Category Archives: Travel

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.

 

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.

 

Blood and Belonging

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

 

This is now a quiet business street. Not long ago, it was hell on earth. It has been completely rebuilt.

The Balkans is one of the most interesting areas on the globe.  Michael Ignatieff wrote a series of excellent books that focuses a lot of attention the region, and were supplemented by some documentary films. Michael Ignatieff was a much better writer and thinker than he was a political leader. As he said in one of the series of books I mentioned, Blood and Belonging,

 

“…huge sections of the world’s population have won the ‘right-of-self-determination’ on the cruelest possible terms:  they have been simply left to fend for themselves.  Not surprisingly their nation states are collapsing… In critical zones of the world, once heavily policed by empire—notably the Balkans—populations find themselves without an imperial arbiter to appeal to.  Small wonder then, that, unrestrained by stronger hands, they have set upon each other for that final settling of scores so long deferred by the presence of empire.”

 

It is not good enough to blame the melee on the assertion that this area of the world was filled with sub-rational intractable fanatics.  Though it was more than its fair share of those. We have to think more deeply than that.  We have to ask why people who had lived together for decades were transformed from neighbours into enemies?  That was the crucial question that has to be answered.

 

It was that great British philosopher Thomas Hobbes who wrote about the war of all against all that occurs in the state of nature (when there is no state) and requires the creation of a state to protect all and to provide a platform for morality when all give up the means of violence in favor of the sovereign. As Ignatieff said,

 

“Thomas Hobbes would have understood Yugoslavia.  What Hobbes would say, having lived through religious civil war himself, is that when people are sufficiently afraid, they will do anything. There is one type of fear more devastating in its impact than any other: the systemic fear that arises when a state begins to collapse.  Ethnic hatred is the result of terror that arises when legitimate authority disintegrates.“

 

This was the basis of the film Civil War shown a couple of years ago, speculating what might happen in the United States if their state broke down. Not at all an impossibility. It was brutal.

 

Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, with his brand of Coca Cola Communism,  had realized that the unification of each of the 6 major Slav peoples required a strong federal state to keep it together.  Like Canada.  Who knows what would happen in Canada if the state collapsed as it did in Yugoslavia? If later any group wanted to secede it would have to deal with the minorities within in its own territory. After all, people don’t live in neatly separated enclaves.  In the case of Yugoslavia, in too many cases, this led to the forcible expulsion of whole populations.  They called it ethnic cleansing, an expression now known around the world, thanks to Yugoslavia. Remember that as much as 25% of both Croat and Serb populations have always lived outside the borders of their own republics.

 

The big mistake that Tito and the Communists had made was to fail to provide for divorce or succession. They failed to provide for the eventual emergence of civic, rather than ethnic based multi-party competition.   His doctrine of socialist rhetoric had lauded, not without some moral attraction, the “brotherhood and unity of all Yugoslavs.” This was a lofty goal, but it provided no mechanism for that to be accomplished when the state disintegrated.  That idea swiftly melted in the face of the profound hatreds that were released between the combatants. As Ignatieff said,

 

By failing to allow a plural political culture to mature, Tito ensured that the fall of his regime turned into the collapse of the entire state structure. In the ruins, his heirs and successor turned to the most atavistic principles of political mobilization in order to survive.

 

If Yugoslavia no longer protected you, perhaps your fellow Croats, Serbs, or Slovenes might.  Fear, more than conviction, made unwilling nationalists of ordinary people. …

 

Ethnic difference per se was not responsible for the nationalistic politics that emerged in the Yugoslavia of the 1980s.  Consciousness of ethnic difference turned into nationalistic hatred only when the surviving Communist elites, beginning with Serbia, began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power.

 

That is precisely the issue; people have to learn to live in plural cultures.  If difference leads to hate, as it often does, bloodshed soon follows when the dogs of hell are let loosed. No one should insist on my way or the highway, but many do. Who doesn’t like variety? Who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth? Many conservatives in the US now want a country without those nasty liberals. Of course, many liberals would like to get rid of the conservatives too. How could that happen peacefully?

 

Well, the extremists think they have a lock on the truth. Sometimes they even come to believe their own lies. This can even happen in modern countries such as the United States. Or Canada.

 

We all need to learn to live in pluralistic societies. If we can’t look out for those hounds. That is why Yugoslavia is so important. Even in Canada.

Dark Tourism: History is Never Dead

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

 

This is a photograph I took of a house in Vukovar Croatia that was riddled with bullet holes. The owner could not get a permit to fix it up, even though town was eager to clean it up after the Croatian War of Independence in 1992, so in a huff he decided to leave it, bullet holes and all, but now surrounded by flower pots. You can read about war, but seeing the bullet holes makes it real.

I mentioned how much I disagreed with my friend who told me he did not want to learn anything about old European wars. He had no interest in that. To him it was boring history. I wondered why he would bother travelling to Europe in that case.

 

I was lucky in my journey. In each country on our trip through the Balkans we had a local guide who gave us the local slant on its history.

 

Secondly, I had the benefit of being informed by 3 brilliant historians of European history:  Eric Hobsbawm, Tony Judt, and Michael Ignatieff. The three of them transformed my view of European history. I can’t thank them enough.

 

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it“.  Winston Churchill said something very similar, in a speech he gave in 1948: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.

