Quick Take: How Yugoslavia Was Murdered & Dismembered (1)

The West's first attempt at crushing Slavs who won't play ball

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Thirty years ago, the first Yugoslavian war ended in Bosnia. After two decades as a correspondent, it’s still the only war I’ve ever been to (I was briefly in Croatia and Slovenia in the summer of 1994) and I was merely a J-school undergraduate at the time.

One day at Pula, Croatia, some people told me they would kill me, and that’s also the only time I’ve ever been threatened so very personally: forgive me if I think that this war was a bigger deal than many people believe.

Still, even if I were to let that little incident aside (and it wasn’t a big deal, the people who threatened me weren’t armed), there are good reasons to reconsider the Yugoslavian Wars. As I write, it certainly makes sense to look at the conflict, the way it was presented to Western audiences, and the consequences that it had, as a source of important lessons about our present and the future.

People who were adults in the 1990s will agree with me that the Yugoslavian wars dominated media headlines for years, among accusations of untold atrocities, leaving behind a legacy of division, distrust and revanchism that is far from being dispelled.

That was a conflict that – as Craig Nation, a U.S. Army instructor and historian wrote in a book about the period – was marked by Western media manipulation and straightforward political trickery aimed at defeating and humiliating Russia and its allies. It was also a conflict that ended with a peace deal that was comprehensively violated by the winners, since it contained no provision to create an independent Kosovo – and yet, we have an independent Kosovo today.

If you’ve been following the media headlines about the current war in the Ukraine, perhaps you should care a lot more about what actually happened in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The country we used to called Yugoslavia was created in 1919 and would still survive after 1999, as a rump of itself, until yet another round of manipulation, deceit and treachery, through 2006. Reading Nation’s comprehensive book, (until recently available for free download by the Strategic Studies Institute, and still reachable there using the Wayback Machine) I was struck by the enormous influence that foreign forces had on the destruction of that country.

Nation doesn’t absolve Yugoslav themselves from blame. Probably, the number one reason why the country doesn’t exist anymore is that Yugoslavs were unable to make the necessary compromises and arrangements to keep their federation, which was — in summary — a much superior concept to the tiny, powerless countries that we were left with. Still, the overarching message left by Nation’s book is that scheming foreigners have a lot of responsibility for what happened.

To understand this, it helps to first look at the moment in which the breakup of Yugoslavia is commonly understood to start: the Camp Kosovo speech by Slobodan Milosevic.

There actually were two such speeches, which has been a source of confusion for, literally, decades. I was in J-school in the 1990s, during the Yugoslavian Wars, and it was unusual to find a long story about the war that didn’t include a reference to the infamous “Milosevic speech in Kosovo” that supposedly drove these peaceful, Socialist peoples to kill each other from that point on.

It’s worth pointing out that the very first Milosevic-in-Kosovo speech was in 1987. Milosevic was the top dog in Serbian politics since 1986, when he became the leader of the largest section of the Yugoslavian Communist party. In later years, he always claimed that he never favored Serbs, or Serbian nationalism, until 1989, and he was largely right: in his 1987 speech, that one can read here, there’s only Socialist platitudes and boilerplate.

The 1987 speech only became infamous in Serbia (and elsewhere in Yugoslavia) because of what happened after Milosevic spoke: he went to shake hands with locals, and some Serbs complained heatedly of harassment by Kosovo’s Albanian majority. Milosevic, caught in a bind, vowed to protect Kosovar Serbs. Scandal ensued¹.

By 1988, Nation reports (p. 41), several European states (among others Germany, Austria, Denmark, Hungary, and the Holy See, then at the tail end of its long run as an influential voice in European politics) were openly plotting to destroy the Yugoslavian Federation in the guise of recognizing the right of constituent parts to secede. They sometimes pledged diplomatic support and arranging for illegal arms transfers to prepare the way for independence. Others waited a little longer.

Milosevic, always interested in ways to keep himself in power, had understood where the wind was blowing from. In his very well known “Gazimestan speech,” (his second Kosovo speech, in 1989) he did embrace Serbian nationalism, ensuring power for himself for the next decade and a half. Working against Yugoslav politicians and military officers whose priority was to keep some sort of federation alive, Milosevic saw (correctly) that Yugoslavia was beyond salvation, given foreign-supported nationalist agitation especially in Slovenia and Croatia, and shifted his priorities towards ensuring Serbs would get as big a piece of the Yugoslavian pie as possible.

The stage was set for disaster by then, but the actors were not yet ready, and many things could have been done to try and stop it. Mostly, the opposite was done. A early example of this, Nation explains (p. 122), is how in 1990 Slovenia “was being assured by friends inside the European Community (EC) that in the event of a military confrontation, European intervention in support of separation would result.”

