The blackened skeleton blends in almost completely with the flame licked walls. I suppose he looked about the same, if a bit less crisp, when he stormed the embassy the night before in head-to-toe black, shoes to balaclava. He was a Serb, a proud nationalist, and those filthy mud-blood Americans, not even a decade past the bombing of his country, now recognized the false state of Kosovo. Named Kosovo, after the Serbian word for blackbird, for the Field of Blackbirds, where the great Serb king Lazar and his troops lost the final battle to the Ottoman Turks and the dark birds descended to devour their flesh over 600 years ago, this was Serbian land. Although accidental, our skeleton’s sacrifice in the name of defiance to a world that sought to erase his history would have made him proud, had he lived to see it. It was his plan to live to see it, of course. He was a Serb, and cowardly suicide bombings were never the Serbian way. He intended to stay alive to watch the flames destroy the American embassy and hear the screams of those imperialist pig dogs. Only he missed while lighting the Molotov Cocktail. And now he was a martyr.
Go back far enough in the Balkans, you can always find a crime worth dying for, a crime worth sacrificing for, and most importantly a crime worth killing for. The constant oppression, mysticism, legend and sheer pessimism of a land so long the crux of world conflict has created a glaring blind-spot to their perspectives, however: very few can see a cause, a legacy, worth living for.
Defining ethnicity is incredibly tricky. The US census summarizes the dominant perception by social scientists in declaring that “race and ethnicity are complex, multifaceted constructs”, and this is no doubt true. However, despite ethnicity’s constructed nature, it is the excuse for incredible savagery and lazy politics and as such its power deserves decent study and acknowledgement. I do not seek to define ethnicity as that can only be done by the self-identifying members of the in-group itself, but as ethnicity is at the core of popular support for the recent conflicts in the Balkans, and a motivating factor behind the rise of right-wing xenophobia in the USA, the facts behind these self-identifications are worthy of further study.
Somewhere around 1,500 years ago, the South Slavic, or Yugoslav, tribes arrived in the Balkans. Ethnically, the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians are indeed very closely related to the point of being basically the same people. There are all kinds of theories as to where the tribes came from, each theory with its own agenda. Slavic identity is an ideal example of the creation of ethnicity narratives, and an impressive piece of evidence in the argument that “ancient ethnic hatreds” was the bullshit construct of power-hungry politicians. Florin Curta posited in 2001 that “Slavs… did not come from the North, but became Slavs only in contact with the Roman frontier.” This is a direct challenge of “traditional historiographical interpretation, which tended to lump these two groups [Sclavenes and Antes]” whose own identities were a Byzantine construct, Curta notes, “under one single denomination, on the often implicit assumption that the Slavs were the initial root from which sprung all Slavic-speaking nations of later times.” His premise is that the use of weak evidence from trade routes and fallible ancient linguistic records created false history of Slavic identity.
Wherever they came from, the Serbs settled in the East, the Croats in the West, instituting largely similar cultures until invaders and missionaries moved in. For the Croats, it was the Franks under Charlemagne that moved them quickly towards Catholicism, for the Serbs it was the Eastern Orthodox missionaries. More simply, a similar-to-identical Slavic-speaking group fell under differing religious influences that shaped differing identities, these identities having nothing to do with biology or ethnicity, and they maintained overlapping languages, even under both Austro-Hungarian and Turkish imperial rule. The Bosnians were merely Slavs in the geographic region known as Bosnia. Bosnian became its own identity with the invasions, mass conversions and everything else that came with oppression by the Turks and Hungarians.
Miraculous new hybrids of religion emerged, if only briefly, and a vibrant culture was created (and crushed) by this co-mingling of empires. Macedonia, one of these vibrant regions, is according to regional pop scholars like Robert Kaplan the inspiration for the French word for Mixed Salad from its 19th century status as Europe’s clusterfuck, a no-man’s-land of Bulgarian, Greek and Turkish hatred, fanned by the flames of Serb mercenaries from the north and Russian funds from the east, a disputed nation whose paramilitary ransoms, assassinations, rapes and massacres set the standard for the violence that would tear the region apart nearly a century later.
