Although this book was written in 1993, I ended the story of Tito’s Yugoslavia in August 1991, before the outbreak of full-scale war, and before the international recognition of Slovenia and Croatia dashed all hope of preserving a South Slav federation. However I like to think that this book may have helped readers to understand the tragic events of the last five years in the light of earlier conflicts, such as the Bosnia-Hercegovina Crisis of 1875–78, the First World War that followed the Sarajevo assassination in 1914, and the hideous carnage during the Second World War in the Independent State of Croatia.
The first warning shots in the present conflict were fired in the Krajina, or Military Frontier, region of Croatia, which Arthur Evans described in 1877 as ‘containing the most warlike and not the least civilised part of its population … peopled by what is in fact a separate and purely Serbian nationality’. In 1941, the Ustasha launched their campaign to remove the Orthodox Serbs from Croatia by converting a third, expelling a third and killing a third. Though many Serbs around Knin became royalist Chetniks, their fellows in Slavonia joined Tito’s Partisans. When the Communist leaders in 1943 discussed the constitution of postwar Yugoslavia, they overruled the suggestion by Moša Pijade, of forming a series of semi-autonomous Serb enclaves in Croatia. These Serb enclaves round Knin and in western and eastern Slavonia took up arms in 1991, as they had threatened to do in 1971. In eastern Slavonia, the Serbs used artillery of the former Yugoslav army to batter the town of Vukovar into surrender. This, and the shelling of the suburbs of Dubrovnik (although not, as it turned out, the old city centre), aroused world opinion against the Serbs and in favour of recognition for Slovenia and Croatia. The support given by Germany and Austria to their wartime ally Croatia fuelled Serb fears of a new ‘Drang nach Osten’ or ‘drive to the East’.
When the rest of Europe rather reluctantly followed the lead of Germany in recognising Croatia, the Muslims in Bosnia-Hercegovina found themselves in a dire predicament. They formed a plurality, not a majority of the population, and were overwhelmingly concentrated in cities and towns. The Orthodox, or Serbs, who made up a third of the population, owned nearly two-thirds of the land, while the Catholics, or Croats, owned virtually all the land in western Hercegovina and in districts of central Bosnia. The independent state of Bosnia-Hercegovina, which came into being in 1992, could be described as a string of towns encircled by hostile countryside. Moreover, the country Muslims around Bihac, where Tito established his government in 1942, had made a local alliance with the Serbs against the Sarajevo government.
As soon as fighting began in Bosnia-Hercegovina in April 1992, the Serbs and Croats rushed to consolidate and expand what they regarded as their rightful territory. The Serbs, as if programmed by history, resumed their struggle against the South Slav converts to Islam, begun at Kosovo in 1389, and celebrated by Petar Njegoš, the Montenegrin poet:
So tear down minarets and mosques,
Kindle the Serb yule logs
And paint the Easter eggs.
In Banja Luka the Serbs not only destroyed all but one of the fifteen mosques, but beat, imprisoned, starved or murdered thousands of Muslims before expelling most of them from their ancient homeland. Having convinced themselves that the Bosnian government wanted to introduce Islamic fundamentalism, the Serbs rampaged through eastern Bosnia, where Chetniks had slaughtered thousands of Muslims at Foča and Goražde in 1941. A wartime letter from a Chetnik commander (though probably not by Mihailović, as the signature purports), in which the author recommends ‘cleansing’ non-national elements to create an ‘ethnically pure, great Serbia’, was seized upon by an American public relations company, acting on behalf of the Bosnian government, to accuse the Serbs of ‘ethnic cleansing’.
Since the warring parties in Bosnia-Hercegovina were ethnically identical, the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ was meaningless when applied to what was in fact a religious conflict; however it had the desired effect of branding the Serbs as ‘racist’ and anti-semitic, therefore condemning them in the eyes of the Jewish community in the United States of America and Europe. This was a welcome but undeserved propaganda bonus for President Tudjman of Croatia, whose attitude to the Jews is made clear in his book Wastelands.
In his articles for the Manchester Guardian, in 1877, Arthur Evans reported that 250,000 Orthodox refugees had been driven from Bosnia-Hercegovina and that 50,000 had died from cold, disease and starvation; he also alleged that many Orthodox women had suffered ‘the usual fate’ from Muslim soldiers. The number of refugees in recent years has been no higher proportionately to the size of the population, but the Muslims have suffered as much as, or more than, the Serbs. This time, the Serbs were widely accused of raping Muslim women, and once again the alleged attacks were denounced in the House of Commons.
Evans described how after the Montenegrins captured the Slav Muslim town of Nikšić, there was ‘hardly a house that had not been struck by a shell, and it is not by any means safe to knock too hard on a friend’s door when paying a visit’. Later, the Montenegrins hauled their twelve-and-a-half-pounder guns into Bosnia-Hercegovina, to shell the Muslims there. More than a hundred years later, the Montenegrin psychiatrist Radovan Karadjić ordered his Bosnian Serbs to employ their much larger weapons against the city of Sarajevo. The Bosnian government and Croatian forces have also shelled or mortared those parts of the city mainly inhabited by the Serbs. A former British Army officer, Rod Thornton, who had studied Serbo-Croat in Sarajevo for six months shortly before the war, rejoined his regiment for a year in Bosnia and later described the artillery warfare there:
On returning to Sarajevo as a soldier, I noticed that the buildings which had taken the brunt of the shelling were the gleaming, newly-built, architecturally monstrous show-pieces that had mostly sprung up prior to the 1984 Winter Olympics. The Oslobodenje tower was a mere stump, the Privedna Banka and its copper-coloured glass was no more.
