http://www.gulfnews.com/weekend/Special_Report/10329330.html
Tito's secret prison camp
By Arno Maierbrugger, Staff Writer
Section of the Goli Otok prison camp. Josip Broz Tito's regime used the
prison to detain 'enemies of the state'. The prison, closed in 1988, eight
years after Tito's death, is falling to ruin
Published: July 09, 2009, 22:46
Even as Yugoslavia presented a reformist face, a jail on an island
exposed its heavy-handed approach to crush dissent.
The idyllic Karst islands off the northern Adriatic coast have been a
hotspot for middle-income tourists since the early 1970s. It was a time when
they belonged to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the dissident
state of Josip Broz Tito who pursued a policy of neutrality during the Cold War
and when Europe was divided into Western and Eastern blocs. It was difficult
for Westerners to travel to the communist states behind the so-called Iron
Curtain but Yugoslavia was open to most of them.
So many of the islands were visited then by tourists - mainly from
Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy - who passed their holiday time on
low-budget camping grounds, enjoyed bathing in the clear waters and baking in
the sun on the stony, barren heaps with catchy names such as Rab, Krk, Cres,
Losinj or Pag. Meanwhile, Croatian-born Tito ran the multinational socialistic
pariah state from its Serbian capital, Belgrade, baffling the international
community with his ability to juggle between the interests of the West and the
East while granting his citizens relative freedom, preserving order between the
many Balkan nationalities and maintaining economic stability.
What the tourists and even most Yugoslavs did not know at that time was
that the political stability came at a price. Not far from the holiday shores,
even within view from the eastern edge of the island of Rab, another island
rested under the blistering sun which had nothing to do with holiday-making.
Goli Otok ("Barren Island"), as former inmate Josip Zoretic describes it
in his book Hell in the Adriatic, was a prison camp, a Yugoslav gulag, and few
people knew about it. Tito turned the island into a high-security prison in
1949, one year after Yugoslavia broke away from the Stalinist Soviet sphere and
declared itself "neutral" under its own system of "market socialism",
informally called "Titoism".
Those who maintained ties with the Soviet Union or remained Stalin
sympathisers - not only Communist Party members but also average citizens -
were incarcerated on the island. The prison "institutionalised a system of
repression and enslavement against those who opposed the communist regime and
the spread of greater Serbian authority", writes Zoretic, who was sent to Goli
Otok in 1962 for seven years and provides a first-hand account of what happened
in the Adriatic gulag. Inmates were forced to do hard labour in a stone quarry
and were regularly beaten and tortured. Many died.
"This book ... puts to rest once and for all the [Yugoslav] myth of
'communism with a human face'," says C. Michael McAdams, an American historian
and expert on Slavic history at the University of San Francisco.
It is not clear how many prisoners were sent to the island between 1949
and the closure of the prison camp in 1988, eight years after Tito's death. But
some facts became clearer after the release of a documentary by Austrian
filmmaker Reinhard Grabher on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the
establishment of the Goli Otok prison camp.
The film, Strahota The History of Prison Island Goli Otok, was released
on May 5 in Salzburg, Austria, and is considered the first comprehensive
account of what happened for 39 years in the secret island prison.
"It is not clear how many people were [forced into] hard labour, how many
lost their lives out of dread, humiliation and the torments," Grabher says.
Word-of-mouth indications range between 12,000 and 60,000 inmates who were held
on Goli Otok, while serious sources proceed on the assumption that 16,000
political prisoners have been incarcerated on the island and 400 died.
"The prison was one of the greatest secrets of Tito's communist regime,"
Grabher says. He interviewed contemporary witnesses and historical experts for
his film, to "break the silence" over the island gulag.
In the film, former inmates of the camp talk about the tortures they
suffered in prison. "Goli Otok was what we feared most," says Olga Miklausic,
who lives in the southern Croatian coast town of Split. "Goli Otok was a system
where a prisoner was without any rights," says Pavao Ravlic, who now lives in
Croatia's capital, Zagreb. Croatian ex-prisoners are organised in the
"Association of Former Political Prisoners of Goli Otok", and Serbs have
founded the "Society of Goli Otok". Their goal is to establish a memorial on
the island.
