"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 [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.

Ratko Mladic: All Serbs Are Guilty

I have argued before on this blog--in my review of Diana Johnstone's "Fools' Crusade" for example--that one reason why so many Serb ultra-nationalists and their Western enablers so vigorously deny basic facts about events during the wars in the former Yugoslavia is because the collectivist nature of the nationalist myths they used to fuel and justify those wars erase any concept of individual conscience or accounatability. Because these myths fully embrace a collectivist notion of collective guilt on the part of the "enemies of the Serb nation", they also implicitly accept the notion of collective action, and guilt, on the part of the Serbs themselves.

In this article from The Guardian, Ratko Mladic essentially makes my point for me:

What has been visible since then is a more familiar Mladic, arrogant and demanding, insisting not only on his own innocence but on the shared guilt of all of the Serbian people. "He said: 'You elected [Slobodan] Milosevic, not me. You are all guilty, not me'."

On one level, this is ridiculous. One of the core principles of this blog is that individuals are not primarily or solely members of a collective ethnic, national, or religious group, but rather sovereign individuals who should be equal before the law. But on another level, Mladic is merely taking the collectivist mentality of Serbian ethno-nationalism to its logical conclusion. If ethnic national groups rather than individual citizens are the core foundation of states, then individuals can only be judged as members of their ethnic group. It takes more than elections to make a democratic culture, and in that regard Mladic is speaking more truth than he most likely realizes.

"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.

Former Russian Foreign Minister: Serbs Should Push for Kosovo Partition

As if the situation isn't volatile enough, Yevgeni Primakov decided to speak out in favor of continued ethnic separation, suspicion, and hostility.

Primakov advises Serbs: Migrate and merge

The logic of this proposal exposes the hypocrisy of the "Kosovo is Serbia" line; ethnic Serbs in southern Kosovo are encouraged to leave their homes, and then settle in the solidly Serb north, which will then break away. The fact that these people would have to leave their communities and homes behind means nothing; they are nothing but pawns in an ethnic struggle. The implied threat that "NATO cannot stay forever" tells us what sort of future Primakov has in mind for these luckless Serbs--continued isolation and violence.

He follows this with an absolute red herring; saying that:

" Primakov said that it was not in the U.S.’s interests to support Albanian separatists in other regions until the Kosovo independence question had been resolved."

...which is an answer to a question no one asked--the US does not now, and never has, supported separatist Albanians in Macedonia or Montenegro.

And, of course, such a rant wouldn't be complete without at least one example of anti-Muslim bigotry, this time in the form of a vague premonition:

" Primakov added that it should be taken into consideration that an independent Kosovo represented the beginning of the creation of a strong Muslim country in the middle of Europe."

How "strong" Kosova will be in the near future is debatable; perhaps Primakov could elaborate on the dangers of "allowing" a Muslim state in Europe, especially considering that its Muslim inhabitants have been European all along.

"Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia" by Marko Attila Hoare [7]

CHAPTER SIX: BOSNIA-HERCEGOVINA DEFEATS GREAT SERBIA, c. JUNE 1942-OCTOBER 1943

This is the final chapter of this excellent book, documenting the triumph of the Partisans over the Chetniks in Bosnia. This event was an important turning point in the history of Yugoslavia, but also a telling event in the national history of Bosnia itself. One of the main themes of this book is the specifically Bosnian character of the Partisan movement there, and how Bosnian characteristics and realities helped shape it. In fact, Dr. Hoare even shows that the Bosnian Chetnik movement, despite its allegiance to a "Greater Serb" ideology, was fundamentally a Bosnian movement, often at odds with the Serbian leadership (including Mihailovic himself). The culmination of the events and dynamics mapped out in the preceding five chapters is the unity and institutional strength of the Partisan movement in western Bosnia, and a string of military successes against both the NDH and the Chetniks, which solidified the supremacy of the Partisans and helped assure their eventual victory.

There is little need for a detailed summary--the narrative arc of this chapter is relatively simple and straightforward. First, the author details the temporary ascendancy of the Chetniks in eastern Bosnia-Hercegovina, which was ultimately transient for reasons Dr. Hoare neatly encapsulates:

"Yet the Great Serb project rested on shaky foundations: poor organization, primitive leaders, an administration riddled with Partisan sympathizers, a popular base that could not expand beyond the Serb minority of the population, and an often bitter animosity between its Serbian and its Bosnian adherents. The pyrrhic Chetnik victory merely set the scene for the subsequent Partisan resurgence."

And so, the avowedly provincial and self-limiting Chetnik movement would not be able to overcome its intrinsic limitations, nor would Bosnian Chetniks be able to transcend their own Bosnian loyalties in order to cooperate fully with a pan-Serb movement run by a Serbian and Montenegrin leadership.

Meanwhile, in western Bosnia, the Partisan movement--in a move driven by native Bosnian Partisans as much as by the Supreme Staff and Tito--would succeed in their greatest military triumph to date; the liberation of Bihac, which would allow for the creation of a nascent Partisan state in an area of Bosnia where it would be possible to draw a large number of Croats and Muslims into their ranks. The Partisans were then able to hold the first 'Anti-Fascist Council of the People's Liberation of Yugoslavia' in this liberated territory; this council was an important step towards the goal of creating a truly pan-Yugoslav, multinational movement.

These developments were followed by a series of military moves as the Supreme Staff sought to move back east and take the Chetniks on; these moves were initially successful, including the great victory of the Battle of the River Neretna, during which the Partisans both managed to hold off a coordinated Axis/Chetnik/Ustasha offensive and break the back of the Chetniks (although by no means completely destroy them as a military threat). An ill-advised attempt to return to Serbia ended in the near-catastrophe of the Battle of the River Sutjeska, at which the Partisan forces had to fight desperately just to escape a fierce Axis/Chetnik attack, one which still managed to destroy fully a third of the Partisan forces involved. Yet they did escape, and survived to link up with other Partisan forces.

Bosnia was won. The Chetniks, while not finished, could not hope to prevail. And then the Italian surrender to the Allies took their forces out of the equation, leaving the Partisans free to deal with the wholly inadequate Ustasha and NDH forces in western Yugoslavia. Serbia itself would not fall to the Partisans until the arrival of Soviet military power in 1944, but by then it had long been clear who was the dominant domestic power in the country.

"Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia" by Marko Attila Hoare [6]

CHAPTER FIVE: THE PARTISANS IN WESTERN BOSNIA, c. JULY 1941-OCTOBER 1942

This chapter covers events in Western Bosnia, which became the center of Partisan resistance after the collapse in eastern Bosnia under Chetnik, Nedicite, and Axis assault. In order to explain the dynamics at work in this region, Dr. Hoare moves back in time to the period just before the outbreak of the rebellion, in order to examine the regional particulars at work in this region; and also to explain why the Partisans were ultimately more successful in western Bosnia, and why this became the heart of the movement.