Other new structures had similar damage while the buildings standing on either side of them had been barely scratched. The blue-windowed twin skyscrapers next to the Holiday Inn had, due to their proximity to the hotel and the Press inside, escaped relatively lightly (they were still standing). On asking the Serb gunners on the hills why they picked out these particular buildings, the age-old rural/urban conflict … became apparent. The vast majority of these men were from villages around Sarajevo. To them it did not matter who lived in the city – Serb, Muslim, or Martian – they just wanted to pound it and everything in it … especially its symbols, the brash, colourful modern eyesores … It made no difference that places like the Oslobodenje tower and the futuristic TV mast had long since been reduced to piles of rubble – they continued to pump shell after shell into what remained. I myself spent one afternoon watching the shelling of both these structures. Over 150 shells were fired at objects that were empty of people and had already been completely destroyed. It was sheer vandalism.
Like several military observers, Thornton suggests that the Bosnian government used artillery or mortar fire to discredit the Serbs in the eyes of the outside world:
The airport, for instance, where many UN soliders have died, has been closed more often due to direct government fire than Bosnian Serb fire. The periodic ceasefires, likewise, do not conform to the perceived pattern. All, during my time in the city, were broken by the government forces.
The British troops billeted in Sarajevo … were accommodated in a barracks in the Old Town. The courtyard of the building next door happened to be the site of some of the government’s heavy mortars. The ceasefires and the days of relative calm would come to an end as these mortars began firing at the blocks of flats in the Serb-held suburb of Grbavica. Before long the answering fire would come in from the Serbs and Sarajevo would be back to ‘normal’ …
Once, in the street outside our barracks, I met one of the government soldiers and asked him rather pointedly why his side was breaking the ceasefires. They had orders, he said. Sarajevo was too quiet: to stay at the centre of the world’s attention it needed to be its ‘normal’ self – it needed to be shelled.
Sometimes the shelling would be nothing to do with the Serbs; the Croats would be bombarding the Muslim sector and vice-versa.
South Slav Journal, Volume 15, No 3–4
Mostar, the capital of Hercegovina, whose atmosphere in the summer of 1991 I tried to convey in this book’s final chapter, was first bombarded by the Serbs in April the following year, and in 1993 came under prolonged bombardment by the Croats, who finished off the destruction of the old Muslim town by smashing the Turkish bridge on the River Neretva. The Muslim friend, referred to as ‘Murat’, who was by this time a refugee in London, said that the loss of the bridge had grieved him more than the death of his own mother a few weeks earlier. It seemed to him the end of a centuries-old civilisation.
The Croats of western Hercegovina have taken on the mantle of the Ustasha, whose massacre of the Serbs in 1941 was denounced by the then Bishop of Mostar, Alojzije Misic. In 1993 they attacked the Muslims of Mostar, beating, starving and murdering them with the same ferocity that the Serbs had shown to the Muslims of Banja Luka. The Croats of Hercegovina inspired the massacre of the Muslims in the central Bosnian region around Gornji Vakuf, an atrocity witnessed by troops of the British peace-keeping force. These extremist Croats, who favour a merger in a revived Great Croatia, have all along had the support of the Franciscan Order, now once more at odds with the diocesan clergy. At the village of Medjugorje, where the Franciscans have continued to promote the cult of Marian apparitions, the local women sat down in the road to stop a UN convoy taking food to the starving Muslims of Mostar. In 1994, the new Bishop of Mostar renewed the plea to the Vatican made by his predecessor Monsignor Zanić, to stop the Franciscans promoting claims for the Medjugorje apparitions.
The Roman Catholic Bishop of Banja Luka, Franjo Komarica, whose predecessor during the 1960s preached reconciliation with the Orthodox church, spoke up for the Muslims in 1992, and shamed the Serb authorities into relaxing their persecution. In May 1995, when Serb refugees from Croatia attacked Catholic churches and homes in the Banja Luka region, Monsignor Komarica went on hunger strike. Yet he denounced talk of a Great Croatia, and remained true to the ideal of a Bosnia-Hercegovina in which all three religions would co-exist, ‘like a garden full of different flowers’, as he was fond of saying.
During the first Bosnia-Hercegovina crisis of 1875–78, the statesmen of Europe, including our own Disraeli and Gladstone, were thoroughly versed in the history of the region. They understood that religious conflict between the South Slav Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics and Muslims carried the risk of involving the mighty champions of these faiths, respectively Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The same was true of the statesman who managed to keep the peace in 1908, after the Habsburg annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Sarajevo assassination of 28th June, 1914 led to the First World War and then the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German and Ottoman empires. When the Ustasha murdered King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934, the statesmen of Europe once more ensured that Europe did not become involved in the feud between Serbs, Croats and Muslims.
