Category Archives: Extremism

Yugoslavia: No Stranger to Extremism

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Extremism, Hate, History, Serbia

 

Those who are still with me on this journey will be happy to know we are nearing the end. Only one country left to go and I have been talking too long about Yugoslavia. I am almost done. I have taken so long because I think Yugoslavia and the countries that emerged when it broke up are so important.  And all of the problems, I believe, relate to one very important issue. That is an issue that is get increasingly important in the modern world, including, of course, Canada and the United States. That is the rise in extremism.

 

By now it is obvious that extremism was rampant in Yugoslavia when it splintered in the early 1990s.  As a result, I think Yugoslavia is a country to which more of us in the west should pay attention.  Why is that? Because it can be a lesson to us all. Perhaps, we can learn enough to avoid their painful mistakes. The key lesson is, that it is incredibly dangerous to turn our country over to the extremists in our midst.

 

In Yugoslavia, people of various ethnicities lived together in relative peace for many decades. And peace is like health, if you take it for granted you are not appreciating it properly. It is too easy to forget how vital peace is to the good life. Canadians and Americans both take them for granted, at our peril.

 

In Yugoslavia after their charismatic leader, Tito, died, literally all hell broke loose. The dogs of war were running free and wild after he died. As soon as Tito died, the country became polarized all over again.  People moved to the extremes. The centre was hollowed out. People began to see other people who had different political or religious viewpoints from them, as enemies, rather than opponents. And this happened quite suddenly. From neighbours to enemies in 60 seconds. People could no longer live together with their foes. Some wanted to live separate and apart. Friendship turned to hatred. And the hate curdled and turned to violence.

 

In Canada, I shuddered when I first saw the Truckers’ Convoy that got international coverage carrying signs on their trucks that said, “F**ck Trudeau.”  I saw the same signs in Ottawa, and Steinbach. Trudeau was very popular, until he wasn’t and with amazing speed he  was hated when many Canadians considered him their enemy. It seemed like there was no room in the country for calm reasoning, or a middle ground. The extremist voices were the loudest. Some Albertans wanted to separate from Canada. Some still do. If these voices win the day, what makes us think that the violence that happened in Yugoslavia won’t happen here too. Albertans think they can no longer live with people in Quebec. Many in Quebec have felt that way for decades. What went wrong? Why do so many of us turn towards the loudest voices? Why are so many of us so quiet? Why do so many of us hate the other side? Even our leaders seem to turn to the extremes. Our Member of Parliament in Steinbach offered coffee and treats for the Truckers’ Convoy when it passed nearby. He found time for them, but never found time for the Pride Parade. He clearly admired the extremists. The LGBTQ* community not so much. This was during the time of Covid-19 when we were all on edge. Many hated Covid restrictions. Many of the truckers thought that freedom meant they could do whatever they wanted. They wanted a country without rules or regulations.

 

We in Canada, and even more in the US, are deeply polarized. Yugoslavia can show us what can happen in such circumstances. It is not pretty.

 

Eric Hobsbawn, another brilliant British historian, wrote about extremists in his series of history books on Europe. He pointed out how

 

“in the period from 1880 to 1914 nationalism took a dramatic leap forward, and its ideological and political content was transformed.  It’s very vocabulary indicates the significance of these years. For the word ‘nationalism’ itself first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century to describe groups of right-wing ideologists in France and Italy, keen to brandish the national flag against foreigners, liberals, and socialists, and in favor of aggressive expansions of their own state which was to become so characteristic of such movements. This was also the period when the song ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ (“Germany above all others) replaced rival compositions to become the actual national anthem of Germany. [Sort of like America First] Though it originally described only a right-wing version of the phenomenon, the word ‘nationalism’ proved to be more convenient than the clumsy ‘principle of nationality’ which had been part of the vocabulary of European politics since about 1830. And so it came to be used for all movements to which the ‘national cause’ was paramount in politics: that is to say for all demanding the right to self-determination, i.e. in the last analysis to form an independent state, for some nationally defined group.”

