In this sense, the viability of the state—and the causes of its collapse—was as much of interest to the partisans of various parties arrayed at The Hague as in the former Yugoslavia itself.Histories of Yugoslavia and Its Violent Dissolution
PRESIDING JUDGE [MCDONALD]: Is it possible for you…to tell us, starting from the beginning and taking us to the end, the changes in terms of the ethnic composition in different areas, but beginning from the fourteenth century?.…
DR. JAMES GOW: Overall I think the purpose of the evidence is to set the events of 1991 and afterwards in their military-political context. In order to do that I have been reviewing some of the factors which went to create the Yugoslav states … and that has meant making reference not only to the fourteenth century but to the fourth century … to give a sense of the way in which the territories which went to make up the federation which dissolved came to be.*
There is little about the history of Yugoslavia, its dissolution, or the violence that followed that is uncontested, and the prospects of saying something both meaningful and uncontroversial are vanishingly small. But there is still much to say, and if we consider that history in light of the Milošević trial, we may approach those debates from a new and consequential perspective. Of course, the ICTY was not formally concerned with the collapse of Yugoslavia, or even with the war as such, only its atrocities; still, all that preceded the war, and contributed to it, came into question, becoming part of debates about how those atrocities should be interpreted and judged, and about what the purposes of judging were, or should be.
In the Milošević trial, both the Prosecution and the Accused spent considerable time and resources debating matters of history—matters that occurred before the Tribunal’s temporal mandate, sometimes long before. Indeed, for certain charges, such as genocide, historical context was an essential element of the Prosecution’s case—even more than in other cases, historical claims bore causal weight in the argument, or were supposed to—whereas Milošević openly framed his defense in political and historical terms. For some, these discussions were essential to a full and meaningful accounting of Milošević’s role in context, or as a way of asserting—or defending against—claims of collective responsibility. For others, these historical excursions were a distraction from the proper forensic purpose of a trial.
Perhaps the trial should have dealt with history, perhaps not. Expressing the relationship of Yugoslavia’s history, or of its successors’ contemporary societies and politics, to the Tribunal and the Milošević trial is a fraught enterprise—any selection of facts, events, and interpretations inevitably implies, or will be read to imply, a particular view of the trial, and of the trial’s relationship to the regulation of violence, the telling of judicial narratives, and the assignment of legal or moral responsibility. Each reader will have to decide for himself what, exactly, the relationship of historical events to the trial and its legacy is, or ought to be. But this is precisely the point: Because we are concerned with a trial in which history either mattered or was thought to matter, we must consider that history to understand the trial.*
The region that in the last century came to encompass Yugoslavia is now known, sometimes, as the Western Balkans, though that name itself is of recent and migratory provenance.† Much of the area is mountainous, a factor that, it has been argued, has contributed to the historical character of the region’s social and political structure as a marginal hinterland of empire.1
The populations living in the region during the wars with which we are concerned descend, or say they descend, from communities that have lived in the region for a very long time, and we must be cognizant of parallel if not fully compatible claims about their nature and origins. Nationalist perspectives naturally view the identities of the ethno-national communities discernible today as primordial or at least extremely ancient; the overwhelmingly dominant scholarly perspective points, instead, to those communities’ historicity and the relatively recent formation of specific, and specifically national, identities.2
Slavic-speaking populations arrived in the region from the 6th century and constituted, in short order, a lasting majority in the Western Balkans. But although groupings identified by terms such as “Croat” or “Serb” date from this era, the formation of specific national identities among these Slavs was, on the most commonly accepted academic account, a process that occurred much later. Groups identifiable as Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Bosniaks or Bosnian Muslims, and Macedonians—not merely as eponymous denizens of a given area, but as members of an ethno-national community—appear centuries later, with some of these groups only coalescing as specifically national communities in the 20th century.3
Speakers of South Slavic languages have long constituted a majority in the Western Balkans as a whole, though not in all its parts. Today’s Albanians—speaking a separate, non-Slavic language—commonly claim that their linguistic forebears were in the region before the Slavic migration, identifying themselves with the Illyrians and Dardanians; the full extent of that identity has not been confirmed, but it is unclear where else Albanian-speakers might have come from.4 Albanians have long been present in the southern areas of what became Yugoslavia, and during the 20th century formed an ever larger majority of the population in the area known as Kosovo—a process, the memory of which itself formed the basis for contestation and recrimination; by the time Yugoslavia collapsed, Albanians were an overwhelming majority throughout Kosovo and western Macedonia.* Other ethnic and linguistic communities have played significant roles in the region—Hungarians, for example, or Turks and Germans, whose ethno-lingual antecedents generally arrived in the region somewhat later, with the ascendancy of the two great modern empires, that dominated the region after the 1500s.5
Independent kingdoms bearing the names Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia appear at various points in the Middle Ages.6 Each of these kingdoms disappeared or was entirely absorbed into imperial political circuits. For several centuries, the region was dominated by the Ottoman Empire in the south and later the Austrian Habsburg monarchy in the north. A relatively stable frontier between the two empires formed with the Treaties of Karlowitz in 1699 and Passarowitz in 1718, with the areas that came to form Vojvodina, Croatia, and Slovenia under the Habsburgs, and Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia under the Ottomans, who also exercised suzerainty over areas of Montenegro, which long maintained a kind of frontier independence.7
It is hardly clear that the medieval kingdoms constitute direct lineal antecedents of the current political units bearing those names, though nationalists see it that way.† Croatian nationalists assert a particular historical and legal continuity based on the existence of certain autonomies and governance privileges,8 but even these relatively attenuated claims are absent for the Serbian and Bosnian state projects.‡ The autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church retained, during much of this period, a separate ecclesiastical identity and had considerable autonomy under the Ottomans, and in some sense served as a carrier for Serbian political identity, or was seen to in retrospect,9 but a similar specific religious repository for a differentiated political identity was not available to Catholics or the Muslim community that developed under the Ottomans. Other units—Slovenia, Kosovo, Macedonia—cannot plausibly point to any recognizable independence prior to the 20th century, and consequently base their national legitimacy primarily on other grounds.
Two developments that arguably matter for the more recent history of the region appear around the early 19th century. Beginning, perhaps, with the Napoleonic caesura and the introduction of revolutionary radicalism in Illyria, ideas of pan-Slavic unification surface in the politics of the region—or a more specific South Slavic unification, from which the term “Yugoslavism” derives—a development that drew support from diverse parts of the Slavic-speaking Balkans, and that was consistent with, indeed part of, the broader nationalist trends observable throughout Europe in the 19th century.10
Alongside this, distinct political units whose base of power and self-image was linked to specific ethno-national communities also appear (or become more apparent). An autonomous Serbia formed between 1804 and 1815, still nominally under the Ottomans but effectively independent, and formally, fully so from 1878, the same year Montenegro’s already extensive autonomy was crystalized and confirmed in the Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin.11 The Kingdom of Croatia had long retained a formal, and sometimes substantial political autonomy within the Habsburg Hungarian crown, and secured, after the Nagodba of 1868, a highly autonomous administration.* These units were not uncomplicatedly national in nature—they contained large populations that were religiously or linguistically distinct—but over time their identification with a particular nation became more reified; this too was consistent with, and part of, the arc of 19th-century national and state formation. These processes, especially 19th-century strategic discussions about an expanded Serbian state in a document known as the Načertanije, were invoked by the Milošević Prosecution to contextualize its claims about the meaning of Greater Serbia for the charges against Milošević.12
By the late 19th century, what had been the frontier between two great empires now was a fracture zone with several independent or quasi-independent states (including Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria).13 By the early 20th century, these states had become much stronger and ambitious; in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, combinations of them pushed the Ottomans almost entirely out of the region, then fell to fighting among themselves; as a result, Serbia and Montenegro greatly expanded their territory, encompassing what became Macedonia and Kosovo. Austria-Hungary still ruled Bosnia and everything north of the Sava, but the First World War swept away Habsburg power as well: At the end of that war, Serbia emerged as the dominant power in the region, and its political and military elites acceded to most of the territory with which we are concerned, in the form of what is commonly called the First or Royal Yugoslavia.
This was the moment Yugoslavia first came into existence, and in that moment, both the conditions for its creation and the contradictions it would have to contain might have been discerned: a desire, shared by many, for political union, but also the existence of established separate national identities of the kind that, elsewhere in Europe, were forming—or already had formed—their own states. With these dual forces came the interpretative challenge that—in hindsight—seems so unavoidable, and that later implicitly animated much discussion at the Tribunal about the responsibility for Yugoslavia’s violent collapse: Was this a possible or impossible state?14
Various candidates for persistent political, social, and economic cleavages have been identified on the territory of Yugoslavia—a north–south division, for example, as well as Catholic–Orthodox, Christian–Muslim, Habsburg–Ottoman, Slav and non-Slav.15 Some of these differences are undeniably observable—economic imbalances between wealthier Slovenia, Slavonia, and Vojvodina, on the one hand, and poorer Kosovo, Macedonia, and Bosnia, on the other, long predate the Yugoslav period.16 But these are merely factual observations; their meaning, of course, is what matters and is contested. These cleavages have acquired even greater salience and poignance in retrospect, as possible explanations for what happened in the 1990s. But they are not only read backward; many of them were posited long before those violent events.17
Religious identity: One of the cleavages readily observable—if contested in its meaning or relevance—is religious identity. The north and west of the former Yugoslavia is heavily Catholic; the east and south are Orthodox, and there are large communities of Muslims in the center and south. These historic patterns are readily visible in the architecture of the region—anyone visiting the former Yugoslavia will be immediately struck by the differences in traditional architecture between mitteleuropäisches north and Oriental south—and were to an even greater extent prior to the wars.
