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September 1997 / July 1998
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It would be hard to imagine a place with both a more alluring beauty and tragic recent history than the lands that comprise the former Yugoslavia. While many people smugly believe the wars of the Yugoslav succession during the 1990s were the result of ancient ethnic hatreds, the reality is something far more complex.
Yugoslavia began life following WWI as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The new state comprised the Kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia, the Austrian-controlled territories of Slovenia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia, and Hungarian-controlled areas in Slavonia (today eastern Croatia and northern Serbia). The new kingdom was roughly 47% Eastern Orthodox, 40% Roman Catholic, and 11% Muslim. In Slovenia and parts of Croatia and Macedonia there was one dominant group; however, in Bosnia and parts of Croatia and Serbia the population had been thoroughly mixed for some time.
Although there was considerable support (particularly among intellectuals) for a southern Slav state, the new government had to struggle for legitimacy against the nationalist sentiments which had been raised during the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan Wars of 1912-3. This nationalism was particularly strong among Serbs, who despite their fear of being divided among several states also believed in a Greater Serbia, to include all the lands they had historically occupied. Thus Yugoslavia was born with an inner tension between the Serbs' need to unite with other groups and their desire to dominate them.
The Kingdom was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (Kingdom of Southern Slavs), and functioned as a dictatorship under King Alexander, who stressed pan-ethnic organizational symbols and structures. Appearances to the contrary however, nationalism was never far beneath the surface of political life. In 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded by Germany and partitioned between a fascist Ustasha regime in Croatia and a rump Serbia under direct Axis rule. Resistance was led by the ultra-nationalist Serb Chetniks, who claimed to represent the government in exile) and the Partisans, headed by the Communist Party leader Josep Broz Tito. The Partisans operated mainly out of Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia.
Against the backdrop of WWII, a civil war raged in Yugoslavia between the Partisans, Chetniks, and the Ustasha regime. The latter had established concentration camps where thousands of Serb civilians were murdered, which inflamed Serbian anger. In 1943, Tito and the Partisans formed a provisional government, and in 1944, the Soviet Army entered the capital Belgrade. Eventually the Partisans were able to dominate because they enjoyed broader support than the Chetniks, who appealed primarily to Serbs. Although Tito initially followed a Stalinist economic and political model, the decision to follow a more independent course resulted in Yugoslavia's expulsion from Cominform, the Soviet-dominated league of communist parties.
Yugoslavia's internal borders were redrawn in 1945 once the Partisans were safely in power, and in general these reflected states as they existed prior to the war. However, they were vested with different political rights over time as the regime sought to play off the various nationalities. Thus, Croatia and Slovenia were granted wider powers of home rule, and Bosnia was given a special status in 1976. Kosovo also came to enjoy certain privileges in recognition of its Albanian majority. In large part, these measures were implemented to balance Serb nationalism and dilute the political dominance of Serbia.
By the 1960s, Yugoslavia was winning praise both for its economic model - which was far more open and decentralized than in neighboring Communist regimes - as well as for its politics, which were independent of Moscow. Although the country was industrializing and prospered as its tourism and agricultural potential developed, the model could not sustain itself. By the 1980s, Yugoslavia's economy began to slump under the burden of an enormous foreign debt. Tito had died in 1980, having vested his authority in an awkward collective state presidency.
The old nationalist antagonisms surfaced quickly as the economy deteriorated and the socialist ideology of "Brotherhood and Unity" faded. In 1986, a group of intellectuals from the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences published a list of Serb grievances. This touched a deep vein among many ordinary Serbs, and alarmed others in Yugoslavia who saw it as a call for a Greater Serbia. One Serb politician in particular picked up the mantle of nationalism - Slobodan Milosevic. He deposed his mentor to become president of Serbia, and eventually communist party chief. In 1989, he withdrew the autonomous status of Kosovo, sending a clear signal of the fate awaiting Albanians and others opposed to his program.