 

Love of country can be a beautiful thing. Who after all does not love her country? But when it turns to hating the other country, the rival,  it can turn powerfully ugly. This is what all nationalists must guard against, whether they are Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump.  As Hobsbawn wrote,

 

“The basis of ‘nationalism’ of all kinds was the same: the readiness of people to identify themselves as emotionally with ‘their’ nation and to be politically mobilized as Czechs, Germans, Italians, or whatever, a readiness which could be politically exploited. The democratization of politics, and especially elections, provided ample opportunities for mobilizing them. When states did so they called it ‘patriotism’, and the essence of the original ‘right-wing’ nationalism, which emerged in already established nation-states, was to claim a monopoly of patriotism for the extreme political right, and thereby brand everyone else as some sort of traitor. This was a new phenomenon, for during most of the nineteenth century nationalism had been rather identified with liberal and radical movements and with traditions of the French Revolution.”

And extremism and nationalism go together like rum and coke, but they don’t taste as sweet.

Throughout the Balkans, after World War II this became a big problem. Whether in Romania, Bulgaria, Bulgaria, Serbia, or Croatia, this became a big problem. It is becoming a big problem in the United States today.  Canada seems to be following its big brother into troubled waters. Hitler exploited it. Now Trump is exploiting it. Poilievre would like to exploit it. That’s how the world turns.  But we must be careful.  Look at Yugoslavia to see what could easily happen.

 

Has the newest American Civil War started?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Death of Democracy, Decline of the west, Extremism, Hate, Pluralism, Polarization

 

 

Ignatieff pointed out when he first published Blood and Belonging in 1993 that federal states were all having trouble remaining unified.  He mentioned of course, Yugoslavia which was in the act of breaking up violently.  It actually had 5 Civil Wars in quick succession. All of them violent. But he also mentioned Canada which was facing strong chances of breaking up with the rise of Quebec nationalism. He also mentioned that most other federal states, such as India, Belgium and the former USSR were also facing challenges to thier  federal system.

 

Of course, since then things have got worse. Canada is now facing a threat to its union by Alberta in addition to Quebec. More importantly, the United States which is also a federal state but was not on his list of trouble federal states is now clearly in that camp as many of its so-called red states and blue-states seem to find living together increasingly difficult. Federalism is a political system designed to permit people to live together even though they have some pretty big differences without breaking up.  Such a system did not allow Yugoslavia to stay together. I would add another factor that is challenging federal states, and this is the rise of polarization. Polarization is clearly affecting federal states by driving its elements apart.

 

One of the regular political commentators I read, even though I often disagree with him, is Thomas Friedman, who has won 3 Pulitzer prizes.  That is pretty outstanding for a journalist. I read an article by him this week in the New York Times  in which he said this about his country, “in my view, we are in a new civil war over a place called home.” He thinks the United States is already in the midst of Civil War!   Last year I watched a film called Civil War, about an imagined Civil War in the United States. It was horrifying. Is that what the US is facing?  Even if it is not that kind of a break-up we have to ask, ‘What is happening to the United States?’

It’s horrifying about sums it up.

Nationalism and Pluralism

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate, Moral Humility, Pluralism, Polarization, Serbia

 

I think we all know what nationalism is. It has been with us much longer than pluralism. Unfortunately, nationalism is also much more common than pluralism.

 

Nationalism is usually considered an ideology which emphasizes loyalty to a particular nation. It can be a force for good. Often it is a force for bad. It often promotes devotion to one’s own country above all.  The lates strong iteration of it, is the MAGA movement in the US. Make America great again. Or for those who already think it is a great, make it greater.  America First would be a more important principle for American nationalists. When it leads to feelings of superiority it has usually gone too far. A strong love of one’s own country is a natural feeling and unobjectionable.  But feelings of superiority are often unjustified and not very productive.

