"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 [9]

Chapter 4 [continued]

The next several pages of chapter 4 recount Glenny's adventures traversing the war zone in and around Croatia, negotiating his way through a variety of roadblocks manned on both sides of the front line by an unpredictable spectrum of military, paramilitary, and vigilante personnel in a variety of uniforms and non-uniforms. The abstract political and nationalist propaganda and policies from faraway Belgrade and Zagreb get filtered and reduced down to the ground level to a toxic level of fear, xenophobia, uncertainty, and raw hate. Villages are decimated, beautiful towns and cities like Vukovar are decimated, and atrocities against civilians mount with agonizing regularity.

This ground-level view of the Croatian war is clearly intended as a deliberate contrast between the realities of the war as it played out versus the rhetoric not only coming from Serbia and Croatia, but from Western observers. Most particularly, western advocates of intervention, or those who chose to place the blame primarily at the feet of the Serbian leadership.

Glenny's point here seems to be that the arguments of interventionists simply dissolve into irrelevancy upon contact with the ugly realities of the war. Throughout this chapter, there is a sense that Glenny almost considers the Croatian war to be a semi-discrete event following its own logic, rather than another theater in the larger breakdown of Yugoslavia. I don't think he would characterize his account that way, and I freely admit that I am possibly being unfair by doing so; but all the same I have a hard time squaring the more systematic analysis of the earlier chapters--in which his personal reporting was grounded in a broader consideration of the politics of the dying Yugoslav state--with this "bottom-up" approach.

It's not that Glenny has forgone larger considerations, but often his analysis of political and nationalist factors is almost entirely self-contained; for example, the fact that the JNA is an actor in this conflict, even including the involvement of heavy artillery firing into Croatia from the Vojvodina region, is noted frequently, but the possibility that this threat to Croatian sovereignty might be an important factor in the radicalization of Croats in outlying areas. That is not to excuse the vile racism of the right-wing of the HDZ (or even the clumsy, insensitive jingoism of Tudjman and the mainstream of the party), but rather to point out that Glenny rather abruptly puts the war in Croatia in an almost entirely Croatian context.

He also seems to be advocating for ethnic separation at points in this chapter; whether this is implicit in some of his logic or is something he is aware of, I am not sure. He seems rather dismissive when noting that Croats were adamant about retaining the republican borders of the country even as he never suggests a viable political solution to the "problem" of a Serb minority within that border.

I absolutely agree that the new Croatian state under the HDZ failed spectacularly to meet the challenge of having a sizable minority with memories of being the victims of genocide under the World War II fascists Croatian state. And perhaps Glenny felt strongly that he needed to provide a counterpoint to the standard Western narrative which crudely portrayed the conflict as a simply tale of endemic Serb aggression.

However, this disconnect between the larger geopolitical narrative and the village-by-village portrait of daily life turned into a mosaic of innumerable acts of brutality and senseless destruction does seem to lead Glenny towards a conditional consideration of the legitimacy of ethnic division. He quotes a Macedonian officer who had deserted from the JNA at length; his two-page transcription of this man's words conclude with this paragraph:

"Serbs and Croats in eastern Slavonia can never live together because too much blood has been spilt and the Serbs will never let go of any of this territory. As far as I could work out, the Croats had provoked a lot of the nastiness in the first place but searching for the one who started it is a waste of time. Once it had started the massacres were unstoppable. It will never end whether they have a ceasefire, peace-keeping troops or whatever. This is not a war, this is extermination."

This is not Glenny himself speaking, of course, but his description of this talk as a "[o]ne of the most revealing conversations I had during the war", and of course you don't quote an interviewee for two full pages for no reason.

Glenny is too humane to advocate for ethnic division; however, he seems to be moving towards a point of view in which it is the only reasonable way to end ethnic violence once it was unleashed.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [4]

Chapter 2: Belgrade, March 1991: Dress Rehearsal--Serb Eat Serb

The first several pages of this chapter are a well-written summary of Milosevic's rise to power--the betrayal of Stambolic, the utilization of nationalist sentiment, the exploitation of Kosovo, the manipulation of the mass media and the popular masses--a story which is surely all-too familiar to regular readers.

Glenny also shows that while Milosevic was using the rising nationalist tide for leverage in his political machinations within the Yugoslav Federation, he was hardly a committed nationalist (Milosevic, it's safe to say, never believed in much of anything other than getting power and holding on to it), nor was he able to resist calls for multiparty elections. He managed to win these, but not by an overwhelming majority and even this victory was accomplished through some degree of fraud. The opposition--which was divided, and heavily dominated by nationalists, to the point where even liberal parties had to make accommodations to nationalist sentiment--led by Vuk Drashkovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement--organized a massive demonstration in Belgrade.

Glenny draws a brief sketch of the Serb/Yugoslav capital; a vibrant and cosmopolitan (if architecturally unimpressive) city being slowly swamped with ugly nationalism. This was the setting for Milosevic's sudden, draconian crackdown, in which many people were hurt, violence and vandalism were rampant, and many were arrested, including Drashkovic and many other prominent opposition figures. The fighting was intense, as these protesters were largely committed nationalists rather than liberal-minded peaceful types.

This only spread the discontent; to sum matters up, the protest spread but became more peaceful and settled as thousands of mostly students took over public spaces and for a time seemed to gain the upper hand; the police slunk away, and most of their well-articulated demands were met. One demand was not met, however--Milosevic did not step down. Rather, he stayed out of the public eye and offered up plenty of disposable sacrificial lambs to sate the demands of the public.