To say that these patterns were visible is not to say they were determinative. Although individual practice always varies tremendously, in general the populations of the Western Balkans have not been known for scrupulous orthopraxy, and this has been true of all the major religious traditions.18 The traditional religious tolerance or syncretism of areas such as Bosnia is legendary, and indeed the legend of it has played a powerful role in organizing conceptions of the conflict and external interventions in Bosnia in the postwar era.19
At the same time, although the populations of the region were not always particularly religious in that sense, it is also, and perhaps tragically, true that religious identity was closely aligned with national identity, a process that was reinforced by the Ottoman millet system, in which religious communities were given significant authority to govern their own affairs. Serbs, Montenegrins, and Macedonians are overwhelmingly Orthodox, Croats and Slovenes Catholic, and Bosniaks Sunni Muslim; Kosovar Albanians are predominantly Muslim, though with smaller Catholic populations. Indeed, the very delineation of national identities such as Serb and Croat was essentially a function of religious identification.20 Although a relatively recent phenomenon, this identification was such that, by time time the Yugoslav state formed, even the idea of an Orthodox Croat or Catholic Serb—though such beings have existed in the past and elsewhere—was almost inconceivable. (The idea of a Muslim Serb or Croat persisted for some time longer, but in a sense this only made the national question more, not less difficult.*) Of course, in cross-generational perspective, religious identities were being traded out all the time through marriage, but by the late modern era the result was relatively stable populations and very little defection within any generation.21 And, indeed, the very fact that religious identity did not impose onerous burdens of devotion may have served to reinforce its function as a maker for national identity; relaxed religious practice does not imply irrelevance.
Language:22 Of all the cleavages that have been proposed to explain or justify conflict in the former Yugoslavia, language is perhaps the most problematic. In some cases, language differences correspond crisply with sociopolitical divisions, as between Kosovar Albanians and Slavs, or between Croats and Slovenes. But in many instances—especially within the broad belt of Slavic speakers in the middle of what became Yugoslavia—there is, historically, little correlation between language and other markers of identity. Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks have long spoken (and even now still speak) a mutually intelligible language, with variations in usage and pronunciation that cut across ethnic markers—dialects were regionally marked, and did not correspond with religious, ethnic, or political divisions. Orthography has described a partial difference between Serbs and Croats—Croatian is never written in Cyrillic, while Serbian normally is—but even this division was hardly ironclad, as many Serbs routinely use latinica. But this does not mean language was not, or could not be, divisive: On the contrary, language politics were often fraught in the Yugoslav era; indeed, the very thinness of the differences between the variants of Serbo-Croatian (as it was most commonly called in English) simply served to make the symbolic differences all the more contestable.23
And, if one imagines the intersection of religious identity and language, then discernible cleavages appear that track with the ethno-national division of the populations: Both Slovenes and Croats are predominantly Catholic, but speak distinct Slavic languages; Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks largely share a language, but are Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim respectively, and so on. The communities for which even the dyad of language and religion do not satisfactorily serve to define perceived divisions are, not coincidentally, the same communities that have been or are generally thought to have less than fully separate identities: Many Montenegrins have traditionally felt closely aligned to and identified with Serbs, with whom they share both language and religion. Similarly, a crisp distinction between ethnic Macedonians and their Serb (or Bulgarian) neighbors has been a relatively late phenomenon, reflected in the relatively recent establishment of a separate Macedonian Orthodox Church and the relatively late differentiation of Macedonian as a literary language.
Significance: Whatever their origins, most of these social cleavages—and the self-identified ethnic, national, or religious communities related to them—were in place prior to the creation of the first Yugoslav state. Large groups consciously identified themselves as Serbs, Croats, or Slovenes; others had different identities—Muslim, Orthodox—or, of course, identities based on economic status or relationship to feudal and dynastic categories, but even these, over the course of the 20th century, moved in the direction of more clearly delineated national identities. The question, of course, is whether these differences mattered in a political sense—whether they made the project of a common Yugoslav state more or less plausible.
Intercommunal relations among these groups have varied considerably over time, and indeed the effort to characterize those relations as either peaceful or fraught has itself become inextricably caught up in contestation about the nature—inevitable or contingent, organic or engineered—of the recent conflicts. Although nationalist historians and some Western journalists have painted the region as one of immemorial national struggle,24 there exists broad consensus that the communities in the region generally lived in peace—at least, “[f]or centuries…life in the Balkans was no more violent than elsewhere[.]”25 Moreover, to the degree one recognizes the ethnic aspect of the dissolution in the 1990s, as one must, this presents a problem for historicizing interpretations, as “it is difficult to find examples of sustained interethnic conflict before the modern period.”26 Indeed, for long periods of their history, these communities would not necessarily even have conceived of their linguistic or ethnic differences as meaningful frameworks for politics—that is, the populations were not mass nations in the modern sense, and it is anachronistic to read such identities back onto their behavior.27
Equally, though, claims that the peoples of what became Yugoslavia coexisted in some peaceful, tolerant, harmonious, and multicultural past exhibit their own anachronism or fantasist desire to project an interpretation backward. Much of the region’s social and political organization exhibited qualities related to differences of ethnicity, language, and religion,* and these became more salient once they were mapped onto projects of nationalism, as from the 19th century they increasingly were. And there had been violence, though nothing like what was soon to come.†
We may also discern relative differences in the interactions of communities that later, in the 1990s, divided with such bitterness. For example, plausible claims are made that Bosnian society was notable for its tolerance and syncretism28‡—though its very notability implies the neighbors were less tolerant, just as it suggests that Bosnians themselves were aware of differences among themselves. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Serbs and Albanians have historically been more distant than ethnic groups in other parts of the former Yugoslavia.29 There is no reason to believe this enmity is an immanent condition, but it has been remarked upon at least for a century or more; certainly, by the time the events with which the Tribunal is concerned were set in motion, relations were extremely hostile, and no one could remember a time when that was not at least partly true.30§
The seemingly irreconcilable nationalist projects that, much later, either contributed to or were a symptom of the country’s collapse, were therefore present at the creation. Yet so too were the aspirations and the integrative incentives expressed in the Yugoslav idea—after all, if the country were truly impossible, how did it form in the first place? We turn now to the events and processes that developed across the seven decades of the Yugoslav social and political experiment—the events and processes with which the Milošević trial was most concerned—until the country’s final, definitive destruction.
The actual original name of the new state founded after the First World War—the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, for the three recognized or constituent nations that constituted the state—suggests some of the cleavages that, in retrospect at least, marked the project as unstable. Other communities that would, during the second Yugoslavia, come to be recognized as nations—Montenegrins, Macedonians, Bosnian Muslims—were not recognized in the ethno-political constellation of the kingdom. In addition, the new state was a pastiche of recently defunct and continuing legal and political traditions—Serbian, Montenegrin, Ottoman, Habsburg.
