Genocide in Times of Civil War. Popular Attitudes Towards Ustaša Mass Violence, Croatia 1941–1945

Abstract

Croatian district officials were shocked by what they witnessed at the end of July 1941 in the town of Velika Kladuša in north-western Bosnia. Thirteen members of the Ustaša, a militia serving the same Croatian state as themselves, had been dispatched from the capital, Zagreb, and had started massacring Serb inmates of the local prison. In reaction, and out of fear, most of the Serbs fled from the neighbouring villages. The militia then set about looting the emptied houses. Soon, civilian looters arrived to partake in the pillage. Further expulsions and shootings occurred, and the situation got so badly out of control that the Ustaša started shooting some of the pillagers in order to safeguard their own shares of the goods. Once the militia was gone, the locals started to take the houses apart; the seals the local administration had put on some of the houses were of no avail. This episode illustrates a dilemma that many governments faced in wartime Europe, especially in Eastern and South-eastern regions. With the genocides and the programmes of ethnic cleansing they had unleashed, they had put in motion a social dynamic that was hard to control. They could not even defend their own economic interests against looters and rioters. Against this background, the Croatian case allows to study specific social dynamics and the breadth of participation in collective violence.