These developments are covered in extensive detail; rather than summarizing them all, I will merely note that in very broad terms some of the underlying challenges for the Partisans were the same--the chasm between city and country, the political immaturity of the Serb peasant soldiers, distrust between Partisan units and Croat and Muslim peasants, competition from Chetnik-sympathetic leaders, and so forth. There wasn't a war between Partisan and Chetnik armies, but rather a competition within one disparate resistance force from competing ideologies.

The Communists realized that they needed to increase their political presence in order to combat the appeal of crude Serb nationalist propaganda, and to make other institutional changes as well. When warfare finally did break out between the two groups, the Chetniks--further removed from Serbia than those in eastern Bosnia--were forced to turn to, of all possible allies, the Ustasha and the NDH state; the alliance between the two was never very stable or wholly productive, but along with the cooperation of the Italian and German occupiers this put the Partisan forces at an overwhelming disadvantage. Yet the inevitable defeat was almost temporary; for reasons which are complex and I haven't summarized here, the Partisans had greater public support and a more developed political infrastructure than in eastern Bosnia; once Axis troops pulled out, Partisan forces were easily able to resume control in spite of having been "defeated" the the Chetniks and their allies.

In short, the Partisans were ultimately more successful because in western Bosnia they not only realized that their best hope of defeating the Chetniks and uniting the people behind them was to put their multinational rhetoric and ideals into practice, they were--for a variety of local demographic, political, economic, and social factors--actually able to do so.

By the end of this chapter, the seeds of the future multinational Partisan army are beginning to bear fruit; the Croats of the Livno area were providing a solid base of Croat support, and Croats and Muslims of Bosanka Krajina were beginning to sense that there was a real difference between the Partisans and their Chetnik opponents. Real efforts were made to restrain the bigoted passions of peasant soldiers, to educate them in Partisan ideology and the nascent dogma of what would become known as "Brotherhood and Unity", and to articulate a Bosnian patriotism which could serve as a tangible, livable counter to Great Serb propaganda.

The chapter ends with a consideration of how Partisan efforts on behalf of gender equity were crucial to their ultimate success; Chetnik ideology was conservative in all respects, while Partisan rhetoric about the equality of women and their political and cultural liberation spoke to half of Bosnia's population. This was ultimately a great advantage for the Partisans--and their opponents knew it, as shown by the frequency of Ustasha and Chetnik propaganda about "women of low morals" and such.

It cannot be overstressed how much of Dr. Hoare's book focuses on the fact that the Partisans succeeded because they were ultimately able to impose an urban, literate, cosmopolitan leadership onto an army filled with recruits from rural, provincial, conservative villages and hamlets. The Chetniks--proudly rural, anti-urban, and conservative in all ways--ceded the cities to the Partisans, as well as the potential of Bosnia's women, and they would pay for their stubborn provinicialism.

"Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia" by Marko Attila Hoare [5]

CHAPTER FOUR: THE 'LEFT ERRORS' AND THE PARTISAN CRISIS, c. FEBRUARY-JUNE 1942

This chapter details the period when the Partisans began moving away from "a Serb-oriented resistance strategy, towards one that was genuinely multinational." But the transition wasn't smooth, and even as the Chetniks held the upper hand the Partisans committed serious errors of judgment and worse as they pursued often contradictory policies.

One major problem was that, partly due to the politically unformed nature of most troops and partly because of an embrace of extreme measures implicitly condoned by a shift in policy, atrocities against Croats and especially Muslims continued apace. These atrocities were now often carried out under the aegis of eliminating fifth columnists, but in the eyes of many Partisan troops and even some leaders all Muslims were fifth columnists.

Even as these massacres were eroding Partisan support in the countryside, the increasingly aggressive and confident Chetniks were carrying out putsches in Partisan units throughout eastern Bosnia, killing the Communist leadership and assuming command of military units.

This increasing threat even drove Tito to contemplate a temporary alliance with the Ustasha, a testiment to how precarious the Partisan situation was. Meanwhile, in eastern Herzegovina, a tragedy was taking shape--while this region had, in theory, a strong Partisan presence, in reality there was disconnection between the Serb-peasant countryside and the radicalized, multiethnic urban proletariat in Mostar. The dangerous brew of Leninist extremism proclaimed by the central command combined with the politically crude consciousness of the Herzegovina Partisans to form a perfect storm of revolutionary violence--much of the infamous and tragic "Left Errors" of the war happened here. Scenes of doctrinaire Communist violence against fifth columnists real and imagined (even "future traitors") were common, and the end result was predictable enough--the Partisans in the area completely lost the support of the local population. The remnants of the Mostar Battalion were forced to hide with family, as they had no network of support whatsoever.

Under the 'Third Offensive', the Partisan resistance in east Bosnia and Hercegovina collapsed; ultimately the Partisan leadership was forced to concede that they would not be retaking Serbia in the near future, so rather than stubbornly hold out in a doomed battle, they retreated towards western and central Bosnia--the Partisan "Long March." The remnants of some units from eastern Hercegovina and Bosnia were combined and reorganized; ironically, these stragglers who had escaped from a total defeat would form the experienced, dedicated, and politically mature core of a stronger, more enlightened and ideologically coherent Partisan movement.

"Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia" by Marko Attila Hoare [4]

CHAPTER THREE: FROM SERB REBELLION TO BOSNIAN REVOLUTION, c. DECEMBER 1941-MARCH 1942

The breakdown in the Partisan-Chetnik alliance had the effect of moving both movements toward their ideological extremes; the Partisans became a more explicitly Marxist/Communist movement fighting for social revolution as well as liberation, even as the Chetniks virtually ceased all resistance activities, and instead made deals and alliances with the occupying forces while laying the groundwork for an ethnically "pure" future Greater Serbia.

The Chetniks in East Bosnia soon turned to full-fledged genocide against the Muslims of the region (Jews were also targeted), while plans for a "Homogenous Serbia" were drawn up; the ideology of the movement was now fully developed and driving events at least as much, if not more, than the current political situation. This genocide would have been much worse than it was had it not been for the fact that the Chetnik movement was not as centrally organized and controlled as the Partisans were (a fact which would ultimately favor the Partisans, although not yet).

Much of the first pages of this chapter are concerned with the attempts to build this "Greater Serbia" within the confines of Axis occupation, as well as continuing cooperation between the Bosnian Chetnik movement and the Nedic regime (which was never total). Chetnik propaganda at this point stressed the non-Serb nature of the Partisan movement, and was drenched in virulent anti-Semitic rhetoric. The irreligious nature of the Partisans was also stressed, as well as their urban and non-patriarchal ways.

The Partisan leadership came to recognize that Great Serb sentiment was their greatest enemy, and that they would have to combat it with appeals to pan-Bosnian unity and patriotism. They also realized that they had made insufficient efforts to politicize the masses, who were easily swayed by crude nationalist hate-mongering.

