Thursday, December 28, 1995 – News with a View, Star Tribune
Not so ancient a grudge?
Above, the author, Nick Hayes, surveys the ruins of a Catholic church in a region north of Banja Luka, Bosnia. As part of the ethnic cleansing, Serb forces destroyed most of the mosques and Catholic churches in areas they controlled. At right, Hayes inteviews Father Volaric in front of a Catholic cemetary chapel in Croatia on the Sava River, just across the border from Bosnia.
After a year in the former Yugoslavia, Minnesota scholar Nick Hayes argues that the oft-encouraged practice of trying to understand the Bosnian war in the context of centuries of ethnic hatred may do more to confuse than to clarify the mission faced by U.S. troops. Our task in the Balkans is not to right five centuries of wrongs but to put an end to the damage of the past five years.
As U.S. troops take up positions in
the Bosnian mountains, the American public remains confused and skeptical of what if
anything we can do to bring peace to that benighted region.
One reason for that skepticism
is the belief that our troops are walking into the middle of a Hatfield-McCoy-type feud,
with impenetrable ancient roots and so much blood on everyone’s hand’s that no
outsider could hope to differentiate the perpetrators from the victims.
Over a year ago, as I settled into a
fellowship in the former Yugoslavia, I shared the same confusion and skepticism. As a historian of Eastern Europe, I certainly
believe in taking the long view of current events. But
my year of travel and study convinced me that this war was a case in which the short view
tells us more than the long view.
This was started five
years—not five centuries—ago. Its
proximate cause was Serbian President Slobodan Milosovic’s desire to grab land from
Bosnia and Croatia and his desire to reinvent himself politically as a Serb nationalist
for the post-Communist era.
Of course the war derives to
some extent from the history of the region and the parties involved. Every war does.
But that doesn’t mean that it was the inevitable resumption of a centuries-old
feud among parties that have never been able to live together in peace.
Why then is that idea so widely
believed? One reason is that Presidents Bush
and Clinton, when they were trying to justify a policy of non-intervention, fed us a
misconception of the region’s history. George
Bush called the conflict “a blood feud.” Lawrence
Eagleburger, a former ambassador to Yugoslavia and Bush’s last secretary of state,
told us the fighting had “ancient and complicated roots.”
Last June, Clinton made the
same point by telling us that the conflict in the ex-Yugoslavia dates back to the “11th
century” and that the people there have been fighting for “500 years.”
There is some truth to this
broad generalization. We should understand
that the line between the Christians of the Eastern Orthodox faith and Roman Catholicism
was drawn in the Balkans a millennium ago. The
animosity between Serbs and Bosnians has its historical roots in the 14th-century
Turkish conquest of the Serbs when some of their fellow Slavs converted to the Muslim
faith of their conquerors.
The promoters of the ancient
blood feud analysis would have us believe that the Serbs of Bosnia killed, raped and
ethnically cleansed their non—Serb neighbors in the 1990s because they wanted to
settle a grudge dating back to 1389 Battle of Kosovo, in which the Ottoman Turks defeated
the Serbs.
But most Serbs lived side by
side with Croats and Bosnian Muslims, intermarried, and nurtured a multi-national society
that enjoyed relative peace for the greater part of the modern era.
They might have continued doing
so if not for Milosovic, the former Communist apparatchik, who in 1989 saw the writing on
the wall for communism in Eastern Europe. He
found a new political life for himself by embracing the cause of Serbian nationalism. This meant advocating the creation of a
“Greater Serbia” out of the ashes of the disintegrating Yugoslavia. He enlisted the otherwise dispensable JNA
(Yugoslavia National Army) to serve this cause.
Part of the new political
package was a manipulation of Serb historical memories from medieval wars against the
Turks to more recent memories of World War II when a Croatian fascist government known as
the “ustashe” first transformed Bosnia in killing fields by mass execution of
Serbs.
U.S. leaders have also muddled
the sense of moral responsibility for the war. The White House has added to the confusion
by mixing denunciations of the Serbian leadership with cliches about how there was enough
blame to spread around to all the war-ring parties.
Certainly none of the parties
are blameless. But it should not be necessary
to prove that the Bosnians and Croats are innocent to identify and intervene against the
primary perpetrators of Europe’s worst war crime in 50 years.
Put the clock back to 1991. The government of Croatia under President Franjo
Tudjman played with ultra nationalist rhetoric of its own.