 

Pluralism is the recognition and affirmation of diversity within a society, where different groups, interests, and beliefs coexist and interact peacefully. It sees strength in diversity which all can benefit from. It not only tolerates diverse views, and even peoples, it celebrates in diversity. Respect of other cultures is essential to the philosophy of pluralism.  Feelings of superiority are an anathema. Nationalism can be a fierce opponent of pluralism. In such a case, in my view, nationalism has gone too far. Pluralism is incompatible with extremism. You can one but not both. Pluralism is born out humility.

 

The struggle between nationalism and pluralism is often fraught. For example, recent examples close to home, are the relationship between Quebec and its separatists, who want to form the independent, or sovereign nation, as they like to call it, of Quebec. In Canada, Alberta is the latest example of where feelings are tending towards separation. How far those feelings will lead that province are not known.

 

In Yugoslavia feelings of pluralism were swamped by nationalism, except in those states where a yearning for separation by smaller groups  prevailed. After their leader Tito died, many Croats wanted to have Croatia secede from Yugoslavia. At the same time, Serbians within Croatia did not want to secede because they felt they would become a minority in the new country, when they had been a majority in power in Yugoslavia. As well, some Slovenians wanted to secede from Yugoslavia, and that was opposed by the Croats within as well as Serbians.

 

The struggle for separate national states often leads to serious political problems. It can, and has, frequently led to serious conflict. Around the world people have come to favor nationalism at the expense of pluralism. That is usually a serious mistake. In the former Yugoslavia after the death of Tito, clearly nationalism had the floor. Pluralism seemed dead. Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, all wanted to be sovereign states even if violence was the only way to achieve it.

 

There was no credible force for pluralism.  I often quote William Butler Yeats who described this phenomena well: The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” Serbia claimed to be the leader for unity of the states, but all the others lacked confidence that its claims were not based solely on its interest in dominating the other states. No one argued for all for one and one for all that is the precondition pluralism requires.

Pluralism was dead; war of all against all commenced. And the people suffered.

Who was to blame for the tragedy of Yugoslavia?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate, Pluralism

 

It is not hard to find people in the Balkans worthy of blame for the mess of the Yugoslav wars. It is much more difficult to find the blameless. As Tony Judt said, “There was certainly enough responsibility to go around.” The UN at first showed little concern about what was happening in Yugoslavia.

 

The UN Secretary-General at the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali dismissed Bosnia as “a rich man’s war.”  When the UN finally arrived, it spent most of its time blocking the victims from defending themselves while the brutal aggressors were given a free hand to practice their lethal butchery. France not only was very reluctant to get involved, but also reluctant to even blame Serbia. Frequently it chose to blame the victims instead. It also took the Americans an awful long time to get engaged, but when they did it led the way against Milošević and his thugs. Their initiatives finally drove the allies towards intervention. Yet the US also dragged its feet while innocents were being slaughtered, because after Somalia in particular it was loath to take any risks at all, even though it had the most powerful armed forces in the world, because it felt, as James Baker the former Secretary of State had crudely said, “we’ve got no dog in this fight.”

 

The whole problem of humanitarian intervention in domestic wars or aggressions is truly, as another American Secretary of State, Warren Christopher had said, is “a problem from hell.”  Samantha Power wrote a brilliant book with that title. And in hell there are no easy solutions.  That does not mean we are justified on that basis alone from not doing what we can do to save innocent lives. It just means that the job will be enormously difficult and we must be ready for the task, or stay home and permit the exploitation of innocents. We must proceed with humility, but that is no excuse for inaction. After all the case for humanitarian intervention is always at best, an uneasy one. We must have a great deal of confidence to send our young soldiers into harm’s way in order to set the world right. It takes inordinate hubris, outright foolishness, or, perhaps, profound compassion.

