Through the Embers of Chaos E-Book

Dervla Murphy

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

As Dervla Murphy crisscrossed the Balkans in a series of bicycle journeys towards the beginning and end of the 1990s, she recorded the griefs and confusions of the ordinary people, many of whom had showed extraordinary courage and resilience during that terrible 'decade of decay' and whose voices were so little heard during the conflict. Despite their suffering, she found plenty of traditional Balkan hospitality and was passed between friends from city to city and town to town. Through the Embers of Chaos describes journeys – through Croatia, Servia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo and Albania – that demanded the greatest emotional and physical stamina, while also elucidating the complex history of the both the region and the conflict itself. It's an extraordinary achievement.

Leseprobe

Dervla Murphy

THROUGH THE EMBERS OF CHAOS

Balkan Journeys

For Zea, who dictated the shape of this bookfrom the womb and who,since emerging, has continued to dictate to everyone about everything

In all the former Yugoslav territories people are now living a postmodern chaos.  Past, present and future are all lived simultaneously. In the circular temporal  mish-mash suddenly everything we ever knew and everything we shall know has  sprung to life and gained its right to existence.

Dubravska Ugrešić, August 1993

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphAuthor’s Note Background Information Chronology Maps  PART I 1991–2 CROATIA  1. Croatia in Transition  PART II 1999 SERBIA   2. Belgrade as the Dust Settled   3. Damage – Collateral and Otherwise   4. Where the River Flowed Over the Bridges  PART III 2000 CROATIA, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA, ALBANIA, MONTENEGRO, KOSOVO   5. Carnival Time in Pokupsko   6. Crossing a Shameful ‘Border’   7. Minefields and a Blizzard   8. Transformed by a Siege   9. Threatening Tunnels and a Fractured City 10. Clerical Extremists 11. Disconcerted in Montenegro 12. Slowly into Albania 13. Quickly out of Albania 14. In and around Prizren 15. The Kosovo Experiment 16. A Daytrip with Compatriots 17. Tension in Mitrovica 18. Enclaves at Risk 19. The Uniqueness of Montenegro 20. From a Former Royal Capital to a Former Republic 21. Ruairi’s Last Lap – Through the Krajina  Appendix I The EU in Mostar Appendix II Kosovo, Serbia and Nato’s Airwar Appendix III The Use of Depleted Uranium (DU) in the Balkans Acronyms Bibliography Acknowledgements Copyright

Author’s Note

A word about acronyms, which throughout the Balkans seem to breed even faster than elsewhere (see list in the acronyms section). In the numerous lengthy documents circulated by the plethora of international agencies sentences like this are the norm – ‘The OECD and the OSCE delegates were joined by an IPTF representative to establish new parameters around the structuring of transport programmes related to previous links between PRIZAD and JUSAT in what is now the NDH.’ In an attempt to control this plague I have referred to institutions such as the EU and OSCE by their current acronyms, even when writing about a time when they were otherwise known.

Two new terms are contentious though now in general usage: ‘Kosovars’ instead of Kosova Albanians and ‘Bosniaks’ instead of Bosnian Muslims. In the former case ‘Kosovars’ offends some Serbs who argue that all who live in Kosovo should be so described, that to apply ‘Kosovars’ only to the Albanians is to deny Kosovo’s Serbs the right to exist. However, at least 90 per cent of Kosovo’s population are Albanians who do not see themselves as citizens (or potential citizens) of either Serbia or Albania. Therefore to describe them as ‘Kosovars’ seems fair enough. The Bosnian Muslims’ wish to be known as ‘Bosniaks’ is even trickier. It can be seen to suggest that community’s assumption of a right to dominate in Bosnia, relegating Serbs and Croats to inferior minority status. But that is a perverse misinterpretation of the average Bosniak’s attitude. The adoption of ‘Bosniak’ merely signifies their wish to be seen as citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina rather than as Muslims.

As for the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ – I’m minded to start a campaign against its use. It originated in Serbia when the Milošević-controlled media chose the euphemism čišćenje terena (cleansing the terrain) to describe the forcible uprooting of non-Serbs from their home areas – then referred to, by the same media, as ‘liberated’ territories. Quickly foreign journalists adapted the phrase for their own use and ‘ethnic cleansing’ – a doubly inaccurate term – is by now used all over the English-speaking world.

