"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [15]

[Apologies for the delay; I did not blog last week, contrary to my expectations. This will be a short post, but I wanted to get back to regular blogging.]

Chapter 5 [continued]

The next six pages of the chapter continue his tour of two very different areas in Bosnia which remain cheerfully optimistic that the impending war will somehow pass them by--Bihac-Cazin, and Sarajevo. Bihac, of course, was the location of Agrokomerc and the stronghold of Fikret Abdic. Glenny mentions that the only peasant uprising in Eastern Europe during the Communist period was carried out here by Serbs, Croats and Muslims. He doesn't dwell on the area much; I must say that the Bihac region, and the Abdic insurgency against Izetbegovic and the SDA, is one aspect of the war I wish I knew more about.

Then he moves on to Sarajevo, where the urbane, mixed population of Sarajlije are hoping against hope that the violence and hatred simply won't be able to find root. Most Serbs are embarrassed by the SDS.

Glenny revisits the issue of Izetbegovic and Islam; he clarifies that while he considers Izetbegovic to have been a fundamentalist of sorts at the time of his original arrest, he is nothing of the sort by this time. He gives the SDA leader credit for being a decent and humane leaders who sincerely wanted to avoid war. Yet he also blames him for organizing politically along ethnic lines (again without consideration of the fate of non-ethnic parties).

Week off from blogging

Due to personal factors, I won't be blogging this week. I anticipate returning to the regular schedule next Sunday.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [14]

Chapter 5 [continued]

The next section considers the nationalist character of the Bosnian political system, the organization of major political parties along nationalist/ethnic lines, and the role these factors played in leading the country into war.

In a general way, Glenny is absolutely correct--the major political parties in Bosnia were organized on explicitly national lines, and this was a major obstacle to a peaceful resolution of the breakup of Yugoslavia. But he gets a lot wrong, too--and the manner in which he does so might reveal a shortcoming in his perspective.

Although he acknowledges that Tito played a cynical balancing act by "enforcing communal life on the three communities using repression, and if necessary, violence." Yet he does not dwell at length on the political and constitutional ramifications of this policy, which was carried out in a federation in which nations were the constituent pieces of the polity.

Instead, he blames the "three communities" in Bosnia for creating exclusive national parties, as if this happened in a vacuum--as if the nationalist fervor sweeping all of Yugoslavia wasn't the most salient fact in the creation of political parties in a failing state which regarded the citizen first as a member of an officially recognized nationality. And he ignores that there were other parties not organized along ethnic lines, but the structure of the constitution hampered their ability to attract support.

And finally, he holds the Muslims especially accountable as the SDA was formed before either the Bosnian SDS or the Bosnian branch of the HDZ. This seems to be a very selective use of context and perspective. This would be bad enough if it weren't for the fact that in his discussion of the way political punishment was meted out to individuals of each national group in something not like a quota, he writes this:

"Similarly, if a Moslem fundamentalist were sentenced (as the President Alija Izetbegovic was, following the publication of his theses on an Islamic state), then a Serb and a Croat would soon hear the prison gates closing behind them."

The larger point he is making in the passage that sentence is from--that Tito's tactic was both a gross violation of human rights and ultimately ineffective because it left the wounds of World War II to fester--is not a problem. But anyone who knows the story of the Bosnian War, and of the rhetoric surrounding it, knows that the claim that Izetbegovic was an Islamic fundamentalist is both loaded and very problematic. Surely Glenny knew, even in 1993, that Serb nationalists fanned fears of a bogus Islamist state rising in Bosnia to both radicalize Bosnian Serbs and to justify their campaign to whomever in the international community were willing to buy it. Even if Glenny believes that Izetbegovic was a fundamentalist--again, hardly a point beyond dispute--he had to realize that this bald statement would color readers perceptions.

This tendency to zero in on events in Croatia and Bosnia without considering the larger context continues to be troubling.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [13]

Chapter 5 [continued]

Only a brief post this week; graduate school is a demanding mistress.

Glenny briefly recounts the story of an almost immediately aborted conference of parliamentary parties held in Vojvodina and organized by the Democratic Party of Serbia.

It does not go well, as calls for Albanian and Hungarian translators--it is explained that nobody in the party is able to speak those languages, it isn't a deliberate slight, while they are able to provide Slovenian and Macedonian translators--lead to calls for a Croatian, and then Bosnian, translators as well. Glenny explains that Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians all speak Serbo-Croat so that these "demands" are absurd jingoistic posturing. And he is correct. The conference, of course, is doomed.

In the next section of the chapter, Glenny discusses the ethno-national alignment of Bosnia's politics and political parties, and then the role that foreign recognition played in unleashing war. I will most likely consider the former in the next post, and save the post after that for the former, as this is conviction which I have serious reservations about but wish to consider in depth.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [12]

Chapter 5 [continued]

There is a brief respite in the chapter, during which Glenny visits a pub located at the geographical center of a Yugoslavia which was already breaking apart; named, quite aptly, 'The Centre of Yugoslavia.' The owner tells Glenny that he's not going to change the name because "What else can I call it? The Centre of a Ghost State?"

This anecdote sets the stage for a brief discussion of national identity in Bosnia. Glenny notes that even at this late date, a significant minority still considered themselves Yugoslav; but more depressingly, he also notes that by this point the national designation of 'Bosanci' had died out, replaced first by 'Bosnian Serb', 'Bosnian Croat', and 'Bosnian Moslem*'. Ultimately, the 'Bosnian' prefix was dropped.

What this meant for a viable "Bosnian" national identity was clearly not good. Glenny goes on to explain that Bosnia had never been an independent state since the Middle Ages, and that it's continued existence--and I do give him credit for acknowledging that Bosnia has a long history as a distinct geopolitical entity--it has only been able to survive under the protection of some larger polity--the Ottomans, the Hapsburgs, and Yugoslavia.

He goes on to say that, after the independence of Slovenia and Croatia--he continues to regard Western support for their secession as the primary direct cause of the actual war--Bosnia was left with three choices, none of them good and none of them universally supported. Whether to stay in a truncated Yugoslavia and fight against Serbian hegemony, accept Serbian hegemony under direct control of Belgrade, or declare independence and reap the whirlwind of violence to come--there were no good choices, and none that the country as a whole could rally around.

Glenny's stance here is increasingly troubling--he regards Milosevic as a monster and sympathizes with Bosnia's plight, but he is adamant that nothing could be done by the West. He recognizes the provocations that Belgrade makes but then focuses mostly on the missteps and outrages made by his opponents. Glenny simultaneously says that nothing could be done, yet he assigns blame to the West for supporting Croatia and Slovenia, and to the leadership of those two republics for somehow not placating the same Milosevic whom he has aptly described as a sociopath bent on tyranny.




*I should probably acknowledge that Glenny uses the British 'Moslem' rather than the American 'Muslim' throughout the book. Even though I'm not quoting him directly here, I am paraphrasing his words rather directly and therefore am transcribing his spelling in this case.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [11]

Chapter 5: August 1991-May 1992: Bosnia-Hercegovina--Paradise of the Damned

Glenny's account of the war in Bosnia proper begins with a trip across the Sava River from war-torn Slavonski Samac in Croatia to as-yet untouched Bosanski Samac on the Bosnian side. This gives him an opportunity to note how unprepared for the war Bosnia was; not just militarily and politically, but also at the level of daily life--most people simply did not seem to really believe that the war would cross over from Croatia.

It also gives him a chance to briefly explain who the Bosnian Muslims are, and what their relation to the surrounding Serbs and Croats is. I do mean briefly, by the way, and by spending only two pages explaining how the Muslim Slavs of Bosnia and Sandzak became the Muslim nation in Tito's Yugoslavia in such a cursory fashion, Glenny raises more questions than he answers, some of which are troubling.