And then, ultimately, the opposition sputtered, gave up the streets, and went home feeling that they had won. But Milosevic was still in power; and what's more, he was able to use the mess that was Yugoslavia's constitution to his own benefit, as the man who had and would again use the legalisms of the Yugoslav Federation for his own ends bluntly announced that Serbia would no longer be bound by the Yugoslav Presidency, and that the Serbian Territorial Militias would be mobilized.

All the while, behind closed doors the alliance between the Serbian leadership and the Yugoslav Army was cemented. The last chance for peace--namely, by getting rid of Milosevic--had been squandered.

***********

I apologize if the review of this chapter seems rather perfunctory, but the events here are all pretty well known by now, as I noted already. There is also less personal color here, as Glenny was mostly just observing events and learning about them second-hand. His description of being in the middle of the attempt by the students to cross the bridge over the Sava against police barricades, and of being subjected to tear gas, is effective, but other than than any more detail would simply be rehashing the same cynical schemes we all already know all too much about.

It is worth noting that while Glenny acknowledges the depth of nationalist sentiment among the larger Serb population, he doesn't examine it as deeply as I wish he had. We will see if this becomes problematic in later chapters.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [2]

Chapter 1: Knin, August/October 1990-January 1992: The Heart of the Matter

Glenny begins with a visit to the breakaway statelet of the "Republic of Serbian Krajina" in the Fall of 1990. This was the period just prior to the war, when separatist tensions were high. He describes a tense drive from the warm, scenic Adriatic coast up into the dry, harsh Krajina interior around Knin. Negotiations through multiple roadblocks manned by suspicious locals armed with anything from old shotguns to automatic weapons are the first interaction Glenny has with the ethnic Serb locals. We get the first glimpse of an "us-against-them" seige mentality, of which we will learn much more.

After briefly describing the unimpressive but strategically important town of Knin itself, Glenny goes on to briefly sketch the historic origins of the Krajina and its population of gun-loving, proudly independent Serbs.*Then he finally makes his way to his contact, Knin Town Council Deputy President-turned-Information Minister in the afore-mentioned rebel statelet Lazar Macura, who had agreed to take Glenny to meet Milan Babic, the President of the Knin Town Council and the rabble-rousing Serb politician who did so much to create the rebellion and would ultimately take control of the Serbian Republic of the Krajina. They have to go through a couple more roadblocks--although this is much more perfunctory now that Glenny is with Macura--before this meeting happens; but before I go on there is something worth commenting on in these first few pages.

Glenny does an effective job of conveying the paranoid belligerence the rural Krajina Serbs, and he does so in terms which suggest a dimension to the coming war which many Western observers failed to realize--how the war was, in addition to an ethnic war and even a religious war, was also to some degree a war of the countryside against the city; of the provincial peasant against the cosmopolitan urbanite. This is a difficult subject to examine, partly because the descriptions of suspicious, hostile locals can so easily drift into a more general portrait of a stereotypical Balkan "type" or even just plain racism. Some of Glenny's descriptions of the appearance of the some of the gunmen he encountered, as well as their gun-loving machismo, could be said to skirt the margins of such overkill, but he never crosses the line.

He is not merely describing these people for the sake of "color" nor is he doing what so many glib observers did--dismissing the war as simply an expression of intrinsic Balkan primivitism or propensity for violence. As we will see in the next post (covering the rest of the chapter), Glenny is making a larger, and more subtle, point.

*As always, my reviews assume some degree of knowledge on the part of the reader; I presume I don't need to explain the history of the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans; that "Krajina" means a military frontier; and so forth.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [1]

Preface

Glenny's book was originally published in 1992; revised editions were released in 1993 and then again in 1996. This review is for the final US edition.

The Preface, from the 1992 Edition and included here, is simply a short statement made by an actor from Belgrade named Boro Todorovic, given on a television broadcast on November 2, 1991. The war was still largely confined to Croatia at the time.

Todorovic spoke out against the violence, but just as much against the nationalist rhetoric and the "with us or against us" group-think mentality that it required. He spoke of the war--which at that point had yet to reach its darkest depths--as a horrible nightmare which nobody could wake up from. It is an explicit rejection of nationalism and patriotism in the name of ethnic murder.

Glenny left this prolouge in the final version; adding only a 1996 postscript noting that due to the end of the war and the de facto partitioning of Bosnia, he believes that while the fighting has stopped "I am not yet convinced that the stability of the Balkans has been secured."

In the next post, I will review chapter 1.

Happy New Year--and my 2012 Resolution for this blog

I hope all my readers had a good ending to 2011, and I hope for a happy and healthy 2012 for all of you.

I realize that, in terms of both quantity of posts and quality of what I did bother writing, 2011 was the weakest year yet in the history of this blog. My New Year's Resolution for "Americans for Bosnia" is a modest one--I promise to post more regularly and frequently than I did in the past year, and I promise to do more than merely pass along articles and blog posts by others from time to time.

I will start off right away tomorrow, with the first of what I hope will be several reviews of English-language books on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s (the task which has long been the strength of this blog, to the degree that it has one at all). The book I intend to summarize and review is one most readers should be familiar with--Misha Glenny's The Fall of Yugoslavia: the Third Balkan War. This is toward the long-term goal of transitioning this blog into an interactive database of book reviews and summaries someday (most likely after I finish my Master's studies, to be honest).

