In retrospect, it was not a surprise that the first great test of the post–Cold War era would take place in Yugoslavia, a country that embodied so many of the conflicts and contradictions of Europe in the twentieth century, which, as the century neared its end, remained almost completely unresolved. Yugoslavia was an uneasy composite of smaller, tribal factions rather than one true nation; it had survived as a nation for the last forty years largely because of its unusual geopolitical location and the unique talents of its leader, Josip Broz, or Tito as he was popularly known. Tito had ruthlessly suppressed various competing forces, most particularly the potentially powerful nationalism of the different component groups, and formed if not a whole out of the many parts, then the veneer of a whole.
Yugoslavia had been cobbled together in the period after World War I, an unlikely composite of smaller nations and tribes that were part of the detritus of the end not merely of the most murderous war imaginable, but the final collapse of two great empires, the Ottoman and the Hapsburg. Most of the terrain included in Yugoslavia was on the outer reaches of those two empires, where their magnetic fields were just strong enough to cause problems for those who lived there, and where there had been a constant ebb and flow of ruling groups. The original name for the country reflected the unlikely quality of national consensus; it was to be called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In time that was changed to Yugoslavia, which essentially meant the “country of southern Slavs.” The historical tribal grievances ran deep, and for a variety of economic, cultural, and educational reasons, the forces that worked to divide the nation remained more powerful than those that united it. During the worst of the Cold War, when it had been ruled by the communists under the semi-iron hand of Tito, the quip had been that it had six republics, five nations, four languages, three religions, two alphabets, and one political party.1
Still there was considerable admiration—a surface admiration, to be sure—on the part of visiting foreigners, like the Americans, for the people of the country, in no small part because we disliked their enemies and therefore concentrated on their better rather than their lesser qualities. During World War II the enemies of Yugoslavia—Serb Yugoslavia—had been the Germans, so the French, British, and Americans had liked that; during the Cold War, Yugoslavia had carved out a position of partial independence from Moscow, and we had all liked that as well. The people of Yugoslavia were “at once brawny, animated—a tough brusque lusty folk,” John Gunther, one of the ablest American journalists of his generation, once wrote, reflecting how Yugoslavs were viewed and admired in the West for the way they had fought the Germans in World War II and stood up to the Russians during the Cold War, although, of course, some of the Yugoslavs, most notably the Croatians, had for their own historic reasons behaved quite murderously on the side of the Germans.2
Worse, the internecine hatreds that existed there were a curious blend of the old and new. Their history was not easily escaped, based on what the different ethnic groups had done to each other for over six hundred years, medieval grievances that remained remarkably fresh and bitter as they emerged into more modern incarnations. As the journalist Ed Vulliamy noted, after covering endless battles among Serbs and Croats and Serbs and Muslims, and listening to the commanding officers on both sides explain what they had done and why they had done it, “The answer to an artillery attack yesterday will begin in the year 925, invariably illustrated with maps [of that year].”3
The country rested in an unusually backward part of Europe, a good deal of it mountainous and therefore poor farming land, much of it outside the pull of the more positive economic and social forces of the industrial revolution, which had helped bring steady growth to the rest of Europe, particularly in the years after World War II. Others had modernized; Yugoslavia had remained poor. Not by accident had it been a source of cheap labor for the booming West German economy, for a grim factory job that did not greatly appeal to a young German male with a number of vocational choices was a handsome, middle-class opportunity to a Yugoslav. Many of the powerful political leaders in the region had instinctively fought modernity unless they could manipulate it for their own narrow uses. In Yugoslavia the past not only lingered, but looked to all too many people like the future. In June 1989, Congressman Stephen Solarz of New York, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had visited Yugoslavia, just before the country’s breakup, accompanied by a bright young foreign service officer named Chris Hill. “So what do you think about it?” Hill asked Solarz as his tour ended. Solarz answered, “It’s a nineteenth-century museum piece.”