It is surprising that the prison camp was in use until 1988, a long
period after the normalisation of the relations between Yugoslavia and the
Soviet Union after Stalin's death in 1953, when there was no more point in
sending dissident communists and Soviet-oriented renegades to Goli Otok.
The central government in Belgrade passed the prison under the provincial
legislation of the then Socialist Republic of Croatia.
The secret camp did not become less important, though. Other "enemies of
the state" were brought to the island, especially social democrats, members of
the bourgeoisie, nationalists, fascist Ustaae insurgents, anti-communist
Chetniks and Western-oriented regime critics and intellectuals.
Later on, as the communist regime in Croatia weakened, Goli Otok was
transformed into a high-security prison. Two years before Franjo Tudman was
elected Croatian president in the first post-communist multi-party elections,
the prison was shut down and is now falling into ruin.
'Hell in the Adriatic'
The book by former Goli Otok inmate Josip Zoretic is widely regarded as
one of the closest insights into the notorious prison camp on the barren
Adriatic island. The book is straightforward and brutally frank in its
descriptions of day-to-day life in the island prison. Zoretic, who as a young
man opposed the communist system in Yugoslavia after his father was murdered by
Tito's partisans in 1942, fled to Austria in 1962. But he later fell ill and
was deported back to Yugoslavia, where he was declared a public enemy and
imprisoned at Goli Otok. He describes the prison as a place of pain, barbarity
and executions. Prisoners had to do heavy labour in a stone quarry and produce
construction materials such as tiles, which were sold on the mainland and even
exported. When there was no demand for materials, prisoners were simply forced
to carry heavy stones from one place to another. "Many did not survive,"
Zoretic writes. He did, and after serving seven years on the prison island, he
was released in 1969 and emigrated to Canada.
Sveti Grgur - Women's prison
While the history of Goli Otok is now well documented, little is known
about a nearby tiny island called Sveti Grgur ("Saint Gregory"), which was used
as a prison island for women during Tito's time. Sveti Grgur is very close to
Goli Otok and also within sight of the holiday island of Rab. However, the
prison was abandoned earlier than Goli Otok in the 1980s. Information about the
women's prison is very rare as it was handled as a top secret place of which
few people knew. Older residents of Rab tell that they only heard rumours about
what was happening on the island and saw patrol boats landing and departing.
The only visible vestige is the huge five-pointed communist Tito Star monument,
which the female inmates were forced to create from stones on the eastern shore
of the island.
Tito's Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was established in 1943 from
the remains of the prewar Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It was a socialist state and a
federation comprising Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro,
Serbia and Slovenia. Political power came from Soviet-backed Yugoslav partisans
who fought against Nazi occupation and gained control over the country after
the war ended. One of the leading partisans was Josip Broz Tito, who became the
first prime minister of Yugoslavia in 1946. After an early alliance with the
Soviet Union under Stalin, Tito refused to integrate Yugoslavia into the Warsaw
Pact, under which it would have acted as a Soviet satellite state. He declared
Yugoslavia neutral and joined the Non-Aligned Movement. After Stalin's death,
the relations with the Soviet Union normalised but Yugoslavia never accepted
the latter's interference in its politics and economy. Tito is seen as an
iconic figure in Yugoslavia's postwar history. Due to his politics, the
multi-national country was a single recognised entity with a prosperous
economy. Citizens had the right to travel or emigrate and the economic system
of worker's self-management of factories and businesses proved more successful
than the centrally-planned communist economies elsewhere in the Eastern bloc.
However, Yugoslavia's relative wealth and stability came to an end when Tito
died in 1980. Tito's presidency was replaced by a collective leadership with
representatives from each federal state, a move that bared the roots for the
ethnic conflicts that followed. Between 1980 and 1987, the economy
deteriorated. Even though a new prime minister, Ante Markovich, from 1989,
introduced market reforms and tried to keep Yugoslavia together, he failed and
paved the way for figures such as Slobodan Milosevic, whose politics finally
led to the breakup of Yugoslavia and a series of wars.
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