Jews, Roma people and anti-fascist or dissident Croatians and Muslims, as part of a large-scale genocide campaign in places such as the Jasenovac concentration camp [...]
A new 1991 year started with a fear of the escalation of the political conflicts into a real war as on January 9th the Yugoslav collective Presidency issued order to disarm all paramilitary formations but firstly aimed at those in Croatia, especially the HDZ party’s militia – the Rally of National Guard (the ZNG). In neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina at the same time started a year-long commemoration of the Serb victims of WWII on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, organized by the Serbian Orthodox Church. On January 25th the Presidency of the SFRY, despite the frustration by Serbia and Montenegro, passed decision not to permit military intervention by the YPA in Croatia what was de facto recognition of the end of Yugoslavia. On the same day, the People’s Assembly of Macedonia (Sobranie) issued the Declaration of Sovereignty and Independence without any reaction from Belgrade [...]
That a Serb Question in Yugoslavia was really acute problem became clear on April 24th, 1987 when a group of Kosovo-Metochia’s Serbs met Serbia’s party’s leader Slobodan Milošević in Priština’s suburb of Kosovo Polje when they required protection against the Albanian systematic terror as the Albanians constantly were creating political tensions in the province. During the meeting, Kosovo’s Albanian police forces were brutally beating the Serb civilians. The Albanian terrorism against Yugoslavia was exported outside Kosovo-Metochia on September 3rd of the same year when in the YPA’s barracks at Paraćin in Serbia, an Albanian conscript from Kosovo-Metochia (Keljmendi) killed four fellow soldiers and wounds five in the sleeping room during the night [...]
The process of gradual collapsing of Tito’s SFRY which was finally ended in the total destruction of the country followed by bloody civil war, ethnic cleansing and forms of genocide, started a lesser than a year after Tito’s death in south Serbia’s autonomous province of Kosovo-Metochia where Muslim Albanians in March 1981 organized massive political demonstrations against both republican Government of Serbia and a Federal Government of Yugoslavia [...]
A recent survey by The Azrieli Foundation showed an alarming 52% of Canadian millennials cannot name even one concentration camp and 62% did not know six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust [...]
As a matter of fact, many ethnic Slavs have participated in the armies led by the Iranian-Sarmatian Croats and Serbs and have migrated to the Balkans with their Iranian-Sarmatian military leaders and lords. The sources are speaking in this matter about Indo-European Slaveni – a Slavic people living north of the Danube River in the 5th and 6th centuries which basically provided the crucial part of the manpower which occupied the Balkan Peninsula in the 6th and early 7th centuries (more precisely, from around 580 to 626, according to the Byzantine sources) [...]
Stories of resistance to Croatia’s fascist Ustasa can help counter revisionists’ attempts to rehabilitate the World War II regime and whitewash the truth about its concentration camp at Jasenovac and its role in the Holocaust [...]
The ultraright-wing ideology on which the state-building process was executed in Croatia in the 1990s was fundamentally anti-liberal and above all anti-Serb. In order to solve, as proclaimed, the most important problem in Croatia – the “Serb Question”, Croatia’s authorities privileged national (ethnic Croat) rights over the individual rights, ethnic (Croat) state over the civic multicultural society and political authoritarianism instead of institutional democracy [...]
Probably, the HDZ’s deny of any kind of the regional autonomy in Croatia was the expression of the policy of anti-liberal democracy concept of minority rights. Therefore, the regional parties of Istria, the Serbian Krayina and Dalmatia suffered mostly from such policy of a brutal centralization of Croatia […]
Today, as a result of the HDZ’s policy of extreme ethno-confessional nationalism, Croatia is, since mid-1995, “more ethnically homogeneous than ever was in the historic past”. The Serb population on the present-day territory of Croatia fell from 24 percent in 1940 to 12 percent in 1990 and 4 percent in 1996 with the practice of its everyday assimilation (Croatization) and emigration from Croatia [...]
