reassembling yugoslavia

Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLC

Reassembling YugoslaviaAuthor(s): Flora LewisSource: Foreign Policy, No. 98 (Spring, 1995), pp. 132-144Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1148962 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 09:52

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLC is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Foreign Policy.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 09:52:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=wpni

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1148962?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Reassembling

Yugoslavia by Flora Lewis

fter all, the only solution to Yugoslavia is Yugoslavia. That is certainly not everybody's view as the war in Bosnia rumbles on to the end of a third year, the ceasefire in Croatia is being questioned, and the Balkans remain generally unstable. But some have

been convinced all along that it was a dreadful, avoidable mistake for the six republics in the former Federation of Yugoslavia to cut all ties, and more are coming to see the restoration of key links, including not only trade and communications but also legal and political ties, as the only basis for a durable peace.

The American-brokered agreement between the predominantly Muslim Bosnian government and the Bosnian Croat leaders is the pivotal point for reversing direction and building a new confederal basis to end the war. The accord is not yet firmly founded and insti- tutionalized because continued hostilities with the Bosnian Serbs leave borders and areas of responsibility unsettled. But included in the negotiation was the prospect of special, constitutional-type ties with the Croatian state. That can become part of a settlement only when the Bosnian Serbs accept a plan for a Bosnian federation, and then they surely will insist at the least on confederal provisions with Serbia that are no weaker than those the Bosnian Croats have with Croatia. Such ties would be a strong inducement to the Bosnian Serbs to accept a settlement that would not separate them from the rest of Bosnia. On such a basis, Serbia and Croatia themselves would

F LO RA L E W I S is a Paris-based columnist for the New York Times Syndicate.

132



Lewis

restore a loose integration that could provide a satisfactory solution to the demands of the Croatian Serbs in Krajina. Montenegro would certainly follow Serbia, and Macedonia, which never really wanted to be left all alone and is having a desperate time facing Greek embargo and hostility, would doubtless be delighted to sign back on with its former partners. Then, mirabile dictu, Yugoslavia would be back on the map again, the same old Yugoslavia-minus Slovenia-as before the 1991 breakup, but with rather different, much less con- straining internal relations among the constituent republics.

Such a loose confederation is exactly what the Slovenes and Croats had been demanding for several years before they finally gave up in frustration at Serbian intransigence and proclaimed independence in June 1991. It is what Europe and the United States should have insisted upon, associating Russia with the mediation much earlier, instead of the futile and hypocritical pledge to support whatever settlement the Yugoslavs accepted among themselves. It was obvious to all that the Yugoslavs, without outside pressure and inducement, were not going to agree on even a peaceable divorce. Indeed, war broke out immediately and conflict has been raging ever since.

When the powers decided to recognize independent Slovenia and Croatia in early 1992, the United Nations was able to gain acceptance for a ceasefire on fighting there and dispatch peacekeepers to monitor the lines established between ethnic Serbs in Croatia and the Zagreb-led republic. But that line will not now be accepted as a border by Zagreb, which is growing impatient with the U.N. because its presence consolidates the partition of the state. Peace will require some kind of agreement on the integrity of Croatia with significant constitutional guarantees and autonomy for its ethnic Serbs. Such provisions will be far more feasible within the framework of a loose new Yugoslav confederation than with the establishment of several totally independent successor states.

It was the recognition of an independent Croatia that left Bosnia with the choice of remaining in a rump Yugoslavia with Serbia and Montenegro, in effect accepting full Serbian hegemony, or of de- claring its own independence in turn. The government of Sarajevo was well aware of the risks, and urged the outside powers not to con- secrate the demise of Yugoslavia, to no avail. Indeed, both Alija Izetbegovi6 of Bosnia and Kiro Gligorov of Macedonia openly op- posed the breakup of Yugoslavia. So, at foreign urging and with no

133



FOREIGN POLICY

acceptable visible alternative, Bosnia held a referendum on independence. The Serbs boycotted the vote, the Muslims and Croats voted in favor, independence was declared and recognized, and fighting began.

This tragic scenario was foreseen and publicly discussed. What had not been foreseen was the extraordinary ferocity, the cruelty, the wanton and deliberate massacre of civilians launched to redefine the area's demography. "Ethnic cleansing" was introduced to the mod- em political vocabulary of horrors. It could only be brutal because populations were largely mixed and no amount of creative map-making could have produced a mutually acceptable map of separation. Because of mixed marriages over several generations, many people did not know what allegiance to profess and had to be convinced to choose sides with relentless force.

