C. Michael McAdams, University of San Francisco

A Lecture given at various North American and
European venues in 1997

For over twenty years I have stood before American, Canadian and Australian audiences trying to explain why the Croatian people wanted to be free and independent. In 1985 I traveled around Australia predicting that Yugoslavia would not last five more years: a prediction that was met by skepticism by many, but only off by a only a few months. In the past five years, I have journeyed to a free and independent, though deeply troubled and war torn, Croatia. In 1997, I traveled to a free and independent Croatia at peace. For me, this was the conclusion of a very long journey. My first recollection of Croatia was in my postage stamp album as a child. I studied each stamp, the landscapes, the buildings, and the inescapable depictions of war that still haunt us today.

In the spring of 1971 I had completed my military service, I was a part-time student at a local university and an amateur historian. As an undergraduate, I studied the history of World War II in Europe. History was much easier twenty years ago. At least I found it so. This was especially true of the typical American perspective on history. Prior to the Vietnam War, and with the exception of the American Civil War, American history was very straightforward: America was always right and everybody else was always wrong. Black and white. Good and evil.

It was with that attitude that I approached the study of World War II. America, Britain, France and all of the Allies, except the Soviets, were "good guys." The Soviets were "good guys" but later became "bad guys." As we all know, history is retroactive. The Germans, the Japanese and their Allies were all "bad guys," with the exception of Italy, which, like the Soviet Union, was subjected to a post-war retroactive historical metamorphosis. Italy started the war as Fascist yet ended the war as a virtual Ally.

And then I got to the war in Yugoslavia. Again, American text books gave me the clear cut answers I sought. Serbs were "good guys," Croatians were "bad guys," and the Partisans were all Serbs. I found this over and over again in reading such books as Phyllis Auty's, Yugoslavia, John C. Campbell's, Tito's Separate Road, Vladimir Dedijer's, The Battle Stalin Lost, Milovan Djilas', Land Without Justice, Yugoslavia in the Second World War by the University of Belgrade, Constantin Foti_'s, The War We Lost, Stephen Graham's, Alexander of Yugoslavia, Peter Karageorgevi_'s, A King's Heritage, and David Martin's, Ally Betrayed. I also read such openly propagandistic books as The Serbs Choose War and Genocide in Satellite Croatia.

There was virtually nothing in the average university library that reflected a positive note about Croatia or the Croatians. With some degree of naivete, I decided to study Croatia. I did not read Croatian and had never actually met a Croatian. Nonetheless, I set out in search of Croatian history. There were three books in the public library about Croatia: Croatia: Land, People and Culture in two volumes edited by Father Francis Eterovich and Croatian Immigrants in America by George J. Prpi_. Both authors would later become close friends of mine.

In December of 1973, a popular American magazine, Reader's Digest, published a brief article about Andrija Artukovi_, a Croatian cabinet minister who was eventually extradited from the United States to Yugoslavia. At that time, I had not met Artukovi_ and really knew very little about him. However, I did have enough information about Croatia during World War II to suspect that the charges in the article were false. I did some research and submitted a lengthy reply. With the help of Croatian-Americans, accuracy in media organizations and political leaders, hundreds of letters were sent to the magazine protesting the inaccuracy of the article. Finally, on March 25, 1974, the editors admitted that the charges were "claims and allegations, not necessarily fully documented facts." As the Artukovi_ case became more and more sensationalized, I created standardized answers to those questions that the press most often asked about Artukovi_ and Croatia. That led to my first monograph Whitepaper on Dr. Andrija Artukovi_ published in 1975.

Another myth that got a great deal of press in and around the Artukovi_ case was that of Allied prisoners-of-war held captive here in Zagreb during World War II. The myth was that "dozens" of American pilots and airmen had been sent to the firing squad during the War. For several years I attempted to track down and interview surviving American airmen who had been held captive in Croatia. Some I was able to interview. Some filled-out a questionnaire. Others refused to be interviewed. In the end, I spoke to a dozen former airmen, which is a good sampling considering that fewer than one hundred were held during the War. Of course I learned that American airmen had been treated well by the Baroness Nikoli_ and that no former airman had any knowledge of any other airman being executed. I later tracked the source of the story down to a Serbian-American newspaper editor in southern California who claimed to have been a Balkan intelligence chief for the U.S. Army during the war...even though he consistently misspelled "Balkan" as "Balkin!" The result of this study was a monograph titled Allied Prisoners of War in Croatia published in 1980.

