Category Archives: Croatia

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.

New Nationalism and Barbarism in Vukovar

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

 

Michael Ignatieff visited Vukovar shortly after the Croatian War ended and described it in his wonderful book Blood and Belonging, long before he started wasting his time and his talents on being the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and proved himself hopeless as a politician.

He pointed out that the Yugoslavian Army, then controlled by Serbia, lobbed 150,00 shells into the city. Not that the Croatians were entirely innocent either. The Croats dynamited parts of the city so that when the Serbs took over, they would gain nothing but rubble.

All wars are brutal, but particularly wars between brother nations. Civil Wars or Wars of Secession.  They bring out a particularly nasty hatred that brooks no restraint. Instead, in such wars, the hatred spews out like a fountain—a fountain of blood. That is one of the reasons people should resist the voices of extremists who demand a country breaks up. Separatists in Canada and the United States should remember this.

Ignatieff went on his journeys in order to write a book about what he called the new nationalism. What he found was not very pretty. Particularly in Vukovar, Ignatieff learned a lot about nationalism:

“It was in Vukovar that I began to see how nationalism works as a moral vocabulary. No one is responsible for anything, but the other side.  In the moral universe of pure nationalist delusion, all action is compelled by tragic necessity. Towns must be destroyed in “order to liberate them. Hostages must be shot.  Massacres must be undertaken. Why? Because the other side started it first.  Because the other side are beasts and understand no language but violence and reprisal. And so on.  Everyone in a nationalist war speaks in the language of fate, compulsion, and moral abdication.  Nowhere did this reach such a nadir as in Vukovar.  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 Information Minister who had no information that was not a lie; the mayor of Vukovar, who went around the Vukovar handing out Serbian flags to men whose legs ended at a bandaged stump—not one of these creatures ever expressed the slightest sense of 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.”

The only thing new, about the new nationalism, is that it is even more bloody than the old.

Vukovar: The Croatian Stalingrad

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

 

 

In Vukovar we went on a walk through town led by Marda a local resident. This is one of the buildings we saw filled with bullet holes.

Among other things, she talked about the war in Vukovar that started when Croatia tried to break away from Yugoslavia.  Serbians who dominated Yugoslavia did not want it to leave. Perhaps like Ontario might feel if Quebec or Alberta would leave.  Or how California might feel if Texas tried to secede from the United States. Such ideas are what sparked the American film Civil War a couple of years ago. As the Wendy Ide of the Guardian explained it, “In that film, near-future US has turned its anger against itself; a new civil war is raging.” [1] In that film a president of the United States, who sounded a lot like the current president, was practicing his speech in front of a mirror.  This is what he said, “Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind.” But those brave words were completely removed from reality. And brutal violence followed.  But Vukovar was real. It already happened.

 

What was really appalling about the destruction in Vukovar was that it was necessitated by no military objective.  It was entirely senseless.  As Michael Ignatieff said,

 

“The pulverization of Vukovar made no military sense.  When I asked a Serb tank commander why they had done it, he shrugged his shoulders.  ‘War has many such tragedies… Leningrad… Stalingrad…”  But these were battles with a military objective. In a nationalist war, on the other hand military objectives were driven by a desire to hurt, humiliate, and punish. The JNA (Yugoslav National Army) could have bypassed Vukovar and sent its tank columns down the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity all the way to Zagreb.  Instead, it sat on the other side of the Danube and pounded Vukovar into rubble, as if to say, with each outgoing shell, ‘So you want to be independent, do you?  This is what it will cost you, and what you will have at the end if nothing but ruins.’”

It is hard not to think, as you stand in the shattered graveyards, convents, churches, and homes, that someone derived deep pleasure from all this destruction.  All these ancient walls, all these crucifixes, church towers, ancient slate roofs, were demolished by people whose ideologies ceaselessly repeated that they were fighting to defend the holy and sacred past from desecration. In a way, the artillery expressed the essential nihilism of what people called conviction more honestly than all the nationalist pieties about fighting for the sake of the sacred motherland.

Some uncontrolled adolescent lust was at work here.  The tank and artillery commanders could not have seen what they were hitting. It was all as abstract and as satisfying as playing the machines in video arcade. It didn’t even seem to bother the largely Serb commanders that a significant percentage of the population being bombed, perhaps as many as 20 percent, were ethnic Serbs (maybe as high as 33%). Now many of them lie on the city’s outskirts beneath one of the bare, nameless crosses in a mass grave.”

 

Here is a building that speaks to the violence. It is filled with bullet holes from that conflict. For some reason, the owner chose not to fix it up.

 

They said they wanted to prevent desecration, but how could anyone say that the destruction they inflicted on their own city was anything but desecration?  It reminded me of the American soldier, standing inside a city completely demolished, hardly a building left, thousands killed, many more injured, who said what the coalition forces did in Fallujah was “a great victory”. Calling that a great victory is a great desecration.