The politics of the kingdom were marked by considerable instability and fractiousness, involving recurrent variants of a power struggle between centralizing Serbs and federalist or autonomist Croats, with Slovenes in a kind of intermediating, balancing role. Party politics was highly ethnicized, although parties of different ethnicity regularly cooperated in forming governments.32 By the late 1920s, the resulting paralysis created an opening for a royal dictatorship: the country, renamed Yugoslavia, was reorganized into political units mostly named for rivers, in a bid to avoid ethnic identification. This plan in turn came under pressure from Croats who demanded and received the creation of an autonomous Croatian unit, the Banovina Hrvatska within Yugoslavia, in the agreement known as the Sporazum.33 This element of ethno-national political contestation within Royal Yugoslavia has been of direct relevance in trials at the ICTY, seen as a precursor or model for efforts to unify areas of Bosnia with Croatia.34
The ultimate viability of the first Yugoslavia is a speculative matter, because its efforts to achieve a stable equilibrium under Regent Paul were cut short by the Second World War. In April 1941, Germany and its allies invaded and occupied Yugoslavia, whose territory was divided into a welter of jurisdictions: a notionally independent Croatia, including most of today’s Croatia and Bosnia, and pieces accorded to Hungary, Bulgaria, Italian Albania (which absorbed Kosovo), and Italy itself, as well as areas under direct or indirect German administration, principally in Serbia proper.35
The Second World War itself is often thought to be consequential to the later dissolution of the second Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Two major movements arose in response to the occupation and division of the country: the Partisans, Communist in orientation and led by Josip Broz Tito, and the Chetniks, predominantly Serb Royalists. Under cover of resistance to German and Italian occupation, the two groups frequently fought each other in a conflict taking the character of a civil war.36 The scale of violence of these years was extraordinary, far outstripping the horrors of the 1990s; standard estimates place the death toll at over one million, with the majority of killings attributed to other Yugoslavs, rather than the occupying forces.37
The cataclysmic violence of the Second World War had undeniable ethno-national aspects—the killings of Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and others at the Jasenovac concentration camp were an expression of the fascist Croat state’s raison d’etre, for example38—but entered into postwar mythology as a pan-Yugoslav ideological liberation struggle. The role of the liberator was played by the Partisans, but those against whom the liberators had most often actually struggled were, of necessity, somewhat ambiguously defined—Nazis of course, and Chetniks, but not as visibly the many, many Yugoslavs who had taken no part in the popular liberation but had instead acquiesced or actively taken part in other political projects during the war.* Although this mythologizing policy was intended to reduce postwar tensions, for some observers its sublimation or suppression of memory contributed to the conflagration of the 1990s, or channeled its violence along particular paths.39†
The victors in the civil struggle during the Second World War were Tito’s Communist Partisans, and the state that was declared during the war and consolidated at its end has come to be known as the Second Yugoslavia, also called Socialist or Titoist Yugoslavia. Its formal name went through several changes, but eventually settled as the Socijalistička federativna republika Jugoslavija (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or SFRY). Its ideological slogan was bratstvo i jedinstvo (Brotherhood and Unity)—an aspiration that suggests both an intention to overcome the national divisions that plagued the first Yugoslavia and their very real continuity.40
Sources of Stability: Those inclined to see Yugoslavia as an impossible country must account for its survival over 45 years—certainly, there were considerable bases for stability within the SFRY.41 In its earliest years, the new rulers resorted to repression, terror, and violence, imprisoning opponents and waging campaigns of suppression against remnant rivals for power and the restive Albanian population in Kosovo, for example. But after the first years—and certainly after the fall of Tito’s internal security chief Aleksandar Ranković in 1966—such direct and violent repression was rarely practiced; political repression continued, as during the suppression of liberal and national elements in Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia in the early 1970s, but the authority and respect accorded the regime also drew on other sources.42
Following the break with Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1948, Yugoslavia charted an independent course as a nonaligned Communist country. This interstitial position gave the country considerable diplomatic leverage, from which flowed influence and, inconsistently, Western funding.43 The break with Stalin and the demographics of Yugoslavia also gave rise to a system of decentralized economic governance, known as socialist self-management, which represented a considerable innovation within Communist practice and became, arguably, a source of prosperity and stability for several decades.44 From the 1960s on, however, prosperity was increasingly financed by those foreign loans, as well as by remittances from the large number of Yugoslavs working in Western Europe.45
The basic structure of the Yugoslav political system was also, arguably, a source of stability during much of the Cold War. Yugoslavia was a federal state, with six republics and, within Serbia, two autonomous provinces, each represented in the federal legislative and executive organs. Initially, real power was highly centralized, but in the Savez komunista Jugoslavije (League of Communists of Yugoslavia or LCY) rather than state organs. Over time, and especially after the early 1960s, these state units received progressively more power from the center, so that by the promulgation of the 1974 Constitution, they were in fact highly autonomous.46 The progressive decentralization of the country—with ever more authority over political, economic, and social policy pushed down to the level of republics and provinces, to enterprises, and to the parties at republican and provincial levels—itself provided a measure of alleviation for those who might otherwise have been discomfited by the kind of centralized authority that marked much of the first, Serb-dominated Royal Yugoslavia.
The SFRY’s decentralized system ensured representation and protection for each unit—and through them, implicitly, for the national communities. The republics and provinces provided a secure administrative and political haven for members of titular nations—Slovenia for Slovenes, say, or Macedonia for Macedonians—and the two largest nationalities, the Albanians and Hungarians, in the two Serbian provinces. The rights and interests of members of nations (narodi) living outside their titular republic and of nationalities (narodnosti) were safeguarded against republican or national encroachment by the overarching federal institutions and the Party, as protectors of the coexistence principle. National identity was protected—one was free to identify as a Serb, Croat, or other recognized category on—and even encouraged—Macedonians and Bosnian Muslims were first recognized as nations under the SFRY—though also cabined within cultural and nonpolitical limits.47
The LCY served as an agent of control and mediation among these units, and of course Tito himself acted as arbiter. Tito possessed immense authority and prestige, and as the years passed acquired an almost supra-political status, allowing him to mediate disputes and guide the general direction of the country.48 During his lifetime, Tito exercised formal and factual authority, and under the last, 1974 Constitution, was identified as president for life. More generally, the Partisan legacy supplied a justificatory mythology for the state, as well as a cadre of ideologically aligned individuals to govern.
Sources of Instability: The Partisan legacy, the unique status of the SFRY in geopolitics, and the pervasive decentralization of the country’s economy and politics therefore had a stabilizing influence. Yet certain of these same factors appear, equally, to have served as destabilizing influences in the late Cold War environment: “The country’s complex system of shared sovereignties among levels of government and extensive economic democracy thus produced both centripetal and centrifugal tendencies.”49 That is to say, Yugoslavia did not collapse despite these factors, but in part because of them.
The 1974 Constitution had radically decentralized the state, pushing large elements of governance to the republics and provinces. The state retained some functions—including, critically, the Jugoslovenska narodna armija (Yugoslav People’s Army or JNA)—but even in security matters the republics and provinces took on a larger role through the system of teritorijalna odbrana (Territorial Defense or TO). The LCY itself decentralized power to the republican and provincial parties within an umbrella organization; those local parties increasingly identified with their own local governance structures, patronage networks, and economic priorities. Increasingly, republics and provinces were competing with each other—and their elites competed as republican and provincial elites, rather than as branches of an all-Yugoslav Communist party—and viewed control from Belgrade as a threat. These same disaggregated networks produced redundant and inefficient economies that were heavily reliant on debt financing and vulnerable to external economic shocks.
Thus the decentralization that had, in much of the postwar era, served to mitigate potential conflict itself became a source of instability, especially once efforts were undertaken to reassert central control. And, of course, although decentralization may have provided stability, the impulse to decentralize itself suggested something else: the subunits that were given power were proxies for separate national identities, some of which not long before had openly contested the sovereignty of a centralized state in the Western Balkans. Decentralization had been a response to an endemic challenge to the unity of Yugoslavia.
Finally, the Partisan legacy constituted a source of legitimacy that was, almost necessarily, bound to run out. Tito had begun his rule at the end of the Second World War as a middle-aged man, but by the 1970s he had withdrawn from active governance to attend to international affairs and personal ones. His authority was largely unquestioned but also—the worse for the country’s future—unquestionable. No successor of similar stature was available, and no one person could plausibly take his place—the key being, perhaps, that no one person could, and that thereafter governance, if it was to succeed, would have to be collective and cooperative. Whether Tito himself really was an essential source of support for the Yugoslav state, his death in 1980 provoked considerable anxiety about the future of the country—anxiety which itself indicates that the stability of the country was far from given even then.50
The Partisan generation itself was, by this time, thinning out, and younger, rising cadres—which included Milošević—did not have the same connections and understandings.51 They had grown up, not with Tito, but in his shadow, and in the decentralized society his system had devised, which, over time, directed their loyalties and their attention to the units of decentralization—the republics and provinces—and implicitly to the communities those units represented.
In certain respects, Communist Yugoslavia was a highly mutable political system, constantly revising and reinventing itself, progressively altering the terms of political trade between its layers and units. This can be read, of course, as a healthy and responsive dynamism, or a kind of quietly desperate improvisation, a means of waving off underlying and unresolved tensions. And, at the same time, we may observe certain features that did not change—the dominant role of the Communist party and with it the marginalization of openly nationalist politics—which suggests rigidity at the very points that, in the event and at the end, mattered most.52 For when the crisis came—either by happenstance or with tragic inevitability—it came through the triple challenges of economic distress, the collapse of Party authority, and the rise of nationalist alternatives; the Yugoslav state and society were not able to muster the flexibility to change further and survive.
The Milošević Prosecution chose to begin its account of Yugoslav history with the 1974 Constitution53—a plausible enough point (assuming one believes a trial should deal with history at all), as it was then that the system destroyed in the early 1990s was established. Which is to say, from that moment it became evident to observers that, once Tito died, the Yugoslav system would enter a period of changed and uncertain governance.
The particular form that governance took was a collective presidency, representing all of the federal units of the SFRY: the six republics, two autonomous provinces of Serbia, and the president of the LCY.54 Such an institution requires a considerable degree of cooperation to function. Decentralization had made cooperation far more difficult and far less attractive—much real power was now vested in the republics and provinces, and the federal government’s coordinating role was considerably attenuated. Tensions soon surfaced in ways that converted the stabilizers of the SFRY into drivers of crisis and dissolution, once the broader political and economic conditions in which the country existed changed.
Yugoslavia’s position as a communist country outside the Soviet orbit, which had afforded it so much traction with the West during the Cold War, became strategically less interesting with the decline in East–West tensions in the late 1980s. One consequence was that the economic model underpinning Yugoslavs’ living standards became increasingly difficult to finance. The loans that had floated the Yugoslav economy since the 1960s had piled up a burdensome foreign debt and given Western lending institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund or IMF, considerable leverage over questions of reform; when the IMF adopted a strategy of structural adjustment in the 1980s, it began to impose reform conditions on Yugoslavia that accelerated the political crisis.55 The economic crisis worsened considerably, with hyperinflation and difficulties in financing the country’s debt.56 Reforms that proposed recentralization of power not only challenged the autonomy and powers of the federal units as such, but also of the communities they represented. Thus, for example, the IMF’s demand for recentralization of economic and fiscal decision making—and proposals by Milošević himself, seen by the late 1980s as an economic reformer57—met with considerable resistance from wealthy and autonomous republics such as Croatia and Slovenia. Recentralization to the federal center became conflated with the other risks that, traditionally and logically, were associated with the center in Yugoslavia: dominance by Serbia.
