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Searching for a Storm: A Defense of Croatian Liberation |
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Written by Terelle Jerricks
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Thursday, 16 April 2009 |
The LA Harbor International Film Festival will begin April 24 with a controversial documentary on Friday night with the premier of film producer and former editor of San Pedro Magazine, Jack Baric’s Searching for a Storm, a polemic film on the war between the former Yugoslav republics during the 1990s. This film was intended to make the case for General Ante Gotovina, a Croatian war hero who was charged with war crimes by the United Nation’s International Court Tribunal of Yugoslavia, an indictment that covered the ethnic cleansing of the entire civilian population of Krajina Serbs. According to the indictment, the Croatian army, after successfully wresting control of the Krajina region of Croatia from ethnic Serbian separatists during Operation Storm, murdered, plundered and dispossessed the remaining population of Serbian civilians.
“Searching for a Storm” attempts to appear balanced by including interviews of Croatian war veterans, UN’s ICTY prosecutor, Gen. Gotovina’s legal counsel, foreign policymakers and journalists— Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak, or American. But a deeper knowledge of the expert talking heads that Baric chooses to interview chips away at appearances. One example is the Robin Harris interview, a policymaker who was a close advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and author of A Tale of Two Chileans—Pinochet and Allende, a work that stridently defends the Pinochet coup, which deposed the democratically elected President Salvador Allende in 1973.
Through the voices of Croat civilians and war veterans, Storm pins the blame solely on Croat paramilitaries and the returning Croat civilians as the culprits in the atrocities against civilian Serbs, leaving Gen. Gotovina and the military with no responsibility for protecting the Serb population. Unfortunately for the documentary, the film does not include the voice of Gen. Gotovina himself. This film could not have found a better venue than San Pedro. In any other neighborhood, any other place, any other community, this film wouldn’t be so loaded with historical baggage. Baric billed his documentary as being designed to spark discussion about the war and the merits of the case against Gotovina, but the bias becomes particularly hard to take as it repeatedly glosses over the UN’s rational of calling the conflict a civil war, taking the long-view of the history of ethnic conflicts dating back to the days of the Ottoman empire, and rising to a particular level of savagery during WWII.
The documentary’s ahistorical portrayal of the war attempts to make a clean and clear-cut divide between the former Yugoslav republics—that Serbia was the aggressor with Croats as the victims who rose up in defense of themselves and won, further mythologizing the founding of the new nation of Croatia. Particularly absent is the local historical context of support for Croatian Independence that erupted in the 1970s in San Pedro and the fact of Croatian collaboration with the Nazis during WWII.
Storm is told from the supposition that if there is war someone has to start it, and wonders aloud how anyone could view the war in the former Yugoslavia as anything other than a war of aggression. One of the few times the wool this documentary tries to pull over the casual observer’s eyes is brushed aside is during the discussion of why, in the middle of a war, Croatians and Bosniaks went to war with each other while both were victims of the Serb program of ethnic cleansing. Though the two peoples ultimately resolved their differences, the source of their hostilities is rooted in a long history of conflict between Muslims and Christians.
In addition, Storm doesn’t bring up the Croatian UstaSe genocide of Serbs during WWII or the hiding of Andrija Artukovich, who at one time was the highest-ranking Nazi–era war criminal still on the run. Artukovich “was the Interior Minister and then Justice (police) and Religion Minister in the government of the Croatian fascist dictator Ante Pavelic” (NY Times, Jan 19, 1988). Both men couldn’t have stayed clear of the judicial process had there not been a community willing to aid and abet their flight from judicial prosecution.
Artukovic was arrested in 1951. But Croatian émigré groups, many from Orange
County and San Pedro, and influential clerics petitioned for his release. He managed to stay out of jail for over 30 years living freely through the generosity of the local émigré community. One can’t help but wonder if this film doesn’t represent a lost historical opportunity for the local émigré community to come to terms with its past. One also can’t help but think of a different response, that of Sarajevo, which before the war had been a city in which different ethnic groups lived together peacefully, with high rates of intermarriage.
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Crafted at POLA
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