by Chris Bowers
Interviewed for this book in early 2014, Djokovic looked back on the role Gencic played for him. ‘Jelena had a vision,’ he said. ‘She saw in me something special from the start. She was always preparing each of us for something greater than the game of tennis. She was preparing us for life. My family taught me to always be respectful and polite to people older than me. She was my coach, somebody who my parents chose to be my guide and mentor. I never questioned her methods and ways to transfer her knowledge to me. I was like a sponge and I was only asking for more and she was happy to give me all she could. As I said, she had a vision in how to shape me into a good person and good player – and that would have applied even if I had only been known within Serbia, nobody made any guarantees that I would be a top athlete of the future, travelling around the world and representing my country. Even though she passed away last year during Roland Garros, she still feels very alive to me. She is part of each of my training sessions, each win, loss… I just don’t think that people like her can pass away. She is beyond physical life. I am eternally grateful for having her in my life as a tennis mother.’
CHAPTER FOUR
THE EMERGENCE OF SERBIA FROM THE YUGOSLAV WARS
It’s hard to find a country that does not have some stain on its historical character. Some are easy to highlight, like Germany, a culturally mature country that has produced Goethe, Beethoven and Dürer but was still capable of starting two world wars and inflicting awful suffering on a group of people simply because of their ethnic origin. Russia’s part in its war against Japan in 1904–5 was as awful as it was stupid, sending its Baltic fleet around the world in a nine-month manoeuvre to preserve the Tsar’s prestige, only for it to be sunk in 45 minutes in the Tsushima Strait; Russia also has Stalin’s show trials and purges of the 1930s on its record. Rwanda has the horrendous genocide of 1994, Chile has its Pinochet era, South Africa the apartheid era. The USA has had its fair share of dodgy deals with unsavoury regimes, plus its slowness to afford non-white Americans their rights under the US constitution. And a close examination of British foreign policy over the past 200 years shows up all sorts of things the great empire builders wouldn’t want publicised, like the first concentration camps in the Boer War, the Amritsar massacre of 1919 and other low-profile examples of colonial arrogance and despotism.
All this and more should be stated before laying too strongly into Serbia for its actions in the 1990s. But there’s no doubt it was an era in Serbian history that the likes of Novak Djokovic do not reflect comfortably on. He has often spoken about how part of his statesmanlike role is to convince the world that Serbs are not all the bloodthirsty louts they were frequently depicted as on the world’s television screens in the 1990s, as Yugoslavia broke up in a wave of bloodshed. ‘I’m very conscious of that in every moment of both my public and private life,’ he says, ‘especially when I am abroad. It is something that is built-in with most of us Serbs of my generation and older. We were always told that once we go out of the country, there will be a lot of stereotypes attached to us because we come from Serbia. They will think a lot of nasty and bad things, and we need to be very conscious about our behaviour. We are the ambassadors of our families and our country, and we need to always show the best in us. So I carry this responsibility with big respect and honour, and I hope that I am managing to portray my country in the best possible light.’
The tragedy of the Yugoslav wars is that they should never have been necessary. There is a view among some ethnologists that the Serbian approach to nationhood in 1918 was an inclusive one – that those peoples related to the Serbs through a closeness of language and religion (whether practised religion or just a label of identification with a faith) could easily belong in the same country, be it a ‘Greater Serbia’ or a ‘Yugoslavia’. Not everyone would agree with this view but it is undeniable that there is generally an ease of relations between Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and others on a personal level, and the fact that the language spoken in Yugoslavia was generally known as ‘Serbo-Croat’ is a reflection of how close Serbian and Croatian are.
Yet by 1990 antagonisms between the constituent republics of Yugoslavia had reached the point where you were ‘either with us or against us’. This was bad enough in the five republics that reflected an ethnically recognisable people: Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia and Macedonia. It was even worse in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a small state that didn’t really have ethnic Bosnians. The largest constituent ethnic group of Bosnians were Muslim (known as Bosniaks) but with a good number of Serbs and Croats. It was here that the tragic neighbour-versus-neighbour violence – when friends and neighbours who had recently celebrated festivals together suddenly turned against each other – was at its worst and left a legacy that the new republics are still recovering from today.