I will begin this review tomorrow; hopefully this will breath some life back into this blog.

More to follow.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [10]

Part Three: The Explosion of War

Part Three consists of three chapters which detail how the actual outbreak of hostilities in the former Yugoslavia, first in Slovenia and then in Croatia, and how the international community, most notably Europe, responded.

Chapter 12: "The Hour of Europe Has Dawned" Slovenia's Phony War, June-July 1991

Slovenia's 10 day long "war" of independence is now rightly regarded as a brilliantly-executed piece of political theater carried out by the Slovene and Serb leadership, with the JNA (and the people of Slovenia) largely in the dark as to the real game being played. Another party left out of the loop was the European Community, who sent a "troika" of leaders to Yugoslavia, where they managed to accomplish two things--"force" the Yugoslav leadership into concessions they already planned on making; and revealing just how naive European leaders were for the responsibilities of international diplomacy of this sort, and how fundamentally they misread the situation in the former Yugoslavia. The Europeans never seemed to grasp that the warring parties had clearly-defined goals and rational--if not moral--reasons for resorting to using armed force. The likelihood that European diplomacy was up the task was slim from the very beginning.

Chapter 13: "An Undeclared and Dirty War" The JNA in Croatia July-December 1991

While the war in Slovenia was a largely bogus and stage-managed affair with a pre-determined outcome, the war in Croatia was an all-too-real preview of the even greater horrors to follow in Bosnia. The use of heavy artillery against settled areas, followed by paramilitary forces; the cynical manipulation of the United Nations in order to consolidate gains; ethnic cleansing--it all happened in Croatia. Soon, it would all happen again, at greater extent and over a much longer period of time, in Bosnia.

Chapter 14: Yugoslavia A La Carte Lord Carrington's Plan September 1991-January 1992

This chapter details the failed efforts led by Lord Carrington to get what became known as the "Carrington Plan" agreed to by the various republic leaders, as well as other European diplomatic initiatives, most notably the Badinter Commission, which was driven by German diplomatic pressure on the rest of the EC and which ultimately made the Carrington Plan--which Milosevic at any rate was not going to accept--a moot point. In the meantime, Cyrus Vance was able to broker another deal, one which brought "peace" to Croatia in exchange for a de facto ethnic partition; i.e., the Serbs agreed to let the UN do the dirty work of policing the border between the Serb-controlled areas of Croatia and the rest of the republic.

By the end, the independence of Slovenia and Croatia had been recognized, that of Macedonia was held up by Greek protests (which still reverberate today), and Bosnia was faced with the choice of declaring an independence it was ill-equipped to defend, or remaining in a "Yugoslavia" which by this point was rather nakedly a "Greater Serbia." The Badinter Commission's findings were duly ignored by the EC in the interests of political expediency and deference to German insistence (the commission had rejected Croatia's application), and Lord Carrington's plan was forgotten.

What this chapter makes clear is that his plan was not nearly as ill-conceived, unrealistic, and morally vacuous as many of the famous Western-designed plans for Bosnia which were to come. Carrington understood that the republics--not ethnicity--needed to be considered the constituent units of Federal Yugoslavia. This is the main reason his plan was rejected by Milosevic. His plan also demonstrated how far the international community was willing to go to assuage Serb fears and concerns, contrary to later propaganda claims that the Serbs were being railroaded by an "anti-Serb" international community.

**************************

This concludes Part Three. Part Four: Bosnia, is next.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [5]

Chapter 6: "A Croatian Rifle on a Croatian Shoulder"

While Serbian nationalism had been unleashed and harnessed by Milosevic, in Croatia the two-decades long crackdown on expressions of Croatian nationalism still held sway; it took time for nationalist dissidents like Franjo Tudjman to test the waters and see how far they could push the envelope. The growth of the HDZ was greatly helped by Tudjman's relative freedom of movement--his Partisan past allowed him better treatment in prison after the crackdown, but also he was allowed a passport, which enabled to him to travel and network with the widely-dispersed Croatian emigre population, who would provide key support in the HDZs rise to power.

Tudjman was (unlike Milosevic) a genuine nationalist, and once he and the other members of the HDZ leadership found that they would be able to meet and campaign openly, he quickly became adept at using mass rallies and ostentatious displays of populist support. When the elections in Croatia were held, this support (combined with the British-style election rules) resulted in an electoral victory which gave the HDZ uncontested status as the ruling party (it's winning margin over the reformed Communists was not all that great, but the system was set up to reward the first-place party disproportionately).

This was all being watched by the Slovenes--who had a head start on multiparty elections and were working towards them carefully; ultimately, Kucan would win the Presidency and immediately quit his membership in the (renamed) former Communist Party--and the Serbs. In Serbia, the Milosevic regime played to very real fears among Croatias' Serbian minority that the Ustashe regime was being resurrected. Tudjman and his party did little to assuage such fears, and sometimes even exacerbated them.

The Army was also watching; the threats to take action to defend the integrity of Socialist Yugoslavia were repeated, and Kucan and Tudjman needed to consider how genuine the threat from General Kadijevic and others really were.

