Category Archives: Modern History

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.

Vukovar: When a Demon becomes God

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

 

 

The Flower House

Almost all the buildings in the city of Vukovar in Croatia  were completely destroyed. A few were left riddled with bullet holes.

 

I had read about Vukovar years ago in the two books by Michael Ignatieff and Tony Judt that I have referred to in these posts.  I have often thought about that war between brother states. I wanted to see the city. I thought it was important to understand it. It could happen here in Canada or in the United States.

 

Croatia had not been independent in 1,000 years until it declared its independence from Yugoslavia in1991 and then got tangled up in war with Serbia, also a former Republic of Yugoslavia as was Croatia, really a brother state.

 

An early skirmish in the 5 wars of the former Yugoslavia in what became briefly, Serbia, was the fight for Vukovar that was part of Croatia. Serbia, at great cost, temporarily “won” the war and gained control of Croatia, but that did not last long. It is now again part of Croatia. Why all the killing then? What were all those deaths for? Who knows? Maybe God. Not I.

 

Vukovar was once the Hapsburg episcopal seat. It was located directly on the Danube River and we were fortunate to visit it on this trip through the Balkans. As Michael Ignatieff said in his book Blood and Belonging,

 

“In 1991 it became the Croatian Stalingrad. Throughout the autumn, the Croatian national guard defended it to the last street against the heaviest artillery bombardment seen in Europe since 1945.”

 

They fought valiantly but eventually succumbed to the barrage until November 1991 the Yugoslav National Army (‘JNA’) which was dominated by Serbs, together with Serbian paramilitaries “liberated” the town. The “liberation” was much like the liberation of Fallujah in Iraq by coalition forces led by Americans where crumbled and flattened buildings stood behind the fighters as they drove around the city. Liberation, like beauty, is definitely in the eyes of the beholder. When the City of Vukovar was “liberated” by the Serbs there was, as Ignatieff said, “nothing left to liberate but a devastated ruin.”

 

 

C.S. Lewis, who was a wise man, said this about love of country: “We all know now that this love [nationalism] becomes a demon when it becomes a god.” He was referring to Nazism, but really it has much broader application. It can apply to any form of extreme nationalism, no matter where it is found. It can apply to Serbia, or Croatia, or Nazi Germany, or the United States, or Canada. No one is immune.

 

Lewis made another important point about love of country. And this attitude is becoming more and more common in places like the United States and Canada. This is the attitude that our ancestors were uniquely great. Many of us want to take photoshop to history to eliminate the flaws. Lewis realized that “the actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings.” No country is purely good. We must never forget that. If we do forget it, we don’t really love our country; we love a mirage. We love fake news. As well, if we forget this obvious fact, we begin to nurture a debilitating sense of superiority that can shred our own decency. We can become what we hate. Lewis also said, with such an attitude, “If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. This is what happens when a false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.” In particular, we must guard against using this false sense of superiority as an unjustified basis for cruelty or exclusion.

As Bob Dylan, another very wise once said: “You don’t count the dead with god on your side.” That is what we must guard against.

 

In one house, [shown above] which locals referred to as “the flower house,” the holes from bullets and artillery were resplendent. Apparently, the owner had tried to rebuild it but despite repeated efforts to get a building permit and constantly being rebuffed by the local council, he decided to let it be.  All he did was place a large number of flower pots around it, hanging from every window. I guess he was trying to say, ‘Take your permits and shove them.’

Nothing can grow in the Valley of Bones other than hate. And maybe a few potted flowers.

 

Vukovar: The Valley of Bones 

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Hate, History, Mass killings, Modern History, violence, Waterfalls

 

I had been eagerly waiting to see the Croatian city of Vukovar since I signed up for this trip cruising up the Danube. I am sure I was the only one of our 147 passengers who thought that. Others wanted to see Bran Castle, because it was Dracula’s castle. So at least they thought.

The first thing we saw in this town was a museum. Vukovar has several museums, including the Vukovar Municipal Museum, housed in the Baroque Eltz Palace, which covers the city’s long history. This museum is dedicated to preserving the history of this region, even if that history is not always pleasant.

Vukovar Municipal Museum

We had been warned by our cruise director that the history of Vukovar was rough.

On our short stroll through Vukovar, a crucial city in the wars of Yugoslavia, our local guide, Marda, almost apologized for bringing to our attention the history of the massacre that happened here. At the time it occurred in 1991, it was the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War. I thought that history was important, and I was glad she explained, to us, even though very briefly, what had happened. I wanted to understand it, partly because I realized it could happen back home in North America.

Tito the leader of Coca Cola communism, had a dream of brotherhood and unity.  It was brutally shattered after his death as various ethnic groups attacked each other with stunning ferocity. Brotherhood could not hold back the hatred.

Journalists have used the expression “The Valley of Bones” to refer to areas that are strewn with human remains.  They don’t necessarily refer to a specific area. They really mean an area that is desolate or war-torn after a long battle. I am sure some use it to describe the land that was once Yugoslavia.

In 1989, Frank Viviano, a journalist for the New York times referred to a place in Yugoslavia, Croatia to be specific, this way: “…as if all Yugoslavia had once been paved in concrete and were now breaking up. The biblical valley of dry bones, you might imagine, lay somewhere between Knin and Obrovac.” These are 2 towns in Croatia that were important medieval capitals and became important during the Croatian War of Independence.

The New York Times writer was talking about one of the most beautiful places in the world, called Plitvice Lakes where 16 lakes are connected by turquoise blue waterfalls . He said was second only to the Grand Canyon. I am not sure if the Grand Canyon is more beautiful. That place is called Plitvice Lakes and I saw it in 2008. [I must post about that trip.] In any event the expression refers to land that has far too many human bones.  Like the land that used to be called Yugoslavia. The beauty really can’t hide the bones. Or the hate.

 

The wars of Yugoslavia showed the power of hate.  These powers include powers opposed to fellow feeling.  Forces that seek to divide rather than to join, seemed much more powerful than the forces that kept people together, or at least in line.

 

There was a room with a body bag filled hundreds of bones.  At least 21 people.  And there were many body bags. There are many sites with bones.  Many are found in mass graves that were discovered after the war when bones were found in the earth.  When I was in Vukovar I was told by a young Croatian guide Marda, who held no animosity towards Serbians, that a mass grave of about 900 bodies had been found the day after the war with Serbian ended with the defeat of Croatia. And there are many mass graves around the country.  Many of the bodies are badly damaged. Often the skulls were so smashed you could hardly recognize them as humans. Some contained bones of women and children. Those are all valleys of bones.

 

Political extremism is born from a feeling other than fellow feeling. Its parent is that feeling that finds the other repugnant solely for being other. The feeling that we are superior to them. That the others are not even human.

 

Many people were let down when the UN who declared safe zones in the former Yugoslavia failed to make those zones safe.  People under siege gathered to be protected by the UN troops and  laid down their weapons, but  when the Serbs arrived they proceeded to slaughter those people. Or rape them.

 

We must remember that when we leave our affairs to the hard men in our group—there are always men—we will pay a hard price. As someone said, “as long as there are hard men there will be wars.” I wish I knew who to give her credit for those wise words. Einstein was more cynical than that. He said, “As long as there are men, there will be wars.”

 

We must all remember that there will always be men (again usually men, but sometimes women) who will urge us to join groups where we are obligated, to despise the other side. That is a dangerous path which never leads to glory no matter how much some try to persuade us.

That is the attitude that leads to a valley of bones.

 

Ethnic Cleansing in a Fractured Country

Croatia, Hate, Modern History

 

 

 

Meanwhile, of course, the various small armies in Yugoslavia were fighting each other with distilled ferocity. It mattered not that they had been until recently countrymen and women. Now they were at each others’ throats.

 

Between 1991 and 1999 during these wars of Yugoslavia, hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians were killed, raped, or tortured by others who had until recently been their fellow citizens.  Basically, by their neighbours. Imagine if that happened in your home town. As if that was not bad enough, millions were forced out of their homes into unwelcome and appalling exile by the brutal efforts of ethnic cleansing.

