In an attempt to defuse
internal divisions, he appealed to natural features (like rivers and
mountains) as internal borders. Croatia vanished as a political
entity, replaced by naturally-bounded districts and provinces. The
majority of Croats still believed in a federal solution, albeit less
Serb-biased. They believed in reform from the inside. The Ustashe
and Pavelic were always a minority, the Bolsheviks of Croatia. But
King Alexander's authoritarian rule was hard to ignore: the torture
of political opponents and their execution, the closure of patriotic
sports societies, the flagrant interference in the work of the
ostensibly independent judiciary, the censorship. There was bad
blood growing between the King and more of his subjects by the day.
The Croats were not the only "minority" to be thus maltreated. The
Serbs maintained an armed presence in Macedonia, Kosovo, the Sandzak
and even in Slovenia. They deported thousands of "Turks" (actually,
all manner of Muslims) under the guise of a "re-patriation" scheme.
They confiscated land from religious institutions, from the
deportees, from big landowners, from the Magyars in Vojvodina and
"re-distributed" it to the Serbs. Ethnic homogenization (later to
become known as "ethnic cleansing") was common practise in that era.
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