Zagreb

“ These five fascisti brigands—who were also lieutenants of the Italian army—would therefore have to be tried not only for attempted murder but for attempted espionage. They were put into a train and transported to the prison at Zagreb. "If once we begin to march," so the Italian soldiers at Rieka had over and over again been telling the Croats, "then we shall not halt before we come to Zagreb, your capital." Those five will perhaps some day explain to their comrades how quickly Zagreb can be reached.... ”

“ So much for the complaints with regard to Austria-Hungary's Southern Slav soldiers. Two military courts of justice sat at Zagreb through the War, the Imperial and Royal Court, and that of the Royal Hungarian No. 6 (Croatian-Slavonian) Honved Division. No statistics are to hand with reference to the various courts in Syrmia, and that one which earned such an evil reputation in the fortress of Peterwardein. The judgments of the two Zagreb courts, where Croat officers were able to make their influence felt, did not appear to the authorities of Vienna and Buda-Pest to be sufficiently drastic. ”

“ A confidential contact reports that the regional director of the organization, Dr. Muhammad Fatih Hasanayn, is the most influential NGO official in Bosnia. He is a major arms supplier to the government, according to clandestine and press reporting, and was forced to relocate his office from Zagreb in 1994 after his weapons smuggling operations were exposed. According to a foreign government service, Hasanayn supports US Muslim extremists in Bosnia. (One NGO in Bosnia that includes extremist US Muslims is Taibah International, which has offices in Zagreb, Split, and Sarajevo.) ”

“ In the old kingdom of Serbia, with much the greater part of the land in peasant possession, it may be said that there is no agrarian problem.... Those enemies of Yugoslavia, by the way, who have hoped that the particularism of Croatia would be something altogether different from what it is, should have mingled with the crowd at Zagreb on the evening of Prince Alexander's arrival in July 1920. ”

“ When Cardinal Bourne came to Zagreb in the spring of 1919 and the town-hall was decorated with the British, Croatian, Serbian, Slovene and the town flag, some one asked the mayor why the State flag had been omitted. He was horrified. "The State flag!" he cried. Then it dawned upon him.... Numbers of Croats have belonged to the governing class and—impelled by the Catholic religion—have displayed more devotion to the arts than to the freedom of their country. On the other hand the Serbs, a race of practical peasants, have a highly developed national consciousness. ”

“ And as yet they are much more interested in the harvest than in politics; from day to day they change their views, according to the views of the last orator from Belgrade, Zagreb or Ljubljana. Only the Socialists appear to be well disciplined. Of course the present political parties in Yugoslavia are not wholly free from religious prejudices, an important party, for example, among the Slovenes being based on Roman Catholicism. ”

“ Some of the Serbs wish to keep aloof on the ground that Serbia in the last hundred years has borne the brunt of the battle—and this, whether they were or were not faced with a more difficult situation, is acknowledged by most of the Croats, who for that reason would never dream of wishing the more modern Zagreb to supplant Belgrade. Those few Croats who are not for Yugoslavia are moved by ecclesiastical prejudice or by their longing for the privileges which the Habsburgs granted them. ”

“ Among those whom these proceedings and those at Zagreb brought into European prominence were the Pribičević brothers, a very zealous family of Croatian Serbs, that is to say Croats belonging to the Orthodox Church. [The chief of these four brothers was Svetozar, a statesman whose Serbo-Croat Coalition party was, with the advent of Yugoslavia in 1918, to form the nucleus of the Democratic party. He then became for many [206] months the all-powerful Minister of the Interior, a man with the appearance of a bull-dog in whose veins is electricity. ”

“ Croats insist on the title Jugo-Slavia; Serbs are inclined to drop it and revert to the name Serbia. The Germans during the war are said to have promised the Croats to form the German counterpart of the Allies' idea of Jugo-Slavia, and had Germany and Austria won, a new constituent of Central Europe was to have been inaugurated with its capital of Zagreb. The name Jugo-Slavia was familiar to the Croats and popular with them before the Serbs adopted it. The Croats think that because they are more educated than the Serbs they should be the dominant party in the government of the new State. ”