 

The Yugoslavs themselves are also not without blame. As Tony Judt said, “no one emerges with honour.”  The Serbs held primary responsibility for the disaster, but the Croats and Slovenes were by no means lily white. Bosnian Muslims had minimal opportunities to commit atrocities so they at least committed few war crimes. They might have if they had claws. It is not clear what they would have done had they enjoyed more opportunities to wreak havoc too. They were largely on the receiving end.  And as Paul Thorne the American singer/song said so wisely, “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.”

 

The losses of lives and homes were staggering.  The losses of civilization were appalling. For example, Sarajevo, one of the most beautiful, most cosmopolitan, and most civilized cities in Europe was left in ruins.  As Judt said, “it can be rebuilt but it can never recover.” The same happened to Vukovar and others.

The Croats were responsible for innumerable acts of violence against civilians.  This was directed by their political leaders in Zagreb. For example, in Mostar, a city that I visited that first time I was in this region,  a town in western Bosnia with an unusually high percentage of interfaith marriages, Croat extremists deliberately set about expelling Muslims and mixed families from the western half of the city and replaced them with Croat peasants. They paid back the ethnic cleansers by engaging in it as well. Then they set siege to the eastern districts of Mostar and in 1993 systematically destroyed the sixteenth century Ottoman bridge across the Neretva river even though it had been a symbol of the town’s integrated and ecumenical past.  It would have been like the fascists destroying the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.

In fact, as Judt said,

“The Croats then, had little to boast of—and of all the post-Communist leaders who emerged from the rubble, Franjo Tudjman was one of the more egregiously unattractive.  More than anyone else he made it a personal project to erase the Yugoslav past from his fellow citizen’s memory:  by March 1993 the very word ‘Yugoslavia’ had been removed from textbooks, readers, encyclopedias, book titles and maps published in the new Croatia.”

 

Needless to say, this did not help bring unity or pluralism. Only after he died did Croatia attain semblances of the old civilization. However, as Judt concluded,

“But in the end the primary responsibility for the Yugoslav catastrophe must rest with the Serbs and their elected leader Slobodan Milošević.  It was Milošević whose bid for power drove the other republics to leave.  It was Milošević who then encouraged his fellow Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to carve out territorial enclaves and who backed them with his army.  And it was Milošević who authorized and directed the sustained assault on Yugoslavia’s Albanian population that led to the war in Kosovo.

Belgrade’s actions were a disaster for Serbs everywhere.  They lost their land in the Krajina region of Croatia; they were forced to accept an independent Bosnia and abandon plans to carve out from it a sovereign Serb state; they were defeated in Kosovo, from which most of the Serb population has since fled in justified fear of Albanian retribution; and in the rump state of Yugoslavia (from which even Montenegro has sought to secede) their standard of living has fallen to historic lows. This course of events has further exacerbated a longstanding Serb propensity for collective self-pity at the injustice of history and it is true that in the long run the Serbs may be the greatest losers in the Yugoslav wars.  It says something about the condition of their country that today even Bulgaria and Romania rank above Serbia in present living standards and future prospects.

But this irony should not blind us to Serb responsibility.  The appalling ferocity and sadism of the Croat and Bosnian wars—the serial abuse, degradation, torture and rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens—was the work of Serb men, most young, aroused to paroxysm of casual hatred and indifference to suffering by propaganda and leadership from local chieftains whose ultimate direction and power came from Belgrade.  What followed was no so unusual: it had happened in Europe just a few decades before, when—all across the continent and under the warrant of war—ordinary people committed quite extraordinary crimes.

There is no doubt that in Bosnia especially there was a history upon which Serb propaganda could call—a history of past suffering that lay buried just beneath the misleadingly placid surface of post-war Yugoslav life.  But the decision to arouse that memory, to manipulate and exploit it for political ends, was made by men: one man in particular.  As Slobodan Milošević disingenuously conceded to a journalist during the Dayton talks, he never expected the wars in his country to last so long.  That is doubtless true.  But those wars did not just break out form spontaneous ethnic combustion.  Yugoslavia did not fall: it was pushed.  It did not die: it was killed.”

