In Europe (114 page)

In the final account, the Yugoslav wars were also typical publicity wars. There was a constant manipulation of death counts. NATO smugly televised direct hits on Belgrade, as though the city was a pinball machine. For Miložsević, the national television stations comprised his most important asset, more important even than the army, politics or party. The wars ran on fear, particularly among the Serbs: the fear of decimation, the fear of a repetition of the cruelties of the Second World War. And nothing whipped up those fears more effectively than television.

The history of the Yugoslav wars is complicated. From the fifteenth until far into the nineteenth century, Yugoslavia – like the rest of the Balkans – had acted as a highly prized buffer zone between the three great religious traditions: Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam. Many mountain people lived almost exclusively within their clans and isolated village communities, and it was to them that their loyalty was given. Boys and men were regularly press-ganged into the armies of the warring powers; most of their contact with differing convictions took place on the battlefield. The key virtues were bravery, a sense of honour and loyalty to the clan.

At first there were no major ethnic tensions. The Ottoman Empire was relatively tolerant, its population divided only along religious lines and not by ethnic origin. Western Europeans travelling through Thrace around 1900 noted to their amazement that the people in a mixed Greek/Bulgarian village had absolutely no idea whether their ancestors were Greek or
Bulgarian. That played no role whatsoever. All they knew was that they were Christians.

The First Yugoslavia, also known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, was created at the Versailles peace conferences, as part of the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire. The new nation was dominated by the Serbs; partly because they formed the largest local minority, and partly because they had fought on the side of the victorious Allies. Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina had sided with the Habsburgs and were seen rather as the spoils of war and treated accordingly. Meanwhile, the central government remained weak and the villages fought out their own disagreements: Serbs against Croatians, Croatians and Serbs against Muslims, Croatians and Muslims against Serbs,‘my brother and I against my nephew, my nephew and I against the foreigner’.

During the Second World War this traditional local violence began escalating like never before. The National Socialist Croatians set up an independent state, and their Ustažse movement, along with certain Muslim groups, set out to cleanse all of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina of Serbs. On 9 April, 1942, thousands of Serb families from the region surrounding Srebrenica were driven into the River Drina and massacred by the Ustažse, a bloodbath that horrified even the German occupiers and left a deep mark in the Serb collective memory. The Serbs’ Chetniks, by the way, struck back just as mercilessly, storming Ustažse strongholds and descending with their supporters on dozens of Muslim villages. During this ethnic fighting many hundreds of thousands of people were killed, particularly on the Serbian side, including several tens of thousands of Jews and Gypsies.

The Second Yugoslavia was formed after the war, under Tito, who succeeded in combining an effective central authority with a large degree of autonomy for the six Yugoslav federal republics. The national constitution drafted in 1974 further decentralised the country's administration: each of the federal republics was to have its own central bank, its own police force, its own system of courts and schools. The country rapidly began modernising, and new schools, roads, factories and housing estates were built everywhere. Until the 1980s, in fact, Yugoslavia was seen as far and away the most advanced communist country. Tito declared that
the old complex conflicts had been forgotten and forgiven, and the Yugoslavs were able to live with that for more than thirty-five years.

It was only after the old leader's death in 1980 that things went wrong. Tito, it turned out, had left behind enormous foreign debt, and inflation quickly escalated. Savings and pensions melted away, huge shortages of food and fuel arose, the old certainties were proving worthless. As had happened earlier in other Eastern Bloc countries, this resulted in a huge protest movement. But here, however, the anti-communist rebellion also led to new conflicts along old ethnic divides. Under Tito the expression of nationalist sentiments had been strictly taboo, but some Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian intellectuals continued to foster such ideas on the sly. To remain in power, therefore, the former communist apparatchiks once again conjured up the ideals of nationalism, and with considerable success.