“ Other units of local self-government may be provided by law.
Counties shall be units of regional self-government. The territory of a county shall be determined in the manner prescribed by law.
The capital city of Zagreb may be accorded the status of a county by law.
Larger cities in the Republic of Croatia may be given the authority of a county by law.
Forms of community-level self-government may be established in a community or any part thereof. ”

“ Many of these organizations also support foreign mujahedin fighters in Bosnia. Coordination councils based in Zagreb and Sarajevo, coordinate the activities of the most important organizations. These councils may function like a similar one established in Peshawar, Pakistan, which organizes arms shipments and aid to military training camps, and provides humanitarian aid to refugees, according to a clandestine source.
A growing body of reporting indicates that some of these charities are being used to aid Islamic extremist groups that engage in terrorism. ”

“ One enterprising vendor, a Serb from the Banat, takes 500 copies a week and tramps over the countryside, disposing of his wares either for cash or for eggs, the latter of which he sells at the end of the week to a Zagreb hotel. The peasant is making great efforts to raise himself—a case has recently been brought to light of a farmer in Zagorija who, as a hobby, has taught more than 700 persons to read and write. The peasant perceives that he has been assisted far less by the Catholic Church than by the work of Radić. ”

“ Twenty-four hours later the neural plague had spread to Zagreb and into Albania as far as Tirana. When it crossed to Leghorn in Italy the Balkans held twenty million lunatics and the Danube was an artificial lake a hundred miles wide. ”

“ In accordance with the request of Lieut.-Field-Marshal Szurmay I urgently request that all male inhabitants over fifteen years of age shall be evacuated from this place and from all others in which similar incidents have occurred, that measures be taken without delay in the interior of Croatia, and a stern examination be carried out in association with the Zagreb military command as also with the Army group command of Petrovaradin, acting in conjunction with the Government Commissary Hideghethy. Guilty persons are to be handed over to the military court for legal treatment. ”

“ Links to Other NGOs: Third World Relief Agency KUWAIT JOINT RELIEF COMMITTEE (KJRC) AKA: General Committee For Refugee Assistance Offices: Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Ljubljana. KJRC is the official Kuwaiti government organization which distributes funds to other NGOs. ”

“ Jellačić, on September 11, crossed the Drave with forty thousand Croats, annexed the territory between the Drave and the Mur, and advanced without opposition up to Lake Balaton. His commissary, General Joseph Brinjevac, occupied Rieka. They were confident that History would not misjudge them. "We demand," said Jellačić, in his declaration of war, "we demand equality of rights for all the peoples and for all the nationalities who live under the Hungarian crown." Before he left Zagreb he transformed the feudal Croatian Diet into an elective assembly. ”

“ His democracy, in spite of his agrarian reforms, was very far from that of Vuk, and far from that of a young noble of Croatia, Ljudevit Gaj, who one evening in the drawing-room of Count Drašković—the same Count Drašković who wrote in German, for such was the spirit of the time, his Exhortation to Croatian Maidens that they should be truly Croatian—well, in this gentleman's house at Zagreb Ljudevit Gaj recites some verses he has written for a dowager. They are in Slav. The audience is inclined to be amused. ”

“ The words used to rush from his lips in a torrent, while to many of his faithful peasant followers he seemed, throughout his discourse, to be in direct contact with the Almighty. Next to the Almighty the Croatian peasant had been taught to revere Francis Joseph, so that when the [114] heir to the throne was murdered in 1914 it was not very difficult to make the Croat peasants rise against this sacrilege by plundering the Serbian shops at Zagreb—Austrian officers coming with their children to look on—just as in other parts of Croatia and Bosnia. ”

“ All were vital to the Italian German war effort, since British air and naval activity made supply by sea difficult and the Germans did not have the necessary truck transport facilities. Too, in addition to the occupation forces, those units and installations supporting the German air and naval effort in the eastern Mediterranean had to be supplied by rail, along the line Zagreb-Belgrade-Nish-Salonika-Athens. III. Principal Highways The roads of Greece and Yugoslavia were poor, with the exception of a few international highways and limited areas in and about the capitals and major cities. ”

