A retrospective look at western intervention in Yugoslavia (part II)
By Rade Zinaic
This is the second and final part of an article by Rade Zinaic on the break-up of Yugoslavia. Part 1 focused on the Bosnian war. Mainstream news and popular culture portrayed the conflict as the unavoidable result of a centuries-old ethno-cultural rivalry. That was the view portrayed, for example, in Emir Kusturica’s celebrated film Underground. But according to Zinaic, the problem with such a view is that it makes Yugoslavians seem hopelessly irrational, and therefore in need of “guidance” from NATO countries. Another problem is that it hides the economic and political events that led to the conflict in the first place. What was it that led to the conflict? The federal state had to impose its will on the Yugoslavian republics to control inflation. The IMF/World Bank required this as a condition for giving Yugoslavia desperately needed loans. But this led to clashes between the federal state and the republics, conflicts between the republics, and then to the disintegration of Yugoslavia itself.
The structural changes that led to Yugoslavia’s disintegration were not the expression of some innate “tendency” towards self-destruction. This irrational fatalism is what Kusturica’s film proposes: an unresolved internal tension between the state and the people ending in the betrayal of the former by the katter.
Such fatalism obscures the fully documented fact that extra-state organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank played a substantial and deeply detrimental role in the weakening of the Yugoslavian state system. These two organizations, tied as they are to international capitalism, aggravated the tense relationship between Belgrade (the capital of Yugoslavia at the time, and of Serbia) and the various republics.
By the late seventies, and increasingly after Tito’s death in 1981 [Tito was head of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and leader of Yugoslavia 1943-1980 -NS] an indebted Yugoslavia was forced to undergo intense economic restructuring. In 1984, the Reagan Administration issued the secret National Security Decision Directive 133 (declassified only in 1990) that proclaimed that “US policy will be to promote the trend toward an effective, market-oriented Yugoslav economic structure.” The directive called for the intensification of a neo-liberal policy originally implemented in 1980, when Belgrade was required to sign debt restructuring agreements with its creditors that cut the funding it could give to the republics. This caused much intra-state tension.
By 1990, and under the leadership of pro-Western reformer Ante Markovic, Yugoslavia was overwhelmed with externally-imposed economic mutilation. During the first Bush administration, Western advisors were sent to Belgrade to oversee wage freezes, reduction in government spending, and the dismantling – in the name of economic competitiveness – of socialist self-management. The World Bank and the IMF oversaw this restructuring. It resulted in Belgrade directing transfer funds to debt servicing at the expense of social welfare and intra-state harmony.
But when in 1991 650,000 workers marched out in protest, the Serbian government was forced to reject these measures. Indeed, popular resistance was a tangible reality throughout these years of neo-liberal change. Strikes increased from 100 in 1983 to a staggering 1570 in 1987. As the Croatian leftist Branka Magas correctly pointed out in a dispatch from 1988, the real cause of the federal crisis was “the political dispossession of the working class”; a working class not necessarily ethnically divided. According to Richard Schoenman, “worker resistance crossed ethnic lines, as Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Slovenians mobilized … shoulder to shoulder with their fellow workers.” Nonetheless, worker resistance was denounced and stigmatized as an obstacle to economic restructuring and growth.
Despite this popular groundswell (or because of it) the leaders of the various republics reacted to the structural changes by seeking to maintain their power by stirring ethnic-nationalist sentiments against the federal state. In short, the reaction to the structural adjustments and an oppressive Communist Party (the party in control of the federal government) expressed a politics of exclusion rather than of democratic proletarian solidarity.
Nationalist Euphoria
Slobodan Milosevic was the first to take advantage of this crisis situation. Anticipating a popular uprising, he made an appeal to Serbian nationalist mythology, arguing for the territorial integrity and sanctity of Kosovo as an integral part of Serbian state claims. With unemployment at 50 percent and easily the poorest province in Yugoslavia, Kosovo was nonetheless imagined as “a cradle of Serbian culture”, a means for Milosevic to consolidate power at the republican level. Sensing a federation on the cusp of collapse, he played on the fears (sometimes genuine) of Serb minorities situated in other republics, and especially those in Croatia and Albanian-dominated Kosovo. For him, the only way to ensure the unity and livelihood of all Serbs was to coral them into a single state. The “Greater Serbia” project was born and was, infamously, provided with intellectual justification by members of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This had consequences for other republics, especially Croatia where, in a climate of open elections initiated by President Markovic in 1990, Franjo Tudjman, an anti-Semitic nationalist, won electoral victory with support from German intelligence and Croatian fascist émigrés. The political decentralization of the 1970’s, coupled with the strategic economic restructuring of the 1980’s, set the conditions for the emergence of politically convenient ethnic nationalisms. The alienation, de-politicization, and social suffering experienced by the average Yugoslav was assuaged, for many, by identifying with the ethnic group. Social and economic grievances were turned into a clash of ethnicities and “magical hope” took the place of more practical solutions. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once wrote, “Magical hope is the outlook on the future characteristic of those who have no real future before them.” For the average Yugoslav citizen, the future pointed towards the national past.