The break-up of Yugoslavia happened in the course of four wars concentrated largely around the areas where the different ethnic groups were most mixed. It’s important to understand the difference between how the terms ‘republic’ and ‘nation’ are used in this part of the world – Croatia is the republic, the Croats are the nation; Serbia the republic, Serbs the nation, etc. This was a battle of nations and what happened was the emergence of nationalism over citizenship, or what is often known as ‘state chauvinism’. Instead of a government trying to serve all the citizens in its area of jurisdiction regardless of ethnic or religious origin, the new governments were looking to rule on behalf of the majority ‘nation’. That inevitably relegated those who were not of the majority nation to minorities, normally discriminated against and treated as second-class citizens.
Some put the starting point of the wars at Tito’s death in 1980 and the chain of events that led to the wars of 1991–99 can certainly be traced back to then. But the point at which war became inevitable was probably reached in the late 1980s, when Slobodan Milosevic realised the political benefit that Serb nationalism was likely to deliver. Acting as president of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia (not then a sovereign state the way today’s Serbia is), Milosevic in 1989 rescinded the autonomy of the mainly Albanian province of Kosovo and began a programme of imposing Serbian culture. The move sent shock waves through the Croats and Slovenes. They feared they would be next and, when the 14th congress of the Yugoslav Communist Party voted in January 1990 for a multi-party system, the nationalist parties seized the initiative.
By the start of 1991 it was clear Yugoslavia was going to break up, but the Karadjordjevo agreement between Milosevic and the equally fervent Croatian nationalist leader Franjo Tudjman in March 1991 meant that a bitter struggle over the ethnically mixed areas would follow. This agreement set out how both men saw the dissolution of Yugoslavia, effectively by dividing Bosnia between them.
Three of the four wars overlapped. Skirmishes in the Serbo-Croat war of 1991–95 had begun in the early spring but in June Slovenia declared independence. For 10 days, Serbia, in the form of the Yugoslav National Army, tried to bring the Slovenes back but they soon gave up and Slovenia gained its independence before the summer was out. This was the first of the wars, sometimes referred to as ‘the 10-day War’.
That spurred Croatia and Macedonia to declare their independence. The Croats had already signalled that they wanted to secede and had prepared a constitution for the new sovereign Republic of Croatia. That constitution reclassified the Serbs living in Croatia – about 12 per cent of the population, most of them living in the province of Krajina near the Serbian border – as a ‘national minority’ when, up till then, they had been a ‘constituent nation’. As Serbia’s approach under Milosevic had been that non-Serb nations could have their own republics but that all Serbs were entitled to belong to ‘Greater Serbia’, the Croatian Serbs announced their secession from Croatia in the hope of integration into the new Serbian state.
That triggered the second of the wars, often referred to as the ‘Croatian War of Independence’, although the Croatian Serbs prefer to view it as their battle for self-determinati
on; some call it the ‘Serbo-Croat War’ but that can be misleading because ethnic Serbs and Croats clashed in Bosnia too. Because of the involvement of the largely Serbian Yugoslav National Army, which marched around 70,000 soldiers into Croatia, the initial victories went to the Serbs. The first act of ethnic cleansing took place that summer in the town of Kijevo, where Croats were rounded up and shot simply because they were Croats, but more ethnic cleansing followed. One particular name, Vukovar, became a symbol for the whole Serbo-Croat war. It was a peaceful town just inside the Croatia-Serbia border of around 50,000 inhabitants of mixed ethnic origin – some say there were 22 different nations represented among Vukovar’s residents, making it a model Yugoslav town. By July 1991 Vukovar was surrounded by the Serbs, who bombarded it for four months; it eventually fell to the Serbs in November 1991 as hundreds of Croat patients were herded from a hospital, taken to a field and shot. Four years later, with the Croats surging west, making good the territorial losses they had suffered in the early months of the war, Vukovar was retaken and the Serbs had to flee. Vukovar is less than 20km from Vinkovici, where Dijana Djokovic’s family hails from.