“ One gets very weary of hearing the phrase "Divide et impera," which always occurs at least several times in the course of an exposition of Austrian policy. But we are bound to say that this principle governed her behaviour when she stage-managed in 1908 the Zagreb high-treason trial, [68] which was to drive a wedge between Serbs and Croats, in 1909 the Friedjung case, as also the Cetinje bomb affair which was to, and did in fact, alienate Nikita from his son-in-law, the Serbian King. ”

“ All of the major and most of the minor Islamic charities are significant players in the former Yugoslavia, particularly in aiding Bosnian Muslims. Their contributions represent a significant proportion of humanitarian aid in Bosnia. According to the US embassy in Riyadh, Saudi nationals alone gave $150 million through Islamic NGOs for aid to Bosnia in 1994. Most of the offices of NGOs active in Bosnia are located in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Zenica, and Tuzla. Their field operations appear to be confined to the Muslim areas of Northeastern and Central Bosnia. ”

“ But those who, for various reasons, [399] criticize the central Government are by no means necessarily in favour of setting up a separate one. Whatever the impetuous Radić may have said, he is out for Yugoslavia. Still one cannot be astonished that he was sometimes misunderstood. The Zagreb students who, towards the end of 1918, came to Svetozar Pribičević with the request that he would let them kill the demagogue, were for expressing in this way what Dr. Dušan Popović, the well-known deputy, expressed in another. ”

“ He mentions that Professor Arshinov, alleged to have come to Zagreb in order to carry on an anti-Habsburg and pro-Serbian propaganda, is indeed under arrest, but is being far too well treated at the hospital, where he receives his Serbian associates and even has convivial evenings with them. In fact the whole country, so the writer asserts, is saturated with Serbian sympathies and agitators. He says that in some villages every functionary, from the highest to the lowest, is a Serb ”

“ Second, to thrust with a second Army in the direction of Skoplje and join up speedily with the Italian troops operating from Albania; these operations were due to begin on 6th April. Third, an attack starting on the 8th from Bulgaria in the direction of Nish, with the aim of reaching the Belgrade area; a German corps was to occupy the Barnt on the 10th, and reach Belgrade from the north. Fourth, on the 11th, an army operating from Corinthia, Styria and western Hungary was to open an attack in the general direction of Zagreb, Sarajevo and Belgrade. ”

“ This is not the time to found a party of ideas; the atmosphere is too morbid, too passionate. This is the time," he said, "for an honourable man to remain isolated and to stay at home." ... Several weeks after this at Sarajevo, I read in a Zagreb newspaper, the Rijeć S.H.S., that Dr. Boxich, on account of having—exceptionally, the paper said—spoken the truth to a passing foreigner, had been deported to Italy.
A VISIT TO SOME OF THE ISLANDS
It was impossible to be at Split without meeting people who had fled from the occupied islands. ”

“ Jedna je pravila, da je dobil njen nečak jako dobro službo v Zagrebu. Priporočen je bil na prvem mestu zato, ker je znal dobro nemški, dasi so bili drugi prosilci mnogo starejši in ne brez zaslug. Da, nemški jezik je dandanes mladim ljudem tako potreben kakor vsakdanji kruh; brez njega ne dobiš niti najmanjše državne službe. Gospa Šumićevka te besede potrdi in veli: Jaz sem zanaprej vedela, da tako pride. Zato sem prepovedala svojim dečkom, ki so bili v Zagrebu, da niso smeli pisati po hrvatski ni meni, ni svojim sestram in sploh nikomur ne. ”

“ Tudi med prostimi trgovci, obrtniki in rokodelci si našel dosti doseljenih pravih Nemcev in ponemčenih Slovencev, ki so se gredoč s trebuhom za kruhom nastavili v hrvatskih mestih in trgih. Briga za sinove pa je zdaj vse to gospodo in vse te prostake privedla v isti tabor opozicije zoper Bahovo vlado in sistem. Moglo se je čuti v Zagrebu i na Reki, v Varaždinu i v Oseku, v Karlovcu i Požegi: Naša vlada nima srca za nas in naše potrebe! Koliko brige, koliko stroškov vlagamo za svoje sinove, da dovrše latinske šole in akademijo in se preskrbe za bodočnost. ”