*************

And so Part One, "Laying the Charge", comes to an end. One theme which has been contstant through all six chapters is this--the breakdown of Yugoslavia happened along genuine, pre-existing fault lines of nationalism, national grievances, economic disparities, social unrest, and political dysfunction. All of this is true. But Yugoslavia did not fall apart 'naturally' or without further stress; it was not preordained to break apart violently once the ghost of Tito's iron fist had finally faded away. It took deliberate actions by political and cultural elites to align Yugoslavia's weakened fissures against the hard edges of intolerance, fear, insecurity, and paranoia. These actions were taken by real individuals, and their actions and words have been recorded and witnessed. The tragedy which is about to follow was not organic, it was not the inevitable product of deep-seated, almost animalistic impulses. Rational, powerful, calculating people made deliberate choices to exploit Yugoslavia's weaknesses for short-term political gain.

In Part Two, we will see many of these same actors apply the violent pressure to Yugoslavia, so that the breakup they placed into motion did, finally, become inevitable.

"In Harm's Way" by Martin Bell [6]

Chapter 4: Homes from Home

This chapter--while somewhat longer than many, and not without interest, is of little direct relevance to this blog. This is essentially a slice of life for war reporters; a collection of colorful anecdotes about how Bell and his colleagues moved around looking for suitable places to set up base and from which to do their reporting. A comment about American reporter Kurt Schork, whom Bell clearly admired, is worthy of some notice:

"For Kurt the Bosnian war was and still is an epic struggle between good and evil. I meet more Serbs and see more shades of grey in it than he does, but I have never wavered in my admiration for him."

It should be noted that this comes after Bell has related the story of the first time he met Schork--at a press conference with Ratko Mladic, who physically assaulted Schork for having the temerity to ask him a direct question. Bell seems not to have considered that rather than coloring Schork's view towards "the Serbs", it may have educated him on the character of the specific leaders who were waging war against the Bosnian state. But Bell's admiration for the man seems genuine; rather than suspecting him of an implicit criticism, it is probably better to take him at his word and see why he think "knowing more Serbs" should have led him to doubt a "good versus evil" interpretation of the war he witnessed.

Otherwise, this is an enjoyable chapter, but we need to move on.

"In Harm's Way" by Martin Bell [1]

So, on to another book review. This one, subtitled "Reflections of a War-Zone Thug", is an account of BBC reporter Martin Bell's experiences covering the Bosnian war; as such, it is not a strict history of the war, nor is it an impassioned work of advocacy such as David Rieff's Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. This is an account of war reporting as much as it is an account of an actual, specific war. Still, Bell was one of the more visible and respected broadcast journalists covering Bosnia, so his interpretation of events will be of some interest to anyone wishing to understand how the Western media filtered events for consumption back home.

It should be noted that Bell, whatever else I will say about him, was obviously moved and deeply affected by what he saw in Bosnia. The Prologue explains that this is "my first and probably my only book." He needed to write about his experiences in Bosnia, a need he had never felt or at least never pursued before. He freely admits that this book may be difficult to catalog, noting with amusement that booksellers "didn't know whether to classify In Harm's Way as Biography, Politics, Military, or Journalism. One of them even tried Travel."

We will see if his views on Bosnia are easier to categorize.

"Washington's War" by General Michael Rose [1]

I don't know if I'm going to review all of Washington's War: The American War of Independence to the Iraqi Insurgency or not, since the central premise of this book--that there are strong parallels between Britain in the American Revolution and the USA in the current occupation of Iraq--has no direct relation to the subject of this blog.

However, the author of this book is none other than General Sir Michael Rose, commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia from January 1994 to January 1995. This is more than an interesting coincidence--General Rose argues that his experiences in Bosnia provide him the first-hand knowledge necessary to understand the dynamic at play here. In fact, this book is in some ways an attack on the ideals of humanitarian intervention; as we shall see, when the text does address the Bosnian war specifically, it is also a work of implicit Bosnian revisionism.

I will begin to consider Rose's own text in the next post; for now, let us begin with the Foreward, by Professor Sir Michael Howard:

Foreward

This short Foreward is not nearly as clever as Professor Howard would like to believe it is; fully half is taken up with a strained description of the British military experience in the rebellious American colonies, written in a style meant to evoke the current American (and British, it must be noted) experience in post-invasion Iraq. The clumsiness of this piece of writing reveals the flaws in Rose's analysis before Rose himself has taken the stage--one can only see parallels between the British military in American, and the US coalition forces in Iraq if one ignores virtually all context, and shies away from specificity as well. By the time Howard "reveals" that is the American War of Independence, not the current Iraq war, which he is describing, only the dullest of readers will be surprised. For example, one must be completely ignorant of the fact that while the eastern coast of the USA is 3000 miles from London, it is considerably further than that from Washington, DC, to Baghdad.

However, Howard's "aha!" moment does provide a revelation of sorts--his throwaway reference to "the war that the United States has been waging in Iraq, with the British as her unhappy allies" suggests a polemic underneath the guise of historical study.

After giving credence to Rose's analysis of political incompetence in Iraq, Howard does express reservations about his belief that the US should give up and pull out of Iraq; his concern that Rose's belief that "both parties" (it will be interested to see which "party" in Iraq they are referring to) could quickly come to terms and develop a healthy relationship like the US and Britain did, or the US and Vietnam ultimately have. At least Howard recognizes the differences between the Iraqi insurgency and the revolutionary leaderships in both colonial America and--it has to be said--the Vietnamese Government.

