A retrospective look at western intervention in Yugoslavia
By Rade Zinaic
In the printed version of this article currently in circulation, New Socialist erroneously edited Rade Zinaic’s words “The 1995 Dayton Peace Accord, signed by all three belligerents (Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia), ushered in a Western-sanctioned period of relative stability” to read Albania instead of Bosnia. This was the magazine’s error, not the author’s. The New Socialist team apologizes to Mr. Zinaic and to its readers for this error.
In his masterful yet controversial 1995 film Underground, the prize-winning Bosnian director Emir Kusturica chronicles the birth, development and death of post-World War II Yugoslavia. Focusing on a white-collar intellectual and a working class gangster, Kusturica’s deceptively simple story identifies what he believes to be the primary social forces responsible for the creation, corruption, and eventual degeneration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Marko, a member of the Serbian pre-war intellectual elite, joins the Communist Party at the dawn of the Nazi bombing of Belgrade, taking with him his life-long friend, an electrician and revolutionary named Blacky. Kusturica’s film portrays with great poignancy and depth how historical forces shape and complicate interpersonal relationships. Marko eventually turns into a party bureaucrat, content to enjoy the fruits of power and privilege while duping Blacky into fighting a never-ending revolutionary war. Blacky, oblivious to the intrigues of wartime politics, is wounded and forced to live in a surreal underground cellar with other proletarians and peasants. For forty-six years, his wartime politics fester. When he emerges from underground in 1992 in the midst of the Bosnian civil war, he relives his hatred for Nazis, fascist Croatians and other collaborators — but now that hatred is directed to Croatians and Muslims. The world changes but his sense, real or perceived, of being under siege remains.
Many denounced Underground as pro-Milosevic propaganda because it failed to challenge Serbian ethnic chauvinism by not blaming the Serbs for the destruction of Yugoslavia. Popular intellectual Slavoj Zizek interpreted the film, with its rhythmic dance of sexism, song and sacrifice, as an expression of the fantasies held by ethnic cleansers who tormented Bosnia from 1992-1995. Others viewed it as a courageous attempt to represent the demonized Serbs as people capable of humour, love and humanity. What critics on both sides failed to see, however, was the film’s untruthful depiction of the fall of Yugoslavia as the result of a primarily internal conflict, a tragic and bloody struggle that was somehow predestined to happen. The “underground” served as a metaphor for a collective irrational violence and betrayal that exploded into history as though from nowhere.
The western mainstream view
Interestingly, this interpretation was also the dominant view in Western accounts of the conflict. In the early nineties, there were many high-falutin journalistic surveys of Balkan history with each author claiming to reveal the true causes of the ethnic strife. The most glaring and unfortunate example was Robert D. Kaplan’s immensely popular Balkan Ghosts (1993). This tome, a Clinton administration favourite, described Balkan peoples as natural haters who were culturally stunted by half a millennia of Eastern decadence and empire, and who thus were in dire need of Western enlightenment and moral rehabilitation. This poisonously racist and paternalistic sentiment, one which managed to seep its way into conventional opinion, caricatures the Balkan region as a land inhabited by childish and sadistic people who are easily manipulated by charismatic personalities. From this perspective, the conflict occurred when the surrogate Western parents were unable to effectively deal with murderous Balkan tantrums.
The mainstream media’s take on the fragmentation of Yugoslavia portrayed Slobodan Milosevic as a Balkan sorcerer — an opportunistic politician who managed to stir up an aggressive nationalism among the Serbs of Kosovo in June of 1989. The Albanian majority of this autonomous province within Serbia became a scapegoat for all Serb historical grievances. Milosevic’s populist act ushered in a period of federal turbulence as each republic in the FRY vied for political and financial independence. Croatia and Serbia, the two largest republics, under the leadership of Franjo Tudjman and Milosevic respectively, became embroiled in a bitter contest to partition multi-ethnic Bosnia. The Western response to this Balkan power play was confused and piecemeal, a patch-work of pathetic ceasefires and hollow condemnations of violence. Indeed, the popular media portrayed Western forces as uninterested, bumbling and ill-focused until public opinion helped end the ethnic slaughter by forcing a NATO-led so-called humanitarian intervention in 1995. The 1995 Dayton Peace Accord, signed by all three belligerents (Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia), ushered in a Western-sanctioned period of relative stability.
