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Charlemagne
Goran
Ivanisevic
Jul 12th 2001
From The
Economist print edition
Croatia’s Wimbledon-winning
tennis player is a true symbol of Croat nationalism
HE RUNS, he leaps, at times he skids. He thumps, exceedingly hard. He makes a lot of noise. He is emotional, and a crowd-puller. He can be deadly to his opponents, and all charm to them half an hour later. He knows God is on his side—which plainly is more than God knows, because, above all, he’s erratic and generally he loses. This week was the astounding exception: to the roars of his Croatian compatriots, Goran Ivanisevic, a wild-card entrant out of sight in the world ratings, won the most treasured prize in tennis, the men’s singles title at Wimbledon. And, though he is absolutely not a fanatic, a proud Croat he is, and a very appropriate symbol of Croat nationalism.
The spitting image of it, you might say. Nasty Goran one moment, nice Goran the next, he readily admits to a split personality, as well he may, being born in the city of that name 29 years ago. Just so did Croatian voters in early 2000 replace the near-dictatorship installed by Franjo Tudjman, their newly dead first post-communist leader, with a government of almost unnatural democratic virtue and zeal to join the EU. And when Mr Ivanisevic is on court there is usually some hefty racket going, just as there was among the Croats of Bosnia, whose favourite bank had to be stamped on by the United Nations this year for its financing of separatism, smuggling and other dubious activities.
This week too Croatian nationalism faced one of its hardest tests, though one in which, paradoxically, its best chance of durable victory is surrender. The coalition government of Ivica Racan has been under pressure from the UN war-crimes tribunal at The Hague to hand over two generals for crimes committed against Serbs during the fighting of the mid-1990s. With Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic behind bars, the UN thought it was time to show its justice was even-handed, and its chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, was in Zagreb on July 6th demanding action. By a majority, the cabinet agreed to give way—and promptly lost three ministers, because their party, the Social Liberals, Mr Racan’s main coalition partners, disagreed. The Social Liberal deputy prime minister stayed on, because he disagreed with his party. But even so Mr Racan had to cast about for new allies and call a confidence vote in parliament for this weekend.
To many Croats, to give up the generals would be a betrayal. Sure, there were crimes; in truth—not the Balkans’ best-known product—many and foul ones, as Serbs who had lived for generations in Croat lands were brutally expelled, or killed before they fled. But were the generals not fighting for the nation, against the hereditary enemy? Hereditary enemy? Their Serb brothers? That’s the point at which, repeatedly during the past decade, West European eyebrows have been raised in surprise. Granted, Serbs and Croats differ in their versions of Christianity. But, though they use different scripts for it, do they not speak virtually the same language? Were they not, for some 70 years, all Yugoslavs, united by the long history of alien rule that preceded that country’s invention soon after the first world war?
So they were—except that it was exactly alien rule that disunited them. The Croats for centuries were under Hungarian, then Austro-Hungarian rule. That is why they are Roman Catholic, and historically have looked northward, coexisting with their foreign overlords, often at odds with them but not at war. The Serbs for even longer were part of the Turkish empire, but for them coexistence was dotted with repeated episodes of armed resistance. Early in the 19th century, as Turkish power grew weaker, they broke into open revolt. The Russians, Orthodox Christians like the Serbs, came to their aid.
The struggle against the Turks went to and fro, until, again with Russian help in 1877-78, the Serbs achieved independence (and the freedom to resume the clan vendettas, Karadjordjevic against Obrenovic, that had dominated their history since the first Black George raised the standard against the Turks in 1804, and later had his head cut off by the first of the Obrenovic dynasty). And what were the Croats doing all this while? Arguing with Austro-Hungary, on and off, but still ready to be run by it, rather prosperously. Indeed in 1914-18 they were fighting, if not all of them willingly, in its armies against their Serb cousins.
Little wonder that when the new Yugoslavia was born (and even that unifying “South Slav” name was not adopted at once), the Serbs saw themselves as the real winners and representatives of national freedom, while many Croats quite soon saw them as oppressors. Hence the rise of Croatian nationalism and its extremist arm, the Ustasa terrorist movement. Hence, after the German invasion of 1941, the creation of a puppet Croat kingdom, under German tutelage and nominally ruled by an Italian duke, but run, a good deal less nominally, by the Ustasa leader, Ante Pavelic. His short-lived regime was marked by massacres of Serbs and the destruction of Orthodox churches. If this was brotherhood, it was that of Cain and Abel.
And, for all the decades of communist rule under Tito, neither Serbs nor Croats have forgotten the divisions of the past. It is these, more than anything, that define their rival identities. Hence the red and white flags—the colours of Croatia, but also in earlier days of the Ustasa—that swamped Croatia as they had swamped Wimbledon when Mr Ivanisevic won his famous victory. Hence, maybe, the double edge of his remark that a Dutch prison is where a man like ex-President Milosevic deserves to end his days. And watch him as he crosses himself, thanking heaven for the point he has just won. The gesture is that of a Christian, but not just any Christian: the hand movements are, specifically, Catholic ones, not those of Orthodoxy. Mr Ivanisevic is no more a politician than Mr Milosevic is a tennis player. But here is a Croat, not an ex-Yugoslav. Do not be surprised that some Croats carry such feelings to the point of reckoning that the place for Croatia’s champions is on court, not in it.
http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=693521
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