However, Howard closes with an approving quote from the Duke of Wellington, to the effect that the hardest thing for a military commander to do is to retreat. His suggestion that this would the noblest and wisest course of action in a fragile state like Iraq, where the "party" we presumably would need to deal with is an insurgency which hardly speaks for a unified national movement, indicates that Howard and Rose are placing the cart in front of the horse. General Rose has an agenda to push, and this book will be an exercise in fitting the facts to fit the theory.

"Why Yugoslavia Still Matters" by John Feffer

Big thanks to Roger Lippman for bringing this article from the Foreign Policy in Focus website.

Also, see the debate between Feffer and Bosnian revision Edward Hermann here.

"The Destruction of Yugoslavia" by Branka Magas--Part Five

Part Five: War (June-December 1991)

The nine articles collected in this final selection are impassioned pleas to a Europe that hadn't been paying attention and was callously drawing lazy conclusions about "ethnic wars," "ancient hatreds", and so on. Much of the material here is recycled, as Magas was trying desperately to reach anyone who would listen, and tell them what she had seen and learned in just over a decade of reporting and study. Reading this section now is painful, because as bad as things were at the end of 1991, the reader knows they were going to get worse, just as she predicts in one article after another. She knew that the war would spread to Bosnia, and she knew that the Greater Serb project was untenable.

Another tragedy in the making is that, in 1991, not only was it not too late for the international community to recognize the reality of the situation; there was still time to intervene in a way which might have aided the forces of democratization which were opposed to the Milosevic regime. The sad fact is that lazy, cynical generalizations about "ethnic hatreds" not only justified Western inaction, they demonized the very Serb citizens who were, by and large, either being dragged into a war they didn't want or at the very least blinded by nationalist propaganda and fear-mongering. At that point, it was not too late to reach out to ordinary Serbs, before years of war and isolation and finally the horrible prospect of facing the reality of what had been done in their name became too much to bear.

While the burden of suffering and the burden of guilt were distributed anything but equally throughout the former Yugoslavia, the tragedy of the death of Federal Yugoslavia was shared by all. The articles in this book are a valuable source of first-hand reporting on that agonizing, and thoroughly unnecessary, death. I highly recommend it.

"The Destruction of Yugoslavia" by Branka Magas--Part Four

Part Four: Systemic Collapse (1990-91)

The nine articles collected in this section detail the final collapse of socialist, Federal Yugoslavia. The demise of the League of Communists created a power vacuum at the federal center. Milosevic ruthlessly capitalized on the opportunity to assert his power as the leader of a Serb republic where the political center was moving to the Right and extreme nationalism was being openly promoted by the ruling "Socialist" party--the same "Socialist" party which was pushing for greater privatization of the economy.

Magas does a marvelous job of conveying a sense of how unsettled and anxious the country was by this point. The specter of the Army forming a new political party while nobody quite knew who the commander of the nations' military was exactly, for example, serves as a powerful reminder that Yugoslavia was vulnerable because nobody was at the helm. And make no mistake about it--this was the work of Slobodan Milosevic.

This entire section should be required reading for Michael Parenti and others who claim Yugoslavia was destroyed from without by Western intersts, or Diana Johnstone and all those who claim that it was the Milosevic regime which sincerely tried to keep Yugoslavia together. Their disingenuous, convoluted arguments differ in some respects (although intellectual coherence is hardly a strength of Bosnian Revisionism), but they like all baseless conspiracy theories they rely on a carefully studied, deliberate ignorance of context and foundational knowledge.

The revisionists serve two purposes: they provide rhetorical cover for certain reactionary and far-Right factions to assert their agenda under various, more palatable pretexts; they prop up this fiction by appealing to the other end of the ideological spectrum, pitching their poison both to the receptive ears and willing minds of the authoritarian (often Stalinist) Left, and among well-meaning but ill-educated leftists, progressives, liberals, and internationalist-leaning moderates and conservatives.

Johnstone's pretenses regarding the Constitutional and legal issues regarding the breakup of Yugoslavia and the role the Milosevic regime played in it would not bear the scrutiny of any individual familiar with this material. Magas does what Johnstone and other advocates of Greater Serb centralism only claim to do--take the constitution and the governing institutions of socialist Yugoslavia seriously.

"The Destruction of Yugoslavia" by Branka Magas--Part Three

Part Three: Milosevic Assails the Federal Order (1988-89)

I fear I am not doing Magas or her book justice in this drawn-out and rather slapdash review. The problem may be that the book is so dense with detail, yet so drawn-out chronologically (as a natural by-product of being a collection of articles written over a period of 12 years total) that a summary is very difficult to pull off at the length I've chosen. I feel that a longer review would be tedious, since I would merely be giving a page-by-page recount of information presented in the original text, so perhaps for this section and perhaps the following two a brief synopsis will suffice. And let me add--the book is well worth reading.

Magas has already alluded to the class aspect of the breakup of Yugoslavia, but in this section the analysis is even more focused on this theme. As I noted before, it is very odd indeed that the growing rupture between the working class and the Party in Yugoslavia has not been noted in more Western sources. Most notably, it is remarkable how Left-revisionists have deftly avoided this elephant in the room while defending "socialist" Yugoslavia from its alleged Western tormentors.