Decentralization had also exacerbated ethnic and national tensions in a more direct fashion. With the 1974 Constitution, Kosovo had become an effectively fully autonomous federal unit—still a province within Serbia, but almost entirely self-governing with its own federal representation. The ethnic Albanian majority increasingly took over governance from the Serbs who had, in much of the postwar era, dominated the province.58 This change—against the historical backdrop of tense intercommunal relations, including the intergenerational memory of alternating periods of domination during the 20th century—was discomfiting to local Serbs, some of whom began to voice their grievances in nationalist terms that were also gaining increasing currency with Serb elites in Serbia proper59 Kosovar Albanians had themselves become more radical, with calls for republican status appearing during protests in 1981 that were violently suppressed.60 It had long been politically taboo to advance nationalist political projects—the policy of bratstvo i jedinstvo also implied sanctions for those who questioned the limits on national expression—but there were vocabularies in which such sentiments could be indirectly expressed; one form was to caution against another community’s dangerous nationalism in a defensive appeal. In the early post-Tito years, this convention still held, but was increasingly weakening, opening space for direct, vocal assertion of nationalist interests, both from outside the regime and within it.*
In 1986, a draft report by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences that itself expressed this new opening and further catalyzed it, was leaked to the media—whether intentionally or accidentally it is not clear. The SANU Memorandum, as it is known, painted a grave—from some perspectives hysterical—picture of repression of Kosovo’s Serb minority, and referred to the processes by which Albanians were taking control of the province as a “physical, political, legal and cultural genocide of the Serbian populations[.]”61 The release of the Memorandum was a shock to the increasingly threadbare conventions and complacency of post-Titoist society. It was roundly condemned by the Communist hierarchy—a leadership that now included Slobodan Milošević, the recently appointed head of the Serbian Communist Party.† It was also, of course, a concrete cause for concern in the other republics, now in economic duress and under pressure to repatriate power to Belgrade—to the center.
Milošević began to court nationalists, while maintaining strong credentials with the traditional Communist elites and with reformers. The ascent of Milošević and Serbian nationalism brought with it the political subordination of the two federal provinces within Serbia. In the so-called anti-bureaucratic revolutions, orchestrated by Belgrade, the provincial administrations in Vojvodina and Kosovo were replaced and coerced into surrendering their autonomy back to Serbia. Milošević asserted indirect control over Montenegro through similar means. In Kosovo, the suppression of provincial autonomy was expressly coercive, with military forces surrounding the provincial Parliament as it voted to abrogate its own autonomy.62 Albanian opposition, led by Ibrahim Rugova, adopted a strategy of pacifist rejectionism, holding an unofficial referendum to confirm the independence of Kosovo and developing a system of parallel institutions.63
The subordination of Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Montenegro had destabilizing consequences for the federal structure of the SFRY: The two provinces’ autonomy within Serbia was destroyed, but their position in the federal system was preserved, meaning that Milošević captured their seats on the presidency and in Parliament. Through them, together with his effective control of Montenegro, exercised through Momir Bulatović, Milošević had fully half the seats on the presidency. This presented a serious danger to the other republics’ interests and made any further federal recentralization—even of the most technical kind—difficult to distinguish from subordination to Serbia.
In turn, the other republics’ efforts to insulate themselves from this risk—including moves to assert their own sovereignty and ultimately independence—constituted a threat to Yugoslavia’s integrity, which threatened the interests of Serbs living in Bosnia and Croatia.64 Milošević’s position and appeal, after all, was not simply to Serbian nationalism but to Yugoslavism—it was this system that had provided a unified home for all Serbs and protected them within areas dominated by other communities. Milošević’s ability to control and dominate the JNA arose partly from his ability to appeal to its federal instincts, even as it was becoming, increasingly, an instrument of specifically Serb interests.65
Perhaps the final shock to the rigid and unresponsive system of late (really, post-) Titoism was the introduction of multiparty elections. The literature on democratization is rich, and debate over the benefits and risks of transitioning to a participatory, democratic electoral model wide-ranging.66 In Yugoslavia, the effect of elections appears to have been deeply destabilizing and was a direct contributor to the accelerated descent of the country into great violence.
In 1990, the LCY surrendered its political monopoly—not, however, as a unified and voluntary decision, but rather because of the party’s evisceration and fracturing along republican lines; at the final, 14th LCY congress in January 1990, the Slovenian and Croatian delegations walked out en masse after all of Slovenia’s proposals for reform and political autonomy were rejected by Milošević and his bloc.67 Many observers consider that the state effectively ceased to exist at this point. Nonetheless, this was in fact a time of considerable political ferment, and when multiparty elections were held in the various republics during 1990, they brought non-Communist nationalists (or newly converted former Communist advocates of autonomy and independence) to power.68 Political actors who were strongly opposed to any recentralization, or were openly nationalist, rose to prominence in the various republics, either within the Communist elites or on the outside. In Slovenia—where the highly homogeneous population made co-identification of republic and nation the least problematic of any in Yugoslavia—Communist officials, led by Milan Kučan, reconstituted themselves with little contradiction as defenders of Slovenian autonomy and then as post-Yugoslav Slovene national leaders. In Croatia, the new nationalist leadership was headed by Franjo Tuđman, once a Partisan general, who had apostasized to Croatian nationalism in the late 1960s and spent the intervening years sometimes in prison and always in the political wilderness. Tuđman’s Hrvatska demokratska zajednica (Croatian Democratic Union or HDZ) took power, and its moves to assert Croatian autonomy, including a new constitution that asserted a right of secession, were widely perceived by Croatian Serbs as threatening.69 In Bosnia, various figures arose to represent different nationalist constituencies, including Radovan Karadžić representing Serbs, and Alija Izetbegović representing Bosnian Muslims (or Bosniaks, as they soon came to be called). Three nationalist parties—representing Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats—shared victory and power, but from the outset were engaged in paralytic competition, as the terms of impending struggle, if not yet the fact of war, were clear to all.
Milošević, by this time already President of the Socialist Republic of Serbia—a position whose power was rapidly increasing with the collapse of Party hegemony—rebranded the League of Communists of Serbia as the Socialistička partija Srbije (Socialist Party of Serbia or SPS), and led it to victory; he became the president of the Republic of Serbia under a new constitution, which came to be known as the Milošević Constitution.70* Elections were the vehicle for Milošević—already the dominant political actor in Serbia—to reinvent himself: no longer a Communist apparatchik, but a populist, socialist, and nationalist political leader.
The first significant acts of violence—the kind that observers at the time clearly understood as signaling something far more dangerous than mere protests—occurred in the summer of 1990. In Serb-dominated areas in the interior of Croatia, known as the Krajina, local militia forces formed and blockaded roads, in what became known as the Log Revolution. Over time, these militias, which declared a Serbian autonomous region within Croatia, received increasingly direct support from the JNA and Belgrade, even as local Croatian police and security forces militarized.
By late 1990, the atmosphere was one of full political crisis. The federal prime minister, Ante Marković, had had some success with economic reforms, but the leading political institutions at the federal level barely functioned. In late 1990, Slovenia held a referendum on independence and sovereignty, and in May 1991 Croatia held an ambiguously worded referendum arguably contemplating independence.71 On June 25, 1991, both states declared independence.† The JNA proceeded to take control of Slovenia’s international frontiers, and Slovenian TO units resisted. With this, the first of the five wars of the Yugoslav dissolution began.
One of the great set-piece questions concerning the Yugoslav dissolution is whether the SFRY was a viable state or was bound to collapse—or at what point its dissolution became inevitable. It is a question that has affected the jurisprudence of the ICTY: Although the act of destroying a state, as such, finds no purchase in the ICTY’s jurisdiction, many of the theories adopted by the Prosecution, and accepted in the Tribunal’s jurisprudence, implicate broader political projects, such as the creation of a Greater Serbia or Greater Croatia.‡ The act of proving senior leaders’ legal responsibility for atrocities has gone hand in hand with claims that they engineered the initial resort to violence, which itself was also not a crime the Tribunal could adjudicate.§ In Milošević, as we will see, the Prosecution’s chosen theory of liability required it to make an argument about the political purposes of the killings and crimes during the wars that was difficult to distinguish from a critique of the wars’ instigation itself. In this sense, the viability of the state—and the causes of its collapse—was as much of interest to the partisans of various parties arrayed at The Hague as in the former Yugoslavia itself.
After 10 days of desultory fighting, the JNA forces withdrew from Slovenia. There has been considerable speculation about this decision:73 Slovenes’ resistance was perhaps greater than expected, but equally, the JNA’s efforts were less than one might have expected of a military committed to the territorial integrity of its state. Milošević—who at one point had aspirations to become the strongman of all Yugoslavia—appears to have decided to focus his efforts on the core of republics in which his most reliable supporters lived and had national interests, rather than in peripheral areas such as Slovenia in which there were no significant Serb communities;74 the abandonment of Slovenia certainly was consistent with the realignment of the JNA, and Milošević, around Serbian nationalism.
