"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [28]

Epilogue 1996 [concluded]

Glenny devotes six of the final ten pages of his book to "Operation Storm", the military operation in which Croatian forces retook the Krajina region and through a mixture of direct action and failure to provide security managed to expel virtually the entire Serbian population of the region. I have no real quarrel with his account, although he does seem to be using it to support his implicit case that Tudjman and the Croats bear an equal share of the blame for the Yugoslav wars.

This leaves four pages for the "end game" in which the United States and NATO used bombing to force the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table. Being that Glenny had always argued that using force against the Serbs would backfire, he employs some verbal gymnastics arguing that what actually happened was more complicated and a matter of timing than simple causation. There's some merit in that view, but he pushes it a little too hard and a little too inflexibly. In Glenny's world, he's the only person who always understood the root of the matter. He is right about much of what he says here--it's true that the US was not interested in actually defeating the Bosnian Serbs, and that the Contact Group plan they were pushing for amounted to institutionalizing ethnic partition. But it seems strange, and a little disingenuous, for him to harp on this now when throughout the book he was adamant that intervention was pointless and that the war had its own logic which must be allowed to play out. Glenny grants none of the wars actors--particularly the Serbs--any agency whatsoever. Everything they did was in Newtonian reaction to historic and international forces. 

And so this updated edition ends--with Glenny somberly lecturing the Western world and the international community that although it is too late for the Yugoslavs, we must learn the lessons of this war. What those lessons are--I don't know if Glenny really expects us to draw any. He certainly doesn't waste any ink spelling them out.

I have no final thoughts on this book--I've said my piece throughout this 28 part review, and others have already eloquently pointed out Glenny's failings. He is an excellent reporter, with a great eye for detail and human interest. And I think he is an essentially humane man who genuinely loathed the suffering he saw. But his analytic abilities were overtaxed, and his grasp of history and politics was simply inadequate. He knew the details and the facts, but could not recognize his own biases interpretive framework, and in the end that conceptual limitation undermines the usefulness of this book. 

Sorry to end with a whimper rather than a bang, but it's past time to move on.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [26]

Epilogue 1996 [continued]

The next six pages, in which Glenny meets Richard Holbrooke and Robert Frasure, doesn't quite pass the smell test for me, even though I've never seen anything in this book or elsewhere to suggest that Glenny isn't an honest and reliable reporter (it's his analysis I take exception to). I don't necessarily mean to suggest that he is making these scenes up; only that his presentation suggests, or implies, that Holbrooke was sincerely seeking not just insight or clarification from Glenny but specific advice about actions. Perhaps Glenny is just playing along when he responds to Holbrooke's query about whether or not NATO should bomb the Serbs around Bihac, but if so his sense of humor is dry even by British standards.

The real point of this section is for Glenny to point out that the Americans ultimately pushed for a settlement not much different from the Vance-Owen plan that the Clinton Administration had rejected previously. And this is true; but while Glenny rushes through some of the contingent events in the interim--marketplace massacres, and the fall of two of the three eastern enclaves (he acknowledges that Srebrenica was a massive atrocity even though he states that the full truth is yet to be known)--he does so so quickly that it would be easy for the casual reader to conclude that this means that the partition of Bosnia was the only sensible solution all along.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [25]

Epilogue 1996 [continued]

The next six pages consist of a short discussion of the "parastates", which Glenny describes as "the mutant offspring of an expiring state." The term is not his own, nor is the observation that such parastates existed in the former Yugoslavia. I give him credit for acknowledging that the Serb Republic in Bosnia was a creation of genocide. However, he considers the Muslim-dominated Bosnian government to have been nothing more than one of three parastates within Bosnia, eliminating any lingering doubts that he did not give the Bosnian government under Izetbegovic any legitimacy. Which goes a long way towards explaining why he was so opposed to Western support--he rejected the entire notion that there was a Bosnian state.