The bloodiest of the four wars was the ‘Bosnian War’ of 1992–95. Bosnia-Herzegovina was the only one of the six Yugoslav republics not to have a distinct resident nation. The ethnic mix was approximately 43 per cent Bosniak (Muslim), 31 per cent Serb and 17 per cent Croat. The early part of the war saw the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army bombard Bosniak territory, carrying out ethnic cleansing by killing large numbers of Bosnian Muslims. But there were also clashes between Bosniaks and Croats, and clashes within sub-groups of the ethnic nations.
The Bosnian War lasted three and a half years and led to an estimated 100,000 deaths, with up to 50,000 women raped and around 2.2 million becoming refugees or otherwise displaced. Most of the names that stand out from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s are from the Bosnian War, largely because it was so brutal. The Bosnian Serbs were led by Radovan Karadzic, with the Bosnian Serb military commanded by Ratko Mladic – both were indicted at the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. Several place names became recurring terms in the world’s news coverage – like Mostar for the destruction of its 427-year-old symbolic bridge, or Banja Luka for the concentration camp the Serbs set up there. But perhaps the two names that symbolise the war were Sarajevo and Srebrenica.
Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, had hosted the winter Olympics in 1984 but was badly damaged in a siege that began in April 1992 after Bosnia’s Muslim president Alja Izetbegovic declared independence from Yugoslavia. That independence was promptly recognised by the international community, causing the Serbs to mobilise their forces around the city. The siege lasted longer than the war itself, not ending until February 1996. Srebrenica was a small town of about 8,000 inhabitants but that population had swollen to around 40,000 because of all the Bosniaks fleeing ethnic cleansing. Supposedly under the protection of the United Nations, it was shelled and ransacked by Serb forces on Easter Monday 1993, leaving dozens dead. The UN declared it a ‘safe zone’ but insufficient military protection was provided and in July 1995 Serb forces captured the supposedly demilitarised town and slaughtered an estimated 8,500 Bosnian men. This was the episode that later caused the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal in The Hague to declare the killing as genocide, and to censure Serbia for failure to prevent it.
The Bosnian war came to an end when Nato intervened, bombing Serbian positions in Bosnia in August and September 1995. It was concluded with the Dayton peace accords of November 1995, which established various ethnic rights within the borders of new independent states. The peace has held but almost in the form of a mini-Yugoslavia within Bosnian borders, such that national successes like qualifying for the 2014 football World Cup are never the source of unified national rejoicing they would be in most other countries.
So by the end of 1995, Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia had all declared independence. It meant that Yugoslavia was now only Serbia and Montenegro. Yet it continued under the name Yugoslavia, and in 1997 Slobodan Milosevic moved up from being president of Serbia to being president of Yugoslavia. And he was not finished with his nationalist wars.
The fourth war came in 1998 and centred on Kosovo. This is a conflict rich in symbolism, which embodies many of the factors that cause territorial struggles in a world where travel – and thus migration – is so easy. It is also the war that has the greatest impact on the Djokovic story.
The defeat of Kosovo in 1389 marked the end of Serbia’s great era of dominance in the Middle Ages and the start of the rise of the Ottoman Empire. So Kosovo had always been a poignant reminder of Serbian failure. It had remained a province of Serbia but it was never a massively prosperous area and, from the middle of the 20th century, the Serbs tended to move north where economic prospects were better. As the Serbs moved north, ethnic Albanians moved in. These Muslim migrants, referred to by the Serbs as ‘Siptar’ (very much a term of abuse), often bought land from the departing Serbs. More importantly, they had a phenomenally high birth rate, with the result that by the start of the 1990s Kosovo had a majority ethnic Albanian population.
For most of the four decades of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Kosovo had the status of an autonomous province, but this was rescinded by Milosevic in 1989. Not only that but Serb culture was imposed – Albanian radio and television were closed, Albanian teachers were forbidden from teaching in schools and colleges and Albanians were fired from jobs in public-sector industries (which accounted for most industries at that time). In 1996 disaffected Albanians formed the Kosovo Liberation Army, which started attacking Serbia. An agreement of sorts was reached in 1998 but it was never going to hold because the ethnic Albanian population wanted independence for Kosovo while Milosevic wanted it to remain part of Serbia.
