Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

There were eight suicides reported between mid-May and late June of 1991 in one Međimurje village on the south bank of the Mura. According to the official records and police reports, there was no hint of a link among the suicides. The 1991 census reported a total of twenty-one suicides in all of Međimurje (population 119,966)—one of the lowest regional rates anywhere in Croatia. The six-month death rate in the municipality of 2,500 residents wasn’t significantly different from earlier or later rates, and so the series of suicides attracted little attention in the local and national media. The public was focused, of course, on the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. It was becoming clear that the previously sporadic bursts of violence and mounting tensions would lead to clashes of far greater proportions, so something out on the farthest periphery of the country was unlikely to draw attention from the press. In addition, these events stayed out of public awareness because the people living in the affected village, though terrified (later statements suggest phenomena bordering on collective paranoia), were reluctant to share information about the mysterious events. The suicides were mentioned only twice in the news beyond brief death notices in the local paper, and even these appeared many months apart: in January 1997 during an episode of the talk show Latinica , about depression among war veterans; and, a year later, in the segment A Little About Health on Radio Sljeme’s afternoon show. Both times the cluster of suicides was referred to as a statistical anomaly by psychologist Mario Torjanec, affiliated with the Zagreb Police Academy. In a scholarly article published in 2002 in the journal Društvena istraživanja , psychologist Darija Benci criticizes Torjanec’s determination that this case was one of collective, or mass, suicide. Benci points out that the suicides were asynchronous, and there are no indications of the shared motive usually found in collective suicides, such as the People’s Temple of 1978, when 918 members of an American religious cult died en masse after ingesting cyanide and other poisons.

Of the eight suicide victims, five were males between the ages of 24 and 54 (Mario Brezovec, 1967–1991; Zdravko Tenodi, 1957–1991; Mladen Krajčić, 1949–1991, Imbra Perčić, 1939–1991; Zvonko Horvat, 1937–1991), two were women, one aged 83 (Terezija Kunčec, 1908–1991) and one aged 29 (Milica Horvat, 1962–1991), and one was a boy who was not quite ten (Franjo Klanz, 1981–1991). Six of the suicides were by hanging, one by drowning, and one by slit wrists. Only one farewell note was found, from Zvonko Horvat, suggesting the terminal phase of a serious illness as a possible motive. The other suicides remain unexplained; none of the victims had a history of psychopathological behavior.

In July 2010, this series became the subject of a research project. Dr. Tena Miholjek-Lazanin from the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb and Dr. Dubravka Perković from the Sociology Department of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb began collecting material as part of a ComRem (Community in Retrospective Laymen Explanatory Models) project along with twenty other institutions in Europe. The principal goal was to describe the collective aspects of the mechanisms of memory and how we explain phenomena to ourselves. Miholjek-Lazanin and Perković investigated how the people living in the village had created meaningful ways of explaining these inexplicable occurrences. The suicide cluster was well suited for this project because it had had a significant impact on every member of the community but had not undergone a significant recontextualization through public media, which might have distorted the community’s formation of explanatory patterns. And furthermore, as the researchers noted, this community was, at the time of these strange events, functioning in “remarkable isolation.”

By May 2011, 108 village residents across three generations had been interviewed: 37 third and fourth graders, 28 high school seniors, and 43 persons who had been between the ages of 27 and 35 at the time of the events. Only 5 of the subjects stated that the events had no impact on them, while 72 reported a notable degree of anxiety arising in their closest circle as a result of the suicides. Thirteen of the subjects mentioned “communal terror” in the village, or “collective paranoia,” and 58 spoke of the “confusion” and “odd behavior” of many people in the village, especially after the last two suicides.

There was additional fear stemming from the fact that no one had a sense of when the suicides would stop. One subject said:

To me, it seemed like we were all of us stricken, but nobody knew… nobody had any idea who would be taken by the disease, something would just snap inside and… they’d end it all. When one person took their life, the disease was theirs alone. When four people took their lives, the whole village was afflicted.

As many as thirty-five of the subjects invoked a similar model of infectious disease causing the afflicted person’s mind to unhinge.

Research shows that there were six different ways, according to the subjects, that people in the community explained the suicides. In addition to rational, usually psychological, social, and physiological explanations, most of the subjects included elements of the supernatural. However, they ascribed the beliefs in supernatural causes to elderly residents of the village and generally distanced themselves from these beliefs.

In the subjects’ narratives, the following explanations, which could be considered rational, were recorded by the researchers:

1. As many as eighty-four subjects say that sporadic acute melancholy and depression are characteristic of people living in upper Međimurje. Based on what the subjects say, this could be attributed to two things. First, they believed that depression and suicidal behavior occur more frequently in the areas between two rivers where groundwater pools and that during periods of heavy rain or drought this pooling may have a serious impact on mood. However, global research to date into the epidemiology of suicide has found no substantiation of this. The other possible cause the subjects offered is the fog off the Mura River on autumn and spring mornings, which lingers in the village sometimes through the afternoon during inclement weather. According to some village residents, this can cause behavioral changes.

2. The suicide victims were overcome by depression after workers were laid off from jobs in Slovenia. According to this explanation, the residents of the village feared further layoffs, unemployment, and problems arising from this. At the time, 176 village residents had been employed by Slovenian businesses, and three months before the suicides, twenty had been laid off. However, only one of the victims had been employed by a Slovenian company, and no one knew whether they were likely to be fired. The larger wave of layoffs of Croatian employees from Slovenian firms came later, in 1993, but it’s possible fears had already been sparked by the worsening economic situation in the village.

3. Many of the subjects blame alcoholism for a number of problems, such as serious depression, and problematic behaviors. But none of the victims were described as consuming alcohol in excess.

4. A stranger, or even a village resident, went from one resident to another in secrecy and convinced them to kill themselves, or perhaps killed them and then arranged the scene so that it appeared as if the victims had killed themselves.