 

Vukovar was like that. Almost every building destroyed. The few that remained were pocked with bullet holes and artillery holes, like the one above. And the Flower House that now looks like this:

 

 

The city was defended by 1,800 lightly armed soldiers of the Croatian National Guard together with some civilian volunteers.  They fought against as many as 36,000 JNA soldiers and Serb paramilitaries equipped with heavy armour and artillery. During the battle, shells and rockets were launched into the town at a rate of 12,000 a day. At the time it was the fiercest and most protracted battle seen in Europe since 1945. Sadly, that record was soon exceeded by the siege of Srebrenica during the Bosnia segment of the Yugoslavian Wars. As a result of the 87-day siege of Vukovar it became the first city in Europe to be completely destroyed since the Second World War. 

When Vukovar fell on November 18, 1991, several hundred soldiers and civilians were immediately massacred by the victorious Serbians. There was no reason for the slaughter. They were fellow citizens. The Croatians also discovered a mass grave with more than 900 bodies. More than 3,000 people were killed, and 20,000 civilians had been expelled. This was deep ethnic cleansing of non-Serbians. Of course, many Serbs who lived there were also killed by their fellow Serbs from Serbia. Massacres are rarely neat and tidy.

 

Another interesting phenomenon, considering the extreme bloodiness of the war, was that even though the two sides were often referred to as “Croatian” and “Serbian” or “Yugoslav”, Serbians and Croatians as well as many other of Yugoslavia’s national groups fought on both sides. There was never a pure ethnic division.  What were they fighting for?

After the war, several Serbian leaders were charged with war crimes, including their leader Slobodan Milošević who unfortunately died in prison before the trial concluded. Others survived long enough to be tried and convicted.

Even though Serbia “won” the battle the war exhausted them so completely, that after the war they were unable to continue the war with other belligerents. Not only that but Vukovar only remained in their hands until 1998 when it was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia. Clearly, all those deaths and injuries accomplished nothing!

Many mines were left behind after the fighting died down.  A minefield left as a defence against Serbians.   A million or more mines left in Balkans.  A reminder of war. A deadly reminder that would haunt the area for decades.

Since the end of the war the town has been rebuilt with few scars of war, but the psychic scars remain. The communities to some extent remain deeply divided. The town has also never regained its former prosperity. Destroying a town to save it, is rarely a good policy.

 

As we walked through Vukovar I was surprised to see how much of the city had been completely restored. The buildings were freshly plastered and painted. Most of the bullet holes were covered up. Some buildings however, laid out their wounds for us to see. I wondered why.

Was it stubborn pride to show us how they had suffered? I don’t know but I think it is important for us to see it and recognize it. And try to avoid a repetition of it.

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.

 

Murderous Extremes

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

 

As far back as 1791 the Marquis de Salaberry had described people in the Balkans s as “the unpolished extremities of Europe”.  There is some truth to this.  The countries, it seems to me, were all ruled by extremists.  And when you turn your country over to extremists no one should be surprised when lethal mayhem follows. And many believed it was inevitable that they would bubble over much as they had done in centuries past.  It seemed that this is exactly what happened. Murderous animosities fueled by memories of injustice and vengeance took over a whole nation. In 1992 the American Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said, “Until the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it.” This is the same thing that happened in Gaza and Israel. The extremists led each to war and the ensuing slaughter was as vicious as you would expect.

 

According to the second view the Balkans tragedy was rather the fault of outsiders.  After all, as outlined over the past 2 centuries the Balkans had been fought over, conquered, divided, and exploited by others.  These exploiting countries included Turkey, Italy, France, England, Austria, Germany, and Russia.  They were to blame for creating the bad blood between the peoples.  The problem was not ethnic hostility, but rather imperial manipulation for the benefit of the colonizers at the dire expense of the colonized. The irresponsible interference of foreign countries magnified the local hostilities. According to this view, things like the overly hasty recognition of the independence of Slovenia and Croatia by some European countries such as Germany, led in 1991 to a decade of disaster. This view has the attractive feature of aligning with centuries of dominance and interference by outside countries.

 

While the causes may be muddy, it is clear that a decade of catastrophe followed.  It is important however not to let the local Yugoslavs off the hook. They were far from blameless. As Tony Judt said in his magisterial history of modern Europe, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945,

 

“To be sure there was a lot of history buried in the mountains of the former Yugoslavia, and many bad memories too.  And outsiders did indeed contribute crucially to the country’s tragedy, though mostly through irresponsible acquiescence in local crimes.  But the break-up of Yugoslavia—resembling in this respect the dismantling of other former Communist states—was the work of men, not fate.  And the overwhelming responsibility for Yugoslavia’s tragedy lay not in Bonn or any other foreign capital, but the with the politicians in Belgrade.[Serbia]”

 

The key is to control the extremists. Don’t give in to them.  Once more that is what countries like Canada and the US must do. That is what Israel failed to do. Don’t give in to the loudest voices. Give in, if you must, to the dull boring middle, if you want to improve your chances. That’s really what pluralism and liberalism are all about.

 

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.