by Geert Mak
During the Second World War this traditional local violence began escalating like never before. The National Socialist Croatians set up an independent state, and their Ustažse movement, along with certain Muslim groups, set out to cleanse all of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina of Serbs. On 9 April, 1942, thousands of Serb families from the region surrounding Srebrenica were driven into the River Drina and massacred by the Ustažse, a bloodbath that horrified even the German occupiers and left a deep mark in the Serb collective memory. The Serbs’ Chetniks, by the way, struck back just as mercilessly, storming Ustažse strongholds and descending with their supporters on dozens of Muslim villages. During this ethnic fighting many hundreds of thousands of people were killed, particularly on the Serbian side, including several tens of thousands of Jews and Gypsies.
The Second Yugoslavia was formed after the war, under Tito, who succeeded in combining an effective central authority with a large degree of autonomy for the six Yugoslav federal republics. The national constitution drafted in 1974 further decentralised the country's administration: each of the federal republics was to have its own central bank, its own police force, its own system of courts and schools. The country rapidly began modernising, and new schools, roads, factories and housing estates were built everywhere. Until the 1980s, in fact, Yugoslavia was seen as far and away the most advanced communist country. Tito declared that the old complex conflicts had been forgotten and forgiven, and the Yugoslavs were able to live with that for more than thirty-five years.
It was only after the old leader's death in 1980 that things went wrong. Tito, it turned out, had left behind enormous foreign debt, and inflation quickly escalated. Savings and pensions melted away, huge shortages of food and fuel arose, the old certainties were proving worthless. As had happened earlier in other Eastern Bloc countries, this resulted in a huge protest movement. But here, however, the anti-communist rebellion also led to new conflicts along old ethnic divides. Under Tito the expression of nationalist sentiments had been strictly taboo, but some Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian intellectuals continued to foster such ideas on the sly. To remain in power, therefore, the former communist apparatchiks once again conjured up the ideals of nationalism, and with considerable success.
During summer 1988, Yugoslav news reported day after day on mass demonstrations calling for Serbia to re-establish its authority over the ‘autonomous province’ of Kosovo. That, it was claimed, was the Serbian people's historic right: after all, Kosovo had been sacred ground to them ever since they had lost the battle against the Ottomans at the Field of the Blackbirds (Kosovo Polje) on St Vitus’ Day in 1389. The Serbs had, in their own view, been more or less harassed out of Kosovo: ninety per cent of the population there was now Albanian. The demonstrators turned that same rage effortlessly on the former communist ‘office hogs’, speaking of an ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ and ‘the people's movement’. The communist leader Slobodan Miložsević had suddenly undergone a complete metamorphosis: he now promoted himself as the ‘national’ alternative, and showed great verve in trading in his communist rhetoric for new views and new enemies.
The communist leaders from the other federal republics, particularly Croatia and Slovenia, kept a watchful eye on the developments in Belgrade. Not Kosovo but Miložsević himself was their worry. They saw, and not without reason, the Serb complaints as a pretext for their re-establishing power over the Yugoslav federation. With the help of the army, consisting largely of Serbs, this would amount to the reinstatement of a centralist, authoritarian Yugoslavia dominated by Belgrade.
The Serbs were disappointed by their Slovenian and Croatian brothers’ lack of solidarity concerning Kosovo. Things came to a head in 1990. The Slovenian and Croatian leaders withdrew from the Communist League of Yugoslavia, both republics stopped paying taxes to the federal government in Belgrade, and in spring 1991 the federation fell apart.
The American anthropologist Bette Denich has described how, during her visits to Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s, Tito's policy of integration and modernisation was setting the tone throughout the country, and how the pan-Yugoslav identity continued to gain strength. No one would have dreamed of bringing that process to a halt. Even after Tito's death, in May 1980, Yugoslavs to a man sang along with the pop song ‘After Tito – Tito!’:
So now what, my southern land?
If anyone asks
we'll tell them: Tito again,
After Tito – Tito!