Foreign intervention-the dispatch of humanitarian aid and the establishment of protected areas-has now produced a kind of status quo but not peace. Hostilities go on and on since the foreign intervention prevents a military resolution of the conflict. The serial attempts at mediation have all failed, and there is no reason to think that any new mediation rooted in the same assumptions-that terri- tory must be apportioned to separate people so they can form "self- governments" on distinct ethnic or religious lines-will work any better. Whatever the allocation of land, it will rest on injustice and there will be resistance. Whatever the rules of division, there will be a search for support from kin and sympathizers on the other side of the new lines. There must be a new approach to the conflict.

THE NEW OPPORTUNITY

T here have been two major changes in circumstances since the war began. One is that Serbia, hurt by the international embargo despite its many leaks, is no longer quite so bellicose and

determined to show the world its power. Slobodan Milosevi.

is still its undisputed leader, but he has had some trouble controlling the wild nationalists and thugs he unleashed. He has less room for maneuver than he had anticipated. While he makes the most of foreign denun- ciations to mobilize resentful, insulated Serb opinion, his country's isolation has proven a costly burden. This relative moderation of Ser- bian ambition and aggressiveness may be temporary, to gain a respite

134



Lewis

and recoup strength; but it is a new factor in the situation and could be reinforced in an attempt at an overall settlement.

The second change is the fury, hatred, and thirst for revenge that have inevitably built up as the atrocities have continued. It is a nasty little myth that Yugoslavia was an "artificial" state that could not have been expected to hold together without sheer force. The South Slavs had a disparate, eventful history and never had a chance to form a state together until the Austro-Hungarian empire was demol- ished in the First World War. But Yugoslavia's coming a bit late on the European state scene did not make it a less-authentic country than, say, Germany or Italy, which had formed unified states only a few decades earlier.

People forget the Catholic and Protestant split in Germany or the very different political characters of southern and northern Italy. "These people have been fighting each other for centuries," a phrase used by President Bill Clinton, is a formula consciously or subcon- sciously devised by leaders who need an excuse to shrug off the out- break of a major war in the heart of modern Europe and avoid intervention. It is simply untrue. There is no comparison in the historical record of hostilities, however measured, with the amount of fighting that once went on between French and Germans, or French and Eng- lish, who have now joined their political fate to the European Union. The one real precedent of terrible bitterness among the South Slavs was in World War II, when the Nazis formed a puppet state in Croa- tia that rivaled the S.S. for cruelty. Alongside national resistance to the Germans, there was a very mean civil war, but the divide was ide- ological--communists versus monarchists-and crossed all religious, ethnic, and territorial lines.

A new book by Robert Donia and John Fine, Bosnia and Herce- govina: A Tradition Betrayed, sets the record straight in great, schol- arly detail. It recounts that a "centuries-long tradition of accommo- dation and mutual coexistence of different religious communities and nationalities" characterized Bosnia until only recently, along with "historical patterns of coalition politics and compromise, coupled with deeply-rooted traditions of cooperation and coexistence in everyday life." The people are of the same stock, but because of Turk- ish policies during the centuries of occupation, city-dwellers and landowners tended to become Muslim while peasants remained Croat or Serb. There was no real consciousness of distinct ethnic identity

135



ir ,A

o

O

lo

0

r

"

tCI" /

f

" '• N - %

0\

.,t.•. i G,,,?

• ?P ? . • p*

e

? * L.

ILLUSTRATION BY RANDY LYHUS



Lewis

until the first provincial peasant rebellion in 1875, a phenomenon of social position, not of nationality.

Now it is undoubtedly going to be much harder to recreate a sense of community. How many people would want to return to the homes from which they were "cleansed" by their neighbors is an unanswer- able question at this stage. What kind of judicial punishment and ret- ribution for crimes against humanity will be required to preclude bloody waves of private vengeance is difficult to foresee, and it is even more difficult to see how trials and reparations can be carried out under the necessary conditions of compromise that are the only hope for peace. There is not going to be any unconditional surrender. But the hardest part is finding the terms for ending the war. If that can be done, healing the wounds is another kind of enterprise that can develop its own momentum, just as making war did.

EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE

One of the people who has been arguing from the start for a re- constituted Yugoslavia is Boris Vukobrat, a wealthy Serb busi- nessman who was born in Croatia, married a Bosnian Muslim,

and now lives in Paris. He has established the Peace and Crises Man- agement Foundation, and he works tirelessly to promote the cause among powerful statesmen, intellectuals, and whoever offers support. He has published a small book, based on the work of a committee of international experts, entitled Proposals for a New Commonwealth of the Republics of ex-Yugoslavia. It contains draft declarations on funda- mental rights of all citizens and rights and freedoms of ethnic groups; a draft constitution for the constituent regional republics, leaving open whether the commonwealth linking the republics would be based on a constitution or a treaty; a plan for creating a number of re- gions (like counties or shires) within the republics not based simply on ethnic criteria; and a document on economic reconstruction em- phasizing the need for coordination of monetary and credit policies.

Vukobrat is realistic enough to present his proposals as a staged plan for gradual implementation, not as a blueprint. But even offer- ing it for discussion is a step toward filling the vacuum that prevents an end to the war. It provides a vision of what might come next, an incentive to move on from fighting to planning how life will then go on. In June 1994, he attended a conference in Geneva of distin-

137



FOREIGN POLICY

guished intellectuals from all parts of the former Yugoslavia. They is- sued a statement of the principles on which peace can be established, including democracy, human rights, free communications, and re- jection of any border changes by force. Vukobrat's continuing efforts have brought no concrete results as yet, but they have created a core group of people eager to look beyond the battlefield and establish a basis for postwar coexistence and cooperation. These people are not just looking ahead; they are trying to break the impasse that makes peace impossible for lack of a common view of what it should bring. The list of participants was an impressive mixture of some 30 artists, professors, business and community leaders, journalists, and even a Catholic priest. Their recommendations were unanimous. Each par- ticipant spoke on his or her own but with the knowledge and en- couragement of many others.

That kind of thinking is not encouraged by the people who hold power and are conducting the conflict, but it keeps surfacing when the opportunity arises. The New York Times's Roger Cohen reports the "outrage" of Mimo Sahinpasic, a popular Sarajevo radio show host, when the Bosnian minister of culture ordered him to stop play- ing "aggressor music," that is, songs performed by Serbs. "There are Serbian singers-like Djordje Balasevic-whose antiwar songs have done more for Bosnia than 80 percent of our leaders," the show host said. "So I ignored the letter. I'm in Bosnia to fight for what's left of the Yugoslav idea, not to live in a one-party state."

Such attempts at attitude control by authorities and resistance to that control are mounting, creating tensions even within the Bos- nian governing party. Prime Minister Haris Silajdi6c wrote a letter of protest against growing authoritarianism, using as an example of its effect the humiliation he felt as a child because his father wanted to listen to Voice of America but had to make sure the neighbors could not hear because it was forbidden by the communist authorities. In the atmosphere of inflamed emotion, which leaders need to keep their people mobilized and which foes promote with renewed attacks, it is difficult to measure how much support could be won for the idea of a commonwealth. It takes courage to speak out against prevailing storms of passion inside what was Yugoslavia, but people do, in vir- tually all the republics. Those who do are coming under mounting official pressure. Recently, Milogevid took over Borba, the one remaining independent Belgrade daily. Its staff tried to defy the order,

138



Lewis

but deprived of money, a distribution system, and regular printers, it was reduced to little more than an underground publication that nonetheless found eager readers when the journalists themselves took to selling it on the streets at three times the usual price.

The widely known dissident Mihajlo Mihajlov, who was perse- cuted in communist days for his democratic views, has written against the danger of accepting ethnic or religious partition as the basis for solving the conflict. "Acceptance of the nationalistic version of self- determination, which in practice is the international community's posture today, comes in the end to an acceptance of genocide," he said. He denounces as a myth the idea that it was the fall of the dictatorship that unleashed ethnic conflict. "In 1987-before democra- tization began-the press in each of the Yugoslav republics was already becoming much more nationalistic. In all of the republics, the major media were monopolies of the republican authorities (as they continue to be today). As one Yugoslav writer said, 'Before anyone was killed by bullets, they were killed ten times over by words."'

Mihajlov points out that what happened in Yugoslavia was not a breakdown of normal relations among people after the communists lost power, it was the replacement of a communist dictatorship by nationalist dictatorships, necessarily rivals. That is a most important part of the development, which was ignored by the many Western ob- servers who scarcely noticed Yugoslavia until the killing began. Yu- goslavia faced a dilemma of transformation not so different from that in Russia and the East when communism could no longer serve as the organizing principle of power. And-this is really the crux of the mat- ter-to escape transformation to democratic principles and the free market, key leaders shifted to nationalism as an alternative base that would maintain the authoritarian state. It was the refusal to move toward real reform that made nationalism necessary, and that contin- ues to make it dominant.