 

As bad as ethnic cleansing was, we will never understand it unless we acknowledge that there is some deep perverted logic to it.  As Michael Ignatieff said,

 

“By 1990, this part of Yugoslavia was a Hobbesian world.  No one in these villages could be sure who would protect them.  If they were Serbs and someone attacked them and they went to the Croatian police, would the Croats protect them?  If they were Croats, in a Serbian village, could they be protected against nighttime attack from a Serbian paramilitary team, usually led by a former policeman?  This is how ethnic cleansing began to acquire its logic.  If you can’t trust your neighbors, drive them out.  If you can’t live among them, live only among your own.  This alone appeared to offer people security.  This alone gave them respite from the fear that leaped like a brushfire from house to house.”

 

For the two million people who fled their homes as pitiful refugees such flight was their only believable protection. Consider if that happened in the United States, or Canada. And don’t think that is impossible.

 

There are two common theories about why the fragmentation of Yugoslavia turned so bloody.  Both of them have some truth to them, but neither, in my view is a complete picture of reality.

 

One widely held theory blames the troubles on the assertion that the Balkans are a hopeless mish mash of warring tribes feeding on ancient never forgotten hatreds.  According to this view, Yugoslavia, was always doomed. As Milovan Djilas said in the book Wartime, “It seems as if these feuding peasants could hardly wait for the invasion of their country so they could hunt down and kill one another.”  One often repeated bon mot said that Yugoslavia consisted of 6 republics, 5 nations, 4 languages, 3 religions, and 2 alphabets. Only the charismatic and dictatorial leadership of Tito had held it together and after his demise there was not a shred of hope for the country of Yugoslavia. Like families that explode after the death of a strong-willed parent, so too with Yugoslavia. According to this view, after 1989 the lid on the cauldron of stewing hatreds was lifted and the toxic brew escaped.

Sadly, the international community was not able to do much to help the victims of the aggressors. It imposed an arms embargo that was a pathetic shadow of what it ought to be. As Tony Judt said,

 

“As in the comparable case of the Spanish Civil War, an ostensibly neutral international stance in practice favored the aggressor in a civil conflict: the international arms embargo imposed on the former Yugoslavia did nothing to restrain the Serbs, who could call on the substantial arms industry of  the old Yugoslavia federation, but it severely hampered the Bosnian Muslims in their struggle and goes a long way to account for their substantial military losses between 1992 and 1995.”

 

The “Safe areas” imposed by the UN turned out to be areas that were safe for the Serbs to slaughter Bosnians with impunity. They created a world safe for slaughter. Added to that, as Judt said, “The international presence, far from constraining the Serbs, now offered them additional cover.” And finally and perhaps most egregiously, as Judt pointed out,

 

“Bolstered by this evidence of Western pusillanimity, on July 11th Bosnian Serb forces under Mladic brazenly marched into one of the so-called UN ‘Safe Areas’, the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, by then overflowing with terrified Muslim refugees. Srebrenica, was officially ‘protected’ not just by UN Mandate but by a 400-strong peacekeeping  contingent of armed Dutch soldiers. But when Mladic’s men arrived the Dutch battalion laid down its arms and offered no resistance whatsoever as Serbian troops combed the Muslim community, systematically separating men and boys from the rest. The next day, after Mladic had given his ‘word of honor as an officer’ that the men would not be harmed, his soldiers marched the Muslim males, including boys as young as thirteen, out into the fields around Srebrenica. In the course of the next four days nearly all of them—7,400 were killed. The Dutch soldiers returned home safely to Holland.

Srebrenica was the worst mass murder in Europe since World War II: a war crime on the scale of Oradour, Lidic or Katyn, carried out in full view of international observers.”

 

It was a sorry day for the international order ushered in after the slaughters in Europe during the Second World War as a result of which European countries fatuously promised “never again.” That is another promised that did not have legs. We seem to be living again in an era where the international order is collapsing. I hope the result won’t be the same.

 

Warlords for Dangerous Times

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Fear, Modern History, Pluralism, Polarization, Political Violence, Vigilantism

 

Tony Judt  described what happened in Yugoslavia when the country split up into many tiny pieces after the wars of the 1990s ruled by small men: “These were little more than organized bands of thugs and criminals.” Michael Ignatieff in his wonderful book, Blood and Belonging, said this about what happened when the warlords took over:

 

“Elegant episcopal palaces and monasteries, delicately arcaded squares left behind by the Austro-Hungarians, lie in ruins. Time has slid back five centuries. One of the richest and most civilized parts of Europe has returned to the barbarism of the late Middle Ages. Such law and order as there is, is administered by warlords.”