Not only had the political system been frozen for so long, but the religious order was as well. Many of the major churches in the West—that is, Western Europe and North America—in the years after World War II had taken a more enlightened and tolerant view of competing religions and thereby the different faces of ethnicity that went with them. That was notably true in the Roman Catholic Church under the papal encyclical of Pope John XXIII in 1963. But that was not true of the Balkans. The religious leaders there were unusually anxious to hold on to the old ways, even when the old ways seemed to outsiders to be as burdened by historical prejudices as they were ennobled by belief. It was like a part of the world where in an age of ever-greater light, the shades on the windows remained drawn. Time did not bring greater tolerance. In Bosnia, as David Owen, the former British foreign minister who made a gallant effort to bring some form of peace to the region, once noted, “Time does not move on, it deteriorates.”4
Many of the illusions about Yugoslavia had been created during the Tito years; he had been both wartime partisan leader and the leader of postwar Yugoslavia. Unlike other nations of Eastern Europe, which were liberated by the Red Army, Yugoslavia was effectively liberated by its own people and therefore had its own mythic patriot as chief of state. Unlike most of the dictators installed elsewhere by the Russians largely because of the Red Army’s conquest (and often deliberately selected by Stalin because of their lack of local popularity and therefore their dependence on him), Tito started with true legitimacy. Because of Yugoslavia’s unique geopolitical position (it did not have the Red Army stationed either inside it nor surrounding it nor to the west of it), its physical and cultural connections to the West as well as the East, and its harsh territory, potentially as great a threat to the Russians as it had been to the Germans, Tito had been able to follow a policy somewhat independent of Moscow.
From 1948 when he led his nation out of the communist bloc (or was expelled from it, depending on who was telling the story) to the time of his death, Tito was more than a mere head of state; he ruled the nation like a cunning and deft and occasionally brutal paterfamilias, hero of World War II, and evader of the Soviet shadow. Unfortunately, it was a one-man show, and his legitimacy was personal, not lightly passed on to the representatives of another generation. There was no heir apparent—he seemed not to want one. Like many a dictator before him, he apparently did not believe in the concept of succession. He had loomed far above the political landscape when he first took over, and regrettably, he loomed even further above it when he died. A great oak tree in whose great shadow no other tree could grow, one countryman called him.5 “Even before his death the system didn’t function,” Slobodan Milosevic, one of his successors, once noted, “Tito functioned.”6
Tito was half-Slovene, half-Croat, and the political dilemma he faced was not so much, as it was in other countries in Eastern Europe, in suppressing democratic impulses on the part of his people. Rather it was in suppressing the powerful tendencies toward nationalism—always there, always right under the surface—among the different and always restless ethnic groups that made up the whole. This he did ruthlessly, sending some nationalists into exile, others to prison. Anyone who proselytized on behalf of Serb separatism or hegemony during the Tito years was, in one of those wonderfully clumsy communist phrases of that era, guilty of “reactionary nationalism.”7 Tito was as good at defeating the actuarial tables as he was in suppressing the forces that might threaten his vision of the country. But when he died, at eighty-eight in May 1980, it was the end of an era, of a kind of one-man, one-nation rule. He left behind a country in which none of the burning issues of nationalism had ever been dealt with. Was Yugoslavia actually a country or not? Should it remain unified? “We all cried [at the time of his death],” said Mahmut Bakalli, a leader among the ethnic Albanians in the nation, “but we did not know that we were also burying Yugoslavia.”8
If the death of Tito was the first great step in the breakdown of Yugoslavia, the second was the fall of the Berlin Wall. It changed dramatically the greater East-West geopolitical equation in which Yugoslavia had been so valuable a prize—a showpiece—being sought after by the two giant superpowers. It was like having been the prettiest girl at the dance whom everyone had always courted but now for whatever reason—the coming of other more beautiful girls from the neighboring town—no one wanted to date anymore. What happened then was a fascinating exhibit for those who argued that, in the postwar years, America’s foreign policy had come to represent not so much true internationalism as a thin veneer of internationalism that covered policies that were first, foremost, and finally almost completely anticommunist. As long as there was a Soviet threat, we were ready to be engaged in Yugoslavia, perhaps even—worst-case scenario—willing to go to war if need be on behalf of the freedom-loving Yugoslavs. But remove the Soviet threat, and our commitment to the people of Yugoslavia would drop alarmingly. The immediate post–Cold War attitude toward Yugoslavia certainly reflected the conundrum of an American policy from a previous era that had more or less evaporated and been replaced by nothing else. A country that we had thought of as a place to be weaned away from the Soviets, and into which we had poured a great deal of foreign aid and shipped a great deal of high-quality military hardware, had been almost completely devalued in American eyes; and that had happened even as the dangers of fratricidal fighting became far more grave.