This scenario, Nation adds, “played out without a hitch.” In the event, there was a extremely short 10-day war in Slovenia, after which the Yugoslav army retired from the secessionist region, following negotiations in which the EC acted as rather bad-faith mediator. As Nation writes (p. 124):

In the midst of the negotiations the flamboyant Italian Foreign Minister Gianni De Michaelis spoke incautiously of the EC’s success in “blocking the spiral of conflict.” Regretfully, the European reaction that De Michaelis encouraged, which as promised awarded Slovenia’s provocations by underwriting its independence, ensured that the spiral of conflict would continue to widen.

How come? Nation goes on (p. 126):

These events (after the Slovenian war) established a destructive precedent. Yugoslavia had been shattered without any arrangements in place for resolving the manifold issues that its disappearance as a unified state was bound to create. The instrumentality of violence as a means to affect secession was confirmed. An attempt to shape international attitudes toward the conflict by using stereotypes to manipulate the media proved remarkably successful. The conniving satraps that had inherited power in the Yugoslav republics were embraced as international statesmen and essential interlocutors. A false distinction between the “good Europeans and democrats” of predominantly Catholic Slovenia and the “evil Byzantines and communists” of predominately Orthodox Serbia was adopted as an organizing premise for approaching Balkan affairs. Not least, the ability of secessionist forces to use an appeal to the international community as a mechanism for neutralizing the superior military forces of their adversaries was clearly demonstrated.

Given its “high degree of ethnic homogeneity, relative prosperity, and more developed civil society, Slovenia was able to break free from the Yugoslav federation with a minimum of domestic trauma.” That wouldn’t be the case elsewhere.

Let’s go back to 1990 first. Then, the U.S. Congress also prepared the US Foreign Operations Appropriations law 101-513, eventually passed in 1991 with a section relating specifically to Yugoslavia, stipulating that all loans, aid and credits would be cut off within six months unless elections were held. The actual text of the Foreign Appropriations Law reads:

(The Law) Prohibits, six months after this Act’s enactment, the expenditure of funds made available pursuant to this Act to provide assistance to Yugoslavia. Directs the Secretary of the Treasury to instruct the U.S. executive directors to international financial institutions to oppose any assistance to Yugoslavia. Exempts from such prohibition assistance to support democratic parties or movements and emergency and humanitarian assistance. Makes such prohibition inapplicable if: (1) all the individual republics of Yugoslavia have held free and fair elections and are not engaged in a pattern of human rights violations; or (2) the Secretary of State certifies that Yugoslavia is making significant strides toward complying with the Helsinki Accords and is encouraging any republic which has not held free and fair elections to do so.

It’s important to understand that this is 1991. The Soviet Union is about to disappear. China is still dirt poor. For a Socialist country trying to pivot towards capitalism, in dire need of bridge financing, there’s nowhere else to turn apart from the US and its vassals friends and the international organizations they control.

And, at this moment, what the Americans say is: Yugoslavia cannot receive assistance. The wording leaves room for the secessionist parties in its constituent republics (“democratic parties or movements”) to receive U.S. assistance if the U.S. finds them friendly enough.

The obvious objection would be that there were great majorities in favor of secession in Slovenia and Croatia, and nothing could be done to stop such popular sentiment. Well, that may apply in the case of Slovenia; and even in this case elites in Ljubljana had to be reassured by friends inside the EC, as we’ve seen.

There was no great majority for secession in Croatia’s case. As late as 1990, the Croat nationalists of the HDZ party had only won just over 40% of votes in a local election there. This was not an overwhelming, unstoppable force, yet.

In November 1991, with open warfare ongoing in Croatia, the Arbitration Commission of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia, a body set up in 1991 by the Council of Ministers of the European Economic Community (EEC) in response to the conflict that had broken out between separatists in Slovenia and Croatia and the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) earlier that year, determined that Yugoslavia was “in the process of dissolution.”

That is: a foreign body created by the European Union’s forebear declared that Yugoslavia, a recognized member of the United Nations, was no more. It was “in the process of dissolution.” Can you imagine your surprise if the European Union had taken advantage of open warfare against separatists across Eastern Ukraine in 2014 to determine that the Ukraine was “in the process of dissolution” and should no longer exist?

(For a detailed summary of this Commission’s other decisions, check here.)

Here, I must clarify again: Craig never says that Yugoslavia was destroyed solely because of nefarious foreign conspirations. The claim throughout is that foreign powers were fueling the flames instead of trying to help extinguish the fire. If you want to read histories of the long, simmering historical feuds within Yugoslavia, there are plenty of books to turn to. This is not the place to discuss that history.

Germany recognized the secession of first Slovenia and Croatia in December 1991, whereupon civil war ensued. It lasted for the next eight years until a three-month NATO air war unleashed against the Serbs, who had refused to acquiesce in the break-up of the federal republic, brought it to an end.