Denich was all the more amazed, therefore, when she returned in the late 1980s. ‘Belgrade, as I knew it in the 1960s, was emphatically the capital of Yugoslavia, an administrative and intellectual centre that drew in people from the other republics to assume governmental and other functions. Now, instead of that, I found a Belgrade that emphatically presented itself as the capital of Serbia.'The fronts of buildings and houses had been cleaned and repainted with Old Serbian motifs, bookshop windows were filled with new works dealing with Serb history, literature and other national legacies.
Looking back on this time, Bette Denich saw an almost psychopatho-logical process taking place in Yugoslavia, a rampant spiral of projections between ‘us’ and ‘them’, full of ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’: each participant in the conflict represented himself as a victim or a potential victim, and the other side as a threat or a potential threat. ‘And by reacting, mutually, to the other side solely as a threat, both parties of course became truly more threatening.’
In Café Sax in early 1993, I had been introduced to the writer László Végel, an amiable, square-built man. He had just returned from Budapest and was sitting at a table, mulling over the future. He was wearing a new grey jacket, and his friends teased him a bit about it. Earlier that week, as part of the political purges being rushed through by the new government, he had been dismissed as director of Novi Sad's television broadcasting organisation. Before he went home, the writer György Konrád had advised him to begin by buying a new coat, to keep up his spirits and show those people in Novi Sad that he was still a man to be reckoned with.
In spring 1991, Konrád had written about the insecurity of his fellow Eastern Europeans in the face of a capitalism they had not grown up with, about their aggrieved sense of self-importance, and about the ‘suspect talents’ they were beginning to apply. ‘Before long, anyone who isn't angry at one of our neighbouring countries will be suspected of treason. Hate is standing in the wings, waiting only to be told who to pounce upon.’
Konrád sensed that tension quite acutely. On 25 June, 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. Tito's Yugoslavia had ceased to exist. Miložsević placed all his bets on the formation of a new and powerful Balkan state, an ethnically pure Greater Serbia into which large sections of Croatia and Bosnia were also to be incorporated in due course. That spring, extremist Serbs in Croatia seceded and formed their own ministate, the Serb Republic of Krajina. From the start, they displayed two traits that would prove formative for all conflicts to come in former Yugoslavia: an extreme predilection for local autonomy, and great enthusiasm for the use of violence. It was in Krajina that the first of those militias were set up – by people including the Rambo-esque žZeljko Ražznatović, also known as Arkan – which would later play such a deadly role in Bosnia.
Meanwhile, the protagonists of the drama, Miložsević and the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, started in on a series of secret consultations at Karadjordjevo, one of Tito's favourite holiday villas. Later, at Split, they even included Bosnian-Muslim leader Alija Izetbegović in their talks. They were trying to circumvent a war, and at the same time Miložsević proposed to Tudjman that they more or less divide Bosnia between them along ethnic lines. Izetbegović expressed interest in that proposal as well; he was hoping to work together with Tudjman against the Serbs, and did not wish to offend him. Whatever agreement they finally reached – the arrangements between Miložsević and Tudjman in particular are still shrouded in mist – within a few days their accord was overtaken by the fact
s. A Serb paramilitary force attacked a Croatian police post, the first casualties fell, and the war had begun. In July 1991, the Yugoslav Army openly sided with the Serb rebels in Krajina.
For the first time since the Second World War, campaigns of ethnic cleansing were once again taking place within Europe: approximately 500,000 Croatians were driven out of Krajina, around 250,000 Serbs in Croatia lost their jobs and were forced to flee for their lives. The Gypsy population was persecuted as well: more than 50,000 eventually left the country.
In autumn 1991, the war came close to Novi Sad. The picturesque town of Vukovar on the Danube, an hour away, was besieged for months. Panic broke out among the young people of Novi Sad. Schools, university canteens, Café Sax: they all emptied out. Many of the boys fled to the stands of willow along the river, and the girls went there in the evening to bolster their spirits with food and blankets and other comforts. These days people still whisper about the orgies that went on there; no one gave a damn any more, they were all going to die anyway, they thought.