In early 1989, Warren Zimmermann, newly minted as the first American ambassador to post–Cold War Yugoslavia, had dropped by to see his friend and superior Larry Eagleburger, then the number two man in the State Department, to discuss his marching orders. Zimmermann, like the young Eagleburger just a few years earlier, was considered one of the department’s rising stars. This would be his second posting to Belgrade, and like Eagleburger, he had loved his earlier tour. A certain excitement had come with being right on the border of the Soviet empire, of dealing daily with these rough-hewn, audacious people, who were, the embassy hoped, always searching for greater increments of personal freedom. Zimmermann and Eagleburger were both aware of the potential for violence in Yugoslavia, yet the country was declining in terms of American foreign policy interest. The Congress was not only significantly more isolationist than the executive branch, but dramatically more isolationist than fifteen or twenty years earlier. Given the growing budget deficit at home, ever less foreign aid was being handed out. And the degree of altruism in American foreign policy, greater in the period right after World War II when we had become aware of the cost of neglect and of acting too late in distant places before the war, was also in sharp decline.
Zimmermann and Eagleburger’s meeting reflected that. The prospects for helping Yugoslavia financially on any large scale were already bleak, they agreed. We were still interested in the country, Zimmermann should tell its leaders, just as we had always been. Yugoslavia was important, of course, but, well, it was not very important. It was lagging behind other former satellite states that were now breaking with the past and creating new democratic orders. Nor did we need it as a buffer against the Soviet Union, which itself was in great disrepair, on its way to becoming a nonempire and then a noncommunist Russia. Poland and Hungary were to be cited by Zimmermann as examples of the countries that we now preferred, the prettier new girls just come to the dance. Yugoslavia’s transgressions in human rights, something we had looked away from in the past, were of particular concern. They were especially odious in Kosovo, where Serbian violations of the rights of the Kosovo Albanians had been accelerating, and which had been a principal instrument for the rise of Slobodan Milosevic, to whom, among others, Zimmermann would presumably be making this pitch. The message was clear. In terms of significant American aid, Yugoslavia was on its own, ironically just when it might need help more than ever before. The coda to the message was equally clear. We were judging Yugoslavia not on the old scale—brave little Yugoslavia standing apart from Moscow—but on a new and far more demanding scale: how it treated its own people and how quickly it emulated the way we thought a struggling former central European country should behave.
The new and now more favored states of Eastern Europe—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—would, in fact, make an easier transition from the old order to the new than Yugoslavia. Though there would probably be a split in Czechoslovakia between the Czech and Slovak Republics, it seemed likely, because of the indigenous democratic leadership, to be a cordial one. Both Poland and Hungary were unitary states, with little in the way of tribal or ethnic problems to tear them apart or hinder their future democratic development. Moreover, all three of these countries had formidable nascent democratic movements with readily identifiable leadership—the identification having been made by the former communist rulers themselves, who had placed the most passionate democrats of a generation in jail. Equally important in countries like Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, unlike in Yugoslavia, the old leadership was completely discredited; it had been imposed by Moscow, courtesy of the Red Army, and then the secret police, whereas in the Serb part of Yugoslavia, the leadership had a certain legitimacy. It had produced indigenously, first Tito and his partisans, and now the children of Tito and his partisans. The existing leadership in Belgrade was not discredited and hated as the regimes in Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague had been hated and discredited. In terms of national coherence, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia offered everything that Yugoslavia lacked. They looked like the easier ones; Yugoslavia, because of its internal ethnic divisions, the hard one. Thus, we decided to put our prime effort into those countries and to cut back our interest in Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia had by chance come on hard times economically at that moment, which made it unusually ripe for appeals to age-old hatreds. There was runaway inflation, the virulence of which in any country tended to be political and social dynamite. The Yugoslav prime minister, Ante Markovic, a decent democratic man whom the United States had chosen as its horse, soon pleaded with Zimmermann for financial aid in this extremely difficult time; in a highly inflated economy, he badly needed debt relief. He asked for $4 billion. In the old days that might not have been too great a sum—who knew what the Soviet Union might match it with? But now with Washington feeling a need to help the countries of Eastern Europe and weary of carrying a heavy international financial burden, that suddenly looked like a lot of money, especially for a country that seemed to offer us no benefits in return.