This abuse of language blunts both thinking and feeling. ‘Cleansing’ is a wholesome word, conjuring up a process with a healthy outcome. And in the Balkan case ‘ethnic’ cleansing is seriously misleading. Apart from Kosovo’s Albanians, all those involved in the recent conflicts are of the same stock – southern Slavs to a man and woman. They were not murdering, plundering and displacing each other for ethnic reasons.

The ‘international community’ is another reprehensible euphemism. As the journalist Diana Johnstone has pointed out, ‘The IC is not even a community; the initials could more accurately stand for “imperialist condominium”, a joint exercise of domination by the former imperialist powers, torn apart and weakened by two World Wars, now brought together under us domination with Nato as their military arm. Certainly there are frictions between the members of this condominium, but so long as their rivalries can be played out within the IC, the price will be paid by smaller and weaker countries.’ When I refer to the ‘international community’ or IC I mean this condominium rather than the true (but tragically impotent) international community represented by the UN General Assembly.

Finally, two old terms need clarification.

The Ustasha were ferocious ultra-nationalistic Croatians who fought with the Nazi invaders of Yugoslavia, in the expectation that after a German victory they could rule an independent Croatia.

The Chetniks were Serbian royalists and nationalists equally notorious for their ferocity during the Second World War. They at first fought against the Nazis and Ustasha, then became demoralized and divided. They no longer exist as a recognized group; in 1990 the Belgrade authorities refused to register as a political party Vojislav Šešelj’s ‘Serbian Četnik Movement’. However, recent victims of Serbian aggression in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo habitually refer to the Serbian police, military and paramilitary forces as ‘Chetniks’ and I have sometimes followed that usage.

BackgroundInformation

In the mid-1980s, before Slobodan Milošević gained power, all knowledgeable observers were aware that Yugoslavia might soon fall apart. Tito’s ingenious but perilously complicated constitutional devices had ensured the country’s peace and stability but without his quality of leadership were no longer effective. They had been based on the gradual strengthening of local authorities, and post-Tito this led to a dangerous disrespect for the federal government. Yet a countrywide referendum, held in 1990, might well have shown a majority in every Yugoslav republic (except tiny Slovenia) in favour of maintaining unity. Most Yugoslavs were proud of belonging to a state well regarded internationally for its non-alignment, its original brand of socialism and – by regional standards – its liberal political and economic policies. The failure of the latter didn’t have to prove fatal to Yugoslavia.

However, during Tito’s twilight years (he died in 1980), his government unwisely sought prosperity through exports. Finance ministers borrowed wildly from the West, which soon after plunged into a recession and rejected Yugoslav goods, leaving the country debt-stricken. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) then persuaded the government to dump most of the debt-related hardships on the working class. Concurrently the Yugoslav League of Communists spawned several opportunistic leaders eager to ingratiate themselves with Western bankers and entrepreneurs. Among them was Slobodan Milošević – not a committed Communist, or capitalist, or nationalist, but someone dedicated to reinforcing his own and his wife’s positions in whatever power structure might best serve their purposes as the post-Cold War world took shape.

In 1984 the Reagan administration accepted the US National Security Council’s advice to ‘push Yugoslavia towards a capitalist restoration’ – whereupon the World Bank imposed a uniquely punitive banking mechanism on Yugoslav industries. In the crucial years of 1989–90, this caused 600,000 redundancies, without compensation, out of a 2.7 million workforce. Another half-million went unpaid during the first quarter of 1990. On 29 November 1990 the InternationalHerald Tribune reported that the CIA had warned President Bush’s State Department: ‘Yugoslavia is heading for civil war within eighteen months’.

As the last of the benefits provided by Tito’s ‘self-management socialism’ were eroded, the IMF’s Yugoslav allies assured the masses that if they bore their cross patiently they would soon come to a glorious resurrection within the EU. The Slovenes were the first to indicate that they felt they had carried their cross far enough. In January 1990 they made plain their intention of seceding from Yugoslavia as soon as possible and ‘joining the EU’. Meanwhile secessionists in Croatia were reactivating pre-1945 bourgeois nationalism, complete with slogans and symbols that for older people awoke bloody memories and, among the younger generations, stirred new fears.