For awhile, the Partisan military leadership even became (unrealistically) focused on liberating Sarajevo; aside from the economic desirability of this then-unattainable goal, this fixation on the Bosnian capital revealed how the Bosnian focus of Partisan activity was morphing into a specifically Bosnian Partisan revolution and movement.

As the Partisans increased their efforts to reach out to Croats and Muslims, they also tried to keep the door open to Serbs by setting up "Volunteer" units; military units of Serbs who fought alongside Partisan units without becoming Communists themselves. This effort to allow Serb peasant soldiers to maintain solidarity while fighting the occupation ended up being more trouble than it was worth, as the loyalty and military worth of these units was always questionable; ultimately, most would go over to the Chetniks regardless.

The Partisans also broke with Marxist orthodoxy in one important way--they made great efforts to show sensitivity to and respect for religious traditions, even assigning members of the clergy to units and giving them distinctive religious insignia.

------------

There is a great deal of detail I am bypassing in this extremely brief account of this chapter; in the interests of finishing this review in a timely manner, I will continue to provide bare-bones summaries of the final three chapters as well. I cannot stress enough how substantive and readable the book is. I highly recommend it.

"Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia" by Marko Attila Hoare [3]

CHAPTER TWO: THE GREAT SERB REACTION, c. AUGUST-DECEMBER 1941

Briefly stated, this chapter covers the period when the Partisan movement tried, and ultimately failed, to achieve a military and governmental alliance with the growing Chetnik movement; this policy was driven by expediency--the reality that in the opening months of the rebellion, the vast majority of footsoldiers were conservative rural Serbs. As noted in the first chapter, the KPJ had done a reasonably good job of taking command of an uprising not entirely of its making, but there were limits to how much control cadres actually had.

This chapter details the ups and downs of this ultimately failed enterprise; the author is sensitive to the difficulties the KPJ faced even while he does not shy away from mistakes made. The details of this phase of the uprising--when the Partisans were still "riding the tiger" of a Serb-peasant uprising, attempting to take command of politically unformed rebel bands are thoroughly documented.

Roughly speaking the Partisans were between a rock and hard place; while they needed to appeal to Serb nationalist sentiment in order to maintain even nominal control over the armed rebel bands, this also meant that all too often they had to pander to the bigotry and worse of their own soldiers. This translated to Partisan acquiescence with--and occasionally participation in--atrocities against Croat and especially Muslim civilians, especially as Chetnik influence and propaganda became more prevalent in Bosnia. This often pushed Croats and Muslims into collaboration with the Ustasha, which only fed Great-Serb propaganda even more while weakening Partisan pretensions to multiethnic cooperation and unity--which at this point was little more than a rhetorical flourish.

Still, for awhile the Partisans were able to build a nascent "state" in Eastern Bosnia by cooperating with Bosnian Chetniks, who were more inclined to some sort of accommodation with the Partisans (who's ranks were mostly filled with Serbs anyway) against their common Ustasha enemy than the Chetnik leadership in Nedic's Serbian state. This delicate balance was shattered when the Partisans were defeated in, and driven out of, Serbia, and the Chetnik alliance with Nedic became obvious, as did their decision to collaborate with the fascist occupiers. This triggered a breakdown in the Partisan-Chetnik alliance in east Bosnia.

The chapter ends with a case study of sorts; because of the still-underdeveloped nature of KPJ organization at local levels and other factors, some regional branches of the Partisan movement reacted to local conditions and these extraordinary stresses through their own dynamics, usually not with good results. Dr. Hoare examines the case of the "Drvar Republic", a Partisan mini-state which ultimately fell to Italian troops. Like the rest of this very interesting chapter, the story is far too complex for me to adequately summarize without going to great lengths--I would much rather prefer to encourage you to read the original.

"Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia" by Marko Attila Hoare [2]

CHAPTER ONE: THE COMMUNISTS AND THE SERB REBELLION, c. APRIL-SEPTEMBER 1941

I will make no effort to systematically summarize and review the entire contents of this substantial work, which manages to synthesize a great deal of archival information, documentation, and historical data into a coherent and readable narrative without sacrificing clarity or comprehensiveness. Instead, I will very briefly summarize the general focus of each chapter so that I might communicate some minimal sense of the larger framework Dr. Hoare richly illustrates. This entire review comes with the implied caveat that I cannot hope to do full justice to the book.

--------------------

This 80-page chapter covers the initial uprising in Bosnia, which was initially a home-grown resistance to the Ustasha genocide committed by the NDH fascist regime. Because my summary will be far too brief to do justice to the themes covered in this chapter, I will take the liberty of quoting the entire opening paragraph--which serves as something of an extended thesis statement--in full:

"The Partisan movement in Bosnia-Hercegovina was the product both of long-term socio-economic developments at home and of the short-term 'accident' of foreign invasion and occupation; it involved the merger of a traditional Serb-peasant uprising and a modern urban-revolutionary movement; and it represented both a characteristic chapter and a turning-point in modern Bosnian history. The Axis powers of Germany and Italy, by destroying the Yugoslav kingdom, changed the course of Bosnian history. Their installation in power of the Ustasha regime, and the latter's genocide of the Serb population in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, unleashed a resistance movement that would take shape as the Partisans. Yet the Partisans were not simply an armed response to the new order, but a revolutionary movement of a specifically Bosnian kind."

The Axis invasion of Yugoslavia led to an occupation where the country was split into German and Italian zones of control; the Nazi leadership made sure to control the parts of Yugoslavia essential to their greater strategic aims as well as assuring control over key mineral deposits in Bosnia, for example. The Axis also set up puppet regimes, both in a truncated Serbia and in a greatly enlarged Croatian Ustasha state, the NDH.

The necessity of maintaining some degree of independence ultimately proved a boon to the resistance, as the armed forces of the NDH were inadequate for the task of successfully defeating a mass armed uprising. The creation of this "greater Croatia" in fact if not in name actually exacerbating the Ustasha's difficulties, as ethnic Croats made up just barely over half of the population of the NDH, and the Ustasha were of course only a minority faction of this bare majority.

So while the ruling party dutifully carried out their duties as Nazi allies in committing genocide against the Jewish and Gypsy minorities, the demographic realities of their new state combined with their toxic ideology led the Ustasha leadership to simultaneously pursue a policy of genocide against the sizable Serb population (Muslims being considered Croats who had converted to Islam). Whether this genocide had been planned from the outset, or was a decision that was arrived at later is a matter of debate; what is clear is that the genocide was a product both of Ustasha ideology and the circumstances of World War II but not of Croat nationalism itself.