Magas drills this point home again and again--it was the working class of Kosovo who took up the banner of struggle against the centralization campaign by Serbia and Milosevic. One of the ironies of this period was not the fact that the Federal government of Yugoslavia authorized military force against citizens in violation of the Constitution--that was merely a tragedy, and another sign that the Federal Government increasingly existed only as a hollow shell. The irony was that the Federal Government took this drastic action against citizens who were defending the existing Constitution and the existing institutions of the State!

Besides her adept analysis of the betrayal of the working class by the party, and of the essentially democratic and legitimate struggle of the Kosovar Albanians, Magas also does a fine job of illuminating the rift between Milosevic, and Stambolic and Pavlovic, and of the final battle for control of the Serbian Party.

I cannot do justice to the rich detail the three articles in this section have to offer; I can only encourage the reader to read them for yourself. I will briefly review the final two sections as well, and then move on to another project.

"The Destruction of Yugoslavia" by Branka Magas--Part Two

Part Two: Interregnum (1980-88)

Part Two essentially covers the same time frame as Part One, but instead of focusing on events in Kosovo, the focus here is on the reaction of the post-Tito state to growing economic and social unrest, and on the growing rift between the Party and the working class.

We being with the death of Tito and the resulting fears of threats both external (which seem to have rightly not been considered as dire) and internal--specifically the danger of nationalism, and the dire economic situation the country found itself in. These twin dangers were not unrelated, as republican bureaucratic elites found that nationalism was an effective device to shore up their own power in reaction to economic fear and uncertainty. In the meantime, the working class was increasingly disconnected from the Party and shut out from any considerations of how to deal with the deteriorating economic conditions. With the Federal center weakened and more and more political power devolved to the republics (and more and more economic power devolved to local bosses like Fikret Abdic), the Party proved to be bankrupt of new ideas and of any ability to rally the working class to the cause of Yugoslav unity. Instead, repression and reaction, in hopes to squelching dissent and social disorder until the country somehow, some way managed to recover economically.

Magas notes, more than any other Western source I've read, how much the Polish coup and the resistance of Solidarity in Poland influenced and inspired events in Yugoslavia in the early 1980s. There were demonstrations and petitions in support of the Polish workers, and sometimes the Yugoslav state reacted repressively in reaction, including the mysterious death of Radomir Radovic, an activist worker who had a long history of fighting for workers' rights.

This occurred within the context of a broad campaign of increasing repression throughout Yugoslavia, as even meetings of intellectuals and academics were raided and banned, and participants often arrested, and sometimes incarcerated.

At this point, Magas considers the severe, almost punitive, measures the IMF imposed on Yugoslavia as a result of its enormous foreign debt and continuing economic decline. This is important, because many Left-revisionists have argued that these pressures by the IMF represented the sharp end of the wedge designed by Western interests to dismember Yugoslavia and it socialist economy. While their analysis is ridiculous on the face of it--they have little other actual evidence to support such a claim, even if one can believe that western financial interests desired to the violent disintegration of a nation which owed them so much money, and which possessed resources and an infrastructure which were of much more value intact that war-ravaged--it also ignores the fact that these economic problems were very real, and were not merely the product of Western conniving. Yugoslavia's economy was failing, and the political class lacked the will or the ability to rise above individual Republican interests in order to formulate a coherent, effective response. The alienation of the working class from the Party only furthered the problem--the response of the state was repression, denial, and wishful thinking.

One of the fatal weaknesses of Tito's rule was that he simply sucked all the oxygen out of the room, so to speak--there was no room in the political sphere of the country to consider the difficult realities that the deteriorating economic situation presented; the cumbersome collective presidency that Tito bequeathed to his beloved Federation after his death made it virtually impossible for a coherent, national response to these difficulties to be formulated, much less implemented. The Yugoslav press continued to report on the unpleasant realities the ruling elite and the Party continued to ignore, but the repression of strikes by worker in Bosnia and Macedonia by their respective republican governments--with no intervention on the side of workers by the Party, and no involvement by the Federal government--only underscored the continuing deterioration of the federal center and the growth of increasingly nationalist-leaning Republic governments. The Serbian crushing of unrest in Kosovo--without protest from the Federal government--further demonstrated how power was there for the taking, if unscrupulous demagogues were willing to fan the flames of nationalism, calling for "unity" in the face of unaddressed economic decline.

Decentralization was now a problem, turning republic governments into institutional conduits for nationalism and sectarianism, even as economic decentralization led to the creation of local bosses like Fikret Abdic even as it did nothing to strengthen the position of workers within "socialist self-management."

The campaign against Slovenia in the Serb press only underscored what was at stake--nationalism could be a tool for greater democratic freedom, as Slovene elites fought to maintain their republics political power within a Federation in which an otherwise desirable centralization was in actuality a front for Greater Serb hegemony. The increasing hostility towards the Slovene leadership from an increasingly Serb nationalist-controlled central government, as well as the growing belligerence of the Serb Republican government, in this period is another context which revisionists and Serb nationalist apologists routinely ignore when blaming Slovene separatism for the breakup of the country. Magas makes it quite clear that Yugoslav "unity" was, by the late 1980s, nothing but a sham.

"The Destruction of Yugoslavia" by Branka Magas--Part One

Part One: The Kosovo Watershed and its Aftermath (1981-87)

In the short introduction to this section, Magas notes that, with the imposition of martial law on Kosovo in April 1981, "it was clear that the country as a whole had reached a watershed." A member of the Yugoslav Federation was being treated as a hostile, occupied territory, and security forces were firing on demonstrators, the majority of whom were teenagers. She also notes that there was virtually no public protest from the Yugoslav public, even from the editors of the highly-regarded journal, Praxis. Her shame drove her to investigate the situation; her ignorance of Albanian history drove her to research.

