Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide

5. A Vicious Circle of Lies and Fears

99 5 A Vicious Circle of Lies and Fears The devil . . . was a murderer from the first, and he has nothing to do with the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks in his true character, for he is a liar and the father of them. —John 8:44 Fictional Data and Real Hatreds Yugoslavia would have been less susceptible to violent disintegration if, at the end of World War II, there had been a reconciliation between the nations and factions that had fought one another. All of them, and especially the two most guilty ones, Croats and Serbs, should have admitted the mistakes and crimes committed since they entered the Yugoslav union and taken the steps necessary to prevent another conflict in the future. The enormity of the crimes committed by various parties made such action urgent. The reconciliation of France and Germany was a good model, but it could not be followed because one basic condition was missing: freedom, including the very important freedom of information. One of communist Yugoslavia’s most popular slogans was ‘‘brotherhood and unity,’’ but the lies launched by the regime played a crucial role in undermining whatever feeling of brotherhood and unity that had emerged in the struggle against foreign occupiers during World War II. The most fatal of the lies spread by communist Yugoslavia’s propaganda machine consisted in false ac- 100 | A Vicious Circle of Lies and Fears counts of World War II victims. Huge exaggerations of the number of war victims were launched to magnify Yugoslavia’s losses in the Second World War and thus obtain larger war reparations payments , hide the extent of the crimes committed by the communists, and portray the latter as saviors both from external aggressors and from genocidal policies of domestic nationalists. Yugoslav authorities gave the figure of 1,706,000 Yugoslav war victims to the International Reparations Commission in 1946, without any documentation. It is not known how they arrived at this number, but on the eve of the 1947 Paris Conference on Reparations , the Federal Bureau of Statistics in Belgrade ordered a new employee, the second-year mathematics student Vladeta Vučković, to compute ‘‘a significant number’’ of war victims, and gave him two weeks to do so.1 Vučković estimated the number of wartime losses to be 1.7 million. The number did not denote real war victims, that is, people who were killed or died of war-related causes. Instead , it represented an estimate of demographic losses, that is, the difference between the population after the war and the projected population that would have been reached had there been no war. Never-conceived children were included in these losses. This important distinction was ignored, and 1.7 million remained the officially approved figure of Yugoslav war victims. Many party and government officials were not aware of the magnitude of the distortion, or even that there was a distortion at all. However, a compilation of data on war victims made in 1964 provided a clear proof of the extent of the misrepresentation. The Federal Republic of Germany requested the compilation in order to finalize the agreement about the financial compensation for Yugoslav war victims. The Yugoslav government ordered the preparation of the list of war victims in June 1964, and by November the data were collected. When they were processed in Belgrade in August 1966, they caused consternation because it turned out that the total number of Yugoslavs who died due to war actions and persecutions by the Axis forces and their collaborators (but excluding the victims of the communist-led forces) was lower than 600,000. When a review of A Vicious Circle of Lies and Fears | 101 the data produced only minor corrections, access to them was highly restricted, although they were given to the FRG. Yugoslavia’s communist regime continued operating with the figure of 1.7 million even after it had been made obvious that it was an enormous exaggeration. Even in postcommunist Belgrade, access to the data on the 597,323 victims has remained restricted. The data were finally published in 1997, but in a very limited edition with a controlled distribution.2 Because of communist Yugoslavia’s refusal to complete and publish data on World War II victims in the Yugoslav territory, a list of all victims is still not available...