 

 

And primarily blame fell at the initiative of the Serbs led by Slobodan Milošević who took advantage of deeply burning resentments. Resentment is rarely a good motive for anything, as Friedrich Nietzsche showed us.

I would merely add, that it was the people of Serbia who voluntarily turned their country over to extremists who were also at fault as well. When extremists take over, it is not just their fault. The people should not let that happen, at least if they have a choice. Just as the people don’t get off in Gaza, or Israel, or the United States, or Canada.

The history of the Balkans is not over.    Yet it appears, that Serbia has at least temporarily lost its teeth.  We will have to watch with interest what happens.  Hopefully it will be peaceful.  History however, would suggest otherwise. History would suggest that violence will return and domination from some power, perhaps foreign will prevail.

Hopefully history will not repeat itself. Again. But sadly, those old resentments can always flair up again, as Ukraine and so many other countries have discovered.

Krajina: A Village War

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Serbia

I was sitting on the top of our river boat, in great comfort, probably with a drink in hand, when I saw this on the Danube River and it made me think of Krajina and the battle for Vukovar. I was very lucky.  Others were not.

Michael Ignatieff described a battle he witnessed near Krajina, where he said, “Everywhere in Krajina, the democracy of violence rules.” The Serbs who lived there wanted Vukovar to be part of their country. The Croats resists.

 

The war was everywhere and everyone was involved. This was an inclusive war. DEI not necessary. It was a village war, where people who lived together fought a brutal war against their former neighbours with whom they not so long ago shared drinks. Now they shared blows, bullets, and brutality instead. The front line sometimes ran right through two backyard gardens.  As he said, “This is a war where enemies went to school together, worked in the same haulage company, and now talk on the CB every night laughing, taunting, telling jokes. Then they hang up and try to line each other up in their gunsights.”

 

 

The battle for Vukovar was battle for Yugoslavia. It was battle of an idea.  What would happen after fall of Tito?  Serbians were the largest group. Could they rule the country? Somehow, pluralist options like living together were not available. Why?

 

Yugoslavia was a complex society.  A complex of several states or societies.  What was at issue in Yugoslavia was the fairness of the deal that everyone got within the federation.  Unfair states will not hold. After 1945 Yugoslavia would probably not have been re-constituted were it not for the Communist Party.  They were the only ones who developed significance during war and seized power after the war.

 

Later, the greatest discovery of Milošević was that Tito had died. It opened the door for a top predator like him.  By 1991 a large Serbian army gathered at Vukovar and serious shelling began.  Many people fled Vukovar.  Patriots stayed behind to defend the city in a hopeless cause.

 

 

The war for Vukovar has been called “a holocaust of betrayal”.  People turned against neighbours. War fronts divided neighbourhoods.  A new word entered the English language “Srebrenica.”  And a new expression, “ethnic cleansing.”

 

After the war it was very hard to live in town.  Someone pointed out, “Every day one meets people who were butchers.” I remember listening to a CBC radio program about how the women faced men who had raped them and there were no consequences for those men.  The men continued to be respected. The women not so much. Of course, the consequences for the women were permanent. How can people live there?  They forget, that’s how.  Or at least they try. As best they can.

 

 

After the war, Serbia declared the city of Vukovar  part of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina and in fact its eastern headquarters. This until then was part of the newly formed country of Croatia, which it defied, and where many Serbians in Croatia lived. The Republic was an unrecognized geopolitical entity but rather a self-proclaimed state that created many problems for Croatia. It was active during the Croatian War of Independence fought between Croatia and Serbia, from 1991 to 1995 when Serbs tried to get their independence from the Croats as the Croats had tried to get their independence from Serbia. A Serbian state in Croatia was never recognized internationally and eventually was part of Croatia, but only after many soldiers died in fruitless war. In the end, after all the incredible destruction and desolation, this little piece of land was given back to Croatia. There was only one question left: what was it all about?