During summer 1988, Yugoslav news reported day after day on mass demonstrations calling for Serbia to re-establish its authority over the ‘autonomous province’ of Kosovo. That, it was claimed, was the Serbian people's historic right: after all, Kosovo had been sacred ground to them ever since they had lost the battle against the Ottomans at the Field of the Blackbirds (
Kosovo Polje
) on St Vitus’ Day in 1389. The Serbs had, in their own view, been more or less harassed out of Kosovo: ninety per cent of the population there was now Albanian. The demonstrators turned that same rage effortlessly on the former communist ‘office hogs’, speaking of an ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ and ‘the people's movement’. The communist leader Slobodan Miložsević had suddenly undergone a complete metamorphosis: he now promoted himself as the ‘national’ alternative, and showed great verve in trading in his communist rhetoric for new views and new enemies.

The communist leaders from the other federal republics, particularly Croatia and Slovenia, kept a watchful eye on the developments in Belgrade. Not Kosovo but Miložsević himself was their worry. They saw, and not without reason, the Serb complaints as a pretext for their re-establishing power over the Yugoslav federation. With the help of the army, consisting largely of Serbs, this would amount to the reinstatement of a centralist, authoritarian Yugoslavia dominated by Belgrade.

The Serbs were disappointed by their Slovenian and Croatian brothers’
lack of solidarity concerning Kosovo. Things came to a head in 1990. The Slovenian and Croatian leaders withdrew from the Communist League of Yugoslavia, both republics stopped paying taxes to the federal government in Belgrade, and in spring 1991 the federation fell apart.

The American anthropologist Bette Denich has described how, during her visits to Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s, Tito's policy of integration and modernisation was setting the tone throughout the country, and how the pan-Yugoslav identity continued to gain strength. No one would have dreamed of bringing that process to a halt. Even after Tito's death, in May 1980, Yugoslavs to a man sang along with the pop song ‘After Tito – Tito!’:

Denich was all the more amazed, therefore, when she returned in the late 1980s. ‘Belgrade, as I knew it in the 1960s, was emphatically the capital of Yugoslavia, an administrative and intellectual centre that drew in people from the other republics to assume governmental and other functions. Now, instead of that, I found a Belgrade that emphatically presented itself as the capital of Serbia.'The fronts of buildings and houses had been cleaned and repainted with Old Serbian motifs, bookshop windows were filled with new works dealing with Serb history, literature and other national legacies.

Looking back on this time, Bette Denich saw an almost psychopatho-logical process taking place in Yugoslavia, a rampant spiral of projections between ‘us’ and ‘them’, full of ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’: each participant in the conflict represented himself as a victim or a potential victim, and the other side as a threat or a potential threat. ‘And by reacting, mutually, to the other side solely as a threat, both parties of course became truly more threatening.’

In Café Sax in early 1993, I had been introduced to the writer László Végel, an amiable, square-built man. He had just returned from Budapest
and was sitting at a table, mulling over the future. He was wearing a new grey jacket, and his friends teased him a bit about it. Earlier that week, as part of the political purges being rushed through by the new government, he had been dismissed as director of Novi Sad's television broadcasting organisation. Before he went home, the writer György Konrád had advised him to begin by buying a new coat, to keep up his spirits and show those people in Novi Sad that he was still a man to be reckoned with.

In spring 1991, Konrád had written about the insecurity of his fellow Eastern Europeans in the face of a capitalism they had not grown up with, about their aggrieved sense of self-importance, and about the ‘suspect talents’ they were beginning to apply. ‘Before long, anyone who isn't angry at one of our neighbouring countries will be suspected of treason. Hate is standing in the wings, waiting only to be told who to pounce upon.’

Konrád sensed that tension quite acutely. On 25 June, 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. Tito's Yugoslavia had ceased to exist. Miložsević placed all his bets on the formation of a new and powerful Balkan state, an ethnically pure Greater Serbia into which large sections of Croatia and Bosnia were also to be incorporated in due course. That spring, extremist Serbs in Croatia seceded and formed their own ministate, the Serb Republic of Krajina. From the start, they displayed two traits that would prove formative for all conflicts to come in former Yugoslavia: an extreme predilection for local autonomy, and great enthusiasm for the use of violence. It was in Krajina that the first of those militias were set up – by people including the Rambo-esque žZeljko Ražznatović, also known as Arkan – which would later play such a deadly role in Bosnia.

