The Violent Breakup of Yugoslavia

The wars that tore Yugoslavia apart were among the most brutal conflicts of the 20th century. Mass murder, genocide and war crimes that rival Nazi atrocities of WW II characterized the struggles for independence of the republics that constituted the former members of the Yugoslavian federation. Understanding how this could happen in Europe just a few decades after the world was shocked by the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps is challenging. The causes of this conflict are multiple and complex rather than single and simple. But this is an important analysis to undertake if we want to understand how such brutality can be unleashed in the modern world. Although the specifics of the conflict in Yugoslavia are unique, we can identify three crucial factors in this situation from which we can learn invaluable lessons: the lack of a unified identity, to begin with, the lingering effects of communism, and ethnic conflicts incited by unscrupulous leaders seeking power.

In his book Blood and Vengeance, Chuck Sudetic reviews the long history of this region, as far back as the birth of Christ, to explain the mix of ethnicities in a land that has been a crossroads between East and West. Although his focus is on the experiences of one Bosnian family during the war, a comprehensive understanding of the history of the Balkans is necessary to make any kind of sense of this conflict. Roman Catholic Croats and Slovenes, who use the Latin alphabet, culturally were closer to Europe and the West than the Serbs, Montenegrins, and Macedonians. These latter groups use the Cyrillic alphabet and follow the Eastern Orthodox religion, culturally more Slavic than European. Although in general, the differences seem to have more to do with ethnicity than religion, the Muslim population in Bosnia, less economically developed than the Croats and Slovenes, were another constituent of this melting pot.

What becomes clear, when we look at its past, is that the area that came to be called Yugoslavia has always been shaped by the imperial adventures of the larger powers that have swept back and forth from Asia to Europe. The turmoil of the 1990s cannot be viewed in isolation from global changes, including the collapse of the Soviet Union and the shifting balance of power in Europe during the Cold War. Both the beginning and the end of the conflict have as much to do with East-West relations as it has to do with ethnic hostility within the region itself. Since the assassination which led to WW I, the fortunes of Serbia have been key to the fate of the entire region. At the same time, it was the larger regional conflicts that gave birth to the modern nation of Yugoslavia.

The first important factor to consider when trying to understand the destruction of Yugoslavia is its creation as a nation-state. Yugoslavia did not come into being as a spontaneous union of place and people; it was cobbled together out of expediencies of the conflicts that troubled Europe in the early 20th century. As Coughlin points out, “The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was founded under the royal family of Serbia, a result of the collapse of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires following WWI.” (Coughlin 2000) This first union of the separate republics of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, later named Yugoslavia, had more to do with the imperial powers surrounding it than any movement toward unity by the people themselves. Sudetic describes how the peasant people of Bosnia lived unconnected to the modern world, “most families on Mount Zvijezda… remained on the periphery of the money-earning world and beyond the domain of steam power, watches, and books.” (Sudetic 1998) These people dealt in a basic way with the day to day struggle for survival in a land that often had served as a battleground for conflicts that originated elsewhere. We can see that Yugoslavia, as a nation-state, never had a strong sense of identity and unity, to begin with.

Particularly ravaged by the destruction of the Second World War, this collection of ethnicities and republics first came together under Tito. His authoritarian rule, communist ideology, and economic success in recovering from the war provided an era of stability for the various groups that occupied this territory. So the second step toward the horrors that were to come was really the construction of national stability on the changing sands of the communist experiment. The problem with building your nation around the authority of a “benevolent dictator” is that, eventually, that dictator will die. This is why it is important to make laws and build institutions that have authority over individuals. In the case of Yugoslavia, Tito, who ruled through fear and force, constructed a culture based on these elements. While the communist ideology of “brotherhood and unity” was important during the Tito era, the fact that it did not hold together after his death is an indication that it was the iron hand of the leader that kept people focused on their commonalities. Because of the military buildup of the Cold War, when Tito died, he left the new leaders a powerful army, which it may have just been too tempting to not make use of. By the time Tito died, in 1980, the Soviet Union itself was little more than a decade away from collapse, and the failure of communism in both cases seems to have opened the door to ethnic conflict.

Given these preconditions (the lack of a strong national identity and the existence of a powerful military under Serbian control), the stage was set for Milosevic’s rise to power. The economic stability of the Tito era had been eroded, something Milosevic could use to his advantage, but the primary vehicle for his rise to supremacy was ethnic identity. Although most of the Serbs and Montenegrins who had fled Kosovo in the 1980s had done so for economic reasons, Milosevic was able to reinvigorate cultural myths around the 14th century Battle of Kosovo to give the Serbian nationalist movement impetus. By the time Milosevic’s canny political manipulations had succeeded in putting Serbian nationalists in control of four of the eight votes in the Yugoslavian federation, the nation of Yugoslavia was effectively dead, and what followed was a power struggle between Serbia and the other republics.