Fast forward now to 1917, the Corfu declaration created what would become the state of Yugoslavia, declaring the Serb, Croat and Slovene ethnicities “the same by blood, by language, by the feelings of their unity, by the continuity and integrity of the territory which they inhabit undivided, and by the common vital interests of their national survival and manifold development of their moral and material life.” This unity was disrupted two decades later when the Nazis occupied Yugoslavia, the Croats joining the occupiers and attempting the genocide of the Serbs. Following the hundreds of thousands of deaths and deportations, Yugoslavia was recreated after the war, divided into six ethnic republics and two autonomous ethnic regions, inclusive of many ethnicities that had not previously been a part of the union.
To explore any further than this the history of the Balkans would be an exercise in futility, not to mention a reinvention of the wheel, as it was already done pithily but thoroughly for the recent history of the whole of Central and Eastern Europe by Hannah Arendt in chapters IX-XII of her 1963 masterwork Eichmann In Jerusalem. Franks, Romans, Turks, Hungarians, Habsburgs, Germans, and countless other external forces conquered, ruled, and slaughtered the Balkan peoples. And Bulgarians, Macedonians, Serbs, Croats and Albanians all tried their own hands at subjugating their neighbors. More than a millennium of conquest, shifting borders and bloodshed, yet we’re still no closer to determining root causes or even solid histories, no different than most of Europe but for some reason the history here is even less generally agreed upon.
And there was indeed a beautiful 40 year peace that took the region under the dictator Tito (“beautiful peace” is of course a relative term, which is to say that relative to their Soviet satellite neighbors in post-war Europe, Tito’s regime sending only around 30,000 prisoners to the work camps and murdering a mere 4,000 is nothing to scoff at. This history is a generalization, not comprehensive), but that ended with bloodshed the likes of which Europe had not seen since the 1940s.
The death of Tito was a tragedy for Yugoslavia. He was Comrade, Father, Leader, Godhead. Marshall Tito led Yugoslavia out of the hold of fascism, imperial domination and genocide. He and his top advisors maneuvered his country carefully between communism and capitalism. They were the most free and happy people of Eastern Europe. Tito had given Yugoslavia everything. Now he was gone. There was no charismatic leader poised to take his place. There had been no talent bred and raised for post-Tito navigation. There were merely the uncharismatic leaders of the Communist Parties of the six autonomous republics within Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was the best candidate of all Eastern bloc countries to peacefully transition from communism to democracy. As Michael Montgomery described it, “it had an educated labor force, a solid middle class that bridged the gully between the various ethnonational groups, and a sense, albeit fragile, that Yugoslavia was something more than the sum total of its six republics.” Yugoslavia, under the leadership of Tito, the brilliant negotiation of Yugoslav diplomats, and the skill and artistry of Yugoslav intelligentsia and the creative class, was a world power, though not a great power, and its future should have been assured. Yet, even with all of the economic and social advances that Tito oversaw, it was squandered in under a decade following his death in 1980.
Despite the atrocities and tragedies, there is no deep historic ethnic difference between the original Yugoslav tribes. Not only is this a well-documented fact, it was a convenient political truth for Tito and the post-war Yugoslav regime. Further ethnic division guaranteed further bloodshed, whereas common ethnicity meant easier rule and coexistence. Tito himself declared in 1952 “I would like to live to see the day when Yugoslavia would become amalgamated into a firm community, when she would no longer be a formal community but a community of a single Yugoslav nation.”
The common legend of the breakup of Yugoslavia is that the nation was an unsustainable falsehood, incompatible ethnicities bearing seething ancient hatreds against one another forced by a dictator to live as a single community. The Western world was fully willing to embrace this bad pop psychology and accept the nationalists’ actions as historically and politically inevitable and proper. A more in-depth, non-commercial investigation, however, such as that done by Robert M. Hayden in 1996, shows “that the wars have been about the forced unmixing of peoples whose continuing coexistence was counter to the political ideologies that won the free elections of 1990. Thus extreme nationalism in the former Yugoslavia has not been only a matter of imagining allegedly ‘primordial’ communities, but rather of making existing heterogeneous ones unimaginable.”
Nationalist political rhetoric and elections created the reality of ethnic nations where none had previously existed. “The rise of mutually hostile nationalisms led to a sharp decline in the percentage of Yugoslavs throughout the country, from 5.4% in 1981 to 3.0% in 1991-a 41.3% drop.” The ethnic classifications did not change, but the self-classifications of the population within those options changed significantly. These changes in self-classification had much to do with increased nationalism throughout Yugoslavia’s constituent republics, but also with fear, as Hayden clarifies from his research: “At the time of the census (April 1991) I was told by a number of people that they would prefer to continue to identify themselves as Yugoslavs but were afraid that doing so could cost them their jobs, and perhaps even their property, in the chauvinist political climate then dominant.”
What happened next was unthinkable from the most prosperous nation in Eastern Europe. Within 5 years, unemployment was over 1 million, with an overall jobless rate of nearly 20%. Inflation followed austerity, and with this perfect economic storm came an unprecedented fear. To give a Western parallel, quoting Chris Bennett, assistant high representative and head of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, “if David Duke were given a monopoly on media and standard of living were to fall 40% in a decade, America would have its Milosevic.” The next chapter in this story was written in blood.
Though rhetorical and military techniques are obvious ethnic cleansers, the leadership in the constituent republics used different tactics as well. In Slovenia, tens of thousands of non-ethnic-Slovene residents were erased from the government registers following the nation’s declaration of statehood in 1991. For these people, now illegal residents in their own homes and villages, for whom work was also outlawed, relocation was often the only option. It took over a decade for the European Court of Human Rights to declare this act illegal, though it has not yet been rectified by the Slovenian government.
In Croatia, science was, and still is, used to differentiate ethnicities, to tear apart the fragile fabric of interethnicity. Despite biological science having little, if anything, to do with ethnicity (as shown by the work of the Bioanthropology Research Laboratory at the University of Maryland), the Croatian academy has taken it upon itself to prove otherwise, and to prove, despite the strong evidence in the studies of experts like Florin Curta or Frederick Singleton, the non-Slavic history of their great nation.
In his recently publicized state-subsidized study, “Genetic origin of the Croats”, Dr. Ivan Juric, professor at the Zagreb Faculty of Agriculture, drew genetic distinctions between the biology of Serbs and Croats. His findings showed greater similarities in cells of Croatian and Iranian, or what his study refers to as Persian, blood samples, than between Croatians and any Balkan people. The study uses this discovery to make claims about the historical differences between the nations of the Balkans, and to call to the proposed history that Croatia was populated by Illyrian settlers from a long extinct sea. The next census will show whether Illyrian or Persian becomes a valid categorization and who loses out on their right to identify.
No side was innocent, and innocents of all sides were similarly victimized, subjected to weaponized rapes, torture and mass slaughter. Sure, they’d all been Yugoslavs a year or two earlier, but they weren’t countrymen now. Today, this history is of no concern. The invented histories of ethnic nationalists and international leaders are today’s reality. They are Croats, or Serbs, or Bosnians, or Albanians. 20, 15, even 10 years ago, militant Croats held signs reading “The only good Serb is a dead Serb” while burning their neighbors in effigy. A Serb matriarch would do her laundry with a rifle slung across her back in case “those Moslem barbarian rapists” came by while she was outside. They weren’t people now. They were The Other. They pick the histories they choose to remember, those histories that place them in the best light or drive them to the greatest passion, forgetting the inconvenient truth that their people, too, have been the villain.
Slobodan Milosevic had the capacity to ignite civil unrest and bloody massacres with his words. This is well-documented and undoubtedly true. Yet, if we’re honest with ourselves, Milosevic is himself overshadowed as the Balkan exemplar of fascistic nationalist risk rhetoric by Franjo Tudjman of Croatia. On August 28, 1995, Tudjman delivered a speech on the success of Croatia’s ethnic cleansing of the Serbs from the town of Knin. “We did not have our own rulers from our own blood since 1522, when it was captured by the Turks and when those who were in our Croatian Knin until yesterday came together with them,” he said of the Serbs, continuing:
“And from today, this is Croatian Knin. And there can be no return to the past, to the times when they the Serbs were spreading cancer in the heart of Croatia, cancer which was destroying the Croatian national being and which did not allow the Croatian people to be the master in its own house and did not allow Croatia to lead an independent and sovereign life under this wide, blue sky and within the world community of sovereign nations… Here in Knin the Serbs were creating their own Serb state in order to unify it with those Bosnian Serbs and Serbia proper and their Yugoslavia… Here in Knin they were preparing for a long-term war.”
