Blagaj massacre

Vjekoslav Luburić

Blagaj is a village in the Kordun region, about 30 kilometres (19 mi) south of Karlovac.[21] It is predominantly inhabited by ethnic Croats.[22] On the evening of 5 May 1941, two unidentified men forced their way into the home of a local miller, a Catholic Croat named Joso Mravunac. They first robbed the family and then killed Mravunac, his wife, his mother and two of his children. Mravunac's 12-year-old daughter Milka escaped by jumping into a nearby river. The following day, investigative judge Nikola Lasić and county commissioner Eduard Lenčeric filed a report describing the incident as a "murder-robbery by unknown perpetrators". Local Ustaše officials dismissed these findings and suggested that the deaths could be attributed to "Chetniks"[lower-alpha 1] from the nearby village of Veljun, whose population was predominantly Serb. Dido Kvaternik, a senior Ustaše official, believed that the murders signalled the start of a Serb revolt. He immediately dispatched his subordinates Ivica Šarić and Vjekoslav Luburić to Blagaj.[22] Šarić and Luburić led a contingent of about 50 Ustaše fighters, mostly returnees from Italy, into the village and its surroundings.[21] Under Šarić and Luburić's supervision, the Ustaše rounded up nearly 400 Serbs.[22]

On 6 May, NDH Justice Minister Mirko Puk requested that Vladimir Židovec, the secretary of the Karlovac Ustaše Council, select local lawyers deemed "certified good Croats" to prosecute Serbs suspected of involvement in the Mravunac murders. The arrested individuals were to be tried by a so-called "people's court" in Blagaj.[22] That evening, Puk dispatched messengers from the Karlovac Ustaše Council, telling the lawyers he had selected that they should be ready to depart for Blagaj by 05:00 the following morning. Those selected included Mirko Mikac, president of the county courthouse, as president of the Special People's Court; Ivan Betlehem, the assessor of the county court, and Zdravko Berković, an Ustaša Council representative, as members of the Special People's Court; Milan Stilinović, district court clerk, as the deputy judge; Ivan Gromes, the secretary of the district court, as the state prosecutor; and Berislav Lukinić, a local attorney, as the public defender for the accused.[24]

All those appointed, with the exception of Stilinović and Lukinić, were either Ustaše collaborators or known sympathizers of Pavelić's regime. Early on the morning of 7 May, Puk confirmed the appointments by decree of the Ministry of Justice while the members of the "people's court" were still at the crime scene. According to the subsequent corroborating statements of Betlehem, Stilinović and Lukinić, the members of the "people's court" encountered a large group of prisoners at the Blagaj school, many of whom had visibly been beaten or otherwise tortured. According to surviving detainees, the prisoners had been tortured by Ustaše émigrés under Luburić's supervision. Ustaše from local "readiness units", numbering about 50 armed peasants, also participated.[24] Infuriated by the Mravunac murders, many Croats from Blagaj and neighbouring Pavlovac apprehended their Serb neighbours and brought them to the Blagaj school for "questioning". Lasić repeated before the court that there was no evidence suggesting the perpetrators were Serbs or that there was a political motive behind the murders. He stood by his initial findings and reiterated that the crime was a "murder-robbery by unknown perpetrators". He noted that Mravunac's surviving daughter was unable to identify any of the perpetrators from a police lineup. Šarić promised the court that he would prepare a detailed report with proof that Serb rebels were to blame. The court reconvened at the Blagaj school, stated that there was no evidence to justify a trial and reached a unanimous decision that suspects would only be tried once sufficient evidence had been gathered. By the evening of 7 May, the judges had returned to Karlovac.[25]

