In the Baltic states, or Ukraine, or Slovakia, post-Communist politicians could resort to national independence as a route out of the Communist past—building a new state and a new democracy all at once—without having to worry unduly about the presence of national minorities. But in Yugoslavia, the break-up of the federation into its constituent republics would in every case except Slovenia leave a significant minority or group of minorities stranded in someone else’s country. Under these circumstances, once one republic declared itself independent, others would feel bound to follow suit. In short, Yugoslavia now faced the same intractable issues that Woodrow Wilson and his colleagues had failed to resolve at Versailles seventy years earlier.
The catalyst, as many had foreseen, was Kosovo. Throughout the 1980s there had been sporadic Albanian demonstrations and protests at Belgrade’s mistreatment of them, notably in the local capital Pristina. Their institutions had been closed down, their leaders dismissed, their daily routines constrained by harsh policing and, from March 1989, by a curfew. The Serbian constitutional amendments effectively stripped the Albanians, already a depressed and deprived underclass, of any autonomy or political representation—a course of events celebrated and underscored by Milošević’s visit to the province in June 1989 to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the ‘Battle of Kosovo’.
In a speech to a crowd estimated at nearly one million people, Milošević reassured the local Serbs that they had once again ‘regained their state, national, and spiritual integrity. . . . Hitherto, thanks to their leaders and politicians and their vassal mentality [Serbs] felt guilty before themselves and others. This situation lasted for decades, it lasted for years and here we are now at the field of Kosovo to say that this is no longer the case’. A few months later, following bloody clashes between police and demonstrators with many dead and injured, Belgrade shut down the provincial Kosovo Assembly, placing the region under direct rule from Belgrade.
The course of events in the far south of the country directly affected decisions made in the northern republics. At best mildly sympathetic to the Albanians’ plight, Ljubljana and Zagreb were far more directly concerned at the rise of Serbian authoritarianism. At the Slovene elections of April 1990, although a majority of the voters still favoured remaining in Yugoslavia they gave their backing to non-Communist opposition candidates openly critical of existing federal arrangements. The following month, in neighboring Croatia, a new nationalist party won an overwhelming majority and its leader, Franjo Tudjman, took over as President of the republic.
The last straw, revealingly, came in December 1990 when—under Milošević’s direction—the Serbian leadership in Belgrade seized without authorization 50 percent of the entire drawing rights of the Yugoslav federation to cover back pay and bonuses for federal employees and state enterprise workers. The Slovenes—whose 8 percent of the population contributed one-quarter of the federal budget—were especially incensed. The following month the Slovene Parliament announced that it was withdrawing from the federal fiscal system and proclaimed the republic’s independence, though without initiating any moves to secede. Within a month the Croat Parliament had done likewise (the Macedonian Parliament in Skopje duly followed suit).
The consequences of these developments were initially unclear. The substantial Serb minority in south-eastern Croatia—notably in a long-established frontier region of Serb settlement, the Krajina—was already clashing with Croat police and calling upon Belgrade for help against its ‘Ustashe’ repressors. But Slovenia’s distance from Belgrade, and the presence of less than 50,000 Serbs in the republic, gave grounds for hope that a peaceful exit might be engineered. Foreign opinion was divided: Washington, which had suspended all economic aid to Yugoslavia because of the Serbian measures in Kosovo, nevertheless publicly opposed any moves to secede.
Anticipating President Bush in Kiev a few weeks later, Secretary of State James Baker visited Belgrade in June 1991 and assured its rulers that the US supported ‘a democratic and unified Yugoslavia’. But by then a ‘democratic and unified’ Yugoslavia was an oxymoron. Five days after Baker spoke both Slovenia and Croatia took control over their frontiers and initiated unilateral secession from the federation, with the overwhelming support of their citizens and the tacit backing of a number of prominent European statesmen. In response the federal army moved up to the new Slovene border. The Yugoslav war was about to begin.