Serbia's Milogevi6 was the first to grasp the idea of that approach, stirring historic Serb sentiment about the rise of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Even moderate, well-educated people responded to his ap- peal because they felt Serbs were being pushed out of their venerated heartland and that it had to be stopped. But, of course, skewing the regime inherited from Josip Broz Tito to make Serbian nationalism do the job of the discredited Communist party made it impossible to maintain the federation. MilogeviC knew that all along, and maneu-

139



FOREIGN POLICY

vered around it, just as Boris Yeltsin knew when he planned to chal- lenge Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership by becoming president of Rus- sia that his success would doom the Soviet Union. If the largest, strongest part of a multinational or multiethnic state is persuaded to make its own specific traditions and ambitions the basis of power, the other parts will also look inward and to their specific past to protect their share of identity. That is what happened to Croatia, where Franjo Tudjman built himself up by more or less mirroring the Mi- logevi6 strategy. (Something similar happened in Slovenia, but its circumstances are different. It is more Alpine than South Slav, and more homogeneous than much of Yugoslavia.) There were people in the federal government who tried valiantly to head off the collision that

Milosevi. and Tudjman were engineering, but they were neither

strong nor charismatic, got little outside support, and in the end were undermined and swept away. Today, after so much blood has flowed with so few positive effects, their voices may carry further. It is non- sense to claim that weak gestures to sustain the federation by then president George Bush and then secretary of state James Baker gave Miloievi6 the green light to go to war, ostensibly to "save Yugoslavia." On the contrary, Milogevi6 complained bitterly that the State De- partment was "anti-Serb." He was out all along to blow up the country, create a "greater Serbia," and damn the rest.

Naturally, the war has done nothing to promote the shift to democracy and market economy that was the alternative to Yu- goslavia's intensifying problems during the 1980s, the alternative that the promotion of rival nationalisms was designed to avoid. Tito left an intricate system of regional checks in order to prevent the rise of another Yugoslav dictator in his own image. In that sense, he suc- ceeded too well. Since the central authority could not dominate, the republics went off in their own directions. While he was alive, Tito could settle frictions and disagreements by the personal force of his own position. His successors could not. Trains had to be stopped at the republic borders to change locomotives because the local officials demanded the right to provide their own. Republics printed the federal currency on their own, without reference to the central bank, bringing hyperinflation and undermining the promising federal currency reform at the end of the decade. At one point, the Interna- tional Monetary Fund (IMF), asked to help with a stabilization pro- gram, found that nobody could answer its question about the total of

140



Lewis

Yugoslavia's foreign exchange debt. Various republic authorities had borrowed abroad without bothering to tell each other or the center. It took the IMF, on its own initiative, to collect and add up the es- sential information. The total debt was a staggering $20 billion.

It is a nasty little myth that Yugoslavia was an "artificial" state that could not have been expected to hold together without sheer force.

Officials in Belgrade, in Zagreb, and in Ljubljana complained in the mid-1980s about the impossibility of making things work in this uncoordinated way. It seemed there were only two obvious ways of dealing with the problem: Either restore a central dictatorship, which would revive the discipline of central planning, or establish a democracy and a free market as an approach to economic and political co- herence. Neither one was acceptable to the people in power, and the rest of the people were not allowed to voice their opinions. A Croat who had spent 40 years in exile because of the communist regime and who had returned to serve as a Zagreb diplomat after independence said that in the late 1980s there were more political prisoners in Yugoslavia than in all the East European states of the Soviet bloc combined. Show trials of dissidents and outspoken writers ended in heavy sentences.

Even Bosnia, which looked toward democracy after the communists were ousted and independence proclaimed, is turning back to the authoritarianism that Serbia and Croatia never really left. Slavko Santic, a commentator for the struggling independent Sarajevo paper Oslobodenje, told reporter Roger Cohen that the Party of Democratic Action (headed by Izetbegovi6) "is on its way to becoming a total- itarian party, just like the Communists were. We have no political op- position to speak of here, police are everywhere, and state jobs in- creasingly require party membership." Others have also warned that Bosnia is turning into a one-party state. Ethnic and religious fury is needed to sustain cohesion in the absence of democratic pluralism. "Demons must be created, and heroes, to justify senseless suffering," Cohen writes. "The alternative is to look the enemy in the eye and

141



FOREIGN POLICY

recognize a brother, ethnically indistinguishable and condemned to inhabit the same land."