While Coughlan makes a good case that the Bosnians he interviewed were unaware of the “ethnic or religious background of friends, neighbors or fellow workers” (Coughlan 2000) before the war, it seems clear that even then people did not identify themselves as Yugoslavians, but rather as Serbs, Croats, Albanians, etc. This weak sense of national identity, Yugoslavian identity, must have been an important contributing factor in the conflict that was to come. Milosevic was able to make political capital out of Serbian nationalism because so many people identified themselves as Serbian rather than Yugoslavian. Coughlan seems to want to blame the leaders, Milosevic and Tudjman, for using ethnic conflict to build their own bases of power as democracy and independence swept in from the West. But that’s not unlike blaming Hitler for anti-Semitism. Hitler didn’t invent anti-Semitism, he just used it to build his power during the Holocaust, a pattern Milosevic seems to have followed with frightening precision.

Just as Hitler used anti-Semitism and fed into the paranoia of Germany, Milosevic seems to have consistently maintained that the Serbs were justified in whatever they did because somehow they were threatened by the mere existence of the ethnic other within their own communities. Repeatedly he claimed that the Serbs were in “mortal danger” (Death, 1998) from the non-Serbs they had lived in peace with for half a century. In reality, it was the Serbs who were in control of the Yugoslavian military and the Yugoslavian government, while the move toward independence in Slovenia and Croatia seemed motivated by the desire to join the West after the end of the Cold War, rather than Slovenian or Croatian animosity toward Serbians.

Here we can see what seems like very personal psychology acted out by nation-states: paranoia leading to the first strike. But Coughlan points out that this was a paranoia carefully cultivated and manipulated by Milosevic, who jumped on the ethnic bandwagon in an opportunistic attempt to seize the power to use the army to extend his sovereignty. Throughout the conflict, he may have claimed to be fighting to keep errant republics together as a united Yugoslavia, but clearly, it was a Serbian dominated Yugoslavia that he fought for, and by the mid-1990s the rhetoric, as well as the practice of “ethnic cleansing”, looked more and more like nationalism a la Hitler.

The oppression and discrimination the Serbs used to justify their aggression may not have been more ancient in origin than the atrocities perpetrated by the Ustashe in WW II, but clearly, for many people, there was a simmering resentment and hostility to the other ethnic groups that populated this land. Yes, Milosevic incited the hatred, much as Hitler had done before him, but in both cases, the leaders were riding an existing wave of public sentiment. Both Coughlan and the BBC film Death of Yugoslavia seem to indicate that Milosevic fueled the flames of ethnic conflict in an entirely Machiavellian manner to enhance his own political power, doing things like providing Serbian protestors with rocks to throw at police so that by the time the cameras were rolling, the police were beating up the Serbians.

While Coughlan focuses on the leaders who manipulated hate, Sudetic’s analysis is grounded in ordinary people, where the ethnic differences may not have always been sources of murderous intentions, but even in more peaceful times, the Serb neighbor is clearly identified as Serbian; the Muslims have different conventions of dress and manners. The differences between the ethnic groups may have been effectively obliterated by the communist ideology of Tito’s rule, but once Tito was gone and the various communist countries around the world began to move toward the freedom of market economics, these issues of identity came to the surface.

The potential for discrimination and conflict existed in the population, but certainly, a different group of leaders might have sought to resolve the conflicts in a different way. Sudetic point out that Tudjman was also guilty of building on WWII hostility between Croats and Serbs for his own political ends.

From the moment they took power, Tudjman and his nationalist party set about antagonizing the Serb minority in Croatia and effectively driving them into Milosevic’s hands. (Sudetic, 1998)

Milosevic, in particular, seems to have set himself up as the leader of the Serbians rather than the leader of Yugoslavia, and while Coughlan claims his motivations were for territory and power, it seems clear when the Serbians were quite willing to let go of Slovenia without a fight it was because it did not have a large Serbian population. Milosevic’s purported reason for sending the army into Croatia and Bosnia was because he was the defender of the Serbians who lived there.

The Yugoslavian army was a powerful force that could easily dominate the smaller militias of Croatia and Bosnia, but soon it must have been clear that military domination of the territory was not enough. Nothing short of exterminating the non-Serbian population would result in a Yugoslavia safe for Serbs, according to the out of control rhetoric the conflict spawned. One might argue that given the arbitrary nature of the creation of Yugoslavia, the breakup into sovereign constituent republics was inevitable after the collapse of communism, or even that different leadership might have made use of the army to hold the republics together in a multi-ethnic nation-state. But because of Milosevic’s use of Serbian nationalism and his intentional heightening of ethnic distrust, once it became a Serbian state that he was fighting for, the ethnic nature of the conflict led to the horrors that eventually prompted intervention from the West.

The first “ethnic cleansing” took place in Croatia, where the Yugoslav army began killing civilians or forcing them to flee captured territory, but the worst of it may have taken place in Bosnia. By that time combatants were living out their own personal dramas of revenge. As Serb Mihiailo Eric told Chuck Sudetic, the Serbs felt that “sooner or later our five minutes will come,” and what they were seeking was “blood vengeance." (Sudetic, 1998) Once the bloodbath started, it seemed to turn into an out of control cycle of violence and vengeance.