Of course, we all know by heart the preferred Western narrative on the war. It’s been repeated non-stop, for years – the Serbs were guilty. To this, Nation has some caveats. He notes, for example, that mass ethnic discrimination against Serbs in newly-independent Croatia was not a figment of Milosevic’s imagination (p. 114):

(HDZ, the ruling nationalist party in Croatia that had won just almost 40% of votes) instituted obligatory loyalty oaths for ethnic Serbs in public positions, discouraged use of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet and made the Latin script obligatory in official documents and proceedings, purged members of Croatia’s Serb minority (17 percent of the population) from positions in state administration and local police forces, and rewrote the Croatian constitution in such a way as to demote Croatian Serbs from the status of a constituent nation to that of a national minority.

In a delicious note, Nation adds that the Croatians immediately rescued the old Nazi-era flag adopted by the regime of the Hitler-loving Croatian wartime leader Ante Pavelic, the “sahovnica.”

Still, they made concessions to Serb sensibilities, given that the Croatian fascists had killed hundreds of thousands of them in World War II (that is, just four decades before all of this happened):

The use of the šahovnica as a state symbol was particularly resented. Croatian officials demonstrated sensitivity, of a particularly ineffective sort, to minority opinion by reversing the shield’s red-white checkerboard alignment in order to differentiate it from the emblem used by the Pavelić regime.

It’s a completely different flag now. If you check it out, you can see it starts with red on the upper left-hand corner, instead of white. It’s nothing like the Nazi-era flag.

Nation stresses (p. 118) that Milosevic, joined by his protégé Momir Bulatovic of Montenegro (a country that later split from Serbia in a fascinating, separate process outside of the scope of this book and review), was increasingly committed to support for the emerging Serb entities inside Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. “This decision to prioritize the creation of a “greater Serbia” would eventually be singled out as the root cause of the entire Yugoslav tragedy, though in fact the unambiguous orientation of the western republics toward secession left the Serbian leadership with little choice but to see to its own interests,” he adds. He follows up:

On March 16, 1991, as the crisis of federal institutions climaxed, Milošević remarked on Belgrade television that “Yugoslavia has entered into the final phase of its agony.” … Such statements outlined a program, to accept the dismantlement of Yugoslavia and use force to assemble an enlarged Serbia from the ruins. Ljubljana and Zagreb viewed confederation as a kind of halfway house that would buy them time to prepare for independence, and the Slovenes in particular pushed hard to provoke a break as soon as possible. Sarajevo and Skopje feared the breakup of Yugoslavia, but they were not willing to accept incorporation in a rump state where the western republics were not on hand to balance Serbia.

It’s absolutely remarkable that Nation, an American, is so shocked by all of this that he actually (p. 129) criticizes the Yugoslav military for not staging a coup! Nation argues, with some reason, that in these circumstances such an action would have been within the military’s purview, and possibly a better option than the bloodbath that was to follow. Here’s his explanation of how a bunch of generals who came of age under the rule of the Socialist strongman Josip Broz, “Tito” (1892-1980) preferred not to act:

The high command at the outset of the conflict was what several generations of indoctrination in Titoist Yugoslavia had prepared it to be, a professionally competent and ethnically diverse group of officers committed to the preservation of the Yugoslav idea. Tito had repeatedly referred to the Yugoslav armed forces as the ultimate guarantor of national unity, and in the confused circumstances of 1990-91 the JNA would have been acting within its prerogative had it seized the initiative, declared a state of emergency as a pretext for dismissing nationalist leaders in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Belgrade, and imposed federal elections and association between republics on a new foundation. Pretexts for intervention were not lacking. On January 25, 1991, a secretly filmed video was shown on national television documenting the illegal arming of Croatian paramilitaries in Slavonia. The video featured (Croatian) defense minister Špegelj, his back to a hidden camera, instructing fellow officers on techniques for murdering their Serb colleagues in the context of a national rising. The “Špegelj Affair” created a sensation, but a majority of the Federal Presidency refused to sanction a military response, and the army balked at acting without a political mandate. Following the May 6, 1991, demonstrations protesting efforts to disarm the Croatian territorial militia outside the Yugoslav naval headquarters in Split, during which a young Macedonian conscript was killed, Yugoslav Defense Minister Kadijević spoke publicly of a “state of civil war,” but his rhetoric was not backed up by action. The decision by Milošević’s Serb bloc to veto the accession of Mesić as chair of the Federal Presidency in May 1991 has also been represented as a possible occasion for the declaration of a state of emergency and military crackdown, which was not exploited for lack of political support.