Her initial reporting in Kosovo recognized that socio-economic factors, not inherent fascist tendencies as so many Left-revisionists have maintained, were the driving factors behind the rise of Albanian nationalism in Kosovo. She also recognized that Kosovar Albanians, and the left-wing Yugoslav students who for a time supported their cause, were fighting not to destroy Yugoslavia but to establish Republic status for Kosovo.

When she had completed her research on Albanian history, the result was the lengthy 1983 article "Kosovo between Yugoslavia and Albania." This article artfully summarizes the situation for readers unaware of the historical background, Yugoslav constitutional and political structures, and then-current demographic realities, much of which would be very familiar to readers of this blog. However, Magas comes from a Leftist tradition, and she examines events and institutions through that framework.

She notes that Albanians found it necessary to subjugate all other national considerations in the interests of unity in the early days of national development, in light of expansionist pressures from Serbia and Montenegro. Therefore, Albanian nationalism developed a high degree of unity, but at the cost of delaying all other social developments. The 'internal class struggle' was stunted at this early stage of national development.

Also, while most Western observers recognize that the rebirth of Yugoslavia as a federal republic of nations was the creation of Tito and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (later renamed the League of Communists), it is rarely explained that each individual nation was specifically vested in the new socialist federation by virtue of participation in the revolution and the resistance.

Furthermore, she argues that the failure of the Balkan Socialist Federation, which would have united Yugoslavia with Albania and possibly Bulgaria, was a crucial development in creating the later crisis, by delaying a proper resolution of the status of Kosovo and Yugoslavia's Albanian minority for several years, and finally allowing the province to be subsumed into Serbia, and for the Albanian nationality to acquire what seems to have been second-class status among the nations of Yugoslavia. Other minorities, of course, had a similar status, but the fact that half of the Albanian population was in Yugoslavia made this situation rather different than that of, say, the tiny Bulgarian minority in far eastern Serbia. In short, Tito and the Party leadership kept waiting for the creation of the Balkan Socialist Federation to resolve a number of national and demographic issues, so that no deliberate strategy was instated at the outset of the new political order.

Finally, Magas recognized even then that the "nationalism" which was already infecting Yugoslavia's politics was in large part a creation of decentralization--the bureaucratic elites of the individual republics found that appeals to their respective national majorities were effective tools to mobilize support and deflect criticism. Yet, the future would show that centralization was a devil's bargain, since any attempt to revive the Federal center would in practice strengthen the Serb republic government, which under Milosevic would use "centralization" as a cover for Greater Serb expansionism.

Her fears that the Yugoslav Left opposition were not going to side with the cause of Kosovo turned out, of course, to be well-founded, but while she was perceptive to recognize the danger that the Kosovo situation posed for the future democratization and even survival of the country, it would take some time for the failure of the Left in Yugoslavia to overcome, or even recognize, the dangers of nationalism and centralism to become obvious.

Ultimately, of course, many of the prominent editors of the once-proud Praxis would ultimately disgrace themselves by signing on to an anti-Albanian petition in 1986, as part of the same campaign which produced the infamous "memorandum" from Serb Academy of Arts and Sciences of that same year. In the final article, "Nationalism Captures the Serbian Intelligentsia", she reproduces the anti-Albanian petition mentioned above, and then follows with her September 1986 article "The End of an Era" in which she decries the signing of that petition by three former editors of Praxis, and explains in plain language why the claims of this petition are ridiculous and its demands outrageous and dangerous.

Those three--Zaga Golubovic, Mihailo Markovic, and Ljubomir Tadic--responded directly to her article in a letter to the "Editorial Collective" of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, which had published her article. Their response was lengthy and maintains a tone of exasperated faux-'reasonableness' which would be familiar to readers of Diana Johnstone. And Magas then includes her reply, which is factual, systematic, comprehensive, and devastating. Considering that no small fraction of this blog has been devoted to similar work, I can only admire the completeness and clarity of her deconstruction of such dissembling.

Her concluding paragraph is worth quoting:

"Thus what above all moved me to write 'The End of an Era' was a real concern that, if such well-known socialists as Zaga Golubovic, Mihailo Markovic, and Ljubomir Tadic were to join the nationalist cause, all hope of seeing the emergence of a genuinely democratic alternative to the present quagmire of bureaucratic and nationalist discord would be set back."

We can only wish, too late, that more on the Left had been listening at the time.

"The Destruction of Yugoslavia" by Branka Magas--Introduction

Left-wing journalist Branka Magas began covering events in Yugoslavia in 1980, in order to track changes in the country after the death of Tito that year. As a result, when the country was destroyed by war in the early 1990s, she was one observer who was not only not surprised, she had a pretty good idea what the underlying causes to the countries agonizing death were.

In 1993, Verso books published a collection of her articles on Yugoslavia from her initial reporting through to the then-still raging war, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Breakup 1980-92. There are 31 articles collected in this volume, which is divided thematically and chronologically into four sections. I intend to review each section over the next four posts, in order to convey the general sense of her reportage as well as touching on some of the themes she grapples with; themes which unfortunately either did not figure into most Western reporting on the war, or which were used to undermine the case for intervention.