He essentially regards the creation of a Muslim nationality as a Titoist move to create leverage against Serb and Croat nationalism in the late 60s and early 70s. He points out that they are a nation who are solely distinguished by their religion, but ignores how much Catholicism and Orthodoxy define Croats and Serbs, respectively.

Lastly, he refers to the problems this creates under the convoluted 1974 Constitutions, which defined Yugoslavia as a federation of both constituent republics and constituent nations. He argues that republics could not leave Yugoslavia without the consent of the all nations. The objection is obvious--neither Croatia nor Bosnia had the right to leave, as the Serb nation in both republics refused to cooperate.

How Glenny will square this legal objection with Western notions of individual liberty (who decides how "the nation" feels?) and minority rights (minorities were not "nations" in the Yugoslav Constitution) will be interesting.

I am not suggesting that he is misreading the Yugoslav Constitution--I am merely curious as to whether or not he sees the same problems with it that I do; and also how he thinks the situation should have been managed. Under Glenny's logic, only Slovenia and Macedonia had the right to leave Yugoslavia, given the objections of the Serb "nations" within Croatia and Bosnia (let alone the fact that the Albanian minority in Kosova were not a "nation" and therefore lacked such rights).

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [10]

Chapter 4 [concluded]

Glenny meets with Slobodan Milosevic for a short interview; the results of which are so devoid of interest that he only gives a brief, one-page account of the entire incident, including the race to find a tie and pair of slacks on short notice. The general impression one gets is that Milosevic really was a sociopath; Glenny notes of his demeanor in the interview that the "most abiding feature, however, was the complete absence of anything resembling feeling or humanity in his attitude." It is also noteworthy that Milosevic was put off by Glenny's ability to speak Serbo-Croat (a true Serb nationalist would have been pleased, but "an autocrat like Milosevic, however, felt uncomfortable").

The rest of the chapter to the end is taken with a trip through the Sandzak, into Montenegro, and then up the war-ravaged Dalmatian coast to besieged Dubrovnik. There is plenty of local color and interesting detail, but the overall effect is simply a collective portrait of localized sociopolitical trauma in every nook and cranny of the old Yugoslavia.

While there is little in Glenny's account to editorialize on--he is largely a sympathetic observer with a good eye for telling detail--there is one comment which, in light of the troubling subtext of equivalency in his entire consideration of the Croatian war, might strike the reader as odd. In his explanation of how the JNA bombardment of the old town of Dubrovnik served as a symbol of how devoid of human considerations the aggressors' tactics were, he also adds that the "Croat defence forces bear a share of this responsibility" because they deliberately housed gun and light artillery positions on the old town walls, "goading the JNA into firing on them." Glenny sees this as a cynical attempt to exploit the resulting destruction for propaganda purposes.

While this is probably largely true, there are two objections one might raise. First; the JNA and their supporter reservists (many from Montenegro; Glenny does an excellent job of describing their craven and gleefully destructive conduct) were going to be shelling the city, regardless; and really, shouldn't the blame be fixed on the forces shooting at a city full of civilians, rather than at the forces of the UN-recognized government defending it? And, secondly--this line of criticism unfortunately parallels the later frequent criticisms of the Bosnian Government for playing to international opinion while their country and citizens were being subjected to extermination.

And so this chapter ends, with Glenny leaving his fellow journalists in Dubrovnik in order to hurry up towards Mostar, where tensions are near the breaking point. In the next chapter, we arrive in Bosnia.

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NOTE: My next semester in graduate school begins this week; knowing that I will be much busier, and also aware that I have never honored one of the common suggestions for a really successful blog--regular and consistent posting--I have decided that beginning with this post, I will now seek to post on every Sunday; but probably only on Sunday for at least until summer. This way, I can promise a certain level of regular posting so that readers don't have to keep checking in, and at the same time as I keep this blog active and vital, I am also not over-committing myself.

So, next Sunday, January 29, I will return with a post reviewing at least the first part of Chapter 5.