Symbolic gestures by the Tudjman government re-kindled real Serbian fears from the
ustashe regime in World War II. Zagreb
re-introduced the WWII government symbols and in the Serb populated regions street signs
switched from the Serbian cyrillic to the Croatian Latin letters.
Rumors spread that Serbs were
summarily dismissed from their jobs. It was
obvious to me and many Croatians that the action of their government were stupid and
risked setting off a paranoid reaction among Croatia’s substantial Serbian minority.
But these policies, provocative
and bigoted as they were, do not justify an armed secessionist movement, aided by the
overwhelming power of the JNA.
There is a world of moral
differences between firing policeman, and changing street signs, as the Croats did, and
unleashing a heavily armed artillery against virtually unarmed civilian populations and
precious historical monuments and systematically bringing “ethnic cleansing” to
each new area that fell under Serb control.
Take the example of one of my
students last year at the University of Zagreb. Marja
was a refugee from Vukovar, which the JNA captured in November 1991. The city was reduced to rubble while the Serb
troops took away some 2,000 Croat men and 105 women age 14 to 45. Marja’s mother and an aunt were among those
women. Her father and brother disappeared
with the men taken from Vukovar. Five years
later, the Serbs have never even identified the names of those detained let alone
accounted for their fate.
Eyewitness account
Yes, Croats began to take
revenge. Last May, I followed the trail of
the Croatian armed forces into the region of Western Slavonia which they had just retaken
from the Serbs who had ethnically cleansed the region in 1992.
But I crossed into the
Serb-held areas of Bosnia near Banja Luka, an apprehension about what the Croats might
have done gave way to a sense of horror in face of the reality of what the Bosnian Serbs
had done in their occupation of Bosnia.
The Serb record in the region
already included the utter destruction of 17 mosques, 55 Catholic Churches and a Jewish
cemetary. I followed what came next. On May 7, the Serb troops in the Banja Luka
vicinity removed seven monks from their monastery and refused to allow them to save an
eighth member, a paraplegic who perished as the troops destroyed the monastery with hand
grenades.
Two days later, Serb troops
entered a Catholic Convent in a village outside Banja Luka.
Nine nuns, aged 65 to 80, were assaulted, stripped and left on the Croatian border
after the troops had demolished their convent that dated back to the 17th
century.
I could not help but conclude
that the Serbs’ actions in areas of Croatia and Bosnia read like pages from
“MacBeth” while the acts of the Croats and Bosnians remind us that no
nationality is perfect and that victims often take revenge by imitating the crimes of
their tormentors.
Let’s get our perspective
on this war straight. Our task in the Balkans
is not to right five centuries of wrongs, but to put and end to the damage of the past
five years.
What is more, its outcomes goes
far beyond the Balkans. The war in the
ex-Yugoslavia is a vivid example of the extreme political battles being waged throughout
the former Communist countries of Europe ever since the Berlin Wall came down.
The View from Moscow
That’s why as I watched
the war I also paid attention to how the war played in Moscow.
The connection between the
worst in the new Russian politics and this was obvious.
Russia’s clown fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky had visited Vukovar in 1994 and
Russian TV broadcast the toast he gave there in honor of Serbian troops. He didn’t bother while in Vukovar to inquire
about the fate of my student Marja’s mother, aunt, father or brother.
In the same year, the same
nationalists in the Russian Duma or parliament who would triumph in Russia’s 1995
elections, had bequeathed its highest literary award on Bosnian Serb leader Radovan
Karadzic’s nationalist poetry.
If the Serbian aggression
succeeds and the atrocities go unpunished, the war in the Balkans will become a script to
be followed by every two bit nationalist in Central and Eastern Europe. The script goes like this:
Build your political base by joining
the nationalist right with the frustration in the armed services whose privileged position
went out with the Warsaw Pact, then grab international media attention by defying the
U.N., NATO and, best of all, Washington.
Thus, as the winding down of
the war in the ex-Yugoslavia coincided with the recent Russian elections, I could not
suppress the fear that out of the Balkans something is slouching towards the Kremlin.
For the past five years, the
worst in Serbian politics were able to practice ethnic cleansing with such impunity from
the fear of reprisals or international protection of the victims that the new
totalitarians in post-Communist politics from Belgrade to Moscow can still harbor the evil
dream that Eastern Europe, at least, is still safe for genocide.