 

And it is true that much of European history is brutal. That is a sad fact, but that makes it ever more important to make sure that we do all we can to make sure we don’t repeat the brutality. Much of the important history of this region of European is fairly recent, 30 years ago, when I was already the father of 3 young boys, makes it vitally important to know this history. This is not ancient history,  I do not require any insisting to heed the warnings of the past of this region.

 

I know what happened here could happen again much closer to home.  I know enough to know that I don’t want my country to go there and there are many similarities to this region and my country and our closest neighbour. There is no comfort in thinking falsely that we are an exceptional nation. We are not. We have had our national crimes already and don’t need more of them.

 

The night before we arrived in Vukovar, where much of this brutality occurred, our cruise director warned us that here we would be learning some uncomfortable truths, but he felt that it was important for us to learn. I agreed completely with that sentiment.

 

Our guide for this region was a young woman by the name of Marda. She apologized when she brought up that history as we were standing in the public square. I think she thought we could not handle too much of such history. She might be right, but I was glad she did.

 

Was this so-called dark tourism? Dark tourism refers to traveling to sites associated with death, tragedy, the uncomfortable, and the macabre, such as concentration camps, disaster areas, and battlefields. The phenomenon, also called thanatourism, can be motivated by a desire for education, historical connection, emotional experience, or a morbid fascination with death. It can be morbid, but it can also be a respectful engagement with difficult history. I think that is important. We should know that. If we don’t the bad parts of our country’s history, we don’t know our country. Unlike so many conservatives today, I don’t want to keep our “sacred ignorance” as James Baldwin called it. I want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

 

Probably one of the most popular dark tourism sites would be the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland which I would like to visit but have not had the honour. Another would be the catacombs of Paris. Or the colosseum of Rome. Although I have not seen those, I have seen the well-preserved Roman colosseum in Split Croatia in 2008. Not far from here. I have already talked about the first settled city of Europe that we saw this trip. Lepenski Vir. Very interesting.

 

A more modern site would be the World Trade Center site in New York which I have not seen. I have seen slave quarters in New Orleans, and I think I learned things of value there. I don’t think it is only people who hate their country who go to such places as the Trumpsters wrongly suggest.

 

Closer to home it might mean visiting a former Residential School. Or the scene of the Battle at Batoche. Or Little Bighorn. I know people who don’t want to know anything about places like that.  They want to go to beaches, or shopping malls, or wineries. Nothing wrong with going to such places, I like to go to such places too, but I think interesting travel can be more than that.

 

I always remember the advice I got from my great uncle, Peter Vogt when he heard I was going to the pub in LaBroquerie: “If you would have been through the Russian Revolution you wouldn’t bother with that.” I think that was going a bit far, but I know what he means. It was shallow entertainment, but there is nothing wrong with socializing with friends and having some fun too.

 

I know I wished on this trip that we would have visited Belene island in the Danube River where there the largest Bulgarian concentration camp is located.  Or even any of the other ones. But they are not high on most tourist agendas.

 

In any event I wanted to learn about the history of this region of the world. And I was glad I had learned a lot. So that I could bore you about it when I got back.

 

 

 

A Bloody Mess: The Five Wars of Yugoslavia

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia

 

The disintegration of Yugoslavia was accomplished by 5 over-lapping wars.

The first of the 5 Yugoslav wars was about to begin.

It is very difficult to keep track of all the wars of Yugoslavia because they did not fall into line neatly without overlaps.  It really was a schmozzle.

The brilliant historian, Tony Judt tried his best to make sense of this:

 

…the Yugoslav wars, for there were five.  The Yugoslav attack on Slovenia lasted just a few weeks, after which the army withdrew and allowed the secessionist state to depart in peace. There then followed a far bloodier war between Croatia and its rebellious Serb minority (backed by the army of ‘Yugoslavia’—in practise Serbia and Montenegro) that lasted until an uneasy cease-fire brokered by the UN early in the following year. After the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia voted for independence in March 1992, the Serbs of Bosnia declared war on the new state and set about carving out a ‘Republic of Srpska’ again with the backing of the Yugoslav army, [the ‘JNA’] laying siege to a number of Bosnia towns—notably the capital Sarajevo.

Meanwhile, in January 1993 a separate civil war broke out between the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia, with some attempting to carve out an ephemeral statelet in the Croat-dominated region of Herzegovina. And finally, after these other conflicts had been brought to an end (though not before the Croat-Serb war broke out afresh in 1995 with a successful move Zagreb to recapture Krajina, lost to Serv forces three years before), came the war in and over Kosovo and was only preventing from destroying or expelling its Albanian population by an unprecedented attack on Serbia itself by NATO forces in the spring of 1999.

 

The first of those wars was one of the least bloody.  After just a few weeks of attacking Slovenia for trying to rebel, in 1991 the Yugoslav army withdrew, permitting the secessionist state to depart in peace.

The second war, against Croatia by its Serbian minority, supported by the “Yugoslav” army, which really meant Belgrade and Montenegro, was much more devastating. It was bloody like only civil wars are bloody. That war lasted until 1992 when the UN finally lost its stomach for the growing casualties and finally brokered an uneasy cease-fire.

It really was a melee of wars, difficult for a poor student like me, to make any sense of. But I am trying. I hope my poor readers bear with me, because I will try to make clear why it is important, for us hear in Canada and the United States.