Meanwhile, the protagonists of the drama, Miložsević and the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, started in on a series of secret consultations at Karadjordjevo, one of Tito's favourite holiday villas. Later, at Split, they even included Bosnian-Muslim leader Alija Izetbegović in their talks. They were trying to circumvent a war, and at the same time Miložsević proposed to Tudjman that they more or less divide Bosnia between them along ethnic lines. Izetbegović expressed interest in that proposal as well; he was hoping to work together with Tudjman against the Serbs, and did
not wish to offend him. Whatever agreement they finally reached – the arrangements between Miložsević and Tudjman in particular are still shrouded in mist – within a few days their accord was overtaken by the facts. A Serb paramilitary force attacked a Croatian police post, the first casualties fell, and the war had begun. In July 1991, the Yugoslav Army openly sided with the Serb rebels in Krajina.

For the first time since the Second World War, campaigns of ethnic cleansing were once again taking place within Europe: approximately 500,000 Croatians were driven out of Krajina, around 250,000 Serbs in Croatia lost their jobs and were forced to flee for their lives. The Gypsy population was persecuted as well: more than 50,000 eventually left the country.

In autumn 1991, the war came close to Novi Sad. The picturesque town of Vukovar on the Danube, an hour away, was besieged for months. Panic broke out among the young people of Novi Sad. Schools, university canteens, Café Sax: they all emptied out. Many of the boys fled to the stands of willow along the river, and the girls went there in the evening to bolster their spirits with food and blankets and other comforts. These days people still whisper about the orgies that went on there; no one gave a damn any more, they were all going to die anyway, they thought.

The EU, full of optimism and self-confidence, now adopted the role of mediator. The Common Market, after all, was proceeding as planned, the Treaty of Maastricht was on its way, there were far-reaching plans for a common currency and a common security policy. This would be the first test case for the community's new joint foreign policy. Three representatives – the Luxembourger Jacques Poos, the Dutchman Hans van den Broek and the Italian Gianni De Michelis – travelled to Zagreb and Belgrade to meet with the warring factions and, as the negotiators were still frequently saying, to ‘bang their heads together’.

Little attention was paid at that point to the structural and historical contexts of the conflict. For years, as the closely involved BBC journalists Laura Silber and Allan Little wrote, the European negotiators acted as though the conflict had been caused only by the vaguely delineated ‘temperament’ of the Balkans, ‘an irresistible southern Slavic tendency –
be that cultural, be that genetic – towards fratricide.’ The warring groups had only to be convinced of the foolishness of war, nothing else was needed to bring about peace. What they overlooked, however, was that the background to these wars was often not as irrational as all that. For the Yugoslav leaders, Silber and Little wrote, war was quite often ‘a completely rational affair, and indeed the only way for them to achieve their objectives’.

The Serbs almost completely flattened Vukovar. After the city surrendered on 18 November, a large number of wounded men were carried off and never seen again. They probably still lie in a mass grave in the surrounding countryside.

In January 1992, Miložsević and Tudjman agreed to a ceasefire. Whatever role the European negotiators played, that was a rational decision: the battle of prestige for Vukovar had been won, a quarter of all Croatian territory was now occupied by the Serbs, an international peacekeeping force was on its way to guard the new borders, and Miložsević's Greater Serbia had come another step closer. As far as Tudjman was concerned, Croatia's recognition by the international community granted him enough time to revamp the Croatian Army thoroughly. What is more, both men were planning to breathe new life into the ‘gentlemen's agreement’ formerly reached at Karadjordjevo, and to move on together towards the next prize: Bosnia.

Miložsević more or less left the Serbs in Krajina to their own fate. In August 1995, the tables were turned at last and a modernised Croatian Army rolled into Krajina and chased out almost the whole Serb population. Belgrade, Novi Sad and other cities filled with refugees.