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.