Since Mikhail Gorbachev’s advent, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Vatican had been seeking to re-establish their traditional spheres of influence and by 1989–90 were vigorously promoting Slovenian and Croatian independence. In 1992 John Zametica, of the London International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote:

Austria saw the Yugoslav crisis as an auspicious moment for self-assertion and had a remarkably open and sometimes brazen policy aimed at helping Slovenia and Croatia in their efforts to leave the Federation. By the summer of 1991 the EU was warning Austria that unless it desisted from its energetic meddling in Yugoslavia it would not be considered for eventual EU membership. But Austria only laughed at this empty threat. And Hungary – even keener to see the death of Yugoslavia – covertly supplied Croatia with a large consignment of automatic assault rifles in December 1990. These were being used six months later when Hungary’s prime minister, the late Josef Antall, recalled the 1920 Treaty of Trianon [which had humiliatingly dismembered Hungary] and commented that it had been made only with Yugoslavia. ‘This historical fact must be kept in mind,’ he said. ‘We gave Vojvodina to Yugoslavia. If there is no more Yugoslavia then we should get it back.’

Yugoslavia was made up of six republics – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia. The two provinces – Vojvodina and Kosovo, parts of the Serb republic – gained a measure of autonomy in 1974. Safeguards were provided to ensure that no one need fear being dominated by anyone else – everyone else had been dominated by Serbs during the inter-war Monarchy. Many Serbs had lived for generations in the other republics and in Tito-time this bothered only the Kosovars (occasionally) because the constitution gave equal rights to the individual as a citizen of a republic and as a member of a nation – a device which could have been used to avert disaster. As Peter Gowan has noted, ‘If the Western powers had been interested in putting the interests of the Yugoslav people first, they had adequate levers to play a decisive role, alongside Yugoslavia’s federal government, in maintaining the country’s integrity.’

Croatia claimed the right to self-determination because the Croatian nation had voted for it in a referendum. But when the Croatian Serbs organized their own referendum, an overwhelming majority rejected the option of living within an independent Croatia. Croatia’s leaders ignored this vote, thus denying those Serbs their sovereign national right. Yugoslavia’s constitutional principles required a resolution of such conflicting rights and democratic wills. But the EU seemed unaware of the fact that the rights of the Serb nation were as valid as the will of the Croat republic – admittedly a confusing concept for non-Yugoslavs, yet a vital cog in Tito’s peace-keeping machine.

In midsummer 1991, when Germany decided unilaterally to recognize Slovenian and Croatian independence, the Great Powers fell to squabbling among themselves. The US, the UK and France (still passively favouring Yugoslav unity) reminded Germany of the 1975 Helsinki Accords and of the 1990 Treaty of Paris, guaranteeing that all Europe’s inter-state borders should be inviolate and that adequate internal arrangements should be made to safeguard minority rights. Yugoslavia presented this new treaty with its first challenge. But the EU, bowing to Germany’s will, failed to enforce the relevant principles – having nothing to gain by upholding them. In June 1991 Germany and Austria made fools of the EU Council of Ministers by persuading it to mediate between Ljubljana (Slovenia), Zagreb (Croatia) and Belgrade (Serbia). The EU, though as yet refusing to recognize Slovenia’s and Croatia’s right to independence, now found themselves, in their role as mediators, implicitly acknowledging the breakaway republics’ repudiation of Yugoslavia’s sovereign authority.

Many international law savants (including Barbara Delcouri and Olivier Carten of the Free University of Brussels) consider the secessions from the Yugoslav Federation illegitimate since the principle of ‘self-determination’ applied to none of those cases. During the turmoil preceding the disintegration, this issue was never openly debated in detail.

How did the Germans bring the other EU members to heel? We know that during an all-night European Political Co-operation meeting, on 15–16 December 1991, Helmut Kohl secured John Major’s support by offering the British two important Maastricht Treaty opt-outs, on the Social Charter and Monetary Union. Doubtless comparable inducements were offered to other leaders. Chancellor Kohl promised the meeting that Germany would withhold recognition from Slovenia and Croatia until their minorities’ rights had been fully and formally guaranteed in compliance with the Helsinki Accords. As this was not an issue in Slovenia, he was really talking about Croatia’s Serbs. Exactly one week later he broke that promise. Apparently the newly united Germany was intent on acquiring a sphere of influence extending over Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia – and perhaps, later, Poland and Czechoslovakia. How else to explain Kohl’s and Genscher’s determination to dismember Yugoslavia?

