The town of Sinj is situated in the hinterland of the Dalmatian coast, among the hot white rocks of the Dinaric mountains. When the 19th century British travellers, J. Gardner Wilkinson and A.A. Paton visited Sinj, it was a remote and rather wild place. Nowadays it is a one-hour journey along the highway from Split.
Gardner Wilkinson made a round trip, travelling up the Krka river from Šibenik to Knin, then on to Sinj, and back to the coast at Split. He described the country around Sinj as highly primitive, noting the poor state of agriculture. He acknowledged, however, that the Austrians, who took over in Dalmatia following the Napoleonic Wars, had done something for the improvement of the region, notably through the founding of schools, in contrast to the neglect of the earlier Venetian rulers.
Gardner Wilkinson visited a market at Sinj, where he described seeing ‘blue-legged Morlacchi’ from the surrounding countryside, a reference to the leggings worn by the Morlachs. Visiting Sinj a few years later, Paton saw Morlachs dancing to a two-string gusla. There are different versions of the etymology of the name ‘Morlach’. One idea is that it comes from Greek, meaning ‘Black Vlachs’, while others suggest it comes from the Croatian ‘morski Vlasi’, ‘Sea Vlachs’. In either case, they were Vlachs.
In origin, the Vlachs were the Latinised, pre-Slav Illyrian population, who spoke a Romance language, akin to Romanian. While by the Middle Ages it seems that the Vlachs of Dalmatia had largely been linguistically assimilated by the Croats, they continued to be regarded as a quite distinct population almost until modern times. Their numbers were bolstered by waves of migration from the Ottoman lands in the 16th and 17th centuries. Complicating matters, the term was sometimes, in the twentieth century, used as a derogatory term for the primitive people of the Dalmatian hinterland, or for Serbs. Indeed, the Orthodox Vlachs of the Dalmatian interior, as well as north-west Bosnia, were assimilated by their co-religionists in the Serbian Orthodox Church from the 17th century. The Croatian political leader in the 1920s, Stjepan Radić, frequently blasted the Serbs as ‘Vlasi’. In 1993 I had an unpleasant meeting with a Croatian historian in Zagreb, a hard-line nationalist given a senior position by PresidentTudjman. He sought, by arguing that the Serbs of Croatia were not Serbs at all, but Vlachs, to demonstrate that there was no Serb minority in Croatia entitled to any rights as such.
Professor Sonia Bićanić told me how, having noticed that the olive groves on the island of Brać, where she had built a house, were being left un-harvested, was given as an explanation by a local woman, “there are no more Vlachs”. Apparently Vlachs had traditionally carried out such back-breaking seasonal labour. By the late 20th century Morlachs had virtually disappeared as a distinct group in Dalmatia. In the 1991 census, 22 people in Croatia declared themselves as Morlachs.
Gardner Wilkinson attended the famous Sinjska Alka, an equestrian event held in the town each August to commemorate a victory over the Turks in 1715. Something between sporting event, pageant and national tradition, the Alka occupies a place in Croatia akin to the Oxbridge boat race in England. It is shown live on television, is attended by the highest state dignitaries, and has become a tourist attraction. Men in traditional, 18th century costumes, gallop down a narrow street through the town, wielding a lance with which they attempt to skewer a little metal ring, the ‘alka’, hanging overhead. The ring contains a central bull’s eye, which scores three points, and three outer segments, the top one of which scores two, and the lower two three points. Each rider makes three passes. Only men from the region of Sinj are allowed to take part. It is a great spectacle, although unlike Gardner Wilkinson, I have only watched it on a television set in Zagreb.
Sinj was part of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reverting to Venetian rule in the wars at the end of the seventeenth century. But that was not the end of the border wars with the Turks, and in 1715 there was an attempt by the Ottomans to retake the town. Credit for the victory in 1715 against the superior Ottoman force was given by the defenders to the intercession of the Virgin Mary. Pride of place in the Franciscan church in Sinj is given to an icon of the Virgin of Sinj. Thought to have been painted at the end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century, the icon was brought by the Franciscans as they fled from Rama, in nearby Turkish-ruled Herzegovina, in 1687. The icon was placed in the church that was completed in 1714. As the Ottoman force attacked the following year, the icon was carried up to the small fortress on the hill above the church, where the defenders drew confidence from their belief in its miraculous powers.
The icon draws pilgrims in their thousands, especially on 15 August each year, when it is paraded through the town, carried aloft by members of the Alkar society in their regalia. The heavy metal doors of the Franciscan church depict the battle below Sinj fortress, with the Virgin Mary hovering above – a strikingly martial image for the doors of a church. The memory of the victory over the Turks, of the favour attributed to the Virgin Mary, and the pageantry of the Alka have combined to make Sinj an important symbol for Croatian nationalists since the 1990s, even if some look down their noses at the wild people of the Dinaric mountains, as they are still regarded by many of the sophisticates of Zagreb and the coastal cities.
