"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 [8]

Chapter 4: July 1991-January 1992: The Twilight Zone

The first few pages of this chapter briefly describe the naive and optimistic diplomacy of the European Community. Despite some fumbling and miscalculation, the European "Troika" of diplomats were able to obtain an end to the ten-day Slovenian war; the Brioni Accord. This rather neat and uncomplicated end to the fighting (Glenny does not here discuss the possibility that the entire war was a very half-hearted, even disingenuous, effort by the Yugoslav state and Milosevic) gave the European Community (particularly Germany, according to Glenny) a false belief that "it could promote piecemeal solutions to the Yugoslav crisis--a grave error." [page 101]

The next several pages illustrate the growing violence in several regions of Croatia by focusing on one incident--the murder of Osijek Chief of Police Josip Reichl-Kir, a Croat of German-Hungarian ethnic heritage (a perfect example of the artificial nature of "nationality" in the Balkans--and everywhere else, for that matter).

Reichl-Kir was a brave, principled and far-sighted man, who worked tirelessly at great risk to maintain peace between local Croats and the embattled Serb minority. His efforts had been more or less successful; it helped that this area had not seen serious ethnic violence during World War II, although there were many Serbs and Croats who had been settled here in the post-war period by the Tito government in order to remove them from areas which had seen ethnic violence. Thus, tragically, putting some of the most traumatized and radicalized Serb and Croat communities in close proximity to each other, in a region in which the indigenous Serbs and Croats had no quarrel with each other. Glenny notes that in villages made up entirely of "natives," ethnic violence was resisted and in a few places the war never divided these mixed communities.

But, unfortunately, the virus of nationalism found plenty of fertile soil. When Reichl-Kir and other local leaders (both Serb and Croat) were killed by automatic rifle fire in his car, peace largely collapsed. Within a day, violence had broken out.

I still have some reservations about Glenny's perspective, but I will hold off on them for now. I want to pause here, in an admittedly pitiful and belated tribute to Reichl-Kir; those apologists and non-interventionists who believe that the violence in the Balkans was simply an inevitable outbreak of native bloodlust and an endemic culture of revenge and violence need to account for facts like this--in order for the demons of war to be unleashed, it was necessary for armed thugs to murder decent men like Reichl-Kir and intimidate countless other equally decent of less courageous individuals. In the fighting to come, the casualties begin to increase from a handful, to dozens, then hundreds, and then thousands. We can never let these increasing statistics cloud our view of innumerable individual crimes which constituted the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. It would necessary to murder many other decent, principled men and women in order to create the opportunity for ethnic war.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [7]

Chapter 3 [concluded]

Chapter 3 concludes with a consideration of the role that Slovenia played in the final breakup of Yugoslavia; and of a portrait of the moderate Serb region of Glina, who were traumatized and radicalized by the actions of the HDZ and later by agents from the Knin SDS.

Neither of these brief accounts ring false; yet there seems to be something missing in Glenny's account. It is not incorrect to note that Slovenia's exit from Yugoslavia was in many ways hasty, that it forced Croatia to follow suit while unprepared, or that the Slovenes and Croats were backed by many European governments which didn't fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. Yet at the same time, there seems to be very little awareness from Glenny of the fact that Slovenia was a small republic facing the very real specter of a Serb-dominated central state under Milosevic; he only mentions the economic disparities between the wealthier Alpine republic and its poorer neighbors to the south.

What seems to be in play here is that one of Glenny's strengths--he's a Serbo-Croat speaker who spent a lot of time on the ground and reported quickly--is also, if not exactly a weakness, at the very least has led him to narrow his focus just a little bit too much. For while the early part of this book demonstrated a solid grasp of recent political and economic events which fueled the crisis, in this chapter there seems to be a real disconnect between this larger context and the discrete local scenarios he describes.

In the case of the moderate Serbs around Glina; the larger story here is that the rise of nationalism and and nationalist politicians narrowed, and finally eliminated, the civic space in which is was possible to maintain a "Yugoslav" or non-ethnic identity. Ultimately, the Serbs around Glina were forced to join with the SDS because it was no longer possible to be anything but exclusively Serb.

I cannot shake the nagging feeling that Glenny is too hasty to shift the focus entirely to the heavy-handed, thuggish tactics of Tudjman's government; but at the same time Glenny had been so clear-headed in his analysis up to now it seems a bit unfair to be too quick to accuse him of downplaying the primary role of the Belgrade regime by engaging in some faux-objective 'even-handedness.'