With the successful withdrawal of Slovenia, it was clear that Croatia—already well down the same path—would not be easily deterred from independence, which the large Serb minority there perceived as an urgent and existential threat. That summer, then, a far more violent conflict broke out in Croatia, with active intervention by the JNA—whose actions in the very earliest phases appeared aimed at maintaining order and defending Serb interests, but soon morphed into open action to ensure control by Serb forces. Unlike the short conflict in Slovenia, the struggle in Croatia was protracted and violent, with massed military formations, sieges of large cities, atrocities, and concentration camps. The JNA possessed vastly superior weaponry, but had difficulty mobilizing effective and motivated units; the Croatian forces had materiel as well, especially after they successfully seized JNA depots inside Croatian territory, and garnered considerable diplomatic support from the international condemnation of Serb sieges at Dubrovnik, Vukovar, and Osijek, which included massacres of civilians. By January 1992, with the fall of Vukovar but also some Croatian successes, the frontlines had stabilized; Serb forces controlled several areas together constituting nearly one-third of Croatia, on which they formed the Republika Srpska Krajina (Serbian Republic of Krajina or RSK).75 A United Nations Protection Force, or UNPROFOR, established in February, was interposed between Croatian and RSK positions.76 The JNA withdrew from most areas, but continued to supply the Srpska Vojska Krajine (Serbian Army of the Krajina or SVK). Many European states recognized Croatia’s independence starting in December 1991.*
Just as the implications of Slovenia’s withdrawal for Croatia were apparent to all parties, so the deepening crisis in Croatia presented an obvious danger in Bosnia. Bosniaks and Croats were increasingly concerned about the prospect of remaining in a smaller Yugoslavia dominated by Milošević’s Serbia. At the same time, Bosnia’s Serbs—much like their co-ethnics in Croatia—were concerned by the prospect of losing the protection of the overarching Yugoslav state. Croatia, meanwhile, had an interest in the Croat-populated areas of Bosnia, and indeed Tuđman and Milošević held a series of meetings in 1991 during which they discussed the possibility of partitioning Bosnia—discussions that later proved significant for the Prosecution’s accusation that Milošević was involved in a JCE to create a Greater Serbia.* The departure of Croatia—and the evident determination of Belgrade to oppose this move militarily—signaled to all observers that conflict in Bosnia was likely.
Bosnia’s coalition—composed of the three leading nationalist parties—was increasingly unable to act. Bosniak and Croat leaders looked to assert the republic’s sovereignty and its right to exit from a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia; Serbs, led by Radovan Karadžić, warned that Serbs would not be made to leave their common state, and efforts to take Bosnia out of Yugoslavia would lead to war. Parties on each side were preparing for political division and conflict, though in very different ways: Bosniaks and Croats moved toward withdrawal from Yugoslavia—in late January 1992, the Bosnian Assembly, without the participation of its Serb members, withdrew from all participation in federal institutions and announced an independence referendum; they also prepared militarily, although the Bosniaks, led by Izetbegović, continued to rely on the JNA’s (now implausible) neutrality and consequently made fewer efforts. Serb communities organized a series of parallel autonomous provinces and so-called crisis staffs, some of which received weaponry from the JNA, which coordinated increasingly closely with the Bosnian Serb leadership.77 Serbs had organized a referendum in November 1991 demanding to remain part of Yugoslavia or become independent, and in early January 1992, the self-organized Assembly of Serbian People of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared a Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which anticipated control over wide areas of Bosnia, including areas in which Serbs were a minority.78 These moves—preparatory, anticipatory, preventative—generally predated the crimes that the ICTY later charged against members of the Serb leadership, but were critical to the main causal and intentional narrative of the Prosecution’s cases, which in this sense conflated the decision for war and the conduct of that war.
There were significant episodes of violence during the early months of 1992, and clear preparations for conflict, but unlike in Croatia—where the descent into war was more gradual—full-scale fighting broke out rapidly in Bosnia following a series of political and diplomatic moves. In January, the European Community’s Badinter Arbitration Commission had called for Bosnia to demonstrate, through a referendum, that there was popular will for independence.79 In the referendum, held in February and March 1992, an overwhelming majority of votes cast supported independence—but the vast majority of Serbs boycotted the vote.80 Bosnia formally withdrew from the SFRY in early March 1992; sporadic fighting—and preparations—intensified throughout that month. Open warfare broke out in early April on the day the E.C. recognized Bosnia’s independence:* JNA—effectively Serb—forces besieged Sarajevo and rapidly took control of a majority of Bosnia’s territory. Bosnian government forces—at this point still consisting of representatives of all ethnic communities, though predominantly Bosniak—held central Sarajevo, much of the middle and west of the country, and what became isolated Bosniak enclaves in the east, near the Drina.81
Both Bosniaks and Croats had voted in the referendum in favor of departing a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, but this hardly implied an identity of interests; for many Croats, especially those in ethnically highly homogenous areas of Herzegovina, exit meant union with Croatia. In 1993, the uneasy coalition between Bosniaks aligned with the recognized Bosnian government and Croats aligned with the self-declared Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna collapsed completely, and exceptionally vicious fighting broke out between them in Herzegovina and central Bosnia, even as fighting continued with Serb forces elsewhere. The main Herzegovinian town of Mostar was divided, and several Croat enclaves formed within Bosniak-held areas; fighting there was intense, and several of the most prominent trials at the ICTY focused on events in these areas.82 Most Croat-held territory was contiguous with Croatia, however, which both supplied Herceg-Bosna and exercised effective control over it. By contrast, Bosniak territory was broken into discontiguous, besieged enclaves with tenuous supply lines; at the nadir of their fortunes, Bosniak forces held just 10 percent of Bosnia’s territory.
The early stages of the war—in 1992 between the JNA with its Serb allies and the Bosniak and Croat forces, and in mid-1993 between Bosniaks and Croats—were the most violent and destructive.83 Sarajevo was immediately surrounded and besieged by the JNA and then by the new Bosnian Serb army, the Vojska Republike Srpske (Army of Republika Srpska or VRS), and subjected to sustained shelling and sniping that took thousands of lives and reduced the population to desperate material circumstances. In time, however, many of the frontlines became relatively static, holding until 1995. The siege of Sarajevo continued until nearly the end of the war, and the city became a focal point for international attention, including both humanitarian aid and, later in the war, efforts to redress the military imbalance by pressuring the Serbs to withdraw their heavy artillery from the siege zone.84 Sarajevo and five other areas in which Bosniak forces and civilian populations were surrounded by Serb forces were declared UN safe areas, remaining besieged until July 1995, when two of them, Srebrenica and Žepa, were overrun.85
Considerable debate surrounds the war aims of the various parties—debates that proved central to the competing theories advanced in Milošević about the relationships among various Serb forces.* There were relatively few areas in which the warring parties took or held territory to which their ethnic communities had no prior relationship. This does not mean they were the exclusive or even majority populations in those areas; in the Drina valley in particular, large areas that came under Serb control had had Bosniak majorities. Nor does it mean they did not try to go further: Serb attacks on coastal areas of Croatia often reached far beyond areas of Serb settlement. The point, rather, is that there were few areas over which a given side gained control that had not had a significant population from that side prior to the war.†
The territorial dispensation during the war—quite apart from being only a function of relative military success—was therefore consistent with various purposive theories: a war to consolidate and control territory already populated by the nation, a self-protective war in which success in holding ground roughly tracked with demographic dominance, or a war of conquest that only came to a halt in the face of other communities’ self-protective resistance.86 In later advancing its claims about the aims of the various parties, especially Croat defendants and those involved in a Greater Serbian JCE with Milošević, the Prosecution was inevitably choosing among these interpretations, some of which were about purposes of fighting rather than the criminal means by which those purposes were accomplished.
The stabilization of the front lines—including the seeming reluctance of the VRS to actually take Sarajevo—tends to counsel against viewing the Bosnian and Croatian wars as ones of conquest simpliciter. Certainly the Prosecution’s own predominant theory—that Milošević and his compatriots were involved in a JCE to create and maintain a single state in which all Serbs would live—necessarily was premised on a belief (if one which the Prosecution itself did not acknowledge) that the Serb war aims were self-limiting, having as their object the consolidation of territories that could have been drawn in advance by anyone with a suitably accurate map of Yugoslavia’s demography and a particular sense of history.‡
But whatever the aims and the dispensations of territory, they were achieved during and through profound violence. It was this violence that prompted and justified the work of the Tribunal, and in turn caused the Tribunal to delve, imperfectly, into the origins and purposes of the conflict. All wars have their own patterns of violence—indeed the wars in Bosnia and Croatia were themselves often highly localized, with different modes of fighting and atrocity—but the signal crimes of the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts were very much of a piece: the concentration camps, deportations, rapes and killings that together came to be known as ethnic cleansing.87
Thus in eastern Croatia in late 1991, ethnically mixed areas of Slavonia were rapidly homogenized by both the general fighting and specifically targeted atrocities, often committed by roving paramilitaries. In eastern Bosnia, along the Drina, Bosnian Muslims who constituted majorities or lived in highly mixed communities were violently driven from their homes by Serb paramilitaries, using demonstration killings and rapes to encourage their departure; in Višegrad, Bosniaks were executed and thrown from the historic Ottoman bridge into the Drina.88 In the struggle in central Bosnia, Croats and Bosniaks engaged in raids and counter-raids, aiming to establish zones of dominance. In the Lašva Valley, for example, Croat forces conducted raids, accompanied by sustained shelling, during which massacres were then frequently carried out, with the remaining population fleeing or being driven out.89 Generally, ethnic cleansing targeted not only the physical presence of heterogenous populations, but marks of cultural identity, such as religious structures.90
Populations were not always immediately expelled; in many cases, after control was established the nondominant communities were subjected to regimes of persecution. Parts of the community—usually males of fighting age (generously defined), but sometimes also women—were incarcerated. Notionally these were containment camps, but in practice many were places of torture and execution. Camps were established by all three parties—the Čelebići trial, for example, focused on a camp run by Bosniak and Croat forces—but by far the largest number of camps, and the most notorious, were established by Serb forces. The first trial held by the ICTY, Tadić, involved a Serb guard active at several camps near Prijedor, and there were many more such trials.91 Similarly, the broader campaign of ethnic cleansing was clearly most intensive and violent in areas under Serb control, though there were also clear and highly effective acts of ethnic cleansing by Croats and Bosniaks, and it is true that, by war’s end, areas under the control of all three warring parties had been comprehensively homogenized.