The period from 1987 to 1991 is a sorry prelude to what became the worst conflict in Europe after WWII. It mainly is the story of certain politicians and their political parties fanning the flames of primitive nationalism and ethnic hatred to advance their agendas once it became clear that Yugoslavia was no longer viable. In 1989, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) was formed, with Franjo Tudjman as its leader, and a platform calling for full Croatian sovereignty. Serbs viewed this as the reconstitution of the Ustaha regime, and in response organized their own Serbian Democratic Party (SDS). Once the HDZ won power in the first free elections in Croatia in 1990, Serb officials were summarily fired from their positions, and promulgated a new constitution was promulgated which contained no protection for the roughly 12% Serb minority in Croatia. Armed militias soon appeared in areas populated by Serbs, leading to outbreak of open conflict by the summer of 1991.
Although it followed a somewhat different path, the end result in Bosnia - armed conflict - was the same following the creation of ethnically based parties. The Bosnian chapters of the HDZ and SDS favored incorporation of ethnic Croat and Serb areas into Croatia and Serbia respectively. The Democratic Action Party (SDA) was formed to represent the Muslim population, although it was officially committed to a multiethnic state in Bosnia.
Even though Yugoslavia's imminent collapse was seen clearly by 1991, the U.S. had decided this was an internal problem best left for solution by the European Union; however, both the structure of diplomatic and defense institutions as well as the level of political resolve proved insufficient to the task of bringing peace. When Germany broke ranks and recognized the independence of Croatia and Slovenia in early 1992, the die was cast for a bloody and protracted conflict in Bosnia. The Bosnians were left with the choice of remaining in a rump Yugoslavia dominated by Serbs, or declaring independence and facing civil war by disaffected Croats and Serbs, who formed a slight majority of the overall population.
The horrors of the Bosnian conflict do not need repeating here, except to note that the level of cruelty and brutality was on a scale scarcely believable by outsiders and on a scale not seen in Europe since WWII. Although all ethnic groups committed war crimes, the vast majority of atrocities were directed by Serbs and Croats against Muslims as the former sought to "ethnically cleanse" areas of mixed nationalities and realize a Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia. Although "high profile" atrocities such as the killing of thousands of innocent men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995 dominated news accounts at the time, it should be noted that murder of civilians was the whole point of war in Bosnia. Here is just one example I found in a list of sources for the book The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, by Michael Sells (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996) -- similar accounts in the records of testimony before the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia run into hundreds of pages.
26 May - 6 August 1992
A 30-year-old Muslim was imprisoned for over 9 weeks at Omarska camp. He had been apprehended by Serbian forces in Prijedor on May 26. The witness reported having seen the following:
Guards frequently beat people with thick electrical cables, often so badly that they could not stand afterward; in administering these beatings, guards would hit prisoners in specific places on their bodies, often the kidneys, in an effort to rupture important internal organs.
Prisoners were forced to run across broken glass in their bare feet; when they fell, guards would beat them with nightsticks and iron bars.
As a punishment administered in front of a group of prisoners, a guard cut off the testicles of a prisoner with a knife; one prisoner was forced, under threat of being executed, to bite off the testicles of another prisoner with his teeth. The only water that prisoners had to drink was from a river contaminated by discharges from an iron mine; the water was yellow, the prisoners urine ran red. (Department of State)
While conflict in Croatia had cooled by 1993
following intervention of UN peacekeepers by, the carnage continued in Bosnia
until the U.S. forged an alliance between the Croats and Muslims in 1994.
This succeeded in driving back the Serb advance in early 1995, and by November
of that year the Dayton Accord was signed which partitioned Bosnia into Serb and
Croat-Muslim statelets, each with roughly 50% of the country's territory
(right). 
Although the
Accord ended the war, it also granted to the Serbs most of their war aim of
achieving Greater Serbia through ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile the rump
Muslim-Croat Federation is run as a virtual UN protectorate, its viability
questionable once multinational peacekeepers leave. The failure to bring
justice to the victims of this conflict will likely ensure another war in the
not too distant future. Indeed, the forceful response by NATO to events in
Kosovo in early 1999 was in part a reaction by the Western powers that there
should be "no more Bosnias".