The ‘Kosovo War’ began in 1998. The bloodshed intensified, to the point where Nato ordered Serbia to stop its attacks in Kosovo. Serbia refused, probably believing Nato had no mandate to intervene as Kosovo was a legally constituted province of Yugoslavia. But as evidence emerged of more massacres of innocent civilians, Nato eventually responded by launching bombing raids on both Kosovo and Belgrade. For 76 days, from 24 March to 8 June 1999, Belgrade came under air attack, forcing its residents to flee to underground shelters, including the Djokovic family. Eventually, Serbia accepted the United Nations’ offer for Kosovo to become a province under UN protection and the war ended.
Kosovo remained a UN-protected province for nine years. Then in 2008 it declared independence. It was recognised by most of the international community but a few states – notably Russia, China and five EU members – supported Serbia by not recognising Kosovo as a sovereign state. In April 2013 the EU brokered a deal under which the Serbs in northern Kosovo are guaranteed a community of Serb municipalities in both the north and the south of Kosovo; Belgrade denied that the deal meant Serbia recognised Kosovo’s independence, saying it was just to regularise the situation in the short term so both Serbia and Albania could negotiate their accession to the EU.
These days no more than about 10 per cent of Kosovo’s population is Serb but the Serbs still form a majority in about a quarter of Kosovo’s land – around the city of Mitrovica where Srdjan Djokovic, Novak’s father, grew up. The Serb-Albanian tensions continue to simmer but, with the two countries wanting to join the European Union and the EU saying this can only happen with ‘full normalisation’ of relations (whatever that comes to mean in practice), some lasting solution needs to be found. As part of ‘full normalisation’, the EU has insisted that Serbia should cooperate in bringing the last two war-crimes suspects (Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic) to justice. Meanwhile, Kosovo exists in a sort of limbo – a state recognised by many but not by enough to become a United Nations member. This means, for example, that it can’t join Uefa or Fifa, so a football player such as Manchester United’s Adnan Januzaj, whose parents are ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, couldn’t play for Kosovo in international competitions if he wanted to – exc
ept in friendly matches – as Kosovo isn’t admitted (ironically, Januzaj could choose to play for either Serbia or Albania by dint of having Kosovan parents).
It could well be that the ethnic Serbs in Kosovo will eventually join Serbia as part of a final settlement that will see Belgrade recognising Kosovan independence. Whether Kosovo then seeks to be part of a larger Albania is not yet on the agenda but it might be at some stage. What seems most likely is that Serbia and Albania will both end up as members of the EU and the resulting economic interdependence between the two might well lead to the evolution of a more peaceful solution, whether that involves a sovereign Kosovan state or not.
The four Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s became the subject of various judicial hearings into war crimes held under a specially constituted UN court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (or ICTY). It met in the Dutch city of The Hague, the seat of the International Criminal Court, and was also known as the Hague War Crimes Tribunal. A string of guilty verdicts early on suggested the tribunal was sending out tough signals about what was acceptable in the theatre of war, but a run of not-guilty verdicts on technicalities in recent years has cast doubt on how strong the signals will prove in the long term. The tribunal was supposed to have concluded all its work by the end of 2014 but the late captures of Mladic and Hadzic mean it will probably not wrap up until 2016 or 2017.
The tribunal’s most eye-catching conclusion was that some of the atrocities did constitute genocide. Genocide was defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention (UN General Assembly resolution 260) as an act ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ but, until the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal, no state had ever been found to be in breach of the convention. The ICTY found Serbia not guilty of direct involvement in genocide, but it did become the first country to be criticised for a breach of international law by failing to prevent the genocide committed in Srebrenica in 1995. The tribunal indicted 161 persons under the Genocide Convention and convicted 69 of them for genocide or lesser war crimes. But the most high-profile defendant, Slobodan Milosevic, escaped justice when he was found dead in his cell in 2006. The assumption has been that he took his life but no definitive cause of death has ever been proven. Whether suicide, sudden illness or murder, his death robbed the world of a verdict in a rare trial of a head of state for atrocities committed under his rule.