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.