The EU, full of optimism and self-confidence, now adopted the role of mediator. The Common Market, after all, was proceeding as planned, the Treaty of Maastricht was on its way, there were far-reaching plans for a common currency and a common security policy. This would be the first test case for the community's new joint foreign policy. Three representatives – the Luxembourger Jacques Poos, the Dutchman Hans van den Broek and the Italian Gianni De Michelis – travelled to Zagreb and Belgrade to meet with the warring factions and, as the negotiators were still frequently saying, to ‘bang their heads together’.
Little attention was paid at that point to the structural and historical contexts of the conflict. For years, as the closely involved BBC journalists Laura Silber and Allan Little wrote, the European negotiators acted as though the conflict had been caused only by the vaguely delineated ‘temperament’ of the Balkans, ‘an irresistible southern Slavic tendency – be that cultural, be that genetic – towards fratricide.’ The warring groups had only to be convinced of the foolishness of war, nothing else was needed to bring about peace. What they overlooked, however, was that the background to these wars was often not as irrational as all that. For the Yugoslav leaders, Silber and Little wrote, war was quite often ‘a completely rational affair, and indeed the only way for them to achieve their objectives’.
The Serbs almost completely flattened Vukovar. After the city surrendered on 18 November, a large number of wounded men were carried off and never seen again. They probably still lie in a mass grave in the surrounding countryside.
In January 1992, Miložsević and Tudjman agreed to a ceasefire. Whatever role the European negotiators played, that was a rational decision: the battle of prestige for Vukovar had been won, a quarter of all Croatian territory was now occupied by the Serbs, an international peacekeeping force was on its way to guard the new borders, and Miložsević's Greater Serbia had come another step closer. As far as Tudjman was concerned, Croatia's recognition by the international community granted him enough time to revamp the Croatian Army thoroughly. What is more, both men were planning to breathe new life into the ‘gentlemen's agreement’ formerly reached at Karadjordjevo, and to move on together towards the next prize: Bosnia.
Miložsević more or less left the Serbs in Krajina to their own fate. In August 1995, the tables were turned at last and a modernised Croatian Army rolled into Krajina and chased out almost the whole Serb population. Belgrade, Novi Sad and other cities filled with refugees.
In 1993, just before I left Novi Sad, I found a long letter waiting at the front desk of my hotel. It was from an acquaintance, a Croatian woman. She urged me to be careful, and finally she wrote: ‘I had a dream in which there was no war. I breathed the fresh air of Slovenian snow, I ate the bread of Croatia, I drank Bosnian wine, I sang songs from Serbia and I lay in the beautiful fields of Vojvodina. It was my country, it was my home. For twenty-eight years I lived in a beautiful country and now, after only two years, they're trying to tell me it was all my imagination, nonsense, illusions. Except: twenty-eight years is not an illusion to me. My father was born in that imaginary land, and so was my grandfather. How can that be a fantasy?’
She had translated the letter into English with great difficulty, having to look up almost every word in the dictionary. I went to where she lived to say goodbye. She and her husband lived in a lovely house on the Danube, no one in those parts had ever cared whether you were a Serb or a Croatian. Then the war came. The rumbling of the battle at Vukovar carried across the river and into their home, like the sound of distant thunder, every night.
One morning, down by their neighbour's orchard, the body of a woman had floated up, her eyes wide open, staring at the sky. And when they tried to whitewash the gate of the fortress of Novi Sad – this all happened around the same time – snakes came crawling out of every nook and cranny, hundreds of snakes of a kind they had never seen before. ‘We want to leave here,’ she had written, ‘but we don't know how, with a four-year-old child, where can you find a new job and a house?’ She had no intention of going to Croatia. ‘If I must be a foreigner, then I'd rather be a foreigner in China.’
It is a clear December morning in 1999. The film director žZelimir Zilnić and I are taking a long walk beside the river. The words of György Konrád in Budapest still echo in my mind: ‘The sooner Miložsević and his gang are gone, the better. But no Hungarian, no Czech, no Bulgarian, no Rumanian would ever come up with the idea of bombing the bridges of Novi Sad to accomplish that. To think up something like that you have to be far, very far removed from our reality.’