Croatia, along with Slovenia, declared independence in 1991 and received immediate diplomatic support from a reunified Germany. Germany’s quick offer of recognition was seen by many as marking the end of Yugoslavia as a viable state. It pre-empted any attempts on the part of progressive leaders within the country to fight for a looser confederation, and showed an incredible lack of empathy for the concerns of the sizable Serbian minority within Croatia. Racist clashes between Croatian police and Serbs in the Krajina (a Serbian-populated enclave within Croatia proper) aggravated already simmering ethnic tensions.
This prompted the deployment of UN peacekeepers. The temporary cease-fire that followed only served as a cover for rearmament on both sides, with Croatia receiving arms shipments from Austria and Hungary and Serbia relying on the army surplus from the now defunct federal army. The conflict soon re-ignited and, in 1992, spread to neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Bosnia-Herzegovina was 43 percent Muslim, 31 percent Serb, and roughly 17 percent Croatian. When the West recognized it as an independent state in 1992, this triggered a land grab by Tudjman and Milosevic who armed ethnic Croatians (Tudjman) and Serbians (Milosevic) within Bosnia. The ensuing conflict captured the imagination of European intellectuals, and the beseiged city of Sarajevo became an international cause célèbre.
Bosnian Serb forces occupied 70 percent of Bosnian territory by 1993 under the leadership of indicted war criminal Ratko Mladic.
They were responsible for atrocities against Muslims and Croatians and were supported by ultra-nationalist paramilitary organizations such as the “Tigers”, a murderous unit of thugs led by the notorious Zeljko Raznatovic. Evidence of rape, torture, and ethnic cleansing of Muslims was documented by Amnesty International and Helsinki Human Rights Watch. The so-called UN “safe-haven” of Srebrenica, a Muslim enclave, became the scene of notorious Serbian war crimes perpetrated, according to some estimates, against 8000 Muslims. Some said this was a retaliatory response to the raids led by Muslim warlord Naser Oric against ethnic Serb villages that allegedly killed 1000 Serb civilians.
Western intervention was scattered and modestly effective. But though Western states deployed peacekeeping units, they also covertly supplied or condoned the shipment of arms and mercenaries to various belligerents. This contradiction undermined their professed intentions to establish a durable peace. The 1995 NATO-backed Croatian ethnic cleansing of the Krajina, which overran some of the Canadian peacekeepers stationed there, was a prime example of this two-faced approach.
A systematically-organized policy of ethnic cleansing, with full US sanction, was the principle upon which the Dayton Peace Accord was implemented. The Accord ended the hostilities by created internal boundaries within Bosnia-Herzegovina and mandating international monitoring of the region. But when it was implemented, 160,000 Serbs were forced from their homes, joining the million of mostly Muslim civilians who were already displaced by Bosnian Serb and (to a lesser extent) by Bosnian Croat forces. There was no outcry from the West over this ethnic cleansing operation.
According to Michel Chossudovsky, a period of “new colonialism” began after the 1995 Dayton Accord was implemented. Three things point to this. First, a pro-Western High Representative was constitutionally made “the final authority” on interpretations of the Accord. Second, the inaugural head of the Bosnian Central Bank was chosen by the IMF, which dictated that he or she “shall not be citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina or a neighbouring state.”
Finally, economic decision-making was put in the hands of the World Bank, which has since overseen the sale of socially-owned assets. Ironically, it was precisely these kinds of neo-liberal measures and pressures that laid the groundwork for the socio-economic suffering that determined Yugoslavia’s demise.
Beyond the Fetish
The Balkans has been historically “fixed” by Western eyes as a perennially “crisis-prone” region; “war torn”, a “powder keg”, “localized chaos”. The conflicts themselves are frequently presented as solely cultural/regional problems rather than tragedies with many causes. Indeed, the caricaturing of entire groups of people continues to provide the ideological and moral justification for imperial intervention and empire-building.
Kaplan’s racist posturing and Kusturica’s film repeat these fetishes; the former seeing them as pre-modern and depraved, the latter presenting them as culturally predestined to conflict. These stories deny the lived history of the Balkan peoples, and they are supported by a socio-economic system that denies the sociality and complexity of human beings.