For twenty years, I found myself writing letters and articles, making telephone calls and speeches; trying to help Americans distinguish myth from reality when it came to Croatia and the Croatians. Did Croatia ask to join Yugoslavia? Who killed King Alexander? Were all Croatians Fascists during World War II? Did Croatians kill American pilots? Did Tito draw Croatia's borders at the expense of Serbia? Is the Croatian coat-of-arms a Fascist symbol? The old myths would not die. They were resurrected and embellished upon by the media. Few in the U.S. knew much about Croatia and her history and few articles were published about Croatia, so letter writing and phone calls were an effective means of combating the lies being created pro-Yugoslav propagandists.

But when Serbia launched its war of aggression against Slovenia, then Croatia, and then Bosnia, it also launched a full scale war of words bombarding the United States, Australia and Canada with old myths and new creations. Well-meaning journalists and others fell victim to propaganda while attempting to understand and to justify the war of aggression against Croatia. The Serbs in North America were much better organized that Croatian-Americans. A member of the United States Congress, working from her taxpayer-funded office, Helen Delich Bently, organized the Serbian propaganda effort through her organization "SerbNet." Politicians, newspapers, magazines, radio, television and others were flooded with letters, articles and other evidence of the bestiality of the Croatians and the innocence of the Serbs. That same "SerbNet" is still active today and is currently circulating a letter by Prof. Peter Mayer that claims Dubrovnik was not bombed in 1991 and that the pictures we saw were staged with burning tires and trick camera angles!

The Croatians in America were on the defensive, spending more time trying to fight off the propaganda attack than attempting to get the Croatian message across. I found myself writing two, three, as many as six, letters to editors in a single day. My fax machine would run out of paper daily as Croatians flooded me with articles from their hometown newspaper that needed to be responded to immediately. Because we were dealing with an organized campaign by "SerbNet" the same myths were repeated over and over again in different articles, supposedly by different authors in different cities.

Through the miracle of "word processing" I created standard letters to refute the myths and often needed only to change the name and address of the newspaper. That is when somebody suggested that I write a brief, readable, easy to understand monograph that would respond to the most common myths. The first problem was not getting the information. The problem was too much information. Over twenty years, I had collected volumes of materials. Yet I felt that it was very important that the monograph be less than one hundred pages, easy to read without footnotes or endnotes, and illustrated, preferably in color. I have learned, unfortunately, that the average American reader will not pick-up anything that is over one hundred pages, has footnotes or has no pictures.

I took the months of March and April 1992 off work without pay from the University and dedicated myself entirely to assembling what would become Croatia: Myth and Reality. From start to finish, the manuscript was done in sixty days. As fate would have it, the publisher, Mr. Petar Radielovi_, with whom I have worked for decades, required quadruple heart bypass surgery shortly after the manuscript was completed and the printing was delayed several months. Still, we had the monograph out by the Fall of 1992. The first printing of the English edition was exhausted and the second edition, with some corrections, was published in 1994.

In 1993, I was contacted by Mr. Ante Selak of the Croatian University Press in Zagreb. I granted the rights to Croatia: Myth and Reality to the University Press and Prof. Mirjana Turudi_ translated it into the Croatian language. On May 6, 1993, I was handed the first five copies of the Croatian edition, printed that morning, as I arrived at Zagreb airport on Croatia Airlines where I was greeted by Mr. Selak, Prof. Turudi_, and my old friend _eljko Urban, who is today Croatian ambassador to Canada. It was indeed the culmination of a long journey. In 1995 the Croatian University Press published the book in Swedish and portions have been translated into Spanish. Just as with all previous translations, I have given the rights to translate and publish this work with no profit to myself. I hope that German and French editions will be coming soon.

But even as old myths were being combated, new myths emerged about the Croatian language, Croatian currency, even the names of streets. Once again, I returned to the computer to write a third, and final edition of the book. To include the new myths, and to expand on some of the old, I had to abandon my self-imposed limit of one hundred pages. However, I hope that Croatia Myth and Reality - The Final Chapter will still be as readable and accessible to the average reader as were the previous editions.

I wrote Croatia: Myth and Reality to confront some of the major myths being spread about Croatia in the English-language press. The third edition has been distributed to over forty libraries in Canada and at hundreds of others in the United States and Australia. Copies have been sent to journalists, libraries, universities, and political leaders in North America and Australia to combat the propaganda campaign being waged against Croatia. Now that Croatia is free, she will have many friends. But there was a time, not too long ago, that supporting a free Croatia was not popular and sometimes dangerous, even in Australia and America. My single hope is that this monograph will remind Croatians that they had friends defending their right to self-determination, even when it was not a popular undertaking. Now Croatia has many more friends around the world supporting the Croatian struggle for freedom and independence. Those who supported a free Croatia, and those who did not, regardless of the old politics, may now join together to build a new, democratic Croatia, at peace with itself and its neighbors. Croatia has always had a proud past, today Croatia also has a bright future.