Zimmermann was polite with Markovic and said he would check back with his superiors. But he already knew the answer: Poland and Hungary were coming our way even faster, and they did not, as Zimmermann noted, have the additional baggage of bitter ethnic nationalism. They were obviously better bets. That these very qualities that made Yugoslavia so fragile might also make it a more important prospect for serious aid—the potential threats to itself, to the well-being of southern Europe, and to world peace of mind—was not yet an operative observation. So America was no longer quite as interested or committed, just as Yugoslavia’s darker forces were being stirred.
The man stirring them was a self-declared new nationalist who had spent most of his career as a dutiful beneficiary of the Communist Party, an apparatchik’s apparatchik, Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic was, as Robert Kaplan has pointed out, an odd legatee of a flawed ancien régime looking now to play an entirely different hand of cards in an era that renounced the old totalitarianism, “the only European Communist leader who managed to save himself and his party from collapse [and] did so by making a direct appeal to racial hatred.”9 He was one of those men coughed up by history in its more cataclysmic moments. If nationalism rather than communism was the new game, Milosevic was ready to play it. His ethics were truly situational—he responded to what was around him with innate quickness and skill, but with no larger vision. He was, no one dealing with him would doubt, quicker and more astute than the other politicians with whom he competed, be they Serb or non-Serb. It was a mistake to underestimate him, and a number of his Balkan peers and people in Washington underestimated him for a long time.
Leave the Communist Party he might, but he had hardly changed his stripes. True, the portrait of Tito came down from behind his desk. True, he purged himself of that unique, heavy-handed, semi-intelligible, deliberately obfuscating language that all communist leaders had seemed to favor. True, in time, his position of power more secure, he would seem to defy Yugoslav history by speaking negatively of Tito and how the great man had liked to rape young Serbian girls. But little else changed, and certainly not the modus operandi: the way of going after power and holding it, the dependence on secret police and state-controlled media, and the skillful use of the army led by people chosen for their personal loyalty. Milosevic was a born infighter, trained in a system that placed great emphasis on how to work your way up in a closed, one-party operation, mimicking those above you when it suited you, and squeezing those beneath you. “Milosevic knows only servants and enemies,” his former information minister Aleksander Tijanic once said of him, in what was an almost perfect description of a successful Communist Party apparatchik. “Partners and allies do not exist for him.”10
By the late eighties the most powerful political force in Yugoslavia was Serb nationalism, a belief among many influential as well as ordinary Serbs that somehow the complicated form of the Yugoslav government, the sharing of power with other groups, particularly the Muslims in Kosovo, went against their historic right to have their own country. They also believed that the Kosovo Albanians had been granted too much autonomy in the later Tito years and were exploiting it at the expense of the security of local Serbs. Some of these beliefs were, given the tortured history of Kosovo, quite legitimate, but Milosevic’s manipulation of them was singularly political. He would seek not to address raw grievances in Kosovo and make life more bearable for the Kosovo Serbs, but instead to exploit it ruthlessly as a ticket to hold power everywhere else in the country.
Nationalism was a powerful force throughout Yugoslavia, but nowhere was it more powerful than in Kosovo, where the ethnic Albanians, who were also Muslims, comprised the majority and the Serbs the minority by a ratio of roughly ten to one, and where the two great empires, the Hapsburg and the Ottoman, had been entwined in a long, sad, bitter, and violent history. In Kosovo, six hundred years earlier, the Serbs had fought the most famous battle in their history, and this land, though primarily settled now by Albanian Muslims who were the legatees of the victors in that battle, remained their most sacred territory. The hatreds went so deep, so much was still unresolved, that it often seemed as if the original struggle for this land had taken place not six hundred years earlier, but on the day before.
In April 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but already a time when Eastern Europe was changing at a rapid pace, Milosevic, substituting by chance for Serbian president Ivan Stambolic, went to meet with the local leadership in Kosovo. A huge crowd of Serbs from all over the region gathered outside the government center where Milosevic was talking with Albanian officials. As they pushed forward closer and closer to the building, local ethnic Albanian police—Kosovars as they would be known—tried to hold them off. Some Serbs were beaten. Milosevic came to the balcony and surveyed the huge crowd in front of him. “No one should dare to beat you,” he shouted. That in time became a rallying cry for Serb nationalism. Suddenly the enormous crowd, until then quite mutinous, changed its mood and started chanting, “Slobo! Slobo!”11 At that moment, he became a Serb hero; it was the making of an increasingly successful demagogue in a part of the world where few politicians had ever heard genuine roars of approval from the populace.
