The End of Yugoslavia

Kosovo’s been in the news lately because the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) upheld the legality of Kosovo’s 2008 secession. The last nail in the Yugoslav coffin and far too intricate to explain in detail here, the Kosovo Wars of the late 1990s ended with NATO air strikes in Serbia and Serbian President Milosevic’s indictment as a war criminal. The Kosovo province is regarded as the historical home of Serbs, even though the population after the mid-1900s was around 80% Albanian. Kosovar Albanians wanted independence based on nationality whereas the Serbs couldn’t stand to lose their historical center. The Kosovo conflict is just another bloody chapter in a Balkan history filled with them. The Serbian side going into the ICJ’s announcement was that if the court upheld the independence, “no border in the world would be safe.”

A brief look into their own history would be enough to prove that no border at any time or place is ever safe.

Over the past week, I’ve spent several hours reading Mischa Glenny’s The Balkans. The main thesis of Glenny’s book is that the Balkans isn’t some backward place doomed to tear itself apart repeatedly; but that the great powers have done a lot to contribute to the tension over the last century. It’s a convincing argument. I’ve also watched the BBC documentary entitled “The Death of Yugoslavia,” a six-hour series chronicling Yugoslavia from the late 1980s up to the Dayton Peace Accord in 1995. In the process, I basically needed a flow chart, several maps and a few timelines to keep everything straight. Any discussion of the former Yugoslavia requires a solid knowledge of at least: the previous history of the area; borders and historical borders; and ethnicities and nationalities. We’re talking about Croats, Serbs, Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Albanians, and that’s not even figuring with Montenegrins and Macedonians. I wasn’t lying about the flowchart. The study of this area soaked in blood is both fascinating, heartbreaking, aggravating and at times, surreal. Although I’m definitely a novice on the subject, a few things have jumped out over the past couple days.

First, the amount of ethnicities, religions and nationalities that once lived together in relative peace was pretty impressive. Hundreds of year old Muslim, Croat and Serb histories were written in places like Sarajevo, Vukovar and Knin, respectively. More impressive is just how quickly everything went. Slovenia left Yugoslavia relatively easily and early on. But all the other secessions would prove to be bloody and with extreme amounts of civilian casualties.

In the book and the documentary, what is most apparent is Serbia’s astounding sense of entitlement and inability to play by any set of rules. Serbian domination of Yugoslavia began when Milosevic came to power and undoubtedly caused the end of the very Yugoslavia that it wanted to maintain. Serbian atrocities in the war were by far the worst, highlighted by the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in eastern Bosnia. Bosnian Serb forces slaughtered 8,000 Bosniak males killed in an act of genocide that was the worst mass-killing since World War Two. That Serbia couldn’t control the Bosnian Serb forces is also shameful, as is the unwillingness of both of them to accept ceasefires. It took years in Serbia after the war to round up their war criminals that were to be put on trial by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In retrospect, it’s very easy to single out the Serbs both for the number and flagrancy of their crimes. But they found willing co-conspirators in Croatia and relative ineptitude with the UN and western powers, considering that Srebrenica was supposed to be a “safe haven” under UN protection. In a rare moment when discussing US foreign policy, I felt proud when the US encouraged bombing missions to force Bosnian Serbs to uphold agreements as well as forming plans for attacks if more safe zones were attacked. It’s shameful that the UN and the West ignored two decimations of declared safe zones before it reached this point.

I was far too young to understand any of this when it was happening. I remembered seeing reports on television and hearing about some country called Yugoslavia, but I didn’t really know anything else about it. At the ages of 7-11, I was lucky to not have to experience terms like “ethnic cleansing” first hand. I didn’t have to live in constant fear, even while in a “safe zone.” The city museum of Sarajevo has an entire exhibit on life in the city during the war. I remember it perfectly: one room has a mock apartment, complete with blue UN plastic over the windows since most of them had been blown out. People had lived without electricity, without gas and without regular food and water supplies for so long that they had to get creative. The museum details how people ate pigeons, attempted to avoid snipers while going out for supplies, and features a number of heaters fashioned from coffee cans. Sarajevo today is very much a city on the mend. One look at the tattered and stripped trees over the city’s hillside, and it doesn’t take much to imagine the artillery flying down from those heights.

In my reading, I kept wondering what all if it was for and how something like this could happen. Wasn’t World War Two enough of an example of what genocide is to assure that it would never be allowed to happen again? Indeed, the world wars showed us a new generation of warfare where civilians were “collateral damages,” arguably one of the most disgusting terms to enter English vocabulary in the 20th century? According to Merriam Webster, collateral damage is “injury inflicted on something other than an intended target.” The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, however, featured direct and intentional attacks and murder of civilians. In this sense, collateral damage doesn’t do these actions justice. It’s murder, plain and simple, with the intent of exterminating entire populations. And for the second time in the 20th century, it happened again while we all watched. The largest irony in all of this is Serbian complaints that their populations would be extinguished, thereby justifying their assaults and attacks. No one murdered more than the Serbs.

With the heat turned up around the Kosovo issue, one can only hope that the peace will be able to hold. It seems strange to think that as late as the 1940s, Albania could almost have been a part of Yugoslavia. The two counties cooperated in the postwar years with Albania acting as a Yugoslavian satellite until Yugoslavia’s 1948 expulsion from Cominform. Before World War Two, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had even supported giving Kosovo to the Albanians, although that was later overturned by Yugoslavia’s postwar communists, according to Albania: A Country Study. I shudder to think what kind of bloodshed would have happened during the Yugoslav wars of secession if Albania would have figured into the mix in addition to everything else. At this point, the Serbs must accept that Kosovo is lost and any attempt to change that would produce violence so great that even Bosnia would seem miniscule by comparison. The dream of a Greater Serbia and a home for all Serbs has twice been proven to be impossible. Trying for a third time would be a huge mistake.

EDIT: For more information about the trials of war criminals at The Hague, please see the ICTY website. Two of the big criminals are still at large, including Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic.