The Balkans – A Crossroads of Cultures
I came across a very amusing book the other day that attempted to sum up the history of every European nation in just a few sentences. It may seem ambitious, but it struck me as beautifully concise.
May I present you with the extremely condensed history of Yugoslavia?
Celts. Romans. Slavs (insert your preferred ‘Barbarian’ tribe that displaced the Romans here). Local feuding medieval warlords. Habsburgs (if your country happens to border Austria or Hungary). A sprinkling of peasant revolts. Ottoman incursions (if your country happens to lie in the south). Napoleon. Grumblings of independence (based on language and the preservation of culture). The regional incarnation of romanticism. The regional incarnation of modernism. One world war. Shift in governmental system. Another world war. Socialism. Ultimately capitalist democracy. Possible joining of the EU.
Two major historical factors made the Balkans (Turkish for ‘wooden mountains’) what they are today: The first was the split of the Roman Empire, which divided the Balkans into the West (Roman Catholic) and the East (Byzantine Orthodox). The second was the invasion of the Islamic Ottomans.
To understand the Balkan War of the 1990s, it’s important to acknowledge that the Balkan peninsula has always been a crossroads of cultures. The South Slavs (or Yugo Slavs) are all descended from the same ancestors and all speak similar languages, but they are distinguished by their religious practices and cultural differences. The Croats and the Slovenes (in the west) are predominantly Roman Catholic; the Bosniaks (in the south) predominantly Muslim and the Serbs (in the east) predominantly Orthodox Christian. The region is also home to several Slavic and non-Slavic minorities, who make up Montenegro, Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo. The groups overlap a lot, which is exactly why the break-up of Yugoslavia, in the early 1990s, was so contentious.
But first, let’s go back to the First World War, when the united Slavic land of Yugoslavia was just a glimmer in the eye of a disgruntled Bosniak-Serb nationalist. At this time, the Croats and the Slovenes were part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. And the heir to that empire was none other than Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Impassioned by the notion of freeing the Croats and Slovenes and uniting the Southern Slavs, Gavrilo Princip, infamously shot – and mortally wounded – Ferdinand and his wife, kicking off the chain of events that started WWI.
Naturally, the Croats and the Slovenes were compelled to fight on the side of the Austro-Hungarians, taking up arms against their Slavic cousins in Serbia (whether they liked it or not). Many Serbs, seeing the potential for a united Yugoslavia, felt betrayed to see their so-called ‘family’ fighting against them.
At the end of the First World War, a brief (and unsuccessful) kingdom was founded. The Yugoslav royal family didn’t last long, however, before the Second World War broke out, forcing the Karadjordjevic (now, that’s a mouthful) family to flee to London (self-preservation is a must for royals).
In 1941 Adolf Hitler gave the order for German forces – backed by Italian, Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian Axis allies – to invade Yugoslavia and Greece. With the Balkans secured, he could look to his next target – the Soviet Union. It is at this time that the first instance of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans begins. But Ante Pavelić, the fascist leader of Croatia gets a little carried away, ordering the murder of not just Jews, Gypsies and Communists, but thousands of Serbs living in Croatia and Bosnia. Some believe that as many as 800,000 and as little as 40,000 Serbs were killed during the Second World War. It is unlikely that the true figure will never be known. Needless to say, A LOT of love is lost between Croatia and Serbia during this war.
Enter Tito, a young aspiring socialist, determined to liberate and unite Yugoslavia. Backed by the listless Yugoslav royals hiding away in London, Tito was cashed up and ready to fight his guerrilla war to the end. And that he did, with great success, and with little help from the Red Army.
With a Slovene for a mother, a Croat for a father and a Serb for a wife, Tito was seen as a true Yugoslav – but his vision for a united communist Yugoslavia could not be achieved without force, charisma, and cunning (mostly force). Much to Stalin’s dismay, Tito managed to keep Yugoslavia largely independent from Communist Russia, ending any dreams for an expansion of the USSR.
By refusing to ally himself with the Soviets – Tito received good will (and $2 billion) from the United States. By ingeniously playing the East and West against each other, Tito became a very rich man. Can you imagine the talks that went down? (If you don’t pay me off, I’ll let Washington/Moscow build a base in Yugoslavia). Needless to say, everyone paid up. It is rumoured that Stalin ordered more than 20 assassination attempts on Tito. In a correspondence between the two, Tito is famous for writing:
Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle. [...] If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second.
— Josip Broz Tito
Today, Slovenia and Croatia are believed to be the most economically advanced of the six Yugoslav states, having functioned with relative independence during Tito’s leadership from Serbia. Some believe Tito offered the iron-fist needed to pull things together in the post-war period. Others believe that the socialist experience in Slovenia was the most successful incarnation of the well-meaning (but ultimately problematic) government system. Borders were open, Slovenes could pop over to Italy to buy bananas and other exotic treats. Dora, our Balkan War tour guide in Zagreb (Croatia), tells us that the older generation sometimes pines for the good old days – dubbed Yugonostalgia – when everyone had a job, a heavily subsidised house, two week’s vacation, a simpler life.
Dora was only four years old when the Balkan War broke out. Her mother sheltered her from much of the atrocity, but she is a passionate historian and believes it is important to keep an unbiased view on the events of the 1990s.
So what exactly happened during the Balkan War?
After Tito died in 1980, the illusion of a united Yugoslavia began to slip away. The southern Slavic states had required Tito to hold them together and, as the Balkan War would show, to keep the antagonistic ethnic groups from each other’s throats. Before long, the rotating presidency would come to a stop with Slobodan Milošević – a man openly acknowledged today for his role in the human atrocities committed during the Balkan War.
Slovenia was the first of the Yugoslav Socialist Republics to declare independence and freedom from communism in 1991. The most Western, Catholic and ethnically-similar country, Slovenia was seceded with little fuss (a ten-day war and less than one hundred deaths is considered minor in the scheme of things). Slobodan Milošević was not impressed by the course of events but consoled himself with the fact that no ethnic Serbs lived in Slovenia. It was a knock to his pride – but Yugoslavia would live on.
That is, until Croatia started to make noise on the independence front.
A precedent had been set, but Milošević would not concede the loss of Croatian territory – or the loss of native Serbs living on the land. Of the 600,000 native Serbs living in Croatia at the time, nearly half were forced out, and more than 6000 died during the war. If things were bad in Croatia, things were only about to get worse for the Bosniaks. In July 1995, Bosnian-Serb forces killed as many as 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from the town of Srebrenica. It was the largest massacre in Europe since the Holocaust.
The various ethnic groups of Yugoslavia had lived more or less without discord, for centuries before World War I. So what propelled the region into chaos? Was it the single-minded, self-serving actions of a few selfish leaders fanning the embers of ethnic discord? (Milošević wasn’t alone – Karadžić and Tuđman knew how to tango). It seems likely. With Slovenia (2004) and Croatia (2013) joining the European Union and Serbia and Montenegro negotiating their accession, we can only hope that the southern Slavs – after witnessing three major wars in the space of 81 years – have finally found a long-lasting peace.