In explaining these patterns of violence, some have pointed to the particular qualities of the combatants—different levels of civilization or traditions of tolerance92—but a more realistic rationale can be found in the political logic driving the violence: The Serbian nationalist project, which sought to preserve a maximally imagined Serb-populated territory within one state, perceived the presence of other populations as a threat to that project—accurately, we might note, given the determination of Croatia and the other two constituent nations in Bosnia to withdraw from the common Yugoslav state. By contrast, Croat and especially Bosniak positions were premised on withdrawal and drew on considerably weaker material and military resources—and were reliant on international support. This is not to approve the methods by which these political programs were undertaken, only to note that they followed a certain logic, much as any political program that involves great violence does. Indeed, to suppose otherwise would be to say something entirely different about the nature of the violence that did occur, and therefore about responsibility for it; certainly, in Milošević, the Prosecution’s theory of Greater Serbia and the Accused’s defense of Serbs’ role in the wars each inevitably implicated a claim about the logic of what had happened—that it was not primordial or atavistic, but rational.
The general pattern of these practices—the visitation of terror on towns and villages, and the systematic confinement and torture of large groups—quickly became well-known and was thoroughly documented by human rights groups and, later, by the Tribunal. However, the precise relationship of this pattern to higher leadership in Knin, Pale or in Belgrade—the question with which Milošević’s trial was concerned—was by its nature more complex and contested.
JNA forces fought openly in the early stages of the war, but—in part bowing to the legal and political logic that attached to Bosnia’s independence and recognition at the UN—withdrew in May 1992. Large amounts of materiel and personnel were left behind and reconstituted as the VRS. Throughout the war, the VRS continued to receive significant and sustained financial, logistical, and operational support from the JNA and its successor, the Vojska Jugoslavije (Army of Yugoslavia or VJ), but—in contradistinction to the later events in Kosovo—the claim that Milošević was criminally responsible for actions committed by the VRS required a more difficult level of proof, because he had no de jure authority over these forces, and his responsibility required a much more complex showing that he had de facto authority over them—something that would necessarily need to be demonstrated across repeated moments in the long conflict. VJ units occasionally fought inside Bosnia as well, as did elements of the state security branch of Serbia’s Ministarstvo unutrašnjih poslova (Ministry of Internal Affairs or MUP). The involvement of these units in Bosnia, as well as the measure of control the VJ exercised over the VRS, presented one of the key opportunities for the Prosecution to make a case for Milošević’s direct, formal control over actors and events there.
Irregular and paramilitary units were particularly essential to the ethnic cleansing operations. In addition to local militias, there were also, especially in Eastern Slavonia and eastern Bosnia, sizable paramilitary forces identified with particular commanders—such as Arkan’s Tigers or the Škorpioni, who were involved in the killings at Srebrenica. In the early stages of the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia, some of these groups operated with considerable (or apparently considerable) autonomy. Other paramilitaries were incorporated more directly into the Serbian security services, constituting specialized units within the state security half of the MUP—the Jedinica za specijalne operacije (Special Operations Unit or JSO, also known as the Crvene Beretke or Red Berets), for example, partly incorporated Arkan’s previously autonomous forces, but under the control of Serbian state officials who were identified as part of the JCE with Milošević. Just as with the VRS, to which Milošević had no de jure connections, the problem of linking these complex, interrelated but also sometimes minimally controlled forces to each other and to higher levels of leadership was an interpretive challenge that was essential to the kinds of claims made in Milošević.*
Western powers were closely involved in the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts from the beginning through diplomacy, sanctions, and later, military intervention.93† The European Community established guidelines for recognizing new states, and the Conference on Yugoslavia and various mediators—Carrington, Stoltenberg, Vance, Owen—repeatedly attempted to negotiate peace. Along with the other main leaders—Izetbegović, Tuđman, Karadžić—Milošević was involved in several of these meetings, which were variously held in Geneva, New York, and other places. In one notable incident, after a summit in Athens, Milošević attended a meeting of the assembled Bosnian Serb leadership in Pale to support the recently concluded peace plan, but was rebuffed, along with the plan.94 Incidents such as this later complicated the Prosecution’s efforts to demonstrate Milošević’s effective authority over the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs for the duration of the wars.
After fighting broke out in Bosnia, the UNPROFOR mission—already positioned as a tripwire in Croatia—was reconfigured as a peacekeeping force in the Bosnian conflict. UNPROFOR in Bosnia lacked the kind of robust mandate, armaments, and political support that might have allowed it to actually constrain the fighting. On several occasions, UNPROFOR forces were taken hostage by VRS units and used as bargaining chips, especially as NATO—whose members Britain and France had the most significant contingents in UNPROFOR—became more directly involved.95
Over time U.S. involvement—which early on had conceded the predominant role to European powers—became more intense, leading to rapprochement between the Croat and Bosniak forces under the Washington Agreement in 1994. After this, the terms of combat turned against the previously dominant Serb forces, which began to lose ground. In May 1995, Croatian forces retook Western Slavonia in Operation Bljesak (Flash), followed in August by the much larger Operation Oluja (Storm) that retook the entire Krajina, from which the Serb population fled. Operations continued into neighboring Bosnia, and in short order combined Croatian, Bosnian Croat, and Bosniak forces had seized much of western Bosnia and were threatening the Bosnian Serb center at Banja Luka.
In the meantime, in July 1995, Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić seized two of the three Bosniak enclaves in the Drina valley; in Srebrenica, the VRS separated women and children, then detained or hunted down the male population and killed them, more than seven thousand, in the single act from Bosnia that the ICTY has judged to be genocide. In July 1995, the ICTY issued indictments against Mladić and Karadžić for crimes relating to the siege of Sarajevo, and in November, for Srebrenica.96 Later, Milošević would be indicted on very similar charges, but this did not happen until 2001, after he was already in the Tribunal’s custody for the Kosovo indictment.
By late 1995, however, Milošević was increasingly central to diplomatic efforts to end the wars. In November 1995, Milošević, Tuđman, and Izetbegović met in Dayton, Ohio, to negotiate a final settlement for the Bosnian conflict, which was signed in December in Paris. In August Milošević had secured authority to negotiate on behalf of the Bosnian Serb leadership, which was excluded from the conference. The Dayton Accords concluded the conflict, provided for the deployment of a very large NATO-led force, initially called the Implementation Force or IFOR, and created an extraordinarily confederalized Bosnian state.97 The contours of a settlement in Croatia had been largely determined by the overwhelming victory of Croatian forces; only part of Eastern Slavonia, along the frontier with Serbia, remained in Serb hands, and that territory was transferred to the United Nations Transitional Authority for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja, and Western Sirmium (UNTAES) in anticipation of eventual reincorporation into Croatia.98
One of the forms that outside intervention took was the establishment of a Commission of Experts to investigate war crimes,* followed, in 1993, by the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. At the time, these measures were seen, plausibly, as motivated at least in part by a desire on the part of the major European powers and the Security Council not to do more—not to risk more extensive military intervention.99 The Tribunal is discussed in the next chapter.
Kosovo was the region whose troubles paved Milošević’s path to power, and in which the contours of the Yugoslav dissolution first appeared; many observers had thought it would also be the first to erupt in violence. In the event, Kosovo remained tense but quiescent throughout the wars of the early 1990s. With the conclusion of peace at Dayton, however, and the consequent realization that their concerns had been excluded from the negotiations, Kosovar Albanians became more radicalized. In 1996, the first armed units of the Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës (Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA or UÇK) appeared. By late 1997, large areas of the province were intermittently controlled by the KLA, and Serbian security forces were deployed in active efforts to suppress the guerilla movement.
