Family Politics

After the war Uncle Jovo had refused to return to the new Titoist Yugoslavia and his younger brother could not abandon him, abandoning instead his wife in the old country. When the new Ustashi regime assumed control in Nezavisa Drzava Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia Uncle knew he needed to flee the territory post-haste. On his flight from Gospic up in the north of Lika he saw a recognised figure in a wanted poster offering so many new kune Dead or Alive. A year later when the killings of the local Serbs intensified, his wife, Aunt Anka, left her flight with their infant son Pavle too late and the boy suffocated in the rear of the lorry. (Uncle’s nephew Pavle, son of his steadfast younger brother, would be born more than a dozen years later in the “last continent”, the one as far from the stari kraj, the old quarter under Commie rule, as possible.)

         Around a quarter century before Uncle’s flight from his gendarme HQ in Gospic, granddad Rade, mother’s father, had, like many of his hill tribe, served Emperor Franz Joseph against his neighbour Montenegrins—always shooting over their heads from the trenches, he later maintained.

         Uncle Petar who had been with his two brothers at the Italian farm in Lanciano working as indentured labour had been pressed to return home. There were wife and three children left behind, as well as the aged mother. Petar was the one who should go back. Only to find himself a short time later pronounced a kulak by the new authorities. 

         “It’s a sorry state of affairs,” Petar told his accusers, “when you have none better than me and so-and-so to crown with that title.”

         Tetak or Dondo (Italian form) Nikola, an uncle by marriage, earned a nice fat pension for his teenage heroics during the war, often telling his boozy story of riding a horse beside the celebrated Montenegrin fighter Sava Kovacevic—the name comes back—beside him mounted on his donkey.

         Rade’s son and mother’s brother, Maternal Uncle Djordjo, George, postwar became a local functionary, despite the fact his father continued to hang the picture of old King Alexander beside that of the new ruler in his house; continued to celebrate his Saint’s Day and stand as godfather to the newly-born of the clan. During the war, his house situated against the massif beyond which the Partizans had their lair in the first, early phase of hostilities, Granddad Rade had been President of the Communist cell on Village Uble. Mudri Djed Rade, wise Granddad Rade, said by his advocates capable of carrying a thirsty man over water.

         Another photograph of the tragic king hung on the wall of Great Aunt Jane’s house in Kostanica, on the coast. There it was discovered by local functionaries who had grown too big for their boots. Challenged by the men, local fellow peasants, Rade’s sister Jane—pronounced Yane—recklessly threw in their faces, “Give me your Tito and I’ll hang him instead!”

         Brat od Tetke, Brother of Aunt Cousin Peko, served a number of years on the infamous Goli Otok, Bare Isle in the Adriatic, when post-’58 he would not reconcile to the break from Stalin. Under no circumstances, wouldn’t hear of it. Thereby condemning wife and children to years of hardship and discrimination. Before that jail term, young Peko, Pete came down to the Montenegrin coast to see where his parents were born. During the stay the young eagle had attempted to shock mother, his Aunt Jelena, telling her of his Albanian victims’ blood he had licked from knives in Kosovo. Peko’s parents, Aunt Gospava and her husband Kosto, a Solunski dobrovoljac—Thessalonika volunteer in the First War—had taken up King Alexander’s offer of re-settlement in the former Serbian heartland in the mid ‘30s.

         The cowboy Partizan Uncle Nikola on his handsome steed was one of many from the village who took up Tito’s offer of resettlement in the houses of the Magyars who had fled or been herded from the Vojvodina after WWII. After re-settlement back in Boka some years later, his son Miso told of their fine house up in the North, the metre-thick walls, capacious rooms and fancy window-shutters.

         During the Milosevic period Third cousin Liljana—her name forgotten and coming back in the middle of the night—a lawyer, found a niche in the bureaucracy. Later elevated by the regime, Lilja sat in judgement on war criminals and traitors, delivering capital sentences, some of that branch of the family revealed with poorly concealed pride. Lilja’s sister Vesna, the less academically gifted, lost her husband in the Bosnian fighting.

         We ran into difficulties during the Yugoslav Wars of Succession, as the historians came to call them, with the nationalist position more often than not winning through for each of the various communities. Everyone had their own stories of atrocities committed by the other side. 

         Radovane, Srpska diko. Karadjic was Montenegrin after all. (Dika is “pride and joy.”) 

         Milosevic’s parents were Montenegrin Vasojevici clan, both suicides after the war.

         History and politics doomed us. We were steeped in blood.

         One of our villagers had taken a Catholic priest away from his Sunday altar up into the wilds where he was shot.

         A notable Partizanka from Upper Morinj was roundly condemned by our Marko Bakocevic when he returned to the country in the mid-60s for her own summary execution of an opponent. A true virago. Montenegro had many.

         Mother’s passport out of the country was said to have been the first granted by the regime in the mid-50s, when Tito himself was shamed at a UN meeting after a dossier of her particulars was presented. Passed the papers, the challenge to the President followed, “Does the security of your state depend on keeping a woman such as this from joining her husband in the foreign land?”

         A gendarme commander made Uncle a notable in our corner of Melbourne. We went to see the young dethroned King Petar when he visited in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s. The local Croat builder Janko Krismanic, a Yugoslav patriot like so many Croats of his generation, put on a dinner for the King at his house a few streets away. (Aunt Anka was invited to help in the kitchen, but not her sister-in-law, whose skills did not stretch that far.)

         In 1934 Mother had brought up from the coast for her father, Granddad Rade, the issue of Politika that carried the photographs of old King Aleksandar dead in the back of the automobile in Marseilles. Thirty years before JFK, it was the first assassination of a head of state to be captured in such graphic detail. 

         Place ko kisa, Weeping like rain, Granddad in his reading.

         There exists a 120k MS putting all these events in a much broader context, awaiting the right publisher.

 

 

Here in Malaysia we have a fascinating unraveling of sixty years of single party rule that in the last decade and more featured the worst kind of corruption, political manipulation, environmental vandalism and all the associated silencing of critics (killings included). Suborning of the judiciary and media and outrageous bare-faced mendacity. Hour after hour, day after day, Malaysiakini, an online magazine that began to challenge the regime in the last couple of years, run their brief 100 and 150 word stories beneath a zoological parade of the chief culprits, men now attempting every which way to save their asses.

         A remarkable, quite unexpected miracle of democracy has taken place here. But then similar has occurred not so long ago in South Africa, USSR, much of Latin America, and briefest of all in the Middle East and North Africa.