But the threat of the Serbs alone could not slice apart Yugoslavia and create the state of Croatia. No,
“in order to achieve this, dear Croatian brothers and sisters, we had to unite the disunited Croathood. We had to muster all Croatian wit… We had to create our own Croatian Army, our own armed force, with which we were capable of defeating the Serbs and convince and prove to the world that we are capable of preserving and ruling our country. This also means that we will know how to value what we conquered at the price of Croatian blood and we shall never allow anyone to jeopardize our freedom, our democracy, our beautiful Croatian land in which there must be room not only for all Croatian people here, but also for all those expelled Croats whom I invited to return…”
“Brotherhood and Unity”, Tito’s slogan, took on a whole new meaning with Tudjman. It was a duty for every young Croat, and for the nascent Croat nation as a whole:
“It goes without saying that from fertile areas to all these parts we liberated there will be room for all our people, and our nation will celebrate its freedom and build its Croatia for which… too many Croatian people died and too many of our sons suffered in the dungeons of Venice, Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade. Dear Croatian brothers and sisters, I invite you to start on the revival of Knin, so we can populate it, and not just Knin, but also Benkovac, Obrovac and all the area up to the Plitvice lakes and Sisak. We must revive and build the whole of Croatia, so it can become a country of which every Croat can be proud, and all Croats can be from today, a country of wealth and happiness of all Croatian people.”
With Tudjman’s masterful use of the rhetoric of dread, there was no room for doubt. Thinkers who espoused the risks of this ethnic nationalism are still today viewed as heretics. Such viewpoints were banned, outlawed, with the intellectuals who even suggested this heresy, such as Dubravka Ugresic, exiled to the Netherlands and burned in effigy, literally as witches.
Of course, to place the blame solely on Croatia is as much an injustice as the treatment that most of the world has given the Serbs, placing blame for mutual war crimes on a single party. Milosevic no doubt played his part. However, where Croatia’s game was entirely ethnic, Serbia’s strongman called to economic and social risks as well.
In Kosovo, four years before the conflict with Croatia, Slobodan Milosevic was already perfecting his rhetorical trade. In the town of Kosovo Polje, there was a demonstration by ethnic Serbs at which he represented the Yugoslav government where he took the side of the Serb nationalists. “No one has the right to beat the people!” he declared of a situation the Serbs had manufactured where it was claimed a Kosovar police officer struck an older man, “no one will ever dare beat you again.” With these statements, he lost his position in the Yugoslav government, but gained his messianic post as savior of the Serbs. Most reports show, however, that this alleged beating had never occurred and was simply a tool by Milosevic to undermine Kosovar Albanian authority and paint them as aggressors. “They should know,” he concluded, with no intentional irony, “there will be no tyranny on this soil anymore.”
After Milosevic and Tudjman were done dividing their peoples through the rhetoric of risk, they then joined forces to discuss the imminent threat of the entirely fabricated Bosnian plan to establish a fundamentalist Muslim state, fighting now as “Brothers in Christ” against the “Turks”. Based on centuries of harmonious co-existence of religions throughout Bosnia, this rhetoric was baseless. Summing up the situation beautifully at a conference in Graz, Austria, in November 2011, Gordana Susa, a leading reporter in pre-war Yugoslavia and a lead dissident during the wars of the 90s, explained:
“Multi-ethnic cities were especially targeted. The chief enemy of the JNA [Yugoslav People’s Army] was common life, coexistence… Living proof that people of different societies living together in one city, working together, that went against the nationalist propaganda that tried to present ethnic communities forced to live together against their wills, torn apart by ancient ethnic hatreds.”
Therefore, in order to match reality to rhetoric, orders were given to the Christian soldiers that “It [was] not enough to cleanse Mostar of the Muslims … the relics must also be destroyed.”
The politicians are not wholly to blame, of course. Their citizen-victims followed them willingly, and in post-script blamed the casualties of war on their enemies instead of politicians for entering them into war.
Yugoslavia fell, Croatia rose as the West rapidly and undeservedly projected onto them a model of their own ideals, Serbia is crippled by the West’s hatred and their own psychological dependency on Russia (many would blame it on internal corruption, but that’s easy to overcome or ignore with EU support, just looking at Romania and Croatia for local examples), yet neither country has taken stock of the rhetoric, risks, and lies that got them here.
The tragedy of Yugoslavia is not that its leaders failed to understand the risks they faced, but that they fully comprehended them, repackaged them to be attractive to the narrative of their ethnic nations, and allowed, even caused, tragedy to befall their countrymen in order to achieve great wealth and legacy.
This is not ancient history. This is not history at all. This is a cautionary tale. While Representative Bennett suggested David Duke as an American parallel to Milosevic, in fact Donald Trump’s likely victory as the Republican party’s presidential nominee is an exact mirror of the Yugoslav dissolution. When we look at the shifts in census reporting in the former Yugoslavia, we can see the rapid ethnic unmixing of a homogeneous state.
But this is not the only way to create hatred, nor to create ethnic solidarity. Looking at the United States Census of 1990 and then that of 2000, another troubling demographic shift is evident: white Americans who formerly identified as stemming from any number of European ancestries now identify as solely “American”. The number of citizens identifying as American jumped from 12.4 million to 20.2 million, a 62% increase, significantly greater that the mirrored 41% decrease in Yugoslav identification, made up primarily of those who formerly identified as having English-American and British-American ancestry now considering themselves “indigenous”.
This is not the first time self-identification has shifted, and such shifts by themselves do not necessarily herald crisis. A similar shift in US ethnic identifiers was to be observed around World War II, but in that case the threat to which the demographics were responding was solid, unifying, and distant, creating a broader sense of multi-ethnic, multi-racial American identity, as was Tito’s intent with Yugoslav identity.
In this modern case, however, the solidification of a larger identifier is actually the exact opposite of what Tito and Roosevelt had in mind. Note that the shift occurred even before 9/11, so there was no unifying threat leading to this change, but instead an increased nativism among white people. In combination with the violence and enmity of rhetoric and the fear of an invisible domestic threat, the demographic shift parallels to unifying figures and times end with the numbers, but the mirrored parallels to the dissolution of Yugoslavia continue to bear themselves out. Whereas under Tito “Yugoslav” was a unifier and uniter of supposedly disparate tribes, in today’s America it serves to separate white people from non-white people. And it is this separation which Donald Trump is exploiting when he suggests we throw out all the Hispanic immigrants, just as Tudjman called for the “liberation” of the “fertile” lands he felt should rightfully belong to his Croats.
It is this separation that Ted Cruz is exploiting when he calls Islam “a cancer” and “a theocratic and political ideology that says they are compelled to use violence and force to murder anyone that doesn’t share their radical faith or forcibly convert them”, or Mike Huckabee when he calls Islam “a religion that promotes the most murderous mayhem on the planet in their so-called holiest days”, thereby justifying Trump’s call to block all Muslims from entering America, just as “brothers in Christ” Tudjman and Milosevic ensured their own lands were cleansed of Muslims. And when Trump suggests that Black people who get assaulted at his events deserved it, it is a surreal mirror to Milosevic’s “they will not hit you again”. These groups are not like us “real Americans”, just like the Bosnians weren’t like those real Serbs or Croats. And I’m certainly not the first to suggest that the America of the Republican frontrunners is reminiscent of Milosevic’s Yugoslavia.
Trump didn’t turn America toward fascism, racism or xenophobia. Trump is an opportunist using the psychological phenomena behind this already-occurring shift in demographic self-identification among Americans of European ancestry to rise to power. In a way, we should be thankful. An opportunist’s positions change with the winds of fortune. It could have been a true believer, a Stalin or a Hitler or a Tudjman or a Karadzic or a Mladic, who caught the wave of modern American fascism.
But Trump remains no joke: his supporters, like the supporters of Tudjman or Milosevic, will turn out to vote, especially when the opponent is one of the most despised women in America, or the 74-year-old socialist Jew. He probably won’t win, even despite that, but the danger doesn’t stop there. This kind of movement doesn’t just go away, and doesn’t have just one single leader. These people won’t back down just because Trump loses an election, and even when he moves away from the headlines, acts of right-wing anti-Muslim and anti-Black terrorism and Planned Parenthood shootings will continue.
Just like the leaders of Yugoslavia and its successor states, Donald Trump fully comprehends the risks his rhetoric brings, is repackaging them to be attractive to the narrative of his ethnic nation, and is allowing or causing tragedy to befall his countrymen in order to achieve greater wealth and legacy. The dream of Yugoslavia wasn’t destroyed in a day, but the ethnic hatred that was built by Balkan nationalists, both opportunists and true believers alike, remains to this day. The damage to America is likewise done, a work in progress since even before the Tea Party found its vitriolic voice in opposition to their country’s first black President, Barack Hussein Obama, whose middle name ‘proved’ to them that he was also a secret Muslim.
While it can always get worse, regardless of the turnout of the 2016 elections, it will take decades to heal these self-inflicted psychic wounds, if the nation ever chooses to.
This article is a modified excerpt of Zachary Gallant’s book The Forgotten War Crimes: State Sovereignty, Ethnic Cleansing, and the Autonomist Revolution, available now at forgottenwarcrimes.com. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