What does seem to be clear at the conclusion of this chapter is that Glenny certainly regards the war in Croatia to have been much more of situation in which the Croatian government brought on the war just as much as the Yugoslav government did. This seems to fly in the face of his own admission that Tudjman, unlike Milosevic and the JNA, had not really prepared for war. It also raises the question--if Tudjman had been a wiser leader and the moderate wing of the HDZ had predominated, would the war in Croatia still have happened? Would it have been as brutal? And would ethnic cleansing still have entered the lexicon of the late 20th century? I am not at all convinced that the answers to any of these questions would be 'No'; and therefore, I have some serious reservations about Glenny's perspective.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [5]

Chapter 3: June-July 1991: State of Independence

This chapter starts off with a trio of vignettes which serve both to illustrate the sad sense of impending doom which hung over Yugoslavia (and of which the rest of the world remained ignorant), and of the fragile beauty of daily life which was about to be desecrated by war.

First Glenny goes to Prague, for the Conference on European Confederation which he describes as "a sop to Eastern European countries." While there, he speaks with the former Croatian Deputy Prime Minister Mate Babic, who turns out to be an astute witness to Franjo Tudjman's governing style. The most interesting observation is this:

"Although he was distinctly no friend of Milosevic, Mate Babic admitted frankly that Serbia had gone further down the road to privitization than Croatia. Tudjman, he insisted, was consciously blocking Croatia's progress in this direction. Let it be remembered that according to President Tudjman, Croatia's moral superiority over Serbia lay in its fervent commitment to free-market economics."

And let it also be remembered that, according to left-wing apologists for the Milosevic regime, Yugoslavia was allegedly destroyed partly because he was courageously defending the socialism of Yugoslavia against the forces of Western neo-liberalism and their capitalist lackeys such as Tudjman.

Glenny also meets Srdja Popovic, a distinguished Serbian liberal journalist from Belgrade, who predicts that war will break out when the republics begin declaring independence.

Then he makes his way from depressing, doom-ridden Belgrade to Prishtina, where he meets Veton Surroi, who proves to be a charming observer himself. The account of this visit largely serves the purpose of allowing Glenny to deal with the subject of Kosovo on the eve of the wars which would, for a few years anyway, push this occupied colony out of sight and out of mind. Glenny does seem to "get it" in Kosovo; he regards it as being an occupied territory, and he notes that few if any Serbs from Serbia have ever been there. He realizes that the presence of the state there is one of racist occupation, and that the Albanians are the victims of oppression. He also feels genuine pity for the Kosovar Serbs, whom he realizes are pawns of the Milosevic regime, which needs them in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity in order to justify the crackdown. Glenny essentially concedes the right of self-determination of the Albanian majority and the case for independence.

Finally, he visits Macedonia, where he dwells a little on the state of the Albanian minority there and the larger issue of Albanian nationalism; he ends up in Skopje as the guest of Macedonian journalist Sasho Ordanoski. They avoid politics, meet a lot of people, and have a wonderful night. It's a lovely scene, one which makes you ache knowing of the deluge which is to come.

And it comes...

"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.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [19]

Chapter 30: Conclusion

Because this book was published in 1996, this final chapter is obviously somewhat dated, but unfortunately not nearly enough--the pessimistic tone of this closing chapter remains largely justified. War did not return to Bosnia or Croatia, and both Milosevic and Tudjman have done the world the favor of dying, but on the other hand this book was written before the Kosova war so the author's concerns about possible future conflict was not unmerited, even if the worst-case scenarios or renewed conflict in Bosnia and a possible wider Balkan war was mercifully avoided.

The Dayton agreement achieved peace by institutionalizing ethnic separation, and the biggest winners were Tudjman and Milosevic, even if both Croatia and the rump Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro were still maintaining the fiction of Federal Yugoslavia) were suffering the effects of economic hardship and autocratic rule.

And so this excellent book--probably the best one book to read on the Yugoslav wars (except Kosova, obviously)--comes to a close. The authors make no projections for the future, nor do they suggest a road map. They are too aware of how flawed and compromised Bosnia's chances were, and how limited the international community was to anything other than a simplistic "stability" which could keep the region out of the news.