 

After the war for Vukovar was over, and Serbia had “won,” again, if it can be called that, the Serbians placed a banner over one of the streets in the crushed city. Almost every building was ruined. Ignatieff described the scene this way,

 

In the town square, a banner had been stretched over the road from one pulverized house to another. It reads: “Welcome to Vukovar, Year One.”  But eighteen months after entering the town, the Serbs have done nothing to rebuild it. It should be left as it is. UNESCO could fence it off and declare it a European heritage site. What could be more European, after all, than our tradition of senseless nationalist warfare?

 

Is this different than the current war between Ukraine and Russia. We think Russia is clearly the aggressor.

 

In the evening back on the boat, we had a great happy hour with old friends and new friends. We forgot about war. We could do that. Ukrainians find that difficult now. They are not so lucky. Neither were the people of Vukovar.

 

Vukovar: Hell is Empty; The devils are all Here

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate, Modern History

 

When I went on our guided walk through a part of Vukovar, I realized I was wearing a Belgrade, Serbia, baseball cap, which my sister-in-law bought me as a souvenir.   I asked our guide, Marda if that bothered her. I had been thoughtless to wear it. Marda said it was not a problem. It happened before my time. She was really too young. It was 30 years ago. To me a short time ago. To her a lifetime ago.  I was happy that she held no resentments against the Serbs.  If there is anything the wars of Serbia teach us it is, as Nietzsche pointed out, resentment is a sterile feeling that helps no one.

 

Places like Vukovar make clear the language of nationalism.  It turns the world into one of black and white. Us against Them.  The Good against the Bad.  Dostoevsky said that ‘if God is dead then all is permitted.’  Though profound I believe that he did not quite get it right. Rather I would say that if you reduce the other to an object, to an it, then all is permitted. Then it is not just possible, but honorable, to destroy towns in order to free them. Like Vukovar had been completely destroyed. Then it is possible to make rape an instrument of warfare.  Rape as national policy.  Then there is nothing wrong with shooting hostages. Or your neighbours.  Then heroes commit mass murders. It does not matter if young boys are included. All is permitted in the holy cause.  All is permitted when the other side is reduced to things.  They are no longer people.  They are objects of our wrath. It has nothing to do with the death of God.  All is permitted when the world is transformed into a world of Us against Them.

In such a world, as Ignatieff said, in his book Blood and Belonging,

 

“It was in Vukovar that I began to see how nationalism works as a moral vocabulary of self-exoneration. No one is responsible for anything but the other side… The pistol toting hoodlums, holed up in the ruins of the Hotel Dunav, who came out and threatened to kill my translator simply because he was Hungarian; the Krajinan Minster who had no information that was not a lie; the mayor of Vukovar, who went around the Vukovar hospital handing out Serbian flags to men whose legs ended at a bandaged stump—not one of these creatures ever expressed the slightest shame, regret, or puzzlement that the insensate prosecution of their cause had led to the ruination of their own city.  For all of them, the responsibility was solely Croat.

That is what happens in the world of Us v Them.  Bob Dylan put it well when he said, “you don’t count the dead with God on your side.” Or as our guide for the day, Marda said, “We’ve been to hell and back.”

 

When fighting subsided in Croatia a 14,000-person UN force was installed to keep Croats and Serbs apart. Croats had obtained an independent State and Milošević suffered the second of his string of ignominious defeats. Defeats that never gave him pause to consider the wisdom, or lack thereof, of his approach. Brutes like him rarely seem to reflect on their lives. At least I have seen few records of such reflections. That’s too bad. They might be able to offer some insights.

Shakespeare wrote, “Hell is Empty, the devils are all here. After walking through Vukovar I think I think I know what he meant.