The Ustasha genocide was brutal and savage, but limited by the military weakness of the NDH state. Dr. Hoare wades briefly into the controversy over the numbers killed both in the genocide generally and at Jasenovac specifically; no need to rehash that argument here. The relevant point is that the genocide was real, it did happen, but it was neither as efficient nor as thorough as the Holocaust both because of the lack of manpower and logistical support that the Nazi state had at its disposal, and also because it does seem that the genocide was carried out with varying degrees of ruthlessness and systematic thoroughness from place to place. The infamous Ustasha aim of (to paraphrase) killing one-third of Serbs, expelling another third, and converting the final third to Catholicism, while vile beyond measure, actually serves to illustrate the difference; one cannot fathom a high-ranking Nazi contemplating assimilating any number of the Jews of Europe.

[Note: In the interests of keeping this post at a manageable length, I will be grossly oversimplifying the narrative; my apologies to the author if I neglect any important nuances or fail to properly emphasize certain key points. Any incoherence in the following account is entirely my own, and does not reflect the much more comprehensive and well-developed account in the book]

In the meantime, the KPJ (Communist Party of Yugoslavia) was preparing and organizing for resistance, while waiting for authorization from Moscow (which would come after the German invasion). Dr. Hoare has done an admirable job of explaining the process by which the party organized, and by which connections between Bosnia's small but growing urban working class and the villages were developed and utilized. For example, seasonal timber workers were often exposed to Communist ideas while working at mills with other workers, then took those ideas home with them. Schoolteachers were another important conduit of Communist indoctrination, since they brought ideas to the villages they had picked up at universities and in cities; the author points out that educated and literate people often served as important providers of news and information in provincial isolated villages where illiteracy was common and there was little if any access to broadcast media.

Because of the unique nature of the uprising in Bosnia, Communist proclamations usually stressed Bosnian--rather than Yugoslavian--patriotism; appeals were made to all the peoples of Bosnia. This was a multinational, inclusive ideology, but it often jarred with the sentiments of the fighters in the field, and would not go unchallenged by rebel leadership.

I should note that there is a great deal of material detailing the political development of the Bosnian branch of the KPJ and its relation to the central organization, as well as a great deal of information regarding key figures involved; in the interests of brevity I will not dwell on these admittedly important aspects to the story.

The uprising, when it came, was fought largely in rural areas at first, and most soldiers were Serb peasants from the countryside; yet the majority of Bosnian KPJ cadres and leaders were urban-based, and frequently non-Serbs. The KPJ was not in a position to create this rebellion on its own, nor to completely control it. However, the KPJ was able to "ride the tiger" with an admirable degree of success and step into a leadership role once events were underway; the hard work of organizing throughout the towns and cities of Bosnia had born fruit, as the Partisans were able to provide the logistical and institutional leadership apparatus necessary to coordinate and direct disparate rebel units--the countryside needed urban centers to act as the "nerve centers" of the uprising. Hoare writes:

"Bosnia-Hercegovina created the Bosnian KPJ organization, not vice versa, and the Communists and the peasant rebels formed an organic whole."

The revolt spread across all of Bosnia, although it broke out at different times and with differing levels of success and participation, some of which was arguably due to institutional in-fighting which I won't recount now, and some of which was due to jurisdictional issues; i.e., some areas fell into a no-man's land between regional organizations. In the meantime, the KPJ was busy trying to normalize the structure of the Partisan movement; a thorough reorganization of the military and civilian institutions was carried out. The Partisan army was reordered, and the introduction of Communist insignia, flags, and other symbols was introduced. In liberated areas, governing was carried out by "People's Liberation Councils" (NOOs), which combined Communist organization with traditional village government quite effectively.

None of these potentially positive developments could obscure the central challenge to the Partisan effort at multinational Bosnian state-building--the fact that the military rank-and-file was overwhelmingly Serb. This was no matter for idle ideological speculation, either, once the the Chetnik movement became active.

"Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia" by Mark Attila Hoare [1]

Introduction: Understanding the Partisan-Chetnik Conflict

In the wake of my review of How Bosnia Armed by Dr. Marko Attila Hoare, I am now reading another excellent work by the same author: Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia, subtitled "The Partisans and the Chetniks 1941-1943".

The Introduction begins--after briefly defining the geographical and temporal parameters of his subject--in 1992:

"The war that erupted in Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1992 involved the clash of two mutually exclusive political projects. On the one hand was the goal of a sovereign Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina as a state of Muslims, Serbs, Croats, and others, for which the majority of Bosnia-Hercegovina's citizens had voted and to which the Republic's leadership was formally committed. On the other hand was the goal of the partition of Bosnia-Hercegovina into separate Serb, Croat, and Muslim entities. This second goal was supported by the leadership of the principal Bosnian Serb political party, increasingly by the leadership of the principal Bosnian Croat party, and was gradually accepted de facto by the leadership of the principal Bosnian Muslim party. "

I quoted this section at length because it is noteworthy for what it does not say--that the war in Bosnia was an ethnic between different ethnic groups. No honest inquiry into the root causes of the Yugoslav wars is possible unless one first understands the ideological and political roots of the situation. One must study the past in order to understand the present; but the past cannot illuminate the present unless one is willing and able to recognize current realities.

This is important, because Dr. Hoare goes on to elaborate that while Western supporters of Bosnia-Hercegovina "argued on the basis of contemporary values--multiethnicity, democracy, state sovereignty, and human rights", supporters of the Serb nationalist project relied more on historical arguments, with an emphasis on the events of World War II. Serbs, it was argued, had sound historical reasons to fear living in a multiethnic republic they did not dominate.

The pro-Serb nationalist version of WWII history depicted it as a period of ethnic civil war between heroic, anti-Nazi Serbs fought against pro-Nazi and/or avowedly fascist Croats and Muslims. Dr. Hoare also points out that all to often, Westerners sympathetic to Bosnia reversed the ethnic stereotypes and portrayed 'the Muslims' as good and tolerant and 'the Serbs' as evil and intolerant.

Dr. Hoare argues that the reality of World War II in Yugoslavia was quite different, that members of every national group fought on "both" sides (he understands quite well that the situation in Yugoslavia during the occupation was complex and that it is often quite difficult to generalize about the loyalty and motivations of disparate military units across time and space); it is also true that many Yugoslavs were caught up in the internal war between Partisans and Chetniks without being loyal to or supportive of either side.

That is not to say that the "national question" wasn't present in or important to events in World War II; rather, Dr. Hoare notes that:

"...it is often forgotten that the national question is not just about the claims of one nation set against those of another, but about different concepts of the nation held by members of the same nation."

More specifically, it needs to be explained how the Partisans came to triumph over the Chetniks while following an ideology of multiethnic cooperation and coexistence versus the Chetniks Great Serb ideology which soon led to genocide against non-Serbs in areas they controlled. While outside observers have assumed that the answer is self-evident--the Partisans were able to appeal to all Yugoslavs, while the Chetnik appeal was necessarily limited to Serbs--the answer is actually more complex, because while the Partisan movement ultimately became truly multiethnic at the grassroots level, it began as an anti-Ustasha uprising by almost exclusively Serb peasants. How did the Partisans succeed in establishing leadership over a resistance movement of mostly provincial and often chauvinistic Serbs? Why were the Partisans originally willing and able to cooperate with the Chetniks, and why did this cooperation eventually break down? These are some of the questions Dr. Hoare addresses in this fascinating study.