If you haven't read this book, it is an essential account of the war. If you are looking for suggestions on where Bosnia and its allies need to go from here, you will need to look otherwise--but the next time you are arguing with someone who has been fooled into thinking that the "standard narrative" of the Bosnian war is an emotionally-charged and ideologically-slanted justification for Western intervention, you can rest assured that they have never read this sober, methodical account.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [12]

Chapter 16: The Gates of Hell The Outbreak of War in Bosnia April 1-10, 1992

This chapter opens with a moving and illuminating episode from the opening days of the war, then backs up to recount the opening of full-scale warfare in and around Sarajevo. It is clear from the narrative that, up until this point, Izetbegovic had not fully grasped how much danger his country, and his fellow Muslims, were in. Balkan revisionists and apologists for the Serb nationalist project conveniently forget that this "Islamic fundamentalist" was completely unprepared for armed conflict of any kind.

Chapter 17: The President is Kidnapped May 2-3, 1992

This chapter recounts, in detail, the infamous incident where the JNA apprehended President Izetbegovic and his companions at the Sarajevo airport. This event was revisited inthe news in the past few months when Serbia tried, and failed, to have former member of the Bosnian Presidency extradicted for his role in this affair.

The details here are important, and the book makes a convincing case that the entire incident, which ended with an ambush by Bosnian militiamen and left several dead, was simply the tragic result of some incredibly poor decisions made in the middle of a confusing war. It is worth noting that the JNA forces in Sarajevo were under the command of an old-school general who was not on board with the Greater Serbia project--he would be relieved and replaced with Ratko Mladic--yet another detail which illustrates how confusing the situation on the ground was.

Also of interest to readers of this blog is how this incident, more than anything else, seems to have turned Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie into a de facto ally of the Bosnian Serb government. His initial anger and disgust with the Bosnian government forces was understandable, but his failure to put the incident into context, to recognize his own role in the tragedy, or to realize that trapped in Sarajevo as he was he was--much like the rest of the Western world--unable to see the greater horrors unfolding in the rest of Bosnia--are not.

Chapter 18: The Cleansing The Summer of 1992

While much of the Western world was unaware of what was going on in the rest of the republic, that would soon change. This chapter details both the "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnia as well as the stories of the different journalists who helped bring them to light; all this in the context of hundreds of thousands of refugees bringing incredible and grotesque horror stories which quite often were simply not believed. All this also in the context of an international reaction which chose to regard the war as a humanitarian, not a political crisis (an illusion the West would cling to far beyond the point at which this politically convenient fiction could stand up to the light of day); the authors point out that the creation of refugees was not a by-product of the war, it was the entire point.

The incidents in this chapter are infamous, and well-known to any reader of this blog. The discovery of death camps by Roy Gutman of Newsday, and then the reporting of ITV, should be news to nobody here. Still, the fact remains that there are revisionists who need to believe that these things simply didn't happen. It is crucial, then, to remember that reliable and sober reportage on these atrocities existed from the early days of the war, and that these accounts have stood the test of time and the rigor of analysis and second-guessing. Parenti, Johnstone, Chomsky and the rest don't want to know it. But we are not free to pick and choose which reality suits our ideological purposes.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [11]

PART FOUR: BOSNIA

This section takes up the bulk of the remaining text; indeed, it makes up over a third of the book in total. By this point in the narrative, it is clear that the war which was brought to Bosnia was driven by forces outside the republic; by the time the fighting broke out, whatever chances there had been to avert it had long since been squandered by the republic's political leadership.

Chapter 15: Before the Deluge July 1990-March 1992

This chapter essentially catches the reader "up to speed" on events in Bosnia while first Slovenia and then Croatia were engulfed by radical nationalism, paramilitary intimidation, and finally full-fledged war.

Much of the chapter is taken up with the political developments in Bosnia after multiparty elections were held; as in the other republics, nationalist parties easily dominated the election returns--a situation only exacerbated by the republic's constitution, which dictated that representation was by nation, not individuals. The chapter also discusses Muslim intellectual, SDA leader, and eventual Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, who turned out to be a mostly ineffectual leader who did little more than provide ammunition for his nationalist opponents such as Radovan Karadzic. Izetbegovic was more "Islamic" than most of his people; this would create drawbacks for the Bosnian Muslims and precious few benefits.

