World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [91]
[T]he disparities in development and in lifestyle between the Slovenia and Croatia that I knew and [Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia], were also striking—and troubling. Often what I saw in [the south] reminded me of what I remembered of Yugoslavia of the 1950s and at times even of what I had seen while travelling to and in India. Dirt roads, ragged children, open sewers or peasants who would get off the bus in the middle of nowhere to take a path which led across mountains to a hamlet on the other side—all these were a stark contrast to life in the “north.” There, by 1978, Volkswagens had replaced tiny Fiats and major cities could boast occasional traffic congestion, shopping trips to Italy had become de rigueur for the growing middle class, and the yearning, and to some extent the accessibility, for the “exotic” could be seen in such things as the proliferation of new and modified dessert recipes substituting bananas, kiwis and pineapples for apples, cherries and strawberries.
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Once again, as with all ethnic conflict, it would be absurd to reduce the historical enmity between Croats and Serbs to economics. Among other details, Croats, with Nazi support, killed thousands of Serbs (along with Jews and Gypsies) in concentration camps in World War II. Ethnic hatred has thus long been present in the former Yugoslavia, but from 1945 to 1980 it was held in check by the charisma and iron hand of Josip Broz Tito, himself part Croat, part Slovene. Tito brilliantly played the republics off one another. To diminish Serbian power, Tito reconfigured the former Yugoslavia, creating the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina and drawing other boundaries that left millions of Serbs living outside the (then) state of Serbia. At the same time he filled Croatia’s police and bureaucracy with Serbs, redistributed wealth from the wealthier north to the poorer south, and made ethnic nationalism a crime.
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As hindsight knowledge has allowed many commentators to observe, Tito’s Yugoslavia was a bomb waiting to explode. And the bomb was detonated by—democratization. In Croatia the first free post–World War II elections in 1990 produced a landslide victory for demagogue Franjo Tudjman’s nationalist Croatian Democratic Union party—a party basically defined by its hatred of both the ethnic Serbs living in Croatia and their cousins in Serbia. One of Tudjman’s first official acts was to demote the Serbs (roughly 12 percent of the population) by giving them inferior status in the Croatian constitution. The Croatian majority loved it. “Everything for Croatia! All for Croatia!” yelled ordinary civilians.
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Meanwhile, 1990 democratic elections in Serbia swept Slobodan Milosevic to power on a similar wave of ethnonationalist euphoria. Now that Milosevic has been tried as an international war criminal, it is easy to forget how much the Serbian people once adored him. He was for millions, especially the great masses of frustrated, uneducated rural poor, “the saint of Serb nationalism,” the long overdue champion of a Greater Serbia. Even as his chief hatemonger Vojislav Seselj was roaring to hysterical crowds, “We will kill Croats with rusty spoons because it will hurt more!” the Serb Orthodox Church blessed Milosevic’s Serbian nationalism as a “new holy crusade.”
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In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared independence. Led by Milosevic, the Serbs responded militarily, seizing a third of Croatia and murdering thousands. In 1992, Bosnia declared independence as well. Soon the entire region was engulfed in civil war, mass expulsions, and genocidal violence. In all, thousands of ordinary citizens, mostly men, were killed, often after being tortured in ways painful even to describe. Meanwhile, in female concentration camps, tens of thousands of women were raped, some