Or, rather, the Yugoslav
wars
, for there were five. The Yugoslav attack on Slovenia in 1991 lasted just a few weeks, after which the army withdrew and allowed the secessionist state to depart in peace. There then followed a far bloodier war between Croatia and its rebellious Serb minority (backed by the army of ‘Yugoslavia’—in practise Serbia and Montenegro) that lasted until an unsteady cease-fire brokered by the UN early the following year. After the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia voted for independence in March 1992, the Serbs of Bosnia declared war on the new state and set about carving out a ‘Republika Srpska’, again with the backing of the Yugoslav army, laying siege to a number of Bosnian towns—notably the capital, Sarajevo.
Meanwhile, in January 1993, a separate civil war broke out between the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia, with some Croats attempting to carve out an ephemeral statelet in the Croat-dominated region of Herzegovina. And finally, after these other conflicts had been brought to an end (though not before the Croat-Serb war broke out afresh in 1995 with a successful move by Zagreb to recapture the Krajina, lost to Serb forces three years before), came the war in and over Kosovo: having effectively lost everywhere else, Milošević turned back to Kosovo and was only prevented from destroying or expelling its Albanian population by an unprecedented attack on Serbia itself by NATO forces in the spring of 1999.
In each of these conflicts there was both an internal dynamic and external engagement. Slovenian and Croatian independence was driven forward by well-founded domestic considerations, as we have seen. But it was the hasty German—and subsequently European Community—recognition of the two new states that confirmed their official existence for friend and foe alike. Because an independent Croatia now existed, hysterical propaganda on radio and television stations in Belgrade could start to play on the fears of Serbs resident in the new state, invoking memories of wartime massacres and urging Serbs to take up arms against their ‘Ustashe’ neighbors.
In Bosnia, where Serbs were present in far larger numbers, the prospect of an independent Bosnia with a Croat-Muslim majority aroused similar anxieties. Whether Bosnian independence was unavoidable remains unclear: this was the most integrated of the pre-war republics, with the most to lose from any move to separate by force its constituent communities who were spread like a patchwork all across its territory, and before the rise of Milošević none of its ethnic or religious minorities had shown any sustained desire for institutional separation. But once its northern neighbors had seceded, the issue was moot.
After 1991 the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia were bound to prefer sovereign independence to minority status in what remained of Milošević’s Yugoslavia, and they voted accordingly in a referendum at the end of February 1992. However the Serbs of Bosnia, now exposed for some months to talk from Belgrade not merely of
Ustashe
massacres but of a coming Muslim
jihad
, were no less understandably disposed to prefer union with Serbia, or at least their own autonomous region, to minority status in a Muslim-Croat state ruled from Sarajevo. Once Bosnia (or rather its Muslim and Croat leaders—the Serbs boycotted both the referendum and the parliamentary vote) declared itself independent in March 1992 its fate was sealed. The following month Bosnian Serb leaders declared the Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav army marched in to help them secure territory and ‘cleanse’ it.
The Serb-Croat and Serb-Bosnian wars wrought a terrible toll on their peoples. Although there was initially some open warfare between more or less regular armies, particularly in and around strategic cities like Sarajevo or Vukovar, much of the fighting was conducted by irregulars, notably Serb irregulars. These were little more than organized bands of thugs and criminals, armed by Belgrade and led either by professional felons like ‘Arkan’ (Zeljko Raznatovic), whose ‘Serb Volunteer Guard’ (the ‘Tigers’) massacred hundreds in eastern districts of Croatia and Bosnia; or else by former Yugoslav Army officers like Lt. Colonel Ratko Mladić (described by American diplomat Richard Holbrooke as ‘a charismatic murderer’), who placed himself in charge of the Bosnian Serb forces from 1992 and helped organize the first attacks on Croat villagers living in majority-Serb communities in the Krajina.
The primary strategic objective was not so much the defeat of opposing forces as the expulsion of non-Serb citizens from their homes, land and businesses in the territories claimed for Serbs.
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This ‘ethnic cleansing’—a new term for a very old practice—was engaged in by all sides, but Serb forces were far and away the worst offenders. In addition to those who were killed (an estimated 300,000 by the end of the Bosnian war), millions were forced into exile. Applications to the European Community for asylum more than tripled between 1988 and 1992: in 1991 Germany alone faced requests for asylum from 256,000 refugees. In the first year of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia there were 3 million people from Yugoslavia (one in eight of the pre-war population) seeking refuge abroad.