It was obvious almost from the start that the Serb leadership in the SDS had no interest in a unified independent Bosnia; the Croat leadership in the HDZ made a tactical alliance with the Muslims but it was purely a temporary marriage of convenience; the Croats were in no position to take on either of the larger groups politically but at least the nationalist Croats of Herzegovina had a longer-term goal of union with Croatia proper. While the Serbs quietly armed and radicalized their civilian population, Izetbegovic stumbled closer and closer towards a war he made no significant preparations for. It is true that his hands were largely tied, and that his options were few and mostly dictated by others; but his failure to recognize what was coming and to make better preparations would soon cost his government, his about-to-be-independent state, and the Muslims of Bosnia dearly.

"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 [9]

Chapter 10: The Descent Into War Croatia and the Serbs February-June 1991

The situation in Croatia continued to deteriorate, as neither the SDS nor the HDZ were seriously interested in working out a peaceful compromise. The Tudjman government was playing a game of brinksmanship without being fully prepared, even as the Slovenians were much further along in their quiet preparations.

Tudjman and the HDZ took more and more provocative moves to challenge and threaten the breakaway Serb areas even as the SDS consolidated its hold over Serb majority areas through a combination of propaganda (which the HDZs extreme rhetoric helped legitimize) and strongarm tactics against moderates within the Serb community. In Slavonia, it took a sustained campaign of nationalist intimidation to force out the moderate leadership of the not-yet radicalized Serb natives.

In the meantime the JNA began to get dragged into the conflict, slowly morphing into a de facto "Greater Serbia" army in the process. The SDS began a clever strategy of taking provocative actions, egging the Croatian government into a response, which would then justify intervention by the JNA, which would move in to come between the two parties, thus demarcating more territory for separatist Serbs.

Chapter 11: Conversations of the Deaf The Last Chance Squandered May-June 1991

Last-ditch, half-hearted efforts at constitutional reform, and perfunctory and half-baked diplomatic signals from the United States gave only faint and illusory hope that war could be averted. Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Gligorov of Macedonia tried to convince the other republic leaders that it was not too late to avert war by reconfiguring Yugoslavia into what would be called an "asymmetrical federation", but the Croat and Serb leadership were not truly interested in the plan.

US Secretary of State James Baker and Ambassador Walter Zimmerman both gave the warring parties the same mixed messages, which ultimately added up to one clear message--the West was simply not paying that much attention.

Some of the concerned parties were sincerely interested in averting war, but they were not the parties in a position to do so. It was too late.

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

This is the end of Part Two; I apologize that this review has taken so long. The real reason isn't that I think the text is difficult to follow--anything but. I have been going chapter by chapter for the very simple reason that it has been years since I've read this book and I wanted to re-read it for the review. Which normally wouldn't be a problem, but with graduate school and other claims on my time it's been a slow process. I will try to pick up the pace and get this project moving a little quicker.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [8]

Chapter 9: "If we don't know how to work, at least we know how to fight"

Further subtitled "The Decisive Month", this chapter details political events in March of 1991. The opening two sentences summarize the import of these events:

"March was the decisive month. Milosevic set the country on the course to war."

That is really what this chapter is all about--the grubby details elaborating the process by which Milosevic took off the gloves, and, in certain select company, the mask of being bound by legality and of maintaining any pretense to Yugoslav unity. Faced with mass uprisings and the possibility of the people turning against him, the man who a few short years earlier had claimed the mantle of Serb nationalism by telling the Serbs of Kosova "nobody should dare to beat you" sent the riot police to beat the Serbs of Belgrade, even as his deputy Jovic was trying to strongarm the collective Presidency into authorizing the JNA to take military action against dissent. Reading this chapter alone makes one wonder how Balkan revisionists are able to maintain the fictions their delusional versions of Yugoslavias' demise require.

This chapter is crucial not only for the portrait of Milosevic nakedly throwing Yugoslavia under the bus and declaring himself committed to a de facto Greater Serbia; it also undermines the propoganda that he was merely following the dictates of public passion of the Serb people. It is worth noting that at the moment when Yugoslavia teetered towards war, the Serbs of Serbia stood against him and forced him to play authoritarian strongman.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [6]

PART TWO: LIGHTING THE FUSE

Chapter 7: "The Remnants of a Slaughtered People"

The Knin Rebellion, January-August 1990

The chapter opens with a sobering anecdote; Milan Babic, the future SDS heavyweight, recounts how he was taught as a child that the scar on the old tree outside their house had been cut by the local Ustasha member who had come to kill his father, who was then only 12 years old. His father was lucky to escape with his life, and the complicity of local ethnic Croats became part of Babic family lore from then on.