 

Countries such as Canada and the US, both federations like Yugoslavia, in which people had lived together for many decades, should pay attention. All this could happen here.

 

They were harrowing times. One might have asked what was Ignatieff was  doing there in such dangerous circumstances? He explored it driving through the country and everywhere he saw young men with rifles demanding obeisance or money or both. If you saw the recent film Civil War about what might happen in the US you will know what it looks like, namely,

 

“The ones I began meeting at the checkpoints on the roads leading off from the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity [that joined Zagreb and Belgrade] during Tito’s Yugoslavia and they were short, stubby men who in a former life had been small-time hoods, small-town cops [amazing how similar they can be] or both.  Spend a day with them, touring their world and you’d hardly know that most of them are serial killers.

 

Warlords not only dominate the war zones; they have worked their way to the heart of power in the authoritarian single-party states of Croatia and Serbia alike.

 

War criminals are celebrities in the Balkans. They have seats in the Serbian Parliament… Arkan [-one of these warlord] controls an eight-hundred strong paramilitary unit called the Tigers, who raped and tortured their way through eastern Slavonia in the Croatian war of 1991.  This odious thug, on the run from an Interpol warrant for an attempted murder in Sweden, is a parliamentary deputy and operates a number of immensely profitable sanctions-busting businesses…Ever the post-modern Prince of Darkness.”

 

 

The peculiar thing though was that these warlords, and their followers all claimed to be working for their “country”. That of course, meant the “country” that had broken away from Yugoslavia. These were the reduced nations to which they now claimed to owe allegiance.  As a result, they considered themselves, nationalists. Ignatieff agreed that the force that was driving them was nationalism, but was it? Is that an accurate description? As he said,

 

“The warlords are nationalists, but their convictions are uninteresting.  They are technicians of violence, rather than ideologues.  Earlier than everybody else they had understood that ethnic nationalism had delivered the ordinary people of the Balkans straight back to the pre-political state of nature, where Hobbes predicted, life is nasty, brutish, and short. In the state of nature, the man with a Zastava machine pistol and a Cherokee Chief is king.  For he can provide the two commodities everybody here craves security and vengeance.

 

Once the Yugoslav Communist state began to spin apart into its constituent national particles, the key question soon became:  Will the local Croat policeman protect me if I am a Serb?  Will I keep my job in the soap factory if my new boss is Serb or a Muslim?  The answer to these questions was no, because no state remained to enforce the old inter-ethnic bargain.  As a result, every individual rushed, pell-mell, to the next available source of protection:  the warlord.

 

For the warlord not only offers protection.  He offers a solution.  He tells his people:  If we cannot trust our neighbours, we must rid ourselves of them.  If we cannot live together in a single state, we must create clean states of our own. The logic of ethnic cleansing is not just motivated by national hatred.  Cleansing is warlord’s coldly rational solution to the war of all against all.  Rid yourself of your neighbors, the warlord says, and you no longer have to fear them. Live among your own, and you can live in peace.  With me and my boys to protect you.”

 

It was really a protection racket. Pay up or we will kill you. Pretty blunt demands.  No room for nuance. Pay or die. It was often that simple. And if you belonged to the wrong group, you had no choice. You just died.

 

Of course, this is entirely the wrong approach. In modern societies people are mobile and quickly mover around the world. In each place, people must learn to live together with other people who are different from who you are—we call this pluralism. That is who we much learn to live. Belonging without the blood. Either that or say hello to the warlords.

Peculiar Nationalism: A New World Disorder

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

 

I have already mentioned that the entities that broke out of the disintegrating Yugoslavia were not nations. They were something less than that. Yet, the people in those states were infused with nationalism for their little states.

 

Many outsiders assume that all Balkan peoples are inevitably nationalistic, but that is not true.  Many of them lamented the loss of the old Yugoslavia with its federal state where all ethnic differences were suppressed in favor of the unity of brotherhood. Many of them liked Coca Cola Communism.