 

The Water Tower: A Symbol of Resistance

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Extremism, Hate, Modern History, Polarization, Political Violence

Our guide Marda led us on a fascinating walk through the town of Vukovar in Croatia. This town in 1991 was at the time the sight of the largest siege since the Second World War. Frankly, I expected to see more war-ravaged buildings, but most of them had been cleaned up. I don’t blame them for cleaning it up. Nobody wants to walk through devastation permanently (except me). And it has been more than 30 years since the war ended.

 

The first building we saw, from a distance, was the water tower which had become the symbol of the resistance of brave Croatians to the 3-month Serbian siege. The Croatians see it as symbol of their glorious resistance, defiance, and, they think, invincibility.  I consider such ideas hubris. After the war, it was one of the very few buildings (some say only one) left standing.  And that was truly remarkable since it had been subjected to barrage from the 1st day of the siege to the last, 87 days later.

There are images of the tower that can be purchased in gift shops for tourists. Souvenirs of the war. Go figure.

The Water Tower as a symbol of the defence of Vukovar was officially adopted on 30 October 2020, and is illuminated in the colours of the Croatian flag, with the lyrics of the Croatian anthem.

From day 1 of the siege , each and every day of the siege, the Serbians tried to demolish the tower with gunfire, and amazingly, if not miraculously as the locals think, it stood. It was hit with bullets but never collapsed. In fact, it was hit 640 times in 87 days. The people of the town took its durability as a message of their own durability and that of their town. They thought, that as long as the tower was there the Town would stand.

 

There is another amazing element to this story. Each day 2 young men, Ivica Ivanika and his friend Hrvoje Džalto took it upon themselves, to climb to the top of the tower,  at night in the dark without flashlights, to avoid getting shot. They climbed up the tower in order place  a new undamaged and sacred flag of Croatia to replace the one filled with Serbian bullet holes. The two men were scared every time they climbed up, thinking they might be shot. But every night they succeeded. It took about an hour and half to climb up and back down again, but they did it every day, religiously.

 

The stairs were not in perfect condition.  Entire rows of stairs were missing. No one had asked them to do this. They just did it. Sometimes they climbed in the middle of fierce fighting. They usually started around midnight. And every day the Serbs shot the flag down, and every night the two young men replaced the destroyed flag. Soldiers said that everyday their spirits were boosted as a result.

 

Unfortunately, Ivica Ivanika lost his life shortly before the town fell to the Serbs. After the fall of the city, Hrvoje Džalto was taken prisoner and much later exchanged, but he died before the opening of the renovated Tower. They are the heroes of the town.

 

Today, the tower has been converted into a museum with a restaurant. Traces of the war are still evident. And they are leaving those marks as a reminder. I appreciated that.

 

I think it is important to remember what happened there. It was a place where brothers turned murderous.

 

Sadly that can happen. It can happen anywhere. That is what we must remember.

The Brutes of War

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Authoritarianism, Croatia, Extremism

 

Serbs were often painted as brutes. But as usual the story is more complicated than that. Name calling is just another example of polarization. Rarely, do simple stories tell the whole story.

 

“In Yugoslavia, they [Serbs] were a protected constitutional nation. In independent Croatia, they were reduced to a national minority in a state with a genocidal past. Without a state of their own, the Serbs repeat over and over, they face extermination again. The Serbian war in Bosnia is designed to give them such a state by providing a unified corridor from Serbia proper, connecting up the Serbian lands in western, central, and southern Croatia. Without such a corridor, the Central Serbs know they will not survive, and until such a corridor is secure they live from day to day in a state of armed paranoia.”

 

Serbians always thought they were getting a bad rap from others. They did what every other country does, they claimed, and they were punished for it. They felt they have been scapegoats and misidentified. They felt they were not worse than any other country and yet the world castigated them as brutes and war criminals, while letting their enemies go free. Life really was more nuanced than that.

 

Yet life was in shambles after the war. It was chaos. Disorder on steroids. Or maybe cocaine.  Rule of law was now a chimera, or even less.