There are a few notable things about this story. First, it is by no means an anomaly--ethnic Serbs in the Knin area were frequently the victims of Ustashe atrocities. Secondly, the Babic family legend about the scar in the mulberry tree was also typical, in that it represented the sort of folk history about World War II which contradicted the official Titoist history, and which was passed along secretively within communities, families, and ethnic groups. Thirdly, the fact that Milan Babic was so personally affected by this story should not obscure the fact that he was born 15 years after the incident. There were certainly many stories which could have been passed on to him and other members of later generations, but the story of the murderous Croat neighbor was the one which he remembered most. This, too, was no anomaly in Tito’s Yugoslavia.

The rest of this chapter recounts the growth of the Serb Democratic Party in the Krajina, the former frontier region of Croatia where most of Croatia’s ethnic Serbs lived, and where memories of Ustashe terror had been both passed down and kept alive; fertile ground for nationalistic ideologues to recruit. Tudjman’s clumsy nationalistic sloganeering only fanned the flames. By the time Milosevic shrewdly and discretely moved in to put Belgrade’s support into the mix, the Krajina Serbs were already well on the way towards being radicalized, organized, and armed.

The first armed confrontations between the nascent regime in Zagreb and the fledgling statelet based around Knin (which would soon grow much larger) ended without bloodshed or even any shooting. But it was still an armed confrontation; Milosevic was one step closer to abandoned an effort to dominate Yugoslavia and beginning to carve out an exclusively Serb state from its corpse instead.

"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.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [3]

Chapter 3: "No Way Back."

Subtitled "The Slovene Spring, 1988", this chapter begins with the sentence: "As Milosevic consolidated power, the authorities in Slovenia were relaxing their hold." This parallel development is crucial to understanding the dynamics of what happened next, but it is also important to look closely at the political dynamics in Slovenia in the final years of Yugoslavia in order to understand, as so many revisionists do not, how neither the Slovene leadership nor the Slovene nationalist opposition were not the drivers of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The liberalization of political and civil society in Slovenia did not necessarily lead inexorably towards the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

While the Slovenian leadership were dealing with the push towards democratization and economic liberalization, the one Federal institution with real power--the Army--took offense at some actions taken by the influential opposition magazine Mladina, including leaking of confidential documents as well as harsh criticism of the military leadership.

The resulting crackdown--which was clumsy and overbearing, and mostly revealed how out of touch the army leadership had become--united the Slovene opposition and rallied the normally conservative Slovene public behind them. It also put Kucan and the rest of the republics Party leadership under pressure to pick a side; ultimately, they would side with the public against the Army and the Federal institutions.

The situation was not yet critical and the damage was not yet irreparable; it would take the calculated and cynical manipulation of the situation by Milosevic to make sure that there was truly "No Way Back."

Chapter 4: Comrade Slobodan: Think Hard"

Slobodan Milosevic was a calculating petty tyrant who was capable of appearing to believe whatever ideology was convenient at the moment. He was also a master manipulator of the complex Federal and republican bureaucracies in the former Yugoslavia; and he was the first politician in that country to understand the power of populism as a force and of the mob as a political weapon.

This chapter details the systematic way Milosevic used these abilities to stymie attempts by the leadership of other republics and even the Federal government to halt his destructive path to gaining power over first Serbia, then Kosovo, then Vojvodina, and finally Montenegro. It lays bare how cyncially and proactively popular sentiment was finessed, channeled, and harnessed by Milosevic and his cronies in order to intimidate and defeat rivals within his growing sphere of political power; claims by revisionists and apologists that the wars in Yugoslavia were the regrettable but unavoidable consequence of the loosening of Federal authority are exposed as patronizing falsehoods.

One sentence in particular is worth quoting: "With this move, Milosevic made clear his strategy towards the Yugoslav federation: when it was opportune he invoked the supremacy of the federal institutions over the republics; but when it was in his interest, he claimed that Serbia would not obey the dictates of the federation." Two things are noteworthy about this statement. One; it is no exaggeration. Many times, Milosevic explicitly declares that the Serb people will not allow any Yugoslav institution stand in their way (such statements were often made in the context of carefully planned and stage-managed mass rallies, complete with the threat of violence), and at other times he is a stickler for the letter of the law; he was a master at using the complex rules of the Yugoslav constitution to his own benefit, even as he sought to destroy it. Two; this statement must be remembered whenever revisionists and apologists for the Greater Serbia project utilize arguments based on the technicalities of Yugoslav law. Milosevic only played by the rules of the system when it was in his tactical interest to do so, even though his larger strategic aim was to destroy the system. He openly flouted his contempt for the rule of law time and time again; something which his pathetic minions of admirers consistently fail to acknowledge.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [2]

Part One: Laying the Charge

The six chapters in Part One detail political events in Yugoslavia from the publication of the infamous Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art in 1986, to the eave of armed fighting in the Krajina region of Croatia in early 1990.