Furthermore, he expresses outrage at the video of a Bosnian soldier from a government propaganda piece extolling the upcoming offensive planned during the Jimmy Carter-brokered cease-fire. Specifically, he bemoans what he perceives as a double-standard, as the international community would have been outraged to see "the Serbs" making such provocative gestures, but the Bosnian government does not received condemnation when it "trashes its solemn commitments to the international community."

There's a lot to unravel in that statement, little of which Glenny seems aware of. For one thing, the description of the "Bosnian government" is his--he often refers to "the Moslems" (even in this section, even when describing the very military actions being discussed here), yet here he refers to the "Bosnian government." Yet he is treating the government as just another "parastate" in this section, without explaining how that is.

The issue of why the Bosnian government--a UN member democracy being destroyed by an avowedly genocidal rebel regime supported by its more powerful neighbor--owes to the international community which has denied it the right of self-defense a "solemn obligation", needless to say, goes unmentioned. We are far beyond expecting Misha Glenny to acknowledge that issue.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [24]

Epilogue 1996 [continued]

The next fourteen pages [248-262] recount the situation in the Macedonian Republic throughout the period 1992-1996. The discussion is fairly balanced; Glenny does an admirable job of explaining that Macedonian Slav national identity is both historically recent and legitimate, and I give him credit for that. Being that the worst of his fears regarding Macedonia thankfully have not come to pass (and he wrote this several years before the Kosova war), there is little need to consider this section at length.

I will note that when considering Greek opposition to Macedonian national identity, he takes Greek "fears" of Macedonian expansionism a little too much at face value. Even though he does make the case that Tito once used Macedonian nationalism as an excuse for territorial expansion in the early years of his rule, he is far too quick to forgive ridiculous arguments about Hellenic supremacy and dubious ties to Alexander the Great at face value. He criticizes Macedonian soccer fans for nationalist displays at a game against Cypus, without considering that these displays were perhaps more a function of defiance rather than provocation.

As with Serbian nationalist attitudes towards Bosnian independence, Glenny seems to regard Greek nationalist "fears" regarding Macedonian independence as the default position from which any discussion of the issue should start. And his discussion includes absolutely no consideration of official Greek attitudes towards non-Greek minorities and how that might influence the situation.

All in all, it seems that had armed conflict broken out in Macedonia, Glenny's attitude toward the situation might have been quite similar, although he seems to have a higher opinion towards Kiro Gligorov than he had for Alija Izetbegovic. But having spent far more time than I intended on this book, I won't extend any further time or space on a hypothetical.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [23]

Epilogue 1996: Return to Purgatory

This epilogue was written a few years after the rest of the book; triggered by the end of the war, obviously, but Glenny begins his return with news of the mortar attack of February 5, 1995. Given that the rest of the book came to a close in 1993, quite a bit has happened since then. However, Glenny does not try to summarize the rest of the war. Rather, he picks up where things stand now and takes it from there.

His account of this event was written at the time, and Glenny very explicitly accepts the validity of General Rose's claim that the shell was fired by Bosnian government forces. He does not himself opine one way or the other. He also does not consider the possibility that the incident was simply a statistical probability given that the Bosnian Serbs had lobbed thousands of shells at the city, day in day out, for years.

At any rate, the main result of all this was a new cease-fire, and that both the United States and Russia got more involved. Glenny speaks highly of the unilateral Russian decision to occupy part of Sarajevo to keep the Bosnian government forces in check. Again, the moral and legal ramifications of an international community taking such action against a UN-member state fighting an insurgency are not discussed here. I suspect Glenny doesn't take such issues seriously.

The Russians, he argues, help create a situation in which shelling stops for awhile and Sarajevo becomes almost normal. Of course this situation cannot last, and Glenny himself admits that the cease-fire deteriorates over time and that no progress towards either peace or justice are made. These questions, again, don't seem relevant to him.