Finally, Dr. Hoare is determined to show that the Partisan struggle in Bosnia was not merely an important battlefield in a larger Yugoslav resistance movement, but also the creature of a distinct "Bosnian revolution," in which an ideology of multiethnic cooperation and a Bosnian patriotism triumphed over a Chetnik movement and its diametrically opposed ideology of Serb nationalism and ethnic exclusivism; what is more, the Bosnian Partisan rank-and-file numbered thousands of ethnic Serbs who fought and died for this Bosnian revolution.

How did all this happen? These are some of the major themes of this excellent book.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [15]

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE BRIDGE

This short chapter eloquently makes a case not only for the legitimacy of Bosnian culture, but of its worth. Bosnia was a bridge, Sells argues; the Croat nationalists of "Herceg-Bosna" knew what they were doing when they destroyed the elegant Stari Most bridge in Moster. Ian Paisley, the thuggish Ulter Unionist leader, once contemptuously said (I am paraphrasing here) that "Bridges make traitors." If one is devoted to a diminished and sterile notion of culture and cultural identity--one in which the individual is defined primarily by membership to a group, and furthermore in which the group is defined by hard and fast distinctions versus the "other"--then this is true. Bridges lead to communication and exchanges, which then lead to intermingling and a loss of "purity." The desirability of "purity", then, must never be questioned.

The Wounding Sky

Bosnia has been defined for centuries by the mixture of different peoples and faiths; Orthodox, Catholic, and Bosnian before the Ottoman period, and then Orthodox, Catholic, Islam and then Judaism (both Sephardic and Ashkenazi) after. Sells describes the Bosnian tradition of the sevdalinka love lyrics, which were written in Cyrillac, Latin, and Adzamijski script. The complex mix of gender roles in the sevdalinka, in which a woman poses as a man singing to her male lover (and which were often actually performed by male singers) parallels the complex, multilayered development of this lyric tradition.

Sevdalinkas were composed in all the languages of the Empire--Persian, Turkish, Arabic, South Slavic--and were often translated from one to another. The precious manuscripts recording this unique aspect of Bosnia's heritage were destroyed when Serb gunners deliberately targeted the Oriental Institute.

Sells writes:

"Bosnia has a culture rich in transitions and translations. Those looking for the essence of culture and language in ethnic, racial, or religious purity will find Bosnia incomprehensible. On the other hand, those who see culture as a creative process that by its very nature involves intermingling and creative tension among different elements will treasure Bosnia-Herzegovina."

Unfortunately, many in the West failed to grasp this.

The Execution of Culture

"In the fall of 1995, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger proclaimed that "there is no Bosnian culture." The context for Kissinger's claim was his proposal that Bosnia should be partitioned between Serbia and Croatia and the Muslims (and presumably anyone else who did not want to be part of ethnically pure Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia) should be placed in a "Muslim state." Partitioning Bosnia and putting the Muslims in a religious ghetto was the original goal of the Serb and Croat nationalists."

Other than again supporting the axiom that one can never go wrong disagreeing with America's most distinguished indicted war criminal, what can one say in response to such dismissive rubbish?

Sells dryly notes that the strongest refutation of Kissinger's statement came from Karadzic, Mladic, and the Serbian nationalists themselves, who put a great deal of energy and resources into destroying all traces of this allegedly non-existent culture. Also, there is this story:

"A Serb army officer entered the home of a Sarajevan artist, who happened to be Serb. Among the works of art, he saw a piece that depicted a page from the Qur'an. Infuriated, he had all the artwork taken out into the street, lined up, and shot to pieces with automatic weapons fire."

In order to justify the destruction of a people, you must first destroy their legitimacy. Sells recounts other episodes of genocide throughout modern history to illustrate the general truth of this observation. And then he concludes this section with a paragraph which manages to articulate something I have been grappling with for almost two years in this blog--the reason why Bosnia's fight should have been America's fight. One very big reason I believe American values were under attack in a small republic in southeast Europe in the first half of the last decade of the 20th Century. Allow me to quote the paragraph in its entirety:

"Like culture in the United States, Bosnian culture cannot be defined by the linguistic and religious criteria of nineteenth-century nationalism. Just as Americans share a language with the British and Australians, so Bosnians share a language with Serbs and Croats. Just as the United States has no single, official church, so Bosnia is made up of people of different religious confessions, and within those confessions, vastly different perspectives. If Bosnia has no culture, then the United States has no culture. If Bosnia should be partitioned into religiously pure apartheid states, then the same logic lead to the idea, proposed by the Christian Identity movement, that the United States should be divided into apartheid states of different races and religions."

Creation in the Fire

Sells recounts the art exhibition "Expo/Sarajevo 92" which was organized during the siege. He explains the great risks the artists had to take just to travel back and forth to the studio, and that the artists chose to make engravings because they are reproducible; a 'lucky' shell from Sarajevo's tormentors could destroy the display but not the works themselves. Those artists continued to create, to draw from Bosnia's rich, textured history and culture, and to celebrate life even while the world expected to nothing more than meekly survive and cower before those who wanted to carve the living body of Bosnia into neatly segmented, sterile, dead entities. The enemies of Bosnia, and the indifferent enablers of the West, wanted to believe that Bosnia would be defined by walls; those artists demonstrated yet again that it is rather defined by bridges.

A Dance

The book ends with this brief, almost poetic section. A Bosnian family--they are Serbs--living in North America throw a party for another Bosnian family who are moving to another city. The invite all the Bosnians they know--Serb, Croat, Bosniak. Everybody eats, drinks, talks, laughs. And then a sevdalinka is played. Dancing begins.

They are able to forget that they are Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim. In this bittersweet reunion mixed with farewells far from home, they reconnect with their culture. Away from the burden of being of one ethnoreligious group, they are free to be Bosnians.

--------------------

That is how the book ends. I highly recommend it; at only slightly over 150 pages it is a quick and easy read. It raises important questions about the role faith will, can, or should play in a secular, cosmopolitan democracy in the 21st Century. I suspect we will be revisiting these and related questions in my blog and in many other forums in the near future.

"Balkan Idols" by Vjekoslav Perica [17]

CHAPTER NINE: THE SECOND STRIFE [continued]

The War of the Churches

Relations between the Catholic and Orthodox churches by the late 1980s were at a level of mutual distrust and animosity reminiscent of the 1930s. Growing tensions in Kosovo and the rise of the Macedonian Church exacerbated the animosity between the Serb Church and the other two main national churches, as Serb religious leaders erroneously attributed Albanian separatism to Islamic fundamentalism, while the Vatican came out in support of autonomy for Kosovo while it also recognized and maintained ties with the Macedonian church.