In more recent times, the Alka was politicised, as Sinj became a centre of hardline Croatian nationalism, opposed to the presidency of Stipe Mesić. Mesić was elected following the death of the country’s founding president, Franjo Tudjman, at the end of 1999. He had been a close collaborator of Tudjman’s. He was the first Croatian prime minister following the election victory of Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in 1990, and went on to be Croatia’s last representative on the collective Yugoslav presidency. But Mesić later fell out with Tudjman, especially over the latter’s de facto alliance with Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević in the attempted carve up of Bosnia. By the time of his election as President in 2000, opponents of Tudjman’s authoritarianism saw Mesić as a breath of fresh air. But for the nationalist faithful of the HDZ, and for the wartime veterans’ lobby, Mesić was anathema.
Perhaps Mesić’s most significant act as president, taken in his first year in office, was to retire a group of generals who had signed an open letter complaining at what they saw as the mistreatment of veterans and the criminalisation of the war of independence. At issue was cooperation with the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague (ICTY), as well as war crimes investigations being conducted in Croatia. In August 2000 a key war crimes witness was murdered, leading to a spate of arrests. Veterans’ groups responded with protests, and Mesić, as well as Prime Minister Ivica Račan, who had been Croatia’s last communist boss, received anonymous death threats.
In this context, the letter signed by 12 generals was seen as a challenge, and there was talk in the press that a coup was being planned. Although the atmosphere was tense, this seems unlikely. Nevertheless, Mesić’s resolute action in retiring the seven generals who were still serving sent a message that, in the post-Tudjman world, the country’s democratic institutions were sufficiently robust to withstand any such posturing.
Among the seven generals retired by Mesić was Ante Gotovina, widely lionised in Croatia as the hero of Operation Storm, by which swathes of Serb-controlled territory were recovered in 1995, and which included the widespread murder of Serb civilians, destruction of property, and the expulsion of most of the Serb population. Another was Mirko Norac, who had led a number of controversial military actions, including at Gospić early in the war, and the Medak Pocket in 1993, during which numerous atrocities against Serb civilians had been carried out. Norac was from a village near Sinj. He had attended school in Sinj. In 1994 he had been appointed Vojvoda, ‘Duke’, of the Sinj Alkars, a ceremonial title, and a great honour.
Norac was a local hero in Sinj. Despite clear evidence of his direct involvement in serious war crimes, he was repeatedly promoted during the war years. In Zagreb in 1998, a prominent Croatian journalist told me he and other journalists had seen a video recording which showed Norac personally murdering a Serb civilian at Gospić in 1991. This, he told me, had been brought to the attention of the ICTY. So why, he asked, did Norac remain at liberty? More than a hundred Serb civilians were murdered in cold blood at Gospić, in a planned and organised massacre in which Norac was one of the prime movers. Eventually Norac’s crimes caught up with him. Arrested in 2001 for his role at Gospić, he was in 2003 sentenced to 12 years in prison. In 2004 he was indicted, along with others, by the ICTY for the crimes committed in the Medak Pocket operation. He was transferred to The Hague, but the case was transferred back to the Croatian judicial system. Norac was sentenced to a further seven years. Some would say Norac was treated remarkably leniently given the seriousness of his crimes. In November 2011, he was released. The previous year President Ivo Josipović had stripped him of the rank of general.
In 1999 I met an elderly Serb gentleman from Gospić. He was one of those who had been taken from his home in 1991. He had escaped death, but, having moved away from Gospić for his and his family’s safety, his home had been taken over by somebody else. When I met him he was desperately trying to get his home back. As with all Serbs who had fled their homes, the Croatian authorities showed not a trace of sympathy. The plight of this entirely innocent man, whose flight was prompted by the murder of so many of his fellow Serb townsmen and women, was of no concern in a state which was at that point unwilling to allow any aspersion to be cast on the glorious Homeland War or its holy veterans. I don’t know what became of the man. I hope he was able to return and live out his last days in his own home.
In 2000 and subsequent years, as the net was beginning to close on Norac and some of his fellow wartime criminals, Mesić was an object of vilification for the veterans’ lobby. In Sinj there was a scandal, as the President was snubbed and whistled at at the Alka. Mesić condemned the politicisation of the event. After all, the Alka had been attended by earlier heads of whichever state Croatia had belonged to, from Austrian Emperors, to Tito, and latterly Tudjman. Things were patched up with the leaders of the Alkar society, but even at the last Alka of his presidency, in 2009, Mesić was again whistled at.
Staying in Sinj in the spring of 2012, I saw no outward sign of devotion to Norac. As everywhere in Dalmatia, there were posters proclaiming Gotovina as a hero. But there were none for Norac. Probably his crimes were simply too dreadful to be defended, the evidence of his guilt too conclusive. Unlike Gotovina, who had been convicted on the rather tenuous grounds of command responsibility, Norac’s involvement in war crimes was direct. And unlike Gotovina, who had been tried and sentenced in The Hague, Norac had been found guilty by a court in Croatia, lending his conviction a credibility that the ICTY has failed to acquire anywhere in ex-Yugoslavia.
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