Ultimately, he credits the United States and Russia with forcing an alliance of convenience between the Muslims and the Croats in Bosnia. The result of this--and here I think Glenny is absolutely correct--is that Croatia becomes a direct beneficiary of resulting US support. The Bosnian government no longer has the leverage with Washington, even within its' own borders, that it used to.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [21]

Chapter 6 [concluded; pp. 223-234]

This chapter concludes with an extended discussion of the Vance-Owen Peace Plan, which Glenny thought quite highly of. He rightly notes that the "Geneva Conference on Yugoslavia took its work extremely seriously" and that both Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen "set about their work with gusto." The complexity of the negotiations, and the multiplicity of parties involved certainly deserves mention. But while doing so, he also includes a footnote [page 224] which contains the following aside:

"In one of of its least inspired appointments, the United Nations named Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the former Polish Prime Minister, head of the commission investigating human rights abuses in the former Yugoslavia. Whoever came up with the bright idea of selecting a leading lay Catholic intellectual for a job which involved talking to the Serbs should mug up on his or her European history."

There is plenty wrong with this statement. To begin with, any pretense at drawing a distinction between individuals with a group identity versus the group as a collective singular seems to have been abandoned; were human rights being committed by individual Serbs, Croats and Moslems, or by "the Serbs", "the Croats" and "the Moslems"?

Secondly, the deference given here to "European history" is the same flawed reasoning which accepted the idea of "ancient hatreds" in the Balkans. Simply because the conflict between Catholicism and Orthodoxy has been a factor in conflict between Croats and Serbs (indeed, crucial to defining these respective groups) it should not automatically follow that the rest of the world is bound to filter all interactions in the Balkans through that confessional filter. Or, indeed, that Serbs and Croats should.

Thirdly, it strikes me as rather counter-productive to imply that the prejudices and bigotries of the most paranoid and xenophobic sectors of one particular group should dictate the personnel involved in an activity related to impartially investigating serious crimes committed by members of several groups including that one.

Finally, there is nothing to suggest that Mazowiecki was particularly unqualified for this job for any other reason than being a Catholic intellectual--and a Catholic from outside the region, from a country with no particular involvement in Balkan matters. Mazowiecki was a poor choice simply for being a Catholic intellectual. It seems telling that Glenny chose to make this aside in a footnote, and that he does not detail why knowing "European history" would enlighten the reader as to why the former Prime Minister was such an affront to "the Serbs."

At any rate, Glenny assures that the Vance-Owen Peace Plan was "an exceptionally good document" which was misunderstood or misrepresented by its critics. His claim that it was never intended to be a final solution to the war but rather a mechanism to end the military conflict seems reasonable--except that he doesn't bother to offer any framework for what a more just and permanent settlement would be, or how one would move on from the terms of Vance-Owen to get there.

Glenny is quick to point out that while the plan didn't give the Bosnian government (whose legitimacy and UN membership he generally ignores or dismisses) the centralized state it wanted, it didn't give the Bosnian Serbs everything they wanted, either. This seemingly fair-minded approach ignores the elephant in the room--the fact that by partitioning the country into ethnic sections and then negotiating over the boundaries between them, the plan already accepted the ethno-nationalist logic the Bosnian Serb campaign was based on, even if it did deny them union with a Greater Serbia and cost them some of "their" territory. (Glenny is mum on the legitimacy of the claims of an avowedly ethno-nationalist entity on formerly multiethnic territory). The Croats did well under the plan--the only criticism Glenny can really muster is that it might have been better to force them to give up some land to "the Moslems" (so much for the Bosnian state) so that there would have been three 'losers' and no clear 'winners.'

At this point, Glenny returns to blaming the West for interfering in Bosnia; this time for not supporting the Presidential candidacy of Panic against Milosevic. Yet at the same time, he argues that naming Milosevic as a war criminal helped him. His victory was considerable, two-to-one in the end, so it's hard to see how Western support for Panic could have swung the result the way he explicitly argues it could have--particularly when Western attacks on Milosevic get blamed for hurting Panic.

At this point, he argues that Milosevic, Tudjman, and the Bosnian Serbs were ready to make peace, and the Izetbegovic government was ready to embrace Vance-Owen because it was their last chance to hold on to anything. And then, Glenny argues, the incoming Clinton administration and other foreign powers ruined everything by undermining Vance-Owen at that very moment. His belief that the plan was actually going to provide a framework which by the warring parties would be willing to settle without any further outside intervention seems pure fantasy, but this is what he argues-even as he goes on to note that the plan helped legitimize Croat control of land which led to an escalation of hostilities between the HOV and the ABiH. It it quite telling that he left this factor out of his earlier discussion of the Croat-Muslim war of 1993 and instead included it here.

