"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.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [9]

CHAPTER THREE: DIVIDE AND CONQUER

[continued]

For the record, the closing paragraph of my previous post was not strictly accurate--Parenti does acknowledge the distinction between ethnic nationalism and, if not exactly civic nationalism, at least the notion of sovereignty as being predicated on geopolitical entities:

"The separatist movements in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia revived Serbian nationalists' dream of a nation-state, as promoted by those who believed that self-determination belongs to ethnic nationalities not to republics or federations."

That sentence, for all its faults, at least gives the illusion that Parenti is not taking sides or serving as a mouthpiece for the aims of hardline Serb nationalists. Such flawed but at least ostensibly even-handed objectivity proves to be an illusion, however.

Slovene independence, we are told, was the wedge that broke up the rest of Yugoslavia. Parenti is all-too casual with the facts here:

"Secession for Croatia proved more difficult. Fighting between Croats and the large Serbian population that had lived in Croatia for centuries reached intensive levels and lasted several years."

First, there is no mention of war crimes committed by the Knin regime. Second, Parenti, like Johnstone and other revisionists, loves to point to German and American recognition for Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, but neglect to mention that the United Nations itself also recognized all of the newly independent republics of Yugoslavia.

More importantly, note how the language of collectivism creeps into the text--the fighting is not between the armed forces of the breakaway Krajina republic and the Croatian army, but between "Croats" and the "Serbian population." The masses act as a single unit, indistinguishable from the actions of their leadership.

In the same paragraph (this chapter is the shortest history of the Yugoslav wars you will ever read), Parenti goes on to decry the actions of Operation Storm. I will not defend the atrocities carried out against the Krajina Serbs in 1995; since Parenti, like Johnstone, has not another word to say about their fate after their flight, and since he exaggerates the death tolls by implication (his book is remarkably bereft of hard data and footnotes compared to "Fools' Crusade"), it is safe to assume that his concern has little to do with outrage and simple compassion; this is simply a propaganda weapon to use against the US.

He gives Macedonia all of two sentences, yet still manages to misrepresent reality.

"Spurred by US support, its independence may be something less than complete, given the US troop occupation that Macedonia has had to accept."

What is significant about this statement is not the fact that the presence of 300 US peacekeepers along the Macedonian-Serbian border is characterized as an "occupation." Such dishonesty and hyperbole is to be expected from a book like this. Rather, we see that Parenti's tendency to see the people of the Balkans and their political leadership as being helpless pawns in the hands of the West, no matter what. The fact that Macedonian president Gligorov was actually a pretty astute leader who played a weak hand as well as he could, and managed to take his ethnically divided, landlocked republic (surrounded by unfriendly, or at least unsupportive, states) out of Yugoslavia without descending into war and chaos should evoke at least a small degree of separation. But Parenti cannot conceive that the people of Yugoslavia were in any way responsible for, or capable of, controlling their own destiny.

His "history" of Bosnia's war is equally brief and selective with the facts. Bosnian revisionists often twist the chronology of events in order to uncover post de facto "proof."

"It is a matter of public record that the CIA fueled the Bosnian conflict. Consider these headlines: the Manchester Guardian, November 17 1994: "CIA Agents Training Bosnian Army", the London Observer, November 20 1994: "America's Secret Bosnian Agenda", the European, November 25 1994: "How The CIA Helps Bosnia Fight Back."

[As always, underline text in quoted sections was italicized in the orginal.]

Thus, events from 1994 and 1995 somehow "prove" the true instigator of a war that was already several years along.

Parenti then quotes Charles Boyd--approvingly and in agreement--who makes a statement as shocking in its dishonesty as it is callous and indifferent to the reality he is covering up:

"Charles Boyd, former deputy commander of the US European command, commented: "The popular image of this war [in Croatia] is one of unrelenting Serb expansion. Much of what the Croatians call 'the occupied territories' is land that has been held by Serbs for more than three centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia--what the Western media frequently refer to as the 70 per cent of Bosnia seized by rebel Serbs. In short the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs." As a result of the war, Serbian land holdings in Bosnia were reduced from 65 to 43 per cent."