Introduction

The book begins in 1992, with the war in Bosnia underway, Croatia dismembered and divided, Kosova under martial law and Macedonia living in fear of falling victim to ethnic war itself. Magas pulls no punches in describing the situation, and she makes it clear that the empty noises Western powers were making about humanitarian concerns did not fool her for a second. The arms embargo aided the Bosnian Serb Army and Milosevic, and she knew it then.

She also recognizes that a significant element of the Western Left was getting the situation all wrong; blaming German recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, living in naive nostalgia for the old Yugoslav state without clearly recognizing what centralization meant by that point in time, and so forth.

Magas means to reorient the Left's response to the breakup of Yugoslavia by understanding how it came to be, without being swayed by the superficial socialism of Milosevic or indulging in knee-jerk anti-Western romantic mythologizing of nations and peoples. She understands that Milosevic used nationalism as an ideological tool, something which should be an obvious point but which many revisionists use to confuse criticism of Serbian government actions by showing that the Belgrade regime was not "really" nationalist.

The rest of this Introduction continues to build the argument that, as she puts it, "Yugoslavia did not die a natural death; it was destroyed for the cause of a Greater Serbia." There is nothing in these few pages which would surprise any regular reader of this blog; I only wish to touch on it in order to establish that Magas, even in 1992, clearly recognized the general sequence of events which have long been recognized as a factual and honest account of the political and military events which brought war first to Slovenia, then Croatia, and finally to Bosnia.

The final section of the Introduction (excepting the acknowledgments) begins with this paragraph:

"In 1980, I decided to research the history of Yugoslavia's formation, in order to prepare for the changes to be anticipated after Tito's death. However, study of Yugoslavia's birth in 1981, its speedy decline, and its rebirth after 1945, soon came to merge with examination and assessment of events that seemed to be heading irresistibly towards a final disintegration, not only of the system of 'socialist self-management' but of the country itself. Although the two dimensions of the crisis formed part of the same process, so cannot be separated in physical time, the present book does register the gradual shift from a preoccupation with the fate of 'socialism' in Yugoslavia to a concern with the fate of the country as such."

It is remarkable that so few Western mainstream accounts of the breakup of Yugoslavia have dealt with the specific ills of the socialist system, and of the problems the country faced in an explicitly left-wing context given that it was a socialist federation only two generations removed from a genuinely revolutionary national transformation. This book remains a welcome exception to that rule.

Play "Honey Brown Eyes" to be performed in Washington DC

Dear Colleagues,

The Bosniak-American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina cordially invites you to
the play performance of Honey Brown Eyes at Theater J.

Honey Brown Eyes:
BAACBH Fundraising Event


Thursday, October 26, 2008 ::: 3.00- pm ::: 1529 16h St., NW, Washington, D.C.



Bosnia, 1992. A Serbian soldier confronts a woman he might have known and is faced with a terrible choice, while a member of the Bosnian resistance takes refuge in what he thinks is an abandoned apartment. Unlikely partnerships emerge in this play of heart breaking humanity and stunning relevance.

The purpose of the event is to enable four Bosnian-American students, who survived the war in Bosnia from 1992-95, to intern on Capitol Hill through the BAACBH Summer Educational Internship Program.

At 4:45 pm, following the matinee performance, the Artistic Director's Roundtable will discuss Women and Children in the Wars of Man: Giving Voice to the Unheard, including Elmina Kulasic, the Executive Director of the Bosniak-American Advisory Council, as a panelist.

Artwork by Natasa Keys, a young Bosnian-American, will be featured on the outside of the theater.



If you would like to contribute to the fundraiser, you may purchase tickets through the BAACBH website donation page (
www.baacbh.org Donation on the left side) for $60.00 with the difference going towards the educational program. Tickets will be held at the entrance.

Regular tickets for this play can also be purchased through Theater J at (800) 494-TIXS for $53.00.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [22]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

3. CROATIAN NATIONALISM: THE END OF YUGOSLAVIA

In this section, Johnstone summarizes the first 900-1000 years of Croatian history in three quick pages. With a focus on the development of Croatian nationalism, of course. And what is the nature of Croatian nationalism? While the Slovenes are dismissed as elitist, money-grubbing sellouts, the Croats are ungrateful pretenders whose nationalism is half-baked and cowardly, compared to the heroic Serbs next door.

Cue the trumpets...

-------

While the Serbs rose up from squalor and oppression to fight a working-class revolt of the peasants against their perfidious Muslim overlords, the Croats schemed and plotted in the comfort and safety of the Catholic Hapsburg Empire. That, anyway, is the gist of the first paragraph.

The rest of the opening section of part 3 is a triumph of selective history and what can only be a deliberately clueless summary of the development of Croatian nationalism--clueless because, while the (selectively gathered) facts she deploys are not, on the face of it, inaccurate, they are deployed to bolster a biased and ignorant reading not only of Croatian and Serbian nationalism, but of the phenomena of nationalism itself.

We encounter Johnstone at her most disingenuous here; raising questions against one side of an argument while blatantly failing to apply the same rigorous standards of proof against the other. While grossly oversimplifying the process by which Serbian nationalism developed, she puts the development of Croatian nationalism under a microscope--while ignoring evidence that the development of national identity was never a straightforward, clear-cut, or organic process. Rather than lie about the complexities and contradictions of the Croat experience, she rather more cleverly ignores the same in the experience of the Serbs and others.

We shall see this process at work in the next post.