This is where Glenny leaves off (there are two epilogues written later which I will review in upcoming posts). The civil war in central Bosnia between Croats and Muslims "proves" that arming the Bosnian government would only make the war worse because they would commit just as many atrocities if given the chance (the difference between the larger war aims of the parties is ignored--Glenny, remember, believes that once started Balkan wars must be allowed to play out following their own sadistic logic).

I was going to conclude my review of this final chapter with some analysis, but I simply don't have the stomach. This is the last actual chapter of the book, and by far the most troubling.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [20]

Chapter 6 [continued--pages 210-223]

Glenny recounts how the expose of concentration camps in Bosnia drove the international community into some kind of action, along with the infamous bread-line massacre of May, 1992. Glenny argues that nobody knows who was responsible for the mortar attack which killed dozens, almost fatalistically dismissing the incident as more grist for competing Serb and Muslim "mythology of war." Given that his account was written in 1993, I can almost forgive him for ignoring the obvious fact that it was the Bosnian Serbs who had been lobbing thousands of rounds of heavy ordnance into the city for the duration, and that mortars are imprecise weapons. Almost, but not quite.

He then moves on to condemn the United Nations for its resolutions on the situation because of the double-standard--while it ordered all outside forces to leave Bosnia, it treated Croat forces differently than Serb forces. He states that the "Croats were not involved in the wholesale slaughter which the Serb forces indulged in. But that is not the point--they were in violation of the UN resolution and, were the Security Council being consistent, should also have had sanctions imposed on them." This concern for the fairness of sanctions in the face of a one-sided war of genocide is another indication that Glenny has walked too far down the road of "fairness" and "balance." His concern for the ordinary people of Bosnia is admirable, and his reaction to the sometimes hysterical and often grossly oversimplified media distortion of the war is not without merits, but by this point in the narrative he has gone too far towards false equivalency. He completely decouples the sordid details of the war from the larger political and military narrative he seemed to grasp quite well in the opening chapters.

I agree with Glenny that the sanctions were ineffective and cruel to the people who deserved them the least. His account of the diplomatic efforts led by Lord Carrington and later Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen betrays more respect for, and faith in, Boutrous Boutrous-Ghali than a contemporary reader blessed with the benefit of hindsight most likely does. Even here, Glenny is able to simultaneously detail how peace talks involved Milosevic (who was able to neuter and get rid of Milan Panic and also keep Dobrica Cosic on a shorter leash) were key at this point, yet at the same time downplaying the role of Serbia in the war.

There are also some swipes at the Germans for taking less of an interest in Bosnia (there is justice in this accusation), as well as more observations that the Muslim-led government was not averse to playing to world opinion and using the victim card to shield military actions. This concern for honesty, integrity and playing by the rules in the face of a war of annihilation seems a serious case of misplaced priorities.

There are other incidents and observations, many of them poignant. Glenny is reported current events by this point, not recounting recent ones or providing interpretation. As noted in a previous post, this means that his interpretive framework is more predominant, and therefore more problematic.

I will consider the final 12 pages of this chapter in the next post.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [19]

Chapter 6 [continued]

Glenny is one among many observers who believes that Germany bears a great deal of responsibility for the Yugoslavia. It should be noted that he qualifies such as moral responsibility rather than direct political responsibility as Diana Johnstone rather clumsily tried to demonstrate (or, more properly, imply). Still, he believes that German recognition of Croatian and Slovenia--and not Bosnia-Hercegovina--damned Bosnia to war. He contrasts the German argument in favor of self-recognition for those two republics with its failure to do the same for Macedonia, concluding that "the German government acted not out of principle but out of self-interest."