So, why was there no coup? My best guess is that nobody wanted to run the risk of being immediately identified as the bad guy in the movie. 1991 was not a favorable year for wannabe Francos and Pinochets. Everybody was triangulating, and the Americans were also going around, making less-than-veiled threats (p. 130):

On January 17, U.S. Ambassador William Zimmermann instructed Milošević confidant Jović that although America supported Yugoslav unity, it would not tolerate the use of force by the federal army in Slovenia and Croatia. The EC offered the same contradictory council–simultaneous opposition to secession and to the only effective means to combat secession—in June 1991 on the eve of the Slovenian and Croatian declarations of disassociation.

Late in 1991, foreign pressure again forced everyone’s hands. As Nation explains (p. 138), Germany – the EC’s most powerful member, and one that was flexing diplomatic muscles for the first time since its reunification earlier that year – drove the European bloc to recognize the secessionist republics.

Germany first “embarrassed its allies by moving to recognize Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally,” forcing its fellow euros to follow through on January 15, 1992, despite huge misgivings. Bosnia-Herzegovina, a republic with a tenuous Muslim (Bosniak) plurality, and massive Serb and Croatian minorities, received encouraging messages too:

Bosnia-Herzegovina was urged to conduct a referendum on independence as a condition for eligibility. The rulings were legally disputable, but at this point political motives had become decisive… Macedonia, in deference to Greek protests (including threats from Athens to veto EC initiatives should its will be defied) was left in limbo.

Attempts to explain German haste rest upon a number of contradictory hypotheses, Nation writes: “aspirations to win advantage in an emerging central European economic zone, to assert a more dynamic foreign policy in the wake of unification, to make up for diplomatic passivity during the Gulf War and assume a stronger leadership role in Europe, to pursue a policy of revenge against an historic enemy, to respond to domestic pressures emerging from Catholic, Bavarian, and Croatian interest groups, or to stand up to destabilizing violence on Germany’s post-cold war eastern marches.” Regardless, Nation adds (p. 106):

Some combination of these factors will have to serve — what matters are the consequences of Bonn’s, and the EC’s, miscalculations. Slovenia and Croatia were recognized as sovereign states, and the dissolution of Yugoslavia sanctioned, without any provision being made to address the status of Croatia’s Serb minority, the prospects of the other constituent peoples of the Yugoslav federation, the legitimacy of federal instances, or the consequences for the Balkan region of Yugoslavia’s precipitous fragmentation. The decade of war that followed was at least in part a consequence of these miscalculations.

This mess was facilitated by the absence of any diplomatic counter-balance. The Soviet Union was then contending with its own accelerated process of dissolution, with some countries later to star in international dramas of their own, like the Ukraine, holding referenda to gain independence in the latter half of 1991. In fact, as Nation notes (p. 144), the well-known coup of August that year against Mikhail Gorbachev, a last-ditch Communist attempt to revert the disintegration, “was informed by sympathy toward Serbia as Russia’s historic ally in the Balkans, but it ended as a fiasco.”

Luckily for the West, there was a pathological drunk they were able to push all the way to the presidency of the new Russian Federation: Boris Yeltsin, who worked with his Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev to align Russian Balkan policy with that of the Western democracies (p. 121):

In May 1992 Kozyrev visited all of the former Yugoslav republics, and signed accords establishing full diplomatic relations with Slovenia and Croatia. He also publicly asserted that responsibility for the conflict fell upon the “national-communist” leadership in Belgrade. The Russian Federation voted in favor of economic sanctions against Belgrade on May 30, 1992, on July 10 it approved Yugoslavia’s exclusion from the CSCE, and on September 22 supported UN Resolution No. 777 denying Belgrade the status of legal successor of Tito’s federation.

Yup, all of this from the supposed historical ally of Serbia. Nation keeps hammering on a point that should be more popular among Americans, given that they live in a country that stamped out a wildly popular secessionist movement by killing pretty much anyone who took up arms against the Federal government (p. 146):

The original justification for recognizing Slovenia and Croatia was the right of self-determination, but it was a dubious premise about which no one seemed to agree. The concept was coined by Woodrow Wilson as a means for coordinating the selective dismantling of the defeated European empires of World War I, but it has never been incorporated into the code of international law. There is no consensus in place over what the conditions that qualify any one of the more than 3,000 national communities that can be identified worldwide for such a privilege might be, or whether the principle of self-determination necessarily implies a right to independence and national sovereignty. In the case of Yugoslavia, the right of self-determination was often invoked but never consistently applied. The denial of an option for self-determination to the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia, the Croats of Herzegovina, the Kosovar Albanians, and the Albanian population of Macedonia lay at the root of much of the violence that accompanied the country’s break-up. The sovereignty of the individual republics, and of inherited republican borders, was often cited as a limitation upon self-determination, but the most outspoken proponents of such perspectives were usually those with the most to gain.

I don’t get the impression that self-determination for the Russians of the Ukraine is a NATO priority right now.

(This is the first of two posts about the Yugoslav Wars. The second is here.)

1. The full exchange is shown at the very beginning of this wonderful