The international community was thus hardly unaware of the Yugoslav tragedy—which in any case was unfolding in real time on the television screens of the world, with harrowing pictures of starving Muslims in Serb prison camps and worse. The Europeans were the first to try and intervene, sending an EC ministerial team to Yugoslavia in June 1991—it was on this occasion that the unfortunate Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg, unburdened himself of the deathless claim that ‘the hour of Europe’ had dawned. But despite establishing high-level commissions to enquire and arbitrate and propose, the European Community and its various agencies proved quite helpless—not least because its members were divided between those, like Germany and Austria, who favored the seceding republics and others, led by France, who wanted to retain existing borders and states and who for this reason among others were not altogether unsympathetic to Serbia.
Since the US (and therefore NATO) remained resolutely above the fray, that left only the United Nations. But beyond imposing sanctions on Belgrade, there appeared little the UN could do. Historically, soldiers under UN command were introduced into war-torn regions and countries to secure and keep a peace: but in Yugoslavia there was as yet no peace to keep, and there existed neither the will nor the means to bring it about on the ground. As in the comparable case of the Spanish Civil War, an ostensibly neutral international stance in practice favoured the aggressor in a civil conflict: the international arms embargo imposed on former Yugoslavia did nothing to restrain the Serbs, who could call on the substantial arms industry of the old Yugoslav federation, but it severely hampered the Bosnian Muslims in their struggles and goes a long way to account for their substantial military losses between 1992 and 1995.
The only practical achievement of the international community before 1995 was to install a 14,000-strong UN Protection Force in Croatia to separate Croats and Serbs after the fighting there had subsided, followed by the insertion into selected towns in Bosnia—designated as ‘Safe Areas’—of a few hundred uniformed UN peacekeepers to protect the growing numbers of (mostly Muslim) refugees herded into these areas. Later came the establishment of UN-authorized ‘no-fly zones’ in parts of Bosnia, intended to restrict Yugoslavia’s freedom to threaten civilians (or break UN-imposed sanctions).
Of greater long-term significance, perhaps, was the setting up in The Hague, in May 1993, of an International Tribunal for War Crimes. The mere existence of such a court confirmed what was by now obvious—that war crimes, and worse, were being perpetrated just a few score miles south of Vienna. But since most of the presumptive criminals, including Mladić and his fellow Bosnian Serb Radovan Karadžić (President of Republika Srpska), were actively pursuing their crimes with impunity, the Court remained as yet a ghostly and irrelevant side-show.
The situation began to change only in 1995. Until then all talk of foreign intervention had been stymied by the claim—energetically propounded by French and British officers in and out of the UN forces—that the Bosnian Serbs were strong, determined and well armed. They should not be provoked: any serious attempt to enforce a peace settlement in Bosnia against their will or their interests, it was suggested, would not only be unfair but could make matters worse . . . a line of reasoning slyly encouraged from Belgrade by Milošević, who nevertheless claimed somewhat implausibly to play little part in the decisions of his fellow Serbs in Bosnia.
Thus accorded a virtual free hand
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, the Bosnian Serbs proceeded nevertheless to overplay it. Even though it was broadly agreed by the international community (including a ‘Contact Group’ of foreign diplomats tirelessly seeking an agreement) that a ‘Muslim-Croat’ Federation (formed in March 1994 in a ceremony in Washington that put an end to Croat-Muslim fighting) should receive 51 percent of a newly federal Bosnia, with the Serbs getting 49 percent, the Serb leaders based in the town of Pale took no notice and continued their attacks. In February 1994 their forces had lobbed a mortar shell from the surrounding mountains into the marketplace of Sarajevo, killing sixty-eight people and wounding hundreds more. Following this NATO—with UN backing—threatened air strikes in the event of further attacks and there was a temporary lull.
But in May of 1995, in retaliation for some Bosnian military advances and Croatia’s successful recapturing of the Krajina (putting the lie to the myth of Serbian military prowess), Serbian shelling of Sarajevo resumed. When NATO planes bombed Bosnian Serb installations in response, the Serbs seized 350 UN peacekeepers as hostages. Terrified for the fate of their soldiers, Western governments importuned the UN and NATO to desist. The international presence, far from constraining the Serbs, now offered them additional cover.