In contrast to their earlier equivocation in Bosnia, the major Western powers acted resolutely, even aggressively. The United States in particular was actively engaged in diplomatic efforts to forge a resolution to the conflict. In late 1998, NATO reached the brink of military intervention, issuing the first activation order in the history of the alliance, but pulled back after a ceasefire was agreed, with the insertion of international monitors called the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM). Both Serbian forces and the KLA used this period to regroup, however, and after a particularly brutal and well-publicized massacre in the village of Račak (Reçak) in January and the failure of negotiations in Rambouillet, NATO began aerial bombardment throughout Serbia on 24 March 1999.†
A few hundred thousand Kosovar Albanians had already fled across the frontiers or been internally displaced, but immediately after the start of NATO’s campaign Serbian forces dramatically escalated their efforts. In the course of the conflict, Serbian forces killed about 6,200 Kosovar Albanians and expelled some 750,000 across the borders, with the most intense displacements occurring in the first weeks of the air war.101 Hundreds of thousands of other Albanians were internally displaced within Kosovo, having either fled their homes or been driven out by Serb forces.102 As in Croatia and Bosnia before, a typical pattern of violence appeared. Combined military and police or irregular forces would surround a village and shell it, then round up the population and, after taking their identity documents, drive them toward the frontiers. Large populations were also deported from Pristina on buses or trains.103
During this period, NATO’s bombing campaign intensified. The bombing, which progressively targeted military and communications targets throughout Serbia, killed some five hundred civilians and caused widespread damage to infrastructure.104 KLA forces also remained active. During his trial, Milošević claimed that Kosovar Albanians were fleeing the bombing, but witnesses in the trial—and refugees interviewed at the time—reported otherwise.105
Two months into the air war, the ICTY Prosecution issued the Kosovo indictment against Milošević and four other leading figures in the FRY and Serbia.106 A few weeks later, following negotiations with Russian and Finnish envoys, Milošević agreed to a settlement. A Military Technical Agreement was signed at Kumanovo in Macedonia, providing for the withdrawal of Serbian military and police forces and the insertion of a large NATO force, the Kosovo Force or KFOR, into Kosovo.107 Russian forces stationed in Bosnia made a rapid move through Serbia—with the enthusiastic support of Belgrade and most Serbs—and took up positions in Kosovo, an implicit counterweight to NATO and defender of the Serb population, which at war’s end remained in small enclaves throughout the territory and in a large area north of the Ibar River, including half of Kosovska Mitrovica (Mitrovica).
The Chief Prosecutor, Louise Arbour, ordered an internal inquiry into NATO’s actions that was completed under her successor, Carla Del Ponte; this inquiry—which in an unprecedented move was made public—recommended against any investigation of NATO for any actions in the war.108 Later, the ICTY issued further indictments for other senior Serbs involved in Kosovo, as well as indictments against members of the KLA.109
Throughout the 1990s, Macedonia had avoided the conflicts that ravaged several other former republics, but tensions between its ethnic Macedonian and Albanian communities were high. A concern with the internal fragility of Macedonia and with the risk of violence from Serbia led to the deployment of a peacekeeping force—originally drawn from UNPROFOR, later renamed United Nations Preventive Deployment Force or UNPREDEP—which has been widely viewed as a rare successful example of preemptive action.110 UNPREDEP remained in place through the early and mid-1990s, but in early 1999, China vetoed the renewal of its mandate in retaliation for Macedonia’s recognition of Taiwan. The subsequent resolution of the Kosovo conflict also placed former KLA men and arms at the disposal of the newly formed Ushtria Çlirimtare Kombëtare (National Liberation Army, NLA or UÇK), and the uneasy peace broke down in 2001. The conflict was brief and a peace deal was quickly brokered. The ICTY issued a small number of indictments for this, the last significant conflict of the Yugoslav wars.111
The Tribunal is concerned only with a defined set of crimes that occurred during the wars in the former Yugoslavia; none of its indictments concern any events after the Macedonian conflict of 2001;* Milošević himself was charged with crimes committed between 1991 and 1999. The subsequent period is of interest, however, because it is the context against which the Milošević trial itself and the work of the Tribunal played out. The trial was experienced in real time, as it unfolded, and was both influenced by events in the region—political changes that made states more or less cooperative with the Tribunal, for example—and, perhaps, influenced those events.† Moreover, many claims have been made for the social and political effects of the Tribunal—for its potential to promote reconciliation or the rule of law, for example—which would necessarily have materialized, if at all, during the period since the wars ended.
With the end of the Kosovo conflict and the rapid suppression of incipient war in Macedonia, the wars that began in 1991 appear to have reached their conclusion—though that is a prediction whose optimism may look foolish in a few years—and a period of peace and considerably greater stability began.
Slovenia, always the wealthiest member of the SFRY, with the least contested frontiers and most homogenous population, had in many respects the least troubled transition. During the 1990s, while its neighbors were convulsed by war or economic sanctions, Slovenia was already consolidating its post-Yugoslav position and moving rapidly toward integration with the European Union, joining in 2004—fewer than three years after the last regional war had ended. Indeed, although Slovene businesses are well integrated into the region and its diplomacy active, so comprehensive has the shift in fortunes been that Slovenia is no longer conventionally identified as part of the same geographic region—the Western Balkans—as the other former republics of the SFRY.
Croatia completed the formal consolidation of its territory in January 1998, with the reintegration of Eastern Slavonia. Its postwar demography is radically altered: With the departure of most of its prewar Serb minority and an influx of Croats from Bosnia and Serbia,112 it is now highly homogenous. The wartime dominance of Tuđman’s HDZ persisted until 2000, when it was replaced by a center-left coalition. Tuđman himself died in 1999; he was never indicted by the ICTY though it was revealed that he had been the object of investigation, and that a proposed indictment of him had been rejected in an internal review; in later cases Tuđman was named as an unindicted co-perpetrator.113 Under Tuđman, Croatia frequently had a combative relationship with the ICTY. Later Croatia began to cooperate more fully; even so, the ICTY’s prosecution of prominent generals, such as Tihomir Blaškić and Ante Gotovina, produced a strongly negative reaction in large segments of the Croatian public, and the broader narrative of the Domovinski rat or Homeland War as a patriotic and national liberation has largely been insulated from the negative implications of individual convictions.114* Although it suffered severe economic dislocation during the war and after, Croatia has successfully made a number of economic and structural reforms, and became a member of the EU in July 2013.
Dayton Bosnia: Nowhere in the former Yugoslavia was the fighting as intense, sustained, and comprehensive as in Bosnia. Most of its territory was the scene of fighting at some point in the war, and the levels of death and displacement—one hundred thousand people killed, and perhaps half of the total population displaced115—were similarly greater, though this is only a relative difference. Most critically, the ethnic separation of the population—which had been among the most mixed in the former Yugoslavia—was thoroughgoing, such that at war’s end there was near total homogeneity in the zones controlled by the three warring parties.†
At war’s end, with the agreement at Dayton, Bosnia was recognized as a single state, but an extraordinarily decentralized one. The country is divided into two entities: one, the Republika Srpska, is a centralized quasi-state dominated by Serbs. The other, the Federation (itself a product of the wartime Bosniak–Croat alliance) is further decentralized into cantons—some of which are dominated by Croats, others by Bosniaks, with a few that are mixed—that exercise most of the power. Bosnia’s central government has very few and very limited powers, and most of those are subject to veto mechanisms designed to defend the interests of the entities or of the three constituent nations.116
This extreme decentralization has been considerably counterbalanced by a sustained international intervention. Bosnia’s constitution is actually an annex of the Dayton Accords negotiated by the United States, Milošević, Tuđman, and Izetbegović. The Office of the High Representative, or OHR—also a creature of Dayton—was given plenipotentiary power to govern the country. Over time, the international oversight mechanisms established at Dayton took a more direct role in the governance of Bosnia, producing significant measures of integration, such as the introduction of a common currency and phone system, and unification of the armed forces. The OHR has also been instrumental in such gestures toward acknowledgment and reconciliation as have occurred in Bosnia.‡
Under sustained international pressure, a significant number of displaced persons have returned as well, most notably during the years between 2000 and 2004. Estimates place the total number of returns at over one million, of which some four hundred thousand are so-called minority returns—individuals who returned to areas controlled by one of the other nations. The demography of return is complex, however, Many returns counted by UNHCR were transitory in nature; the success of return efforts were in part due to a shift in focus from actual return to the reclaiming of property, which was often sold on. Many of the actual returns that have occurred have been to areas along the Inter-Entity Boundary Line or to relatively isolated communities, whereas returns to urban areas have been rarer.117
These institutions of international governance have themselves been subject to considerable criticism on the grounds that they override democratic mechanisms; the Dayton framework as a whole has been criticized for entrenching or even reifying ethnic difference,118 though it is probably more accurate to say that it has failed to counter ethnic divisions that had been made overwhelmingly salient by the events of the war. There have been numerous attempts at constitutional reform in Bosnia—aiming both to reduce the role of ethnicity in the governance structure and to remove the international protectorate—but none have been successful. The influence of the wartime leadership has waned considerably due to death, incarceration (for prominent Bosnian Serbs such as Karadžić and Mladić), or international pressure, but the parties and actors replacing them are not necessarily less nationalist. In many respects, one project for which Milošević and his associates were charged—the creation of an ethnically pure Serb state on the territory of Bosnia—was successfully realized.119
Kosovo: At the end of the war in 1999, the displaced Kosovar Albanians rapidly returned; there was a brief surge of violence against Serbs and Roma, and large parts of the Serb population fled or resettled in the north of the province; although the north is now by far the largest single Serb settlement and the only significant urban population, sizable communities have remained in enclaves in the south, and constitute the majority of the remaining Serb population.