 

Too many people around the world thought that the collapse of Communist states would bring a “new world order.”  Remember that quaint expression of George H.W. Bush?  What a foolish expectation!  What we got was a new world disorder. Most of us, around the world,  believed that the fall of communism would lead inevitably to a new order of nation states, hopefully free and democratic, when they were released from what Ignatieff called the “senile grip of Soviets.” Naively people assumed that self-determination meant peace and freedom.  Instead, in Yugoslavia at least, it meant savagery and nation destroying.  As Michael Ignatieff said,

 

“We assumed that national self-determination had to mean freedom and that nationalism meant nation building.  As usual, we were wrong.  We hoped for order.  We got pandemonium. In the name of nationalism, dozens of viable nation-states have been shattered beyond repair.  In the name of state building, we have returned large portions of Europe to the pre-political chaos prior to the emergence of the modern state.

 

Large portions of the former Yugoslavia are now ruled by figures that have not been seen in Europe since late medieval times; the warlords.  They appear wherever nation states disintegrate: in Lebanon, Somalia, northern India, Armenia, Georgia, Ossetia Cambodia, and the former Yugoslavia. With their car phones, faxes, and exquisite personal weaponry, they look postmodern, but the reality is pure medieval…”

 

Of course, since Michael Ignatieff wrote that in 1994 the same thing has happened in many other places around the world and is threatening again to happen in many more. Even countries we long thought of as solemn and steady have shown uncomfortable wobbliness.

We seem headed for dangerous times. No that’s wrong; we are in dangerous times.

Brothers at Each Other’s Throats

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Democracy, Extremism, Fear, Hate, Modern History, Pluralism, Polarization, Populism

 

The problem in the north of Yugoslavia was not so much resurfacing of ancient hatreds, or religious or linguistic differences, as it was economic nationalism. The northerners were producing most of the wealth of the country and felt that much of this wealth was being siphoned off by their poorer southern cousins. They were starting to believe in the north that they would all be better off as independent countries. Sounds a lot like Alberta doesn’t it? Resentment is often fuel of strife.

 

The Communist leader, Tito, had managed to suppress such serious criticisms during his life time, but as soon as he was gone such critiques flourished.

The economy of Yugoslavia had seriously unraveled during the 1980s.  The country moved into hyperinflation.  By 1989 the inflation rate was 1,240 % and rising.  These were conditions in which tensions were incubated into vigorously nasty animosities. As Tony Judt another brilliant historian said, in his book about Europe after the Second World War, “the growing distaste for feckless southerners was ethnically indiscriminate and based not on nationality but on economics.”

 

The ruling centres of former communist enclaves in Belgrade, Serbia, were also spectacularly corrupt. When these led to financial ruin, the people were ready to revolt.  These feelings were intensified by fears that a small group of former Communist apparatchiks coalescing around the brute Slobodan Milošević were planning to make a bid for power in the political vacuum that followed Tito’s death.  That is exactly what happened. He gained power by arousing and manipulating Serb national emotions.  Like Trump decades later, he was a master of that. Many Communist leaders had tried similar tactics in other countries.  As Judt said, “In the era of Gorbachev, with the ideological legitimacy of Communism and its ruling party waning fast, patriotism offered an alternative way of securing a hold on power.” Or as Samuel Johnson said, “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

 

In Yugoslavia however, Milošević and his cronies encouraged nationalist meetings at which the insignia of wartime Chetniks were on public display and this aroused deep disquiet among those groups that had been abused by the Chetniks during the war. The Chetniks were the Serbs who had fought on the side of Hitler during the war, using that opportunity to commit mayhem and destruction. Riding a wave of Serbian nationalism, Milošević was confirmed in power as the President of the Serbian republic in 1989.

Milošević wanted to forge a more unitary Serbian state. No more wimpy federalism. Like so many autocrats before and after him, he used nationalism as an instrument to cement his power. After all, he told his fellow Serbs, we are just taking what is rightly ours.  He could have said, I just want to make Serbia great again.

Naturally the other 4 republics were not so keen on Serbian domination. In Slovenia and Croatia, they saw only one way out from such domination, secession. Unlike other Communist countries where the former powerful Communists had no internal ethnic divisions on which to prey when their political power waned, in Serbia those divisions were exploited for the personal gain of the former Communist power brokers. As Judt said, “The country offered fertile opportunities for demagogues like Milošević, or Franjo Tudjman, his Croat counterpart.”  The problem as Judt saw it was that, “in Yugoslavia, the break-up of the federation into its constituent republics would in every case except Slovenia leave a significant minority or group of minorities stranded in someone else’s country.”  Then when one republic declared itself independent its neighbours quickly fell like dominoes.

