Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [155]
THE PAST, LIKE THE PRESENT, WAS PARADOXICAL. IN 1939, ON THE 550th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje, Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović had talked of “our national Golgotha and at the same time our national resurrection.”46 World War II brought an end to the Serb resurrection. The state headed by Josip Broz (Tito) in 1945 proclaimed the “brotherhood and unity of the peoples of Yugoslavia” and persecuted all strands of exclusive nationalism. Instead of the triune state of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, the new Yugoslavia gave political identity and parliamentary institutions to many excluded from the south Slav idea. Macedonians and Bosnians were both recognized as national groups. Tito’s answer to the problems of majorities and minorities was to abolish the very concept. All were equal within a people’s democracy.47 This supranational Yugoslav identity survived Tito’s death in 1980 by little more than ten years. On June 25, 1991, the Republic of Slovenia was the first to break away from the federal state. But two years before, on the 600th anniversary of Kosovo Polje, the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosević, on the same battlefield had spoken for a militantly revivalist Serbia, and expressed the same ambiguity as Bishop Velimirović fifty years before: “It is difficult to say today whether the Battle of Kosovo was a defeat or a victory for the Serbian people, whether thanks to it we fell into slavery or we survived in this slavery.”
Mobilizing the past to guide the present is scarcely unique to the Balkans. But Balkan myths, whether stories of Kosovo, the tales of Skenderbeg, Njegoš’s Mountain Wreath, or the idea of the unfulfilled nation written by Ljudevit Gaj in 1831—“Long she slept, but she’s not vanquished / We shall wake her and revive”—appear to serve dark and cruel ends.48 A Muslim epic song from Bosnia goes like this:
The bloody frontier is like this
With dinner blood, with supper blood,
Everybody chews bloody mouthfuls,
Never one white day for repose.49
Does this mean that the Balkans were haunted by an inescapable history, cursed ceaselessly to repeat the bloody deeds of the past? The problem was not a curse but a deep belief that history was mother and father to the present. Each time memories of a century—or six centuries—ago were deferred to, they were given new life. Robert Kaplan wondered why Mother Tatiana’s eyes appeared “strangely unfocused” as she told of an Albanian castrating a young Serbian boy. They looked, he thought, as if they had been “blotted out by superstition.” There was another explanation: in her mind’s eye, she was really reliving the past. Hers were foul memories, but conjured up by choice and assembled into a narrative rather as Victor Frankenstein had pieced together his revenant:
Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?… I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame … The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased.50
This chapter, like its subject matter, is deeply ambiguous. On one side it denies that “the Balkans” are uniquely given to cruelty and atrocity. On the other, it presents a long string of horrors that seem to prove the reverse. Had I catalogued the most recent Balkan horrors of the 1990s in all their stomach-turning detail, the pages would have been saturated bloody red. For the same