Ahmići, thirty years later / Croatia / Areas / Home

Thirty years after the Ahmići massacre, Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as in Croatia, have failed to find the moral and mental strength to come to terms with the truth about one of the most heinous crimes perpetrated during the wars of the the nineties. Even admitting that the massacre was the consequence of the madness of a few hateful individuals, of that spiral of evil and vengeance which in 1993 had engulfed both the HVO and the Armija BiH in central Bosnia, where both armies terrorized and brutally killed the local population, the fact remains that the Republic of Croatia – together with the political representatives of the Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina – has made an effort to nationalize the crime of Ahmići, i.e. to make an entire nation responsible for an atrocity committed by a group of bloodthirsty HVO soldiers. Even thirty years were not enough for that nation to learn to face its sins in a responsible, mature and self-reflective way. The same applies to the crimes committed by the Croatian army against the Serbs after Operation Oluja: what the state authorities did – or did not do – after they learned of the killings, destruction and robberies clearly demonstrated that they had not of incidents and isolated acts of revenge, but substantially of actions carried out with the tacit approval of the power, as well as the administrative measures adopted after Oluja confirmed that the purpose of that operation, in addition to the liberation of the territory, was to drastically reduce and permanent Serbian population of Croatia.

In the 1990s, the Croatian political leadership, led by Franjo Tuđman, at first tried to present Ahmići’s crime as a scam against the Croats or as a hoax orchestrated by members of the British peacekeepers who first denounced the massacre . Subsequently, hypotheses were advanced according to which the village of Ahmići would have been a legitimate military target as a stronghold of Armija BiH, thus suggesting that, rather than being aimed at carrying out a planned crime, that bloody operation was a consequence of the loss of control [del territorio]. Dario Kordić and some of the main instigators and direct perpetrators of the crime enjoyed political protection, even being awarded various state honors, until international pressure on Zagreb became unbearable in the second half of the 1990s. In 1997 Tuđman arranged for Kordić and his comrades to be handed over to The Hague. At the same time, however, the military counter-espionage services and the civilian secret services, the latter at the time led by Miroslav Tuđman, Franjo’s eldest son, launched an operation aimed at hindering the activities of the Hague Tribunal, carefully selecting the documents [da consegnare al Tribunale] with the intention of shifting the blame to people whom the Tuđman regime did not care as much as Kordić and his circle. The families of the “prisoners of The Hague” were materially supported at the expense of the state. At the same time, in Croatia, until the autumn of 2000, some people associated with the Ahmići crime lived under false identities, in a state house and enjoying the protection of the military intelligence services. This state conspiracy was revealed above all thanks to the efforts of Anto Nobilo, a Zagreb lawyer who defended Tihomir Blaškić, a general of the HVO before the Hague Tribunal, to whom Zagreb and Mostar tried to assign the role of the only high-ranking soldier responsible for the crimes committed by the HVO in central Bosnia.

In April 2010, then-President of Croatia Ivo Josipović traveled to Ahmići to bow before the monument in memory of the victims of the massacre. The cardinal of Sarajevo Vinko Puljić also bowed together with Josipović, who had previously visited Kordić twice in the city of Graz, in Austria, where the latter was serving the sentence imposed on him by the Tribunal of The Hague.

“According to a troglodyte ethic, the victims others are not worthy of any attention or compassion, the easiest thing is to ignore them, in reality, these victims have never existed, they are the result of lies and propaganda, but even if they had existed, it would have been a perfidious external factor to attribute them to wea powerful factor, perpetually engaged in a conspiracy against we. Many times we have seen this type of ethics materialize in Croatian public opinion in relation to the massacre of Muslims in Ahmići to which Kordić’s indictment and conviction are linked: it was not ‘our knights’ who did it, it was an engineered rip-off by the British, our old enemies, with the intention of demonizing the Croatian people… Such statements never contain any reflection on the victims, on their suffering, on empathy towards them”, writes the scholar Ivan Lovrenović in his text Jesus to Ahmići which is also the title of a collection of essays published in 2015. “Jesus as we know him from the Gospels, a living and radical denial of the tribal ethics of our ‘heroes’ and their Catholic priests, addressed to human beings as such and their suffering, would show interest in children, women, people who were killed in the name of God’s justice and left to lie in houses and in they waved by Ahmici. We can conceive it with certainty. I don’t think such a Jesus can appear in the visions of the ‘heroes of the Croatian Patriotic War’”.