Luburić was dissatisfied with the court's "relatively lenient" decision, contending that it was not reached in accordance with "Ustaše regulations".[26] Kvaternik also voiced his displeasure. That same day, he arranged for Vlado Singer, an old friend from Kvaternik's émigré days, to form a new "people's court" that would oversee legal proceedings and "try cases in the Ustaše way".[25] On the morning of 8 May, Puk approved the creation of the new court, which convened at the Blagaj school later that day. Joso Rukavina was appointed president of the court, Josip Majić and Jakov Jurag were named members, Josip Raspudić and Grga Ereš were installed as deputy judges, and Vladimir Vranković was assigned the role of state prosecutor. All were staunch pre-war Ustaše, and on this occasion, no public defender was appointed.[27]

The surviving Mravunac daughter was again asked to identify suspects from a police lineup. This time, according to Ereš, she identified a Serb detainee as one of the assailants. The Ustaše interrogated several dozen prominent Serbs: a priest, an interwar mayor, suspected Chetniks and known communists. According to Ustaše records, the following afternoon, 32 individuals were sentenced to death by firing squad for "an attempted Chetnik uprising against the Independent State of Croatia and the murder of the Croatian family Mravunac". After the war, Dušan Nikšić, the only survivor from this group, stated that 36 people were convicted and immediately taken to the execution site, a pit behind the Blagaj school. The court concluded that there was "insufficient evidence" to convict the others that had been arrested. "I later found out that Luburić killed all of the remaining detainees," Ereš said during his post-war interrogation by Yugoslav war crimes investigators.[27]

The massacre in Blagaj was the second committed by the Ustaše upon coming to power.[28] Croatian sources tend to understate the number of victims, suggesting as little as 150 killed, while Serbian sources tend to exaggerate, offering figures as high as 600 killed. Most historians agree that the Ustaše massacred around 400 prisoners.[26] Several accounts suggest that the men brought along by Luburić and Šarić participated more extensively in the torture and killing of civilians while local Ustaše activists only assisted and stood guard.[21] Following the war, two local Ustaše admitted their extensive participation in the killings.[29] One Croat woman from Blagaj stated that her husband's participation in the massacre, though limited to guarding the prisoners, left him feeling ill and unable to eat or sleep for several days. The testimonies of survivors indicated that they believed local Croats were equally, if not more, responsible for the killings.[21] The inhabitants of Blagaj recalled hearing gunshots and screams on the night of the murders. One woman recalled seeing Luburić "pouring water from a well by the bucket" so as to wash the blood from his hands and sleeves.[30]

Following the massacre, the inhabitants of Blagaj looted the homes of the murdered inhabitants of Veljun, stealing their valuables and livestock. The victims of the massacre were buried in mass graves, which were subsequently planted over with crops.[31] Prior to burial, their bodies had been covered in quicklime to speed up decomposition.[30]

On 10 May, the women of Veljun stopped by the Blagaj school carrying baskets of food for the prisoners. Šarić told them that the men had been sent to work in Germany, and since the women of Blagaj were unwilling to tell them what had actually occurred, they believed him.[30] As months passed and none of the men were heard from, the women began to fear the worst. "The entire village knew what had happened that night behind their school," the Holocaust scholar Slavko Goldstein writes, "and they participated in a conspiracy of silence that lasted three full months." In August 1941, the Partisans captured Ivan Šajfar, the Ustaše commissioner of Veljun. They demanded to know the prisoners' whereabouts. He told them that they been killed in the pit behind the Blagaj school on the night of 9 May. Shortly thereafter, he was executed.[29]

In September 1942, two battalions of the First Primorsko-Goranski Partisan unit and the First Proletarian Battalion attacked Blagaj. Members of the local Home Guard garrison, consisting of about 120 men, mostly fled or surrendered after sporadic resistance. About 30 defended their homes almost to the last bullet. Some of them were able to escape, several killed themselves rather than be captured, while the rest were captured by the Partisans and summarily executed. Once Blagaj was in Partisan hands, Serb widows from Veljun ransacked and then set fire to more than two dozen of the village's Croat-inhabited homes. "They would have torched all the houses in the village had the Partisans not stopped them," Goldstein writes. The women claimed to have only set fire to the houses in which they had found their property, which the Blagaj Ustaše had stolen in the lead-up to the massacre.[32] After the war, which ended with the destruction of the NDH and re-establishment of Yugoslavia as a socialist state, the inhabitants of Veljun denied that any locals had taken part in the killings. Rumours persisted that the Mravunac family had been killed by a local Ustaše fighter so as to justify a massacre.[29]