This statement seems both obvious and remarkably unfair, given how much of Glenny's book is taken up with a counter-argument to the growing Western narrative which (rightly) pinned most of the blame for the war on the Serbian leadership, often by (wrongly) portraying the war as a primitive struggle between implicitly hostile and incompatible ethnic groups--and he often does so by insisting that there were rational, political calculations behind many of the military actions taken by the JNA, the Bosnian Serb Army, and Serbian paramilitary forces which were too often ignored by outside observers.

Again, this is a fair point but only if Glenny applies it evenly. There is nothing wrong with noting that German diplomacy might have shrouded short-sighted national interest in idealistic rhetoric, or that it might have had unintended consequences which reasonable observers should have anticipated. But once again, Glenny faults others for failing to take Serb actions or concerns into account as if those actions are both inevitable and without agency. In short, Glenny makes Serb nationalist concerns the "default" position which all other actors are expected to adjust to; and Serb political and military actions are reduced to Newtonian reactions to the errors and misjudgments of others.

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

After this discussion, Glenny moves on to the Croat-Muslim civil war of 1993 and then the concentration camps such as Omarska. Unlike his tendency to blame others for the actions of the Serb leadership (including the use of propaganda to create the climate of fear which he subsequently faults Muslims, Croats, and outsiders for ignoring), there is nothing in this account to give any help to Balkan revisionists. Glenny's account betrays no doubt that, say, the ITN reports were completely accurate and believable. Yet even here, he seems more concerned with the fact that the different sides argued about how many prisoners were actually in those camps than with the fact that they actually existed, and that the Serb-run camps were more systematic and were part and parcel of a broader military strategy rather than merely the sort of grotesque collateral damage one might expect when a vicious ethnic war is fought at the local level.

This chapter has been quite frustrating; for one thing, much of Glenny's account here is second-hand, so while the earlier parts were well worth reading because of his keen reporting, good writing, and undeniably humane identification with the ordinary people caught up in the conflict; here he is more interested in summarizing and interpreting the war for his audience. The nagging doubts the reader might have about his decisions of emphasis and focus are more likely to come to the forefront here.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [18]

Chapter 6: June 1992-June 1993: Beyond Hades

Glenny starts this chapter off by noting that for much of the modern era, warfare in the Balkans has involved a high level of violence against civilians; "ethnic cleansing" was not new to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. This is  an absolutely true observation. He also argues against the perception "that these are wars fuelled by 'ancient hatreds', as the British Prime Minister, John Major, has characterized them." He argues that the international community crudely explained the wars as the product of inherent barbarism on the part of the participants, and that the Serbs have been portrayed as bloodthirsty primitives for whom the killing of civilians was the ends, not the means. This is also a true observation. As he puts it:

Our understanding of the war in BiH has, regrettably, been clouded by the level of suffering and the tendency of many witnesses to confuse the moral questions raised by the conflict with the political issues which caused it.


Glenny is raising an important point here; however, his application of this reasonable observation to the facts at hand is problematic, because he makes another distinction--and does so far too absolutely. His effort to explain the underlying demographic, historical, political and social tensions underlying the Yugoslav wars go too far; he draws the demarcation between those factors on he one side and the political manipulation of those fears by nationalist politicians and leaders too firmly. To be asked to completely separate the viciously racist rhetoric of the SDS from the understandable fears of the Bosnian Serb minority is going a step too far.

Granted, Glenny wrote this book in 1993. But he seems more interested in correcting Western misconceptions and media generalizations than in coming to any workable political solution to the fighting. Indeed, Glenny has already stated that once war in the Balkans has started, it must be allowed to run its course. Moreover, he seems loathe to blame the aggressors for much of anything other than excessive use of paramilitary violence. He seems to want it both ways--to argue that the source of the violence in Bosnia was political not social or cultural (I agree), yet at the same time to argue against any ultimate political culpability on the part of the primary aggressors. Needless to say, I do not agree with that.