The problem with this account is twofold. First, it over-emphasizes the role of individual actors in the break-up of Yugoslavia — nations are caricatured as individuals. And, second, the West is presented as only externally related to the conflict, the Keystone cops arriving belatedly on the scene. Like any superficial reading of this tragic war, the mainstream view that this was a conflict between organic evil and naive good conceals as much as it reveals. Glossed over are the processes that set the conditions for the emergence of virulent ethnic nationalisms. The purpose of this two-part article is to explain that war, massacre and social suffering are not natural to groups and/or regions, but fall out from the interplay of various economic and political forces. Indeed, a structural explanation of the 1991-1995 Yugoslavian civil war is possible — an explanation which grants the people their humanity and experience. This should be a prerequisite for any serious debate about the region and a touchstone for any social-activist endeavour within it.
From occupation to self-management
Josip Broz Tito, the Moscow-educated son of Croat-Slovene descent, was the leader of the FRY from 1945 until his internationally-mourned passing in 1981. Tito was the Kremlin-supported head of the small but well-organized Communist Party of Yugoslavia, a party which, in its guerrilla days during the bloody Nazi occupation of 1941-1945, managed to tie down several German divisions in and around the rugged mountains of Bosnia. This ability to organize effective resistance was immortalized in first-hand historical accounts by Fitzroy MacLean and Milovan Djilas. The eventual success of the Yugoslavians to create and cultivate a unique society based on a mixed economy and aspects of worker self-management earned them kudos from liberals in the West. Yugoslavia was one of the inaugural members of the United Nations, positioned rather insecurely between the United States and the Soviet Union, once Tito fell out of favour with Stalin in 1948. Despite dependence upon US loans, the Yugoslavian economy achieved unprecedented economic and social growth from 1950-1971, a time when social welfare amongst modern industrialized nations was on the rise.
Yugoslavia’s “market socialist” economy, dependent as it was on US loans in order to maintain its non-aligned position during the Cold War, was susceptible to erratic shifts in inflation. This frequently required the institution of macro-economic stabilization policies which limited the funds required for the maintenance of a stable standard of living. Yugoslavia was a loose confederation of six autonomous republics (Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Montenegro) with its centre in Belgrade, Serbia. Belgrade, accordingly, oversaw trade and monetary issues, but apart from this held little power to control such things as education, agriculture and manufacturing. The various republics were entrusted with these different areas of control as a way of securing and catering to their formal political autonomy. Even so, some of the revenue from the republics was taxed as a means to maintain federal spending and pan-Yugoslav propaganda. When federal budgets were wanting, the republics had to ante up for their maintenance. This led to political tensions within the federation that prided itself on being founded on the ideal of brotherhood and unity.
Susan Woodward argues that this fragile relationship between two levels of government was not based primarily on ethnic tensions among the six republics, but rather revolved around shifts in economic policy priorities. The OPEC oil crisis, and the related advent of chronic stagflation (high inflation, low consumer demand and high unemployment), forced the federal government into implementing austere anti-inflation policies. After 1975, repayment of debt was hampered by the West’s lack of interest in Yugoslav goods, and trade with oil countries trumped other economic exchanges. The republics were in need of federally-procured World Bank funds in order to service their debts.
This created fears of recentralization among the republics, which were otherwise appeased politically with the modern era’s possibly most generous (and longest) constitution. The 1974 Yugoslav constitution all but devolved every last vestige of political and cultural authority to the republics, delivering a structural blow to any sense of pan-Yugoslav identity. The economic centralization and politico-cultural decentralization of the 1970s occurred against the all-too-obvious reality of uneven economic development. The richer republics, Slovenia and Croatia, were far closer to the standard of living exhibited in Western Europe compared with Macedonia, Bosnia, and the Albanian-populated province of Kosovo. International trade tended to favour the more developed republics, increasing economic tensions among them.