 

Michael Ignatieff put it this way:

 

The war zones of eastern Slavonia, and Vukovar in particular leave behind an unforgettable impression of historical retrogression. Graveyards where Jews and Ruthenes, German, Croats, and Serbs once were buried together now lie desecrated by bombs of both sides. …There is little gasoline, so the villages have returned to the era before the motorcar.  Everyone goes about on foot. Old peasant women forage for fuel in the woods, because there is no heating oil. Food is scarce, because the men are too busy fighting to tend the field. In the desolate wastes in front of the bombed-out-high rise flats, survivors dig at the ground with hoes. Everyman goes armed. No one ventures beyond the village. No one trusts anyone they have not known all their lives. Late twentieth-century nationalism has delivered part of the European continent back to the time before nation-state, to the chaos of late feudal civil war.

A week spent in Servian Krajina is a week spent inside a nationalist paranoia so total that when you finally cross the last Serbian checkpoint and turn on the radio, and find an aria from Puccini playing, and look out of your window and see wet fields in the rain, you find yourself uncoiling like a tightly wound spring absurdly surprised to discover that a world of innocent beauty still exists.”

 

 

Then guess what happened after the bloody war, with the corpses, mutilated bodies, raped women, and shell-shocked soldiers?  The land so bitterly fought over is given back to Croatia in the peace treaty! What was it all for? Absolutely nothing of course.

 

In his travels in Serbia after the war, Ignatieff was struck by the Serbians whining about unfair treatment from the west. This was a persistent and relentless theme. At first when they saw he was a writer they refused to talk. They always refused to talk. As they say,

 

“This, I learn, is part of the ritual style of Serbian nationalism itself.  The dance has its opening  quadrille: we won’t talk, the West never understands; we despise you; you tell nothing but lies; then they start talking and never stop.  Ask anybody a simple question and you get that telltale phrase: ‘You have to understand our history…” Twenty minutes later and you are still hearing about King Lazar, the Turks, and the Battle of Kosovo. This deep conviction that no one understands them, coupled with the fervent, unstoppable desire to explain and justify themselves, seemed to define the style of every conversation I had in Belgrade.”

 

The stories go back hundreds of years. That repeated itself over and over again in Serbia:

 

“…the same rituals repeat themselves. People violently and vehemently refuse to talk, only to start into a stream of Serbian self-justification that begins with their immemorial struggle against the Turks [hundreds of years ago] and concludes with their defense of Serbian Bosnia against the Muslim fundamentalists [in the 1990s]. Along the way, the invective sweeps up anti-Serbian crimes of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Tito into rhetorical flow as muddy as a spring torrent.”

 

No one owns up to what they have done. The reckless slaughter and supporting demagogues. No someone else is always at fault in post war Serbia. After all someone must have brought the deluge upon their heads. It can’t be them or their heroes.  As Ignatieff said, after the Serbs had to line up at stores and banks because they were suffering under inflation of 200 per cent per month. Many of the complainers were weary pensioners and other hapless souls who picked the losing side in the war. Not that there were any winning sides of course.

 

Ignatieff described the case this way:

 

You might have thought such queues would be full of anti- Slobodan Milošević [leader of Serbia] grumbling. Belgrade however, after all, never voted for him and has always resented its demotion from a world capital of the non-aligned movement, as it was under Tito, to an isolated, embargoed, Balkan provincial capital. Yet again, all the anger that might be directed at the West—at Churchill, at Mrs. Thatcher for having supported the Croats, at the Americans for aiding the Bosnian Muslims, and so on.

 

The populist dictators always manage to deflect blame from themselves to others, no matter how richly they deserve it. All of them from Hitler to Trump have learned this trick well. And their loyal followers are always eager to blame the scapegoat instead of the real villain. Scapegoats such as immigrants.  Or Nazis. Or the neighbour next door. Scapegoats are always the authoritarians best friend.