I will directly address this concern in my next post.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [17]

Chapter 5 [conclusion]

The final nine pages of this chapter do not add much--in terms of analysis--to what has come before, although it must be noted that Glenny always writes well and demonstrates a genuine concern for ordinary Bosnians of all nationalities. One point he does make--nationalist violence in Bosnia has historically been stirred up by outside powers (competing empires and nations; in this case Croatia and Serbia); he also states that once nationalist violence has been stirred up it takes outside intervention to separate the warring parties and enforce peace. Considering that the only example he gives is World War II (in which the "outside intervention" was provided by the Communist Yugoslav government for which many Bosnians of all nationalities fought), it's problematic to make such a blanket statement. But we can forgive Glenny for this generalization, since his larger point is to emphasize that international involvement will be necessary to help enforce a stable lasting peace after the fighting is over.

But that raises another issue--Glenny's opposition to international involvement to end the fighting, which he does not address here but which is a matter of record. This chapter ends with a glum, fatalistic portrait of a completely broken country in which the state and civil society have simply ceased to function, and a modern capital city now resembles a morbid set from a post-apocalyptic movie. He believes that nothing can stop the fighting, and so therefore nobody should try. It's a tragic story he tells, but it is unclear what the reader is to learn from it. 

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

This (finally!) concludes my summation/review of Chapter 5; there is one chapter and two Epilogues to go.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [16]

Chapter 5 [continued]

(Picking up where I left off...)

It is true that Izetbegovic was careless when he led Bosnia towards independence without making preparations for war. Yet Glenny throws far too much of the blame at the feet of the Bosniak President. Furthermore, Glenny simultaneously acknowledges that Bosnia's tripartite Presidency was an "absurd fiction", yet criticizes Izetbegovic and the international community for ignoring the Serb demands to continue it, describing them as "both just and reasonable."

It is not clear why he regards those demands as "just and reasonable." It is hard to ignore the feeling that Glenny has either not thought deeply about the ramifications of the ethnic-identity basis of the constitutional system, or he accepts it as the best system for Bosnia.

There is a disconnect in Glenny's account between "the Serbs" and the actual actions of the Bosnian Serb leadership; in his account, there is a clear line between the "just and reasonable" demands of an ethnic group versus the morally reprehensible actions of the political and military actors acting on behalf of that group.

And when the war finally breaks out, he continues to focus on the mistakes and strategic missteps of Izetbegovic, as if the forces arrayed against him are anonymous forces of nature rather than military and paramilitary units operating under political, ideological, and military direction. Glenny does not dignify the demands and concerns of the Bosnian Serbs, but he does seem to regard them as the "baseline" upon which the political calculations of others must be based. This might have been strategically wise given the political and military realities, but Glenny presents this point of view as a moral imperative, not a strategic necessity.

Glenny certainly is not blind to the war crimes committed by Serb forces; nor is he wrong to point out that there were a multitude of factors leading up to the war. But he has an unfortunate tendency to segregate a discussion of the legitimacy of Serb concerns and fears from the political and social dynamics which fueled and harnessed those societal factors. This is tricky terrain, because I truly appreciate Glenny's concern for the ordinary Serbs who were caught up in the maelstrom which was not of their own making. The grotesque media narrative about primitive, bloodthirsty Serbs was not a delusion of his--far too much reportage turned the war into a simple morality tale, with all Serbs cast as villains.

But it's hard to know what to make of a passage like this:

The case of the Serbs has often been misrepresented and their genuine fears and concerns dismissed when they should not have been. But the behaviour of Karadzic, the Arkanovci and other paramilitary groups, and the JNA in Bosnia-Hercegovina destroyed their reputation abroad. No injustice had been perpetrated against the Serbs of Bosnia or of Serbia to justify this rape of Bosnia-Hercegovina.


One has to ask--in Glenny's opinion, what level of violence and depravity was justified? I recognize that is not what he means to say--the man is far too decent and humane to contemplate any sort of blood libel against anyone. But the implicit logic of this chapter seems to be heading towards such an ugly question. You can only blame the victim for stumbling into war for so long before your outrage at the excessive violence he then suffers seems to be beside the point.

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

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

Chapter 5 [continued]

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

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

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

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

Chapter 5 [continued]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 5 [continued]

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 5 [continued]

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 4 [concluded]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.