From then on Milosevic moved ruthlessly and single-mindedly to exploit the anti-Albanian hatred of the Serbs. He used it as an instrument to take out his longtime sponsor and friend Stambolic, who was still wedded to the old Titoist idea of a pluralist Yugoslavia. Milosevic repeatedly scorned the advice of the American ambassador, Jack Scanlan, about trying to limit the rising ethnic tensions. Perhaps most important of all, he gained control over the state-dominated media and used it to maximize any incident that might inflame Serb feelings. That was something new in an East European country, where in political terms television had been used primarily to broadcast boring party conferences. Now in September 1987 when an Albanian draftee unraveled mentally and went on a killing spree, Milosevic said, “This is God-sent,”12 and ordered the media to exploit the incident.
In the view of Nebojsa Popov, an old Titoist hand, Milosevic used television the way he was sure Hitler would have used it had there been television in his day. The intense exploitation of nationalism through the use of television, Popov added, had turned his own country into “a real Orwellian dictatorship of the proletariat.”13 It was something new and very ugly—the use of the power of state-controlled media to escalate the darkest fears and hatreds of the people. “You Americans would become nationalists and racists too if your media were totally in the hands of the Ku Klux Klan,” noted Milo Vasic, one of the country’s most independent journalists, talking of that period.14
The country was turning ugly. What had been for many Westerners a joyous place where the negative energy had largely been focused on Moscow and the Russians had changed; now it was aimed at fellow Yugoslavs, albeit those of different ethnic groups. High-level Belgrade dinner parties quickly degenerated into angry, bitter denunciations of one group by another. Westerners (and Yugoslavs, too) who had been away for a few years were stunned by the viciousness in the Belgrade media—the relentless promotion of negative propaganda about all non-Serbs, the manipulation of traditional Serb paranoia, the ugliness with which non-Serb politicians and their ambitions were treated, and the inevitable result of it all: the surfacing among old and trusted friends of a new element of ethnic hatred.
The tensions between the Serbs and the Kosovars, orchestrated and escalated now by Milosevic, continued to mount. Two years after his surprise role as a defender of the Serbs, on June 28, 1989, Milosevic, by now the Serb president, returned to Kosovo for a dramatic repeat performance. This time it was on the most important of Serb national days, one that commemorated the time and the place, six hundred years earlier, when the Turks had defeated the Serbs on a battlefield known as the Field of Blackbirds. Not many nations transform the date of their greatest defeat, one that inaugurated five hundred years of foreign domination, into a sacred day, but that day, June 28, 1389, had deep emotional significance for all Serbs. Tsar Lazar, the most noble of Serb heroes, offered a choice by the Turks between surrendering or fighting to his death, chose to fight to his death.
On this, the six-hundredth anniversary, more than a million Serbs, sensing the beginning of a new age, turned out for Milosevic, and this time he was ready to hit all the right buttons. “Six centuries [later] we are engaged in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, but this cannot be excluded either.”15 The huge crowd loved it and chanted back its own battle cry: “Tsar Lazar, you were unfortunate not to have Slobo on your side.”16 It was a clear warning to the rest of the nation, and to the world, about which way Milosevic intended to go.
In January 1990, the Yugoslav League of Communists—until then the only party in the nation—dissolved itself. By doing so it became the first Communist Party in all of Eastern Europe to disappear, although, of course, it did not in any real way disappear. Milosevic and his supporters were now, in the technical sense, no longer communists. But it was at best merely the most marginal change of nomenclature, for all the other aspects with which the communists had exercised power in Eastern Europe—the control and manipulation of media, the dependence upon the secret police, the fear of genuine democratic procedures, the instinct to suppress dissident groups—remained much the same. Milosevic’s vision was the creation of a Serb state, and his eye, thought some Westerners, was on Bosnia and Kosovo, and perhaps part of Croatia, too.
The larger question now posed for the Western powers as Yugoslavia was poised on the brink of dissolution was what their response would be if war broke out. Here one additional factor was at work, the belief among the different European powers that with the end of the Cold War this was their own special moment in history; whatever happened in Yugoslavia would be on their terrain, and therefore, they could handle it. The Europeans, eager to show the force and muscle of a newly united continent, were anxious to play a decisive role on this issue. Later it would be clear that they had greatly overestimated their influence, but there was no doubt about their enthusiasm for the task at first. “The age of Europe has dawned,” said Jacques Poos of Luxembourg, the chairman of the European Union, in a statement that would be much repeated and mocked in the ensuing months and years.17