When the latest Bosnian crisis exploded in 1992, the statesmen of Europe seemed unaware of the ancient religious differences in the Balkans, preferring to talk instead of ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ conflict. The then US president, George Bush, acknowledged tacitly that the Balkans were not in the American sphere of interest or understanding, and should be left to the Europeans. He decided against sending American troops, and welcomed the large British and French contribution to a United Nations peace-keeping force. Cyrus Vance, an American representing the UN, and Lord Owen, representing the European Union, were given the diplomatic task of negotiating a peace, or at least a series of ceasefires.
The neutral attitude of the Vance-Owen team and the generals commanding the UN forces infuriated the international Press, who were by now demanding punitive action against the Serbs. In the summer of 1992, Bill Clinton, the Democrat candidate for the US presidency, accused Milošević of ‘crimes against humanity’ and demanded the use of American air power. On becoming president in 1993, Clinton refused support to a new Vance-Owen peace plan, and said that what was at stake in Bosnia was ‘standing up against the principle of ethnic cleansing’.
As America sought a Bosnian settlement that would at the same time punish the Serbs, other outside powers began to take an interest in the conflict. Germany and Austria continued to back the Croats, their allies in two world wars. Iran and other Muslim states were sending arms and supplies to the Bosnian government, whose army was stiffened by more than a thousand Afghan guerillas. In Russia, both the nationalists and the Communists called on Yeltsin to help their old allies the Serbs. When NATO launched an air attack on the Bosnian Serbs in 1995, relations between the USA and Russia were at their worst since the Cold War. Clinton’s aggressive policy succeeded in tipping the military balance against the Serbs, forcing them to peace talks at Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. As I write this, agreement has just been reached on a plan that appears to divide up Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia, with peace guaranteed by 60,000 NATO troops. The man who initialed the draft agreement on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs was the same Belgrade politician, Slobodan Milošević, whom Clinton had accused of ‘crimes against humanity’ in 1992.
Milošević’s opposite number, President Tudjman of Croatia, was ready in 1995 to show off the might of his army, funded by German money and trained by former United States officers. In the first week of May, his troops invaded and soon over-ran the Serb enclave of western Slavonia, driving its people in flight over the River Sava. Among the small towns captured by the Croats was Jasenovac, the site of the main Ustasha extermination camp from 1941–45. As it happened, the last Commandant of Jasenovac, Dinko Šakić, had only recently come back to Croatia from exile in Australia. In an interview with the Zagreb Magazin (February 1995), Šakić spoke of his time at Jasenovac:
I regret that we hadn’t done all that is imputed to us, for had we done that then, today Croatia wouldn’t have had problems, there wouldn’t have been people to write lies. I am proud of what I did. If I was offered the same duty today I would accept.
Asked why he had not returned to Croatia sooner, Šakić replied: ‘It was not out of concern for myself, or fear, but in order not to make problems for the President [Tudjman] and the government, for some people could have used my presence … to accuse that the head of Jasenovac, a war criminal, walks the streets of Zagreb.’
The activities of Šakić have been described in some of the documents cited in Koncentracioni Logor Jasenovac 1941–1945. Another Jasenovac guard, Ljubo Miloš has told how in April 1945 he and Šakić worked to remove the evidence of the killing at this and other neighbouring camps. They dug up mass graves and tried to cremate the remains. Newly-killed prisoners were usually thrown into the Sava with weights attached to them, or with their bellies cut open so that they would not float to the surface. Although Miloš was caught by the Partisans, to whom he gave this testimony, Šakić escaped along with many Ustasha, shortly before VE Day, 8th May, 1945.
President Tudjman was one of the foreign heads of state invited to London to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day. On Saturday 6th May, 1995, Tudjman was a guest at a banquet given by the Queen at the Guildhall. His neighbour at dinner, the Liberal Democrat politician Paddy Ashdown, asked Tudjman during the course of the evening how he thought Bosnia-Hercegovina would be divided. Tudjman sketched on the back of Ashdown’s menu a rough map showing Bosnia-Hercegovina split between the Serbs and Croats, on something not dissimilar to the arrangement agreed at Dayton, Ohio. He went on to explain that such a division had been agreed four years earlier with Milošević, who, he added, was ‘one of us’. When Ashdown asked what would be the role in Bosnia of the Muslim leader. Alija Izetbegović, Tudjman dismissed him as ‘a fundamentalist and an Algerian’. Six months later, Tudjman, Milošević and Izetbegović were filmed shaking hands with each other after the initialling of the treaty at Dayton, Ohio.
In August 1995, Tudjman ordered his army to clear the Serbs from their largest remaining enclave in Croatia, with its capital at Knin. After a massive shelling of Knin itself, the Croats occupied the enclave, brushing aside the UN peace-keeping force. Some 150,000 Serbs fled east across Bosnia in a pathetic convoy to Serbia. In four years Tudjman had achieved what his predecessor Pavelić had failed to do – to drive almost all the Serbs from Croatia.