Where does one begin? Boyd seems to be living in the Dark Ages, where land is "held" by tribal groups as a collective. This idea that land was being "held" in a modern nation-state by homogeneous social collective united by blood and religion is almost as troubling as his complete disregard for fundamental facts--how does he square his assertion that 'the Serbs' "held" 70 percent of Bosnia prior to the war? How does one define "held." It is true that the Muslims were more urbanized and therefore were the predominant group in a proportionately smaller part of Bosnia, but 70% is simply an outrageous figure even if Jones is only arguing for a simple majority in a municipality. These are basic, easily verifiable demographic facts that Jones and Parenti simply ignore. The crudeness of the lie is stunning.

Even darker is this--once you have asserted that an ethnic group in a modern nation-state "held" 70% of the land, the next question is how did they "hold" it? What demographic realities verified that a given geopolitical subunit of Bosnia was "held" by the Serbs?

Important questions--which Parenti ignores completely.

We will conclude this chapter in the next post.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Five [3]

CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEW IMPERIAL MODEL

PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION, LANGUAGE, AND TRUTH

A maddening section, in that there is the germ of a reasonable analysis here. If only Johnstone weren't so stubbornly one-sided--searching for evidence to support her predetermined point of view rather than examining the facts and developing her interpretation with an open mind--this section might have contained interesting and useful insights.

Essentially, Johnstone focuses on the low level of education and literacy among Albanians, and the related failure of Albanians to develop a national literature (or even an accepted written form of the language) until the early 20th Century.

There is much to ponder here; in spite of herself, Johnstone has brought up an interesting subject. Albanian nationalism is--even by Balkan standards--a recent, immature phenomena, and the separation of the Albanians of Kosovo from their ethnic brethren in Albania proper from the very dawn of this process was all but certain to affect this process. The cultural and social identity of ethnic Albanians in Yugoslavia was struggling to define itself in modern, nationalistic terms even as they were a minority in a nation-building project dominated by two national groups with more established and pronounced national identities.

The decision by Tito to allow Albanian-language instruction by teachers and books from Hoxha's country was, in retrospect, a minefield. And Johnstone's point about the decline of bilingualism (or even trilingualism, as Turkish died out) among Kosovar Serbs and Albanians is a serious one. If only it were being raised by a serious individual.

The picture she draws is of a society rapidly becoming segregated by language, the majority being educated as de facto citizens of another nation. Albanians, according to her, were fed a steady diet of crude nationalist self-pity and martyrdom, deficient in science, math, and other useful skills. The Kosovar Albanians became increasingly resentful of the stagnant economic and social conditions in their province, and they placed the blame on the Slavic majority of Yugoslavia.

This isn't an entirely unconvincing argument. But Johnstone consistently peppers her presentation with implicitly derogatory and condescending asides. The strong suggestion that Albanians would have been better off had they been educated in Serbian--a more established written language with a more extensive literature--smacks of patronizing colonialism. This impression is all but inescapable given that, in the previous section, she defended the Serbian conquest of Kosovo on the grounds that Albanian nationalism was too young and undeveloped, and Kosovar Albanian society lacked the social, cultural, and political infrastructure to successfully manage independence.

Her "analysis," as usual, is facetious. Such a shame, too--she comes close, or at least within sight of, a reasonable, even-handed interpretation of events. She seems to have grasped a larger tragedy at work in Kosovo, where the two main ethnic groups were slowly segregated psychologically as well as physically from each other as a byproduct of the larger forces wrenching the Balkans throughout the 20th Century.

But that won't do, for our Miss Johnstone. As we shall see in the next section.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [29]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

THE SECOND BOSNIAN PROTECTORATE

The penultimate section of Chapter Three begins with this nuanced, informed statement:

"Everything that happens in the Balkans echoes previous events>"

Diana Johnstone, you will recall, constantly chides Western observers for making broad, uniformed generalizations about the region. Yet her book is littered with hoary cliches such as that opener.

The rest of the lengthy opening paragraph briefly relates, from her selective and biased point of view, the role of Bosnia's Muslims in World War II. I will give her credit--after the predictable mentions of the mufti of Jerusalem and the Handzar division, she closes with this one sentence:

"On the other side, Muslims were also recruited by the communist-led partisans, mainly based in Bosnia throughout the war."