The Churches and the World War II Controversy

The death of Tito provided the opportunity to openly and vigorously questions the dogmatic version of history that underscored the civic religion of Brotherhood and Unity. The most prominent manifestation of this was the "new Serbian history," which refuted the notion that the Ustashe movement was an aberration in Croatian history imposed by outsiders. These historians believed that the NDH government was "above all a very efficient instrument of genocide against Serbs, conceived in Croatia several centuries before the genocide took place." Croats were portrayed as implacably hostile to Serbs, and that any independent Croatia would automatically be a threat to Serbs within its borders.

Croat historians countered with their own version in which the genocidal nature of Ustashe crimes were downplayed and explained as reactions to Serb pressures. Tudjman, the preeminent historian of this school, also defended the role of the Catholic church during the war. The competing commemorations and other events of the 1980s can be seen as attempts by the Catholic and Orthodox churches of propagating these respective revisionist myths.

Forgive but Not Forget: Liturgy in the Concentration Camp

After Titos death, the Serb church attempted to lay claim to the legacy of Jasenovac, which under Tito had been interpreted as a memorial to the multiethnic Partisan struggle against fascism. The Serb church reinvented Jasenovac as one of the two centers of Serb spiritual life, the other being Kosovo--both were sites of martyrdom and victimization at the hands of hostile neighboring peoples.

In mass ceremonies at Jasenovac, the parallel between Serbs and Jews was explicitly laid out, with Kosovo as the Serb Jerusalem and Jasenovac as their Auschwitz. The Serb version of events vastly exaggerated the number of Serbs killed at Jasenovac while omitting any mention of the many non-Serbs (including many anti-Ustashe Croats) who also died there, with the exception of Jews, with whom the Serbs claimed an affinity.

As these events at Jasenovac became yearly events, the Serb church expanded its campaign to rewrite history and began holding other commemorations to the victims of the "Serb genocide" at sites of Partisan military heroism and loss--the church was eliminating the complex reality of World War II and replacing it with a new myth in which the Serbs had been systematically hounded by enemies; and those enemies were all the other peoples of Yugoslavia.

A Battle of Myths: The Yugoslav Auschwitz versus the Martyr Cardinal

The battle of the numbers of Serbs killed at Jasenovac and in the war in total continued to wage, with Croat historians putting the numbers very low and Serb nationalists putting the numbers impossibly high. Serbs sought to win over the opinion of Yugoslavia's small Jewish community, which required the history of Nedic's wartime quisling Serbia to be completely ignored and forgotten.

Some Yugoslav Jews took the bait, and did their part to help promote the Serb nationalist version of events. Meanwhile, "Archimandrite Jevtic accused Croat Catholic clergy and the Vatican of inciting a genocide against the Serbian people." Other Serb scholars and clerics echoed the belief that the Vatican either directed the genocide or had the power to stop it had it chosen to.

In response, the Croat Catholic church stepped up its defense of Cardinal Stepanic, arguing that he had actually opposed Ustashe atrocities and had saved many Serbs and Jews from death. This defense angered the Serb church, who believed that he had been made a saint because he was involved in genocide.

Disputes over Holy Places

Serb clergy laid claim to the ruins of churches and other religious buildings which had laid dormant for decades, and in some cases centuries. Services were held at various ruins in ethnically mixed areas, based on dubious or often unproven claims that this church or that monastery were "really" Orthodox. Doing so was a way of laying claim to an area both spiritually and historically, by way of showing that a given area has historically Serb.

Many of the massacres and other acts of violence against Croats in Croatia at the beginning of the war happened in towns and villages where such commemorations had been held and claims had been made. And one of the first acts in newly "liberated" areas was the destruction of Catholic churches.

Similar confrontations were organized by Serbian nationalists--including Vojislav Seselj and his Radical party--at contested holy sites in Macedonia and Montenegro.

-------------

In the interests of keeping this post at a manageable length, I will conclude my review of Chapter 9 next time.

"Balkan Idols" by Vjekoslav Perica [6]

CHAPTER TWO

[continued]

War Continues: Exile Politics and Warring Myths

Opposition to the Communist regime was muted or suppressed at home, but thrived in exile, as dozens if not hundreds of competing anti-communist and/or anti-Yugoslav groups agitated against the regime and on many occasions turned to assassination and terrorism in their efforts to destabilize the state.

These groups were mostly ineffective for two reasons--their violent tactics tended to cost them international sympathy and support (and did little to endear them in Yugoslavia; and they spectacularly failed to rise above their divisions in order to form a unified front. Most of these exile groups were national groups, exclusive to one ethnic group or anther. Most also had ties to organized crime--another impediment to international support.

Some of these groups received support from religious institutions and clergy members from inside Yugoslavia, giving them legitimacy and strengthening the link between religious and national identities.

While these groups failed to seriously weaken the Yugoslav state or to form a credible opposition front, they did manage to nurture, articulate, and propagate the self-justifying and revisionist histories of their respective ethnic and religious groups. Croat groups lionized Cardinal Stepanic and made widely inflated claims about the number of NDH, Ustasha, and anti-Communist Croats were killed at the Austrian border at the end of the war. Serb groups developed their own myths about the World War II period, claiming that there was a Yugoslavia-wide genocide against the Serbs, and that all the other national groups in Yugoslavia were against them.

While the Tito regime imposed the civic religion of "Brotherhood and Unity" on Yugoslavs and swept the complexities and tragedies of the war period aside in favor of a simplified myth of Partisan righteousness, ethnic exile groups developed alternate histories, based on the latent fears and real memories of Serbs, Croats, and others. These hate-mongering, self-pitying national myths were just as dishonest as the official Titoist line, and much more poisonous, but they fed off real emotions and were fueled by real memories of real atrocities which could not be discussed openly.

Years of Renewal and Peaceful Coexistence

The split with Moscow in 1948 soon led to more liberal and less draconian policies towards religious institutions. Over the years, the regime improved its relations with the Vatican in particular, restoring diplomatic relations after the Second Vatican Council.

The Interfaith Dialogue

The Vatican's openness to ecumenical dialogue bore some fruit among the clergy of the Croatian Catholic church. A joint Catholic-Orthodox prayer service was initiated by the bishop of Split-Markarska, who reached out to the local Serb Orthodox archpriest. Their joint services were welcomed by local worshipers but opposed from above by the Catholic hierarchy, which forced them to end.

The Serb Orthodox church demanded a public apology from the leadership of the Croat Catholic Church for Ustasha massacres and other war crimes; although the Bishop of Banja Luka issued a public statement of contrition and an acknowledgment of accountability, most Croat clergy responded to Serb charges by demanding apologies in kind for alleged anti-Catholic discrimination prior to World War II and for Chetnik atrocities against Croats during the war.