Ustaše killings of Serbs continued throughout the war, and dozens of concentration camps were established to detain Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, anti-fascist Croats and others opposed to Pavelić's regime.[33] Contemporary German accounts place the number of Serbs killed by the Ustaše at about 350,000.[34] According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, between 320,000 and 340,000 Serbs were killed by the Ustaše over the course of the war.[35] Most modern historians agree that the Ustaše killed over 300,000 Serbs, about 17 percent of all Serbs living in the NDH.[36] At the Nuremberg trials, these killings were judged to have constituted genocide.[34]

Pavelić fled to Argentina, survived an assassination attempt by Yugoslav government agents in Buenos Aires in 1957, and died of his wounds in Madrid two years later, aged 70.[37] Kvaternik survived the war and the destruction of the NDH, fled to Argentina with his family and was killed in a car accident in 1962.[38] Following the war, Luburić emigrated to Spain, where he was assassinated by a Yugoslav agent in August 1969.[39]

A memorial tomb was constructed behind the Blagaj school after the war. The remains of the victims were later transferred to Veljun, where a mausoleum was erected.[32] The monument, erected by Yugoslavia's socialist government, evasively described the perpetrators as "fascists" rather than explicitly calling them Ustaše, part of an attempt at fostering cooperation and reconciliation among the country's ethnic groups.[40] Until 1990, commemorations were held annually every May, with the mandatory attendance of schoolchildren.[32] "Children from Veljun would hear how, in this place, their grandfathers had been killed and the Blagaj Ustaše were the ones who killed them," Goldstein writes. "Children from Blagaj would hear how their grandfathers had been killers, how with no reason they had murdered the grandfathers of the children from Veljun, with whom they went to the same school." In private, the residents of Blagaj blamed Chetniks from Veljun, Poloj and other Serbian villages for initiating an uprising against the NDH and killing the Mravunac family, for which no more than 150 were tried and executed in accordance with the law.[41] The historians Philip Cook and Ben Shepherd note that the atrocities that took place in April and May 1941, such as those at Gudovac, Blagaj and Glina, occurred before any organized uprising by either the Partisans or Chetniks.[42] For the Serbs of Kordun, the killings came to epitomize the brutality of Ustaše rule,[29] and were commemorated in Serbian folk poetry.[43]

Tensions between the residents of Blagaj and Veljun persisted long after the war.[41] By 1991, Blagaj and Pavlovac had been reduced to 200 residents, from a pre-war population of 708, while Veljun and the neighbouring villages of Lapovac and Točak had been reduced to 700 from a pre-war population of 1,297. That same year, all the remaining residents of Blagaj and Pavlovac were forced from their homes by Croatian Serb rebels, amid inter-ethnic warfare sparked by the breakup of Yugoslavia. Most of their houses were pillaged and destroyed. In August 1995, the Croatian Army recaptured all the rebel-held areas in central Croatia, forcing the residents of Veljun and surrounding Serb villages to flee. Their homes too were pillaged and destroyed, and several elderly residents that stayed behind were killed. In 1996, the displaced residents of Blagaj and Pavlovac began returning to their homes, and several years later, some of the pre-war residents of Veljun also returned. On 6 May 1999, they attempted to organize a commemorative ceremony at the Veljun mausoleum, but were prevented from doing so by a crowd of around 100 Croatian nationalists. More numerous and vocal, they forced the residents of Veljun to retreat from the site. A woman then emerged from the crowd and urinated on the ossuary, which was met with laughter and approval.[44] Annual commemorations have resumed since then, though tensions persist, owing primarily to disputes over the number of victims and disagreement over who killed the Mravunac family.[45]

• List of massacres in the Independent State of Croatia

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