It is worth stressing again, that the book traces the political developments in the country; while the authors understand and explain that nationalist tensions and grievances were a real issue prior to the outbreak of hostilities, they categorically reject the possibility that the mere existance of such resentments and prejudices could explain the Yugoslav wars. The book makes it quite clear that the wars which destroyed Yugoslavia were the direct result of deliberate political decisions made by ambitious and shrewd political leaders.

Chapter 1: "This Is Our Land"

We begin with the publication of the Memorandum, which the authors put into context of the political situation in Yugoslavia after the death of Tito in 1980 and the Yugoslav constitution of 1974. We are also introduced to Dobrica Cosic, Ivan Stambolic, and Slobodan Milosevic, among others. Cosic's status as the godfather of modern Serbian nationalism is briefly sketched out, and while Stambolic takes the position of an orthodox Communist official who fears the latent power of nationalism and who wishes to keep the Titoist system working, we are shown Milosevic shrewdly keeping silent on the issue, although a party official in his position should very well have had an opinion. The calculating, ruthless nature of the man is already beginning to show.

At the end of the chapter, the Serbian government took Cosic and his co-conspirators under its wing; the Communists were coopting the nationalists for their own ends--a power play to replace the vacuum still left vacant by Tito's death.

Chapter 2: "No One Should Dare to Beat You."

This chapter is a detailed summary of Milosevic's infamous visit to Kosovo in 1987, the circumstances surrounding it as well as the context it occured in. While the basic outlines of the story are familiar to anyone who has studied the Balkan wars, what is striking about Silber and Little's account is how much of these events were thoroughly stage-managed and prepared. Milosevic, the nationalist Kosovo Serb leadership, and the Serbian media all cooperated to create a flashpoint moment which, more than any single event, sent everything which followed into motion.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [1]

[I am now embarking on my promised ongoing/open-ended series of books reviews; I am undertaking this project with an eye towards developing an online annotated bibliography of books on the Bosnian war, the context it occurred in, and related issues. I am working these reviews out in process in public view in hopes of soliciting feedback, editorial suggestions, and knowledgeable feedback. Please feel free to weigh in on these reviews as I work them out in this public forum.]

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Laura Silber and Alan Little

In 1995, BBC broadcast a six-part documentary entitled "Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation", which won wide praise for its in-depth reporting and extensive use of previously unseen archival footage.

Two of the journalists who were deeply involved in creating the series, Laura Silber and Alan Little, would subsequently go on to produce a book by the same title based on the body of documentation gathered for the production of the BBC series. This book would also garner much-deserved acclaim, and nearly fifteen years after its publication remains probably the best widely availabe single-volume English-language history of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

As the Introduction makes clear, the authors intended this book to be a dispassionate, fact-based work of sober reportage; to quote:

"It is also important to state what this book is not. It is not a crie de coeur of the "Save Bosnia Now" type (though we both believe that Bosnia could, and should, have been saved). It is not a polemic against the failure of the West to protect the weak against the strong, or even to honor its own promises. And it is not a book about journalism or journalists; it is not a "we were there and it was horrible" account of life on the front line."

This disclaimer is accurate. The authors are willing to let the facts speak for themselves, and they do powerfully in this book. For someone who knows nothing of how the wars started or what happened once they did, this is the place to start. The authors do not dwell too deeply on history--the story begins with Milosevic's rise to power, after only the briefest of historical sketches in the Introduction to set the stage. There is no examination of cultural or social undercurrents to the violence. The authors are concerned with political decisions made by mostly unscrupulous leaders who were willing to utilize the latent power of nationalism to fill the political void left by Tito's death.

The Introduction is brief, and sets the stage for the story to come. There are multiple maps, a "Cast of Characters" giving names and a brief identifying entry for approximately 175 persons, a list of acronyms, and a sense that the reader is in the hands of two authors who are able to present sober, even-keeled analysis without jettisoning their respective moral compasses in a misguided quest to be "neutral" or "objective."