Neither church was able to overcome such defensive positions. The Serb Orthodox church had several theologians who took staunchly anti-ecumenical positions. Such efforts continued to be made at grassroots levels, but the hierarchy of the two main national churches continued to block any progress towards real dialogue and reconciliation.

Church-State Relations in the Sixties

The Communist Party adopted more tolerant policies towards religious institutions after the adoption of the 1958 Constitution. Relations with the Vatican were normalized and a compromise was struck--the state allowed for free circulation of religious literature and renewed church building while the church quietly dropped the matter of the "martyr" Stepinac.

The government took a policy--documented by Perica from missives and reports he accessed during his research--of giving religious institutions certain latitude and ending the previous practice of intrusive spying and other aggressive intelligence-gathering methods, opting instead for dialogue and monitoring the religious press and other statements. The government understood that many of these churches had strong ties to what the government considered dangerous nationalisms, and sought to avoid pushing religious institutions on the defensive, thus encouraging a retreat into "zealous and fundamentalist" behavior and attitudes.

The government also responded to complaints about delays of the construction and reconstruction of religious buildings, even though the delays were really due to poor urban planning and rapid, uncontrolled urbanization rather than deliberate obstructionism.

Relations with the Serbian Orthodox Church, despite improvements throughout the decade as it received the lions share of government largess, deteriorated at the end of the decade after the rebellion of the Kosovar Albanians in 1968.

Religion Erodes, Churches Grow

In a curious dichotomy, religious participation and even nominal belief plummeted even as religious institutions grew. Church/mosque attendence continued to drop until the vast majority of Yugoslavs simply never attended a place of worship, regularly or at all; meanwhile nearly half of the population were self-described atheist/agnostics.

Yet at the same time, various religious institutions were on a building spree, building--and manning--churches, temples, seminaries and other religious institutions; the production of religious literature also increased exponentially.

The state also supported most national churches--as noted, the Serbian Orthodox church benefited the most by far. The Croatian Catholic church was the one notable exception but it of course received support from the Vatican and from a widely-dispersed diaspora. Clergy in Dalmatia:

"coined terms such as "hard currency areas" and "Deutschemark parishes," referring to regions from which large number [sic] of men went to work in the West and regularly sent back donations and financial contributions for the rebuilding of churches."

These ties to outside support were suspect by the state. But this suspicion--which sometimes took the form of implicit hostility (not always unfounded--there were certainly contacts with and ties to some of the violent anti-Yugoslav emigrant groups)--did not stop the Croatian Catholic church from becoming the wealthiest and most well-supported of all Yugoslav religious institutions.

Perica summarizes his chapter neatly in the final paragraph. He notes that neither the royal Yugoslav state nor the communist one were able to secure legitimization from either of the two main national churches, both of which serve as "guardians of their respective ethnic communities" first and foremost. The gap between church and state was only widened by the violent and traumatic events of Yugoslav history in the 1940s. The two churches were hostile towards each other even as they supported domestic opposition the multiethnic Yugoslavia. The brief promise of ecumenical accommodation in the 1960s failed to overcome deep-seated institutional hostilities, and the hierarchy of each church mostly took the opportunities of political liberalization to agitate for nationalist sentiment. The Serbian Orthodox church lost its preeminent position as the Croatian Catholic church emerged as a strong and well-funded competitor.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [21]

CHAPTER TEN: ON TO KOSOVO

Parenti is simply begging for a beat-down in this chapter His ignorance has been on display throughout this book, but while most of his chapters have begun with overheated rhetoric or laughable assertions (the Serbs were targeted because a larger percentage of them were Communists, for example), he begins this chapter (after a short initial paragraph recapping that "all that remained" of Yugoslavia was Montenegro and Serbia with its two autonomous provinces) with the following declaration:

"Let us begin with some history.".

Well, historical context is good--let's see where Parenti starts, and what historical facts he chooses to emphasize:

"During World War II, the Albanian fascist militia in western Kosovo expelled seventy thousand Serbs and brought in about an equal number of Albanians from Albania."

On the one hand, I'm oddly thankful that Parenti didn't go back much, much further into the historical record in order to muddy the issue with even more half-baked nationalist myths and questionable demographic facts. One of the main impediments to any US involvement in Bosnia was the ridiculous claim that the war was a tragic by-product of "ancient hatreds". Serious observers of the crisis realize that it was more recent history--the vicious, multi-faceted civil war that raged during WW II and the clampdown on discussion imposed by Tito--rather than unfinished business from the Ottoman invasion which truly fueled whatever genuine nationalist passions were inflamed by cynical and irresponsible politicians in the years after Tito's death.

So I do not object to the decision to begin his brief historical sketch during WW II in principle, but while it should be possible to present a balanced view of the conflict there without examining previous events such as the 1908 conquest, such a balanced presentation is clearly not Parenti's intention. His account is incredibly one-sided, and riddled with misinformation clearly derived from Serb nationalist sources.

The claim that thousands of ethnic Albanians entered Kosovo during World War II has long been a staple of Serb nationalist propaganda, so there is little mystery as to where Parenti is getting his information (there is no citation for this claim in the text). He goes further still in deferring to the views of his Serb nationalist allies when he regurgitates claims that there was an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Serbs and other non-Albanians throughout the post-WW II period.

The portrayal of Kosovar Serbs as being victims of ethnic cleansing in the years before Milosevic is not without a grain of truth--relations between the two communities were not good--although Parenti, typically, does not bother detailing any of the history of the region prior to WW II, when the province was conquered and a policy of harassment against the Albanian population as well as a colonization project to settle ethnic Serbs in the region in order to turn the demographic balance in Belgrade's favor.

The chapter continues to list all the failings and shortcomings of Kosovo and its Albanian majority in language very similar to the logic used by 19th Century imperialists to justify the subjugation and exploitation of colonial peoples.

And then we get to the Milosevic era and beyond. The rest of this chapter will be discussed in the next post.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [18]

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE OTHER ATROCITIES

Anyone familiar with the conspiracy-minded arguments of the Balkan revisionist movement will most likely be able to guess both the general theme of this chapter and some of the specific incidents cited with a great deal of accuracy merely from reading the title.

First, he sets the stage by introducing that favorite revisionist strawman--the reflexively anti-Serb--and monolithic--West.

"To accomplish this, [support for "costly, illegal, and often bloody intervention"] they filled the air with charges about brutally depraved Serbian aggressors who perpetrated genocidal atrocities against innocent Croats, Muslims, and ethnic Albanians."

At the end of my previous post, I quoted Parenti's snotty aside about the US media being "propaganda and tools of war" without adding much comment. I still do not feel like addressing this point--there are important issues regarding the corporate nature of the mass media in the US, and various institutional biases which are deeply embedded in the vast majority of major new outlets. And it is certainly true that, all too often, mainstream media outlets tend to be too chummy with government leaders and too deferential to accepted orthodoxies.