I guess that counts for balance, although the implication is that only individual Muslims "were also recruited" without any leadership on their own part, while she names leaders and politicians among the Muslim elite who took fascist stands and actions.

At any rate, her motivation for that small concession to the complex reality of the situation isn't to exonerate the Muslims of Bosnia, but to emphasize how multi-faceted and confusing the war in Bosnia was. She is correct in noting this, as she is also correct when she points out that this is why it was the Republic with the most repressive and slavishly Titoist leadership after the war.

She then moves on to note that it was only in 1971 that "Muslim" became an officially designated nationality. She does have a valid, if narrow, point when she questions the legitimacy of a Muslim ethnicity. However, in order to truly investigate this question, one must address the uncomfortable reality that in the Balkans, religious identity and ethnic identify (with the notable exception of the Albanians) have gone hand in hand. Croats and Slovenes are Catholic, Serbs and Greeks are Orthodox, and so on. Any serious study of the region will need to address the problem of converts, or of people who were forced to decide their identity in the late 18th or early 19th centuries, when national identities were being solidified. This, clearly, is not a conversation Johnstone wants to have.

That is a theme which runs through the entire book; of more immediate concern is her subsequent assertion that the usefulness of an identifiable Muslim nationality with its own homeland in cultivating support from Muslim countries abroad (a widely acknowledged factor) actually became a drawback. She alleges that rather than primarily giving Yugoslavia leverage and clout with the Muslim world, the elevation of Muslims within Yugoslavia and their identification with the wider Muslim world actually gave Muslim fundamentalists leverage within Yugoslavia.

There is the seed of an interesting point here; by sharpening Slavic Muslims awareness of their "muslimness" and fostering them upon the wider Muslim world, Tito was encouraging their community to develop a more explicitly relgious, and less Slavic and Balkan, identity. This an avenue of potentially interesting and enlightening inquiry.

Needless to say, Johnstone doesn't follow it. Instead, she takes the much cruder and sinister position that Islamists from Saudi Arabia and Iran empowered alleged "fundamentalists" such as--you guessed it--Alija Izetbegovic. Johnstone is no longer merely implying that he was a fundamentalist fanatic, she now states it outright.

She then oddly confronts one of the key objections to the ethnic nationalism she has been championing throughout this book:

"There were very many people with no religion at all in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a small number of Jews and even Protestants, not to mention many families whose members were of different religious affiliation."

The obvious question is--how, then, can she propose to divide Bosnia between Serbs and Croats? How can she advocate carving the geopolitical entity of Bosnia-Hercegovina between two states of an explicitly ethnic-national character based on this same logic? Wouldn't the wisest solution--one she never, ever advocates--have been a unified Bosnia based on individual citizenship--the very form of government that Izetbegovic's SDA, however imperfectly and occasionally hypocritically, fought to defend?

She doesn't say. She dwells on the frequency of intermarriage and the popularity of the "Yugoslav" nationality in some parts of Bosnia, then even admits that it was the ethnic quota system of Yugoslavia which undermined such efforts at pluralism. She does not consider the ramifications of this among Serbs or Croats; the only negative consequence she is willing to consider is that many Bosnians felt compelled to 'become' Muslim.

The identification of Sandzak Muslims with Bosnia's Muslims and then with Bosnia itself is discussed, in sinister terms. The same dynamic applied to Bosnian Serbs and Hercegovina Croats--an obvious parallel--but she does not seem to recognize this.

The rest of this section compares Fikrit Abdic to Izetbegovic; Abdic is Johnstone's guy. He's the Muslim we're supposed to admire. His decision to lead a breakaway statelet and ally with Bosnian Serbs and separatist Croats against the Bosnian government and most Serbs is presented in the best possible light. I don't want to demonize Abdic too much, but he certainly doesn't deserve the hagiography she gives him here; he is practically a martyr in her telling. She often refers to "his people," indicating that she not only knew about his Don-like standing, but seems to approve.

She closes with a brief discussion of the Muslim civil war in Bihac; in the context of her discussions about Muslim nationhood and Izetbegovic's alleged fundamentalism, her intent when mentioning that "foreign mujahidin" took part in the final assault against Abdic's forces could not be clearer.