And so there they lie. No attempt has been made to clear the rubble. The oldest bridge in particular is a dearly departed one. Atop the lanterns, partly under water now, a row of gulls is sitting in the sun. ‘The next morning, there were a lot of people standing on the banks, weeping,’ žZelimir told me. ‘On the far shore, the nationalists began singing their songs, that was horrible too.’ The traffic now hobbles across a makeshift pontoon bridge.
A friend of his had seen the last of the bridges collapse before his eyes. ‘It was 3 p.m., lovely weather, you could see the cruise missile come sailing in across the river.'A few other acquaintances had fought in Kosovo, they had told him how to deflect cruise missiles from their course: a big sheet of cardboard or chipboard painted green, in the shape of a tank, with a hole in it. Behind the hole you lit an alcohol burner for the infrared, and even the smartest of warheads thought it was homing in on a tank. ‘It costs ten marks, and it will take out a missile that costs a million.’
We walk past the big gleaming headquarters of the NIS, Miložsević's state oil company, close to the bridge. It had not been scratched. In Shanga, however, a Gypsy neighbourhood, we end up by the ruins of a hovel that did take a direct hit. The woman next door is willing to talk to us, and invites us in. Her name is Dragica Dimić, she's twenty-three, she has two children and her world consists of a leaky roof, a dark room that measures three metres by four, two brown, lice-ridden beds, a wood stove and a little flickering TV. She has nothing in the world but herself, her intelligence and her unconditional love for her children and her husband. The only bright things in the room are a loaf of white bread and her eyes.
‘It was last June,’ she says. ‘Late in the evening, we were standing outside talking to the neighbours across the fence. They'll probably come after the refinery again, we told each other. We heard the planes coming, there was a bright light. We went inside. Suddenly there was this sound: ssssss. We were thrown against the wall, everything shuddered and burst. More explosions. We threw ourselves on top of the children, covered them with our bodies. Then we raced out of the house, it was all dust and smoke. Our youngest son was covered in blood. Water was spraying out of the pipes, power lines were hissing and popping. We ran out into the field. I could hear my neighbour screaming in the distance. Their house had been hit, her husband was bleeding to death. I was so frightened, I thought: they're going to st
art shooting at us with machine guns, from the air. Our house was in ruins. That week, it rained the whole time. We built it back up more or less by ourselves.’
We talk a little about her life, while the children nuzzle up to her. ‘Do you ever go out these days? To a wedding, or a name day, or something?’ žZelimir asks. ‘Sometimes I go out with my friends, to gather wood in the forest. Then we're gone for half the day. That's always a lot of fun.’ Her husband works on building sites, he earns just enough to buy a few potatoes, a couple of kilos of fat and a carton of cigarettes. ‘I'll tell you the truth: I like this life, as long as the war stops. I'm happy that my children and I can sleep together again, the way we used to, please write that down.’
Ever since the early 1990s, a bus full of young people has left each night for Budapest: you save your hard-earned money for a ticket, you pack your bags and you go. After receiving their diplomas, students pick up their suitcases and walk straight to the bus. In a gallery along the street, beneath the words ‘We have left’, the wall is covered with passport pictures, thousands of them; politicians, journalists, professors, young people. All the stories of flight come down to the same thing: gather your wits, take a good look at the situation, save your money, buy a ticket, get out and then see what happens.
In a survey taken in those years, the Serbs were asked what they would prefer: a secure job and a fixed salary for the next twenty years, or four times the salary with a fifty-fifty chance of losing their jobs. Ninety-five per cent of them chose job security. ‘Every family here has gone through terrible things,’ someone tells me. ‘At this point there's only one thing the people want: stability. They have learned from bitter experience that every change brings with it huge risks. I'll tell you this much: poor people don't want a revolution, all they want is security. That's the first law of poverty, but they don't know anything about that in the West.’