That is particularly true of Bosnia, where people are so mixed, but it has been true of Yugoslavia in general and it could be true again. The overall issue is a free society, and in that circumstance there is so much that people have in common, so much they need from each other, that there is a real incentive to reconstitute something that could be called Yugoslavia. All of the breakaway republics desper- ately want to join the European Union because they know they have little chance to develop and prosper on their own, closed to their neighbors. For now, they ignore the obvious reality that they will have to trade, communicate, and let people come and go once the fighting stops. They behave as though they expect to be part of the big European community while denying community with neighbors who once again will be indispensable partners. But pushed, most ardent defenders of separate and complete sovereignty say they will of course have to have economic ties, some kind of common market at the least, and probably more. The basic issue remains borders and the protection of minorities, just as it was when the war began. And the solution has to be Yugoslav-wide, rejecting all border changes im- posed by force and guaranteeing the rights of minorities. That is the one way to find a peace that can last and to satisfy moral imperatives that would be mocked by drawing up new lines of partition. As people from several republics point out, all the plans proposed so far by one or another set of representatives of the "international community" boil down to dividing up Bosnia, and they fail because the com- batants are not persuaded that accepting a divided peace is better than continuing to fight for their aims.

The Vukobrat plan undoubtedly has flaws and is not meant to serve as a definitive solution, but the underlying idea comes closer to a constructive direction than anything in Vance-Owen, Owen- Stoltenberg, Contact Group, or other proposals. There are aspects of the plan that enjoy support from one side or another, though the idea of a new Yugoslavia does not yet resonate on the world scene. For example, a senior Croat official points out that Zagreb would favor the idea of linking Bosnian Serbs in a Bosnian federation that would have special ties with both Croatia and Serbia because it would give a kind of insurance against the possibility of Bosnian Croats being overwhelmed by Muslims who might tend toward fundamentalism in

142



Lewis

a smaller republic. Already, on occasion, Croats and Serbs in Bosnia have joined in fighting the Muslim-dominated forces, despite the federal agreement.

To escape transformation to democratic principles and the free market, key leaders

shifted to nationalism as an alternative base

that would maintain the authoritarian state.

As to the place of the minority Serbs in Croatia, they were at one point offered dual citizenship in Croatia and Serbia if they chose, providing they gave up the demand to change Croatian borders made at the outset of the war when the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army thought it was an irresistible powerhouse that could take what it wanted. Dual citizenship is not the same as being part of a confederal Yugoslavia, but it is a step in that direction.

The main argument against looking to Yugoslavia again is the trauma of the war and its atrocities. Branko Salaj, Croatia's ambas- sador to France, points out that his country would have been quite satisfied with some kind of confederal settlement in the first place. He is an unusually reasonable man who spent 40 years in exile, mostly in Sweden, because he was anticommunist all along. He notes in half-joking irony that Milosevi6's nationalist extremism helped de- mocrats in the other republics because their communist leaders re- alized they had to offer reforms to win public support. But now, proclamations of sovereignty have aroused their own enthusiasm and, perhaps more to the point, have established political leaders who want no limits on the power they have gained.

Obviously, it will not be easy to reverse gears and persuade people to try to live alongside each other again. But the prospect would provide hope for the many who are disgusted with war but feel they are offered no honorable or tolerable alternative. A battlefield solution is conceivable if everybody else decides to get out of the way and let the fighters slaughter each other until one side or the other cries uncle. That is what the French accuse the Americans of doing with

143



FOREIGN POLICY

the proposal to end the embargo on arms for Bosnia, and they are al- most certainly right that it would lead to reinforcement with more arms and fighters-if necessary, from Serbia, and probably from Rus- sia-and widen the war. In any case, it is a way to make sure that only might matters, that world order comes only out of the barrel of the gun, and that the twentieth century ends with no more sense of humanity and decency than it knew at its worst. Furthermore, it is a way to make sure that the vanquished will seek to turn the tables another day.

It is not possible to say at this point whether a confederal Yu- goslavia or a Yugoslav Commonwealth will work. Nothing else has so far, and there is not the slightest sign that what has been proposed as yet by outside powers can bring a settlement. One thing that practi- cally all the people directly involved agree on is that a settlement is not to be found in smaller and smaller fragments, focusing in turn on what to do about Bihac, what to do about Goraide, what to do about Sarajevo, and so on. It is to be found in moving up the scale, not down, trying to unite interests rather than dividing them into ever more limited pieces. It is true that the United Nations, NATO, Eu- rope, the United States, and the "international community" look terrible in their impotence and indecision in the face of this war. They, too, would have much to gain by helping the people of Yugoslavia find themselves Yugoslav again.

144



reassembling yugoslavia

Documents