None of these criticisms, however, validate Parenti's crude and silly assertion that the US media served as a propaganda arm in Bosnia. Many of the journalists who covered the war so passionately advocated their views so passionately in an effort to influence official policy back home. Parenti blithely ignores the clearly documented record which shows extreme reluctance towards involvement in the former Yugoslavia, so his characterization of the purposes and motivations fueling media coverage should not be surprising. Suffice it to say that both the Bush and Clinton administrations sought to keep Bosnia off the front pages. Warmongering was the last thing they were trying to do.

So what follows is a list of atrocities committed by Croat and Bosnian Army forces--after a disclaimer that:

"Atrocities such as murder and rape are committed in almost every war (which is not to consider them lightly). Indeed, murder and rape occur with appalling frequency in many peacetime communities, and political leaders who wish to fight such crimes could start by directing their energies closer to home."

The cynicism and moral reductionism of such a statement (Diana Johnstone made the exact some point in "Fools Crusade") is hard to overstate. Parenti attempts to elevate his lowest-common-denominator moralizing by going on to state that:

"What should be remembered is that the Serbs were never accused of having committed murder and rape as such, but of (a) perpetrating mass murder and mass rape on a "genocidal" scale, and (b) doing such as part of an officially sanctioned systematic policy."

I had three reactions to this paragraph:

1) Well, DUH. Of course that's what "the Serbs" were accused of. That's why 'they' got the 'bad press,' Michael.
2) About that "the Serbs." Plenty of the press coverage of the war was very simplistic and over-generalized, but I've yet to see a single formal charge from The Hague against "The Serbs" as a whole. Like Johnstone, Parenti regards ethnic groups as uniform, singular entities, and therefore regards any attack on members of the group or of its self-proclaimed leadership to be an attack on the whole.
3) Nice touch putting "genocidal" in quotes--like most Balkan revisionists, I presume Parenti intends to set the threshold of 'genocide' so high that nobody short of the Nazis could ever meet it.

I have already discussed the shortcomings of this intellectual approach in my review of "Fools Crusade" and have no inclination to rehash that discussion right now. Parenti, like Johnstone, deliberately blurs the distinction between often heated, rushed, and often broadly-described press coverage with actual actions taken by and legal procedures implemented by the international community.

And so Parenti begins a tired, predictable, and conceptually disjointed survey of various human rights abuses carried out by different Croat, Bosnian Croat, Bosnian Muslim, and Bosnian Government forces. Operation Storm is here, as well as the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian Croat statelet of Herceg-Bosna; none of these atrocities are defensible, all deserve to be decried. None of them negate the powerful and compelling case made by Norman Cigar and many, many others that the government of Slobodan Milosevic and his proxies in Bosnia and Croatia bear responsibility for planning and committing genocide amidst the wreckage of Yugoslavia.

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I will summarize the rest of this chapter in my next post.

"With Their Backs To The World" by Asne Seierstad

Asne Seierstad, the author of "The Bookseller of Kabul" (I haven't read it yet--I'd welcome any input from someone who has), has written a deeply felt and perceptive portrait of contemporary Serbian society over a period of years; the edition I read was updated after another visit in 2004. Each of the fourteen chapters is devoted to one person (and, sometimes, their families and loved ones) whom the author interviewed and often befriended over several visits to Serbia.

The Serbs Seierstad became familiar with are a varied lot--tired, aging peasants pining for nationalism; a pro-democracy mayor who finds his political career on ice; a young man working for the Socialist Party and parroting pro-Milosevic dogma without enthusiasm or any apparant self-reflection.

One theme that runs through this book is neatly encapsulated in the title--contemporary Serbs, whether they realize it or not, are cut off from the rest of Europe and the world. There is a disconnect which seems odd in a developed country within Europe. Some of the interviewees seem only dimly aware of this distance, and their attempts to articulate their "Serbness" to the Norwegian author are touching in their clumsiness. Most of them, however, are all too aware of the psychological and cultural distance between themselves and the outside.

People constantly speak of being 'stuck,' or unable to accomplish their goals. Frequently we see the subjects trapped in a grinding stasis, unable to find work--meaningful or not--or to engage themselves in life at all.

It's a very good read. Someday I might revisit this book and write more on it.

"Fools' Crusade" Postscript: Perpetual War [7]

POSTSCRIPT: PERPETUAL WAR

THREATS ALL AROUND

This is the last section of the book, the final 2-and-a-half pages of this 268 page assault on truth and honest inquiry. We are at the end.

So what is the concluding moment of this meandering, sloppy conglomeration of conspiracy theories, revisionism, anti-Western hysteria, and disingenuous propagation of collectivist/anti-democratic dogma? On what note does she plan to end her book? What does Diana Johnstone think it all adds up to?

Well, as it turns out, it adds up to a post-September 11th world in which the primary threat to world peace and stability turns out to be--the United States of America.

September 11th was merely a pretext for a long-planned extension of American dominance, predicated on the shift in tactics and priorities which she ominously considered (without a word about changing global geopolitical and economic realities) in the previous sections.

Most tellingly, she refers to the planning of neoconservatives and old-line Cold War hardliners within the Bush Administration while implying that this demonstrates a continuation of American foreign policy during the Yugoslav crisis of the Clinton Administration. While there is certainly fertile ground in examining the continuity of American foreign policy across many Administrations, Johnstone is not discussing complex underlying themes here--she specifically uses papers and reports commissioned during the Bush Administration to defend her tenuous thesis. There is little depth, and almost no substance, to her argument.

Anyone familiar with American foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks doesn't need this book to be reminded of the "Bush Doctrine" and it's emphasis on preemptive military actions and renewed commitment to using American military power.

She says:

"Power has its own momentum. Whatever the declared motives, the war against Yugoslavia served as an exercise in the destruction of a country."

And so, on the very last page of her book, Johnstone makes it clear that she hasn't a clue. Yugoslavia was destroyed, all right, but it wasn't NATO aggression that killed it. In the end, this book isn't about Bosnia, or Kosovo, or the plight of the misunderstood Serbs, or Yugoslavia at all. It's about a knee-jerk, irrational hatred of the West and the United States in particular, with Serbs being used merely as props and their alleged tragedy as a convenient tool with which to berate the Western world and it's tradition of individual liberty and secular freedom. I very much doubt that Johnstone cares much about the true plight of contemporary Serbs at all.

After 268 pages, the book peters out on a tired note of knee-jerk anti-Americanism and stale anti-imperialist demagoguery. The mass of footnotes and bibliography that follows only serve to detail and document the vast amount of effort that went into this dishonest and pointless book; a great deal of sound and fury signifying nothing but the stubborn prejudices of an ossified ex-radical and her detachment from reality.

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And so, my months-long slog through "Fools' Crusade" has come to an end. I have a few closing thoughts on the book, which I'll post next time. And then, it will finally be time to put this book aside for good.