The Security Council had not approved NATO’s use of force in Kosovo, but shortly after the cessation of hostilities, the Council passed Resolution 1244, recognizing KFOR’s presence and establishing a UN administration for the province, the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK).120 Initially, UNMIK sought to promote a process called “standards before status,” aimed at ensuring functioning, rights-respecting governance before deciding on the province’s future, but in 2004 major riots broke out across Kosovo, prompting abandonment of efforts to normalize the situation prior to a final settlement.121 Several years of fruitless negotiations followed, at the end of which UN Envoy Martti Ahtisaari proposed a plan for independence with highly decentralized governance, strong minority protections, and continued international supervision. In 2008, Kosovo’s provisional Assembly and president issued a unilateral declaration of independence; many countries rapidly recognized the new state, but Serbia and its supporters, notably Russia, have adamantly resisted.122 Kosovo’s independence is now an established fact, although it is equally true that the new state does not control the Serb-populated north, which Belgrade continues to subsidize. The 2013 agreement between Serbia and Kosovo, brokered under EU auspices, which transfers some responsibilities to Pristina and incorporates northern Serb institutions into the Kosovar state, has not been accepted in the Kosovo Serb north itself, and has not significantly altered the division of the territory, at least as yet.*
Serbia, the largest unit in the former Yugoslavia and the overwhelmingly dominant partner in the FRY, remained under Milošević after the conclusion of the war in Kosovo, but his rule was increasingly challenged. The opposition—long feckless and divided—unified around a single candidate, Vojislav Koštunica, and in late 2000, the opposition coalition defeated Milošević in a direct presidential election. Sustained protests culminated on 5 October—a date that has entered Serbian parlance—compelling Milošević to concede defeat and resign.†
The opposition took power, headed by Koštunica at the federal level, and by Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić for Serbia. Koštunica and Đinđić were frequently at odds about the direction of post-Milošević Serbia—Koštunica, though an opponent of Milošević, was himself a committed nationalist, Đinđić less so and more willing to undertake reforms after the transfer of power; they also disagreed on sending Milošević to The Hague.‡ The security services, which had switched their allegiance at a critical moment during the protests, retained considerable power in post-Milošević Serbia, but after elements of the JSO assassinated Đinđić in 2003 (partly because of his willingness to cooperate with the ICTY), their power was broken.§
The end of Milošević’s regime also accelerated the dissolution of the FRY. Montenegro, long the junior republic in the FRY and a loyal subordinate of Serbia in the early years of the conflict, had gradually moved out of Belgrade’s orbit under Milo Đukanović. By the time of the Kosovo conflict, Montenegro, though still a republic in the FRY, was effectively neutral. Đukanović, then Montenegro’s president, was no longer attending meetings of the Vrhovni savet odbrane (Supreme Defense Council or VSO), for example.123 In 2003, a new federal arrangement was agreed, called the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, which included provisions for an independence referendum. In 2006, Montenegro declared independence; all federal institutions of the FRY were dissolved, and Serbia reorganized itself as a fully sovereign state.
Sanctions against the FRY were progressively lifted, although a different form of external pressure—conditionality for accession to the European Union—appears to have successfully moved the Serbian government toward greater cooperation with the Tribunal, including the arrests of Karadžić in 2008 and Mladić in 2011.124 The key geopolitical and constitutional challenge in Serbia, however, remains the status of Kosovo: At all points, Serbia has maintained its claim to sovereignty, and no political actor has been willing to concede the loss of the province.
Macedonia under Ohrid: Following the brief conflict, representatives of the two communities—ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians—agreed, under considerable international pressure, to a decentralizing arrangement called the Ohrid Agreement, which greatly expanded Albanians’ access to control over education and governance in areas they inhabited. Relations between the communities remain quite distant, although governments have tended to be combinations of Macedonian and Albanian parties. Macedonia became a candidate for accession to the European Union in 2005. The country’s diplomatic position has remained somewhat tenuous, however, in part because of a continuing dispute with Greece over the country’s name that has kept it from full membership or participation in various international fora.
The ICTY (with which the next chapter is concerned) is not the only judicial mechanism designed to respond to the atrocities of the Yugoslav wars, and its jurisprudence has in some cases interacted with and affected those other judicial efforts to regulate or evaluate the effects of the Yugoslav crisis. There have also been several significant cases at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The most consequential, especially from the perspective of the Milošević trial, was the genocide case filed against Serbia by Bosnia.125 The Bosnian Genocide case, first filed in 1993, was finally decided in 2007. It accused the FRY—later, Serbia—of violating the Genocide Convention, including committing or aiding and abetting genocide in Bosnia. Given that the decision came less than a year after Milošević’s death, the case was seen as a real and symbolic opportunity to vindicate claims that would not be adjudicated in Milošević.
But the case was consequential long before it was known that Milošević’s trial would not reach judgment. Indeed, in certain respects, the case was, potentially, far more important for Serbia and Bosnia than was Milošević or, indeed, any trial at the ICTY. The ICJ’s cases concern state, rather than individual, responsibility, and in theory the Court could have ordered Serbia to make extensive and onerous reparations of various kinds.126 In addition, a finding that Serbia was responsible for genocide would have been deeply embarrassing and delegitimizing. Certainly, one political aim that many Bosniaks attached to the case was the delegitimization of the Republika Srpska as an entity created by genocidal means.*
It is in part for these reasons that Serbia so assiduously resisted the release of the minutes of the VSO, documents that the ICTY Prosecution had subpoenaed for use in Milošević. Although notionally it had an absolute obligation to cooperate with the Tribunal, Serbia demanded that the documents be redacted and that any further dissemination be prohibited. Because of these restrictions, in which the Prosecution and Chamber ultimately acquiesced, the ICTY did not hand the documents over to the ICJ for use in Bosnian Genocide.†
In its decision, the ICJ found that Serbia had violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention, but only with reference to the obligation to prevent and punish: The Court accepted that genocide had been committed at Srebrenica by elements of the VRS—consistent with the ICTY’s jurisprudence—but did not find that Serbia itself was directly responsible for genocide.‡
After the ICJ issued its decision, many observers criticized the Court for reaching its conclusion without more robustly engaging the available evidence—in particular, the VSO documents. Redacted versions have been made public, but naturally it is precisely the redacted portions that occasion the greatest interest. Of course, without their full release, it is impossible to say with confidence what the VSO documents would reveal about Milošević’s or Serbia’s responsibility. But in the event, a case that many hoped would provide a kind of objective imprimatur for a shared truth has evidently contributed little to that aim.127
Several other cases before the ICJ arose out of the Kosovo conflict. While the Kosovo war was ongoing, the FRY filed claims against various members of NATO for alleged violations of international law arising out of the bombing campaign. The ICJ ultimately dismissed all the cases on jurisdictional grounds.128 In 2008, Serbia persuaded the UN General Assembly to address a question to the ICJ, asking if “the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo [is] in accordance with international law[.]”129 The ICJ’s advisory opinion, issued in 2010, comprehensively avoided substantive claims about self-determination and secession, rendering a highly formalistic opinion that found the bare act of declaring independence did not violate international law; the opinion was so narrowly drawn as to be irrelevant, though in its context it represented a victory for an independent Kosovo.130
Domestic war crimes prosecutions have been institutionalized in several countries in the region, including Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, by creating special courts, which also deal with organized crime (activity that was often closely related to the prosecution of the wars themselves). Those in Bosnia and Kosovo have had international judges and prosecutors, and were established by their respective international administrations; the Serbian court was established under domestic legislation. Some of these courts, such as the Odjel za ratne zločine, Sud Bosne i Hercegovine (War Crimes Chamber, Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina), have received cases transferred from the Tribunal,131 as well as generating their own domestic cases.132 The extradition of suspects from neighboring countries has been a source of tension.
A central question of any inquiry into a trial such as Milošević is the degree to which such a case—and the institution in which it took place—has affected the broader course of reconciliation after the wars of the 1990s. There is little agreement on what exactly reconciliation is, beyond perhaps recognition that it must surely be something more than mere peace.133 Even the minimal goal of restoring peace is generally thought to be linked in some way to forms of post-conflict justice.134
One of the core aspirations for the Tribunal and for justice mechanisms more broadly was an expectation that they would contribute in some fashion to the normalization of post-conflict societies and the reconciliation of divided communities.135 Similarly, the institutions of international governance in Bosnia and Croatia, and the mechanisms of integration associated with the EU accession process, were expected to encourage (an admittedly indeterminately defined) reconciliation among the former warring parties—and sometimes consciously designed to do so.136
A decade and more later, the indicia of reconciliation that have been discerned—formal apologies, dialogue, reestablishment of economic ties, returns across the former front lines—are, even on the most optimistic readings, partial and incomplete, and surely far short of what the earliest advocates of postwar reform promised or imagined.137* Serbian President Boris Tadić issued public apologies in Croatia and Bosnia, and the Serbian Parliament also issued a resolution that was as controversial as it was ambiguous,138 whereas in the RS, a formal expression of regret was issued under considerable pressure and with direct intervention by the international community.139† Other states have recognized the occurrence of discrete crimes during the wars, though rarely in a way that would implicate the broader social and national aspects of the conflict.140
Initiatives to establish state or regional truth commissions or similar initiatives, such as the Regional Initiative for the establishment of the Regional Commission for Establishing the Facts about All Victims of War Crimes and Other Serious Human Rights Violations Committed on the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia in the Period from 1991–2001, or RECOM process,141‡ have attempted to open broader dialogues about the wars across the new political boundaries, but to date there is little evidence of commonly shared narratives—about who was victim, and who perpetrator, about what was done and why—among the peoples of the seven states that not long ago constituted a single Yugoslavia.