 

Milošević was the first Yugoslav politician to break Tito’s ban on the mobilization of ethnic consciousness.’  He liked to portray himself as the defender of Yugoslavia against the secessionist longings of Croatia and Slovenia, and, ominously, as the avenger of old wrongs done to Serbs. He wanted to build a greater Serbia on the ruins of old Yugoslavia, but with Serb domination. Milošević was quite capable of inciting Serb minorities in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Kosovo to rise up and demand Serb protection.  In fact, that was his favoured technique.  The Serbs in these other republics to a large extent merely served as Milošević’s pretext for his expansionary designs.

 

Although most Serbs at the time displayed little nationalistic paranoia, and even less interest in distant Serbs, Milošević transformed their vague memories into rabid fears and paranoia that Serbs spread around the old Yugoslavia were about to be annihilated by the majority in their republics. Milošević, in other words, used these fears to further his demagogic purposes. He used the oldest trick in the playbook of wanna be autocrats–manufactured fear. Trump does it all the time.

 

Milošević did not invent the fears.  They grew up naturally when Yugoslavia disintegrated, as every national group feared they were endangered as a minority in some republic. So, for example, the Serbs, as the largest minority group in Croatia, they felt particularly vulnerable. He did not make up the fears, but he sure knew how to exploit them.

 

In the Slovene election in April of 1990 a government was elected that was still pro-Yugoslavia, but also highly critical of the Serbian government in Belgrade. In the following month of May a new nationalist party under its leader Tudjman came to power in Croatia. In December of that year Milošević seized, without authorization, 50% of the entire drawing rights of the Yugoslav federation in order to pay back pay and bonuses for federal employees. Again economics, as always, was a crucial factor in developments that often wore an ethnic or religious disguise. In January of 1991 the Slovenia government declared independence.   Within a month the Croats did the same thing. Soon the Parliament of Macedonia did the same thing.

 

The hasty recognition of the independent states by Europe, especially, Germany, perhaps were not helpful. When an independent Croatia was formed, political leaders in the Serbian capital of Belgrade began to play on the fears of Serbians with outrageous propaganda on radio and television.  This helped to invoke in the Serbs memories of massacres in World War II and prompted those Serbs to rise up in revolt against their ‘Ustache’ neighbours. The Ustache had been seen as traitors in the Second World War who supported the Nazis and did their best to exterminate the Serbs, so now the Serb minorities feared, a repeat, not entirely without  justification.

The Serb minorities in these states were deeply worried.  Clashes with authorities followed. They called upon Belgrade to help them against their ‘Ustache’ oppressors.

When Serbs were dismissed from their positions in the police force, judiciary, and military, many thought the Croats might be setting the table for another massacre. They believed they might be seeing the return of a an ethnic state with a genocidal past. Croats denied that this was the case, but there were some reasons for this angst. When Serb police were fired, Serbs armed themselves as militia. When the Croats were unable to maintain order, the Yugoslav national army, under the direction of Serbs from Belgrade stepped in at first to restore order, and later to obliterate Croatian independence. As Michael Ignatieff said, , “War was the result of an interacting spiral of Serbian expansionism, Croat independence, and Serbian ethnic paranoia in Croatia.”

 

Even though the Americans claimed to support a democratic and unified Yugoslavia, as Judt said, by then “a ‘democratic and unified Yugoslavia was an oxymoron.’” There really was no room for democracy.  Slovenia and Croatia took active measures to implement their independence by actually unilaterally seceding from the federation.  They enjoyed the tacit support of a number of European leaders.  The Serbs responded by moving the national Yugoslav army to the borders.

Although the Serbs and their army, the Yugoslav National Army bear the primary responsibility for what happened, since they hurled 150,000 shells into Croatia from the surrounding hills, but Croats were not without blame. They dynamited parts of the great city as they left so there would be nothing left for their Serb brothers. These are the type of things you can expect when all sides seem to be represented by their loudest and most extreme voices.

Unfortunately, all around us today this seems to be happening.  We had best be alert.