At that time all the emphasis was on Serbia’s evil-doing, and the threat posed to other republics by the revived ‘Greater Serbia’ cult. The demonization of Serbs in general – then and later – was far from spontaneous. Croatian and Kosovar secessionists engaged a Washington DC public relations firm to run their anti-Serb propaganda campaigns – surely an unnecessary expense, given the well-documented atrocities committed by Milošević’s militia, his police ‘Special Units’ and various enlisted criminal gangs. However, these campaigns served to concentrate public attention on Serbian war crimes and deflect the media spotlight from subsequent Croatian, Bosniak and Kosovar atrocities. In Germany few protested when a First World War chant, ‘Serbien muss sterbien’ (‘Serbia must die’), again became popular. The Green Party leader, Joschka Fischer, likened the Serbs to the Nazis. By October 2000, when Milošević was voted out of power, the simplistic notion that he had caused all the Balkan bloodshed was firmly lodged in very many minds.

On 2 January 1992 the Serbs agreed to a ‘cessation of hostilities’ in Croatia, declaring their willingness to accept UN peace-keeping forces in the battle zones. As these troop were to operate only in Croatia, why did the UN commanders choose Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina as its command headquarters, while placing its logistical bases in Banja Luka (also in BiH), Zagreb (Croatia) and Belgrade – although Croatia was now a sovereign state? After that, the UN’s errors bred like fruit flies, to the angry frustration of the troops from twenty-seven countries, who could clearly see the need to disarm and disband the numerous Serb paramilitary and local militia forces in Croatia, armed by Belgrade. Demilitarization, so crucial to the success of the overall plan, was never attempted. In December Mark Goulding, Assistant Secretary-General ‘for political issues’ to the UN Secretary-General, had stated that in UN-protected zones ‘the laws and institutions of the new Republic of Croatia would not apply’. This encouraged the Serbs to continue their violent domination of those Croatian territories recently seized by force. And the setting aside of Croatian ‘laws and institutions’ required Unprofor’s commanders reluctantly to defer to Serbian local authorities who had usurped the positions of murdered or banished Croats.

Next it was BiH’s turn. The Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegović, had personally visited Germany to beg Hans-Dietrich Genscher (then Foreign Minister) not to recognize Croatian independence; he foresaw a consequent BiH separatist movement, led by Belgrade-backed Serbs. The EU-appointed Badinter Commission supported him, advising that Bosnian independence should on no account be recognized without the full and incontestable consent of all three nations. Those, according to the 1981 census, consisted of 1,629,000 Muslims, 1,320,000 Serbs, 758,000 Croats – plus 326,000 Yugoslavs. Many who described themselves as ‘Yugoslavs’ were partners in mixed marriages and their offspring.

However, by January 1992 Germany’s assertiveness had thoroughly unsettled Washington and new actors had arrived on the Balkan stage. Laurence Eagleburger, President Bush’s adviser on European policy, and Brent Scowcroft, head of the US National Security Council, had both served in the US embassy in Belgrade (the former as ambassador) and maintained substantial business interests in Yugoslavia. Eagleburger now warned that when it came to constructing ‘the new Europe’ Germany was ‘getting out ahead of the US’. It was time for Washington to take charge in the Balkans.

As determined by Germany, the position then was that the so-called international community must protect Croatia from Serbia while opposing Bosnian independence. As determined by the US, the position was that Bosnia must be assisted towards independence and then protected from aggressive Serbia. The need to ‘project power’ in Europe was dictating US policy and this US ‘defence of Bosnia’s right to self-determination’ would show the world who was boss.

In Sarajevo President Bush’s envoys confronted Izetbegović, dictating that what he most dreaded – an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina – must happen. Desperately he began to negotiate with the EU. As a result, a three-canton confederal settlement, leaving BiH as part of Yugoslavia, was agreed in March with the Bosnian Serbs and Croats. But this displeased the US, which insisted on his demanding a sovereign, independent state. A week later he repudiated the EU-brokered agreement, US power had been successfully projected and a three-year war followed.

Chronology

Part I gives my impressions of Zagreb at the end of 1991, soon after the secession from Yugoslavia of Slovenia and Croatia and three months before the Bosnian conflict began.

Part II recalls a five-week visit to Serbia in the autumn of 1999, four months after the end of Nato’s ‘airwar’.

Part III describes my three-month cycle tour, beginning in March 2000, of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), Montenegro, Albania and Kosovo.

*

19181 DecemberFormation of the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, known from January 1929 as ‘the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’.1945NovemberFormation of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia.19804 MayDeath of Josip Broz Tito.198111 MarchFirst civil unrest in Kosovo.1986FebruarySlobodan Milošević becomes head of Serbian Communist Party. 198724 AprilOn a visit to the famous battlefield at Kosovo Polje, Milošević intervenes on behalf of Kosovo’s Serb minority.