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.