While Coughlan provides an insightful analysis of the leadership and the complex issues of power and territory involved, it is Sudetic’s descriptions of the violence in personal terms that really bring home the reality of the brutality, as in this account of the shelling of a schoolyard in Srebrenica:

Shrapnel had torn off legs and arms. Teeth had been ripped from mouths. Severed torsos squirted blood and oozed intestines. Hysterical children screamed and trembled. Parents inside the school rushed outside to the playground to look for their kids. (Sudetic 1998).

Some may argue that all war is brutal, but others will claim that the institutions and weapons of advanced civilizations can be used with honor, according to rules and conventions which protect the rights of civilians and prisoners. The horrors that were enacted in Bosnia are what has made this particular war such a disturbing challenge to that concept.

While ethnicity seems at the heart of the violence that played out in Bosnia, the Croats and Muslims were only threats because they were not Serbs. Serbian ethnicity seems key, combining military might with paranoid vulnerability, hostile to the West. Any move toward freedom and democracy or the Europeanization of the Balkans had to be met with force, but once force was employed, the logic of the ‘final solution’ reared its ugly head. Again it is Sudetic who describes what was going on in striking terms.

Srebrenica was little more than a concentration camp cut off from the world and soon almost forgotten, a place surrounded by an enemy hungry for revenge and watched over by foreigners who had no desire to be there. (Sudetic, 1998)

Milosevic may have been using ideals of ethnic purity as a replacement for the communist ideology that had once maintained some semblance of social order, if also the kind of paranoia that resulted in the military might of the Yugoslavian army, but by this time the reality of “ethnic cleansing” was becoming clear to the international community. Once again the fate of the region seemed to lie in the hands of the superpowers, but it took some jockeying for position between Russia, the European Community, and the USA before the bloodshed would stop.

The USA was reluctant to antagonize a Russia newly liberated from communism but still well-armed, and was also distracted by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Their own uncertain economic issues kept the West from wanting to get involved in what many characterized as ancient ethnic animosities. Only careful analysis shows us the extent to which the ethnic conflict was manufactured by Milosevic and Tudjman.

Significantly, the only thing that could stop the Serbian army were acts of violence by a superior military force. The unprecedented NATO airstrikes that brought the conflict to an end may be an argument in favor of the proper use of military force. Unfortunately, more than 100,000 combatants and civilians lost their lives before that happened. The USA seems to have found the right balance between force and political negotiation to bring about a cease-fire finally, but the nation of Yugoslavia was also a casualty of this conflict.

When Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence in June 1991, it was really a Serbian state that was fighting for territory; the Yugoslavian federation had already been politically taken over by Serbian nationalists. The Yugoslavian army was primed to grab territory from Croatia, which had a large minority population of Serbs, and Bosnian Muslims had little protection against invading Serbian nationalists. The fear and force which had been the foundation of the earlier communist regime now were colored by rhetoric drawn from ancient ethnic mythologies, as well as the more recent atrocities of WW II. Because it had been a communist state, there was no free press in Yugoslavia, and Milosevic and Tudjman used media propaganda to inflame passions and promote fear of other ethnicities. The Serbs, who had been the enemy of the Nazi backed Croat Ustashe, ironically enough seem to have re-enacted Nazi solutions to political problems in a devastatingly violent manner. While the communist Serbs had resisted Nazi fascism in WW II, it was a socialist, militarized, ethnically pure Serbia against multi-ethnic democracy in Croatia and Bosnia in the wars of the 90s.

Among the many lessons we can learn from this analysis is that some forces will only respond to force. It took decisive intervention by the West to put an end to the conflict once it had been stirred to such brutality. Sudetic suggests that ethnic hostility still lies just below the surface in a land where “there is no honor if there is no revenge.” (Sudetic, 1998)

The leaders may not have realized how out of control this snowball of ethnic violence would become, or maybe they just didn’t care so long as the leadership could remain remote from the violence. It was primarily civilian militias, Croat and Muslim as well as Serbian, who were on the front lines of a conflict that escalated beyond belief. Good laws and just institutions are necessary for the civilized resolution of conflicts, but leaders continue to have power for evil and well as for good. Leaders that focus propaganda on “brotherhood and unity” can maintain the kind of civic order necessary for economic success. Leaders who promote hate and violence are not the only ones who suffer the consequences of their acts. Unfortunately, many innocent people suffered horribly from a conflict rooted in the past. Unifying the Balkans might have been a noble project for the political elites who created Yugoslavia, but the communist regime that held it together so long fostered a militarized paranoia that became a potent weapon in the hands of subsequent leaders. The brutality occurred because of a lethal combination of unscrupulous local authorities and a West without the political will to meet force with the only thing it respects: greater force.

References

Coughlan, R. (2000), “Dispelling the Myth of Ancient Ethnic Hatred in the Balkans” All College Conference

Death of Yugoslavia, [television series] Brian Lapping (executive producer) BBC, 1995

Gagnon Jr., V.P. (1995), ‘Historical Roots of the Yugoslav Conflict’ in International Organizations and Ethnic Conflict, edited by Milton J. Esman and Shibley Telhami, Cornell University Press, pp. 179-197

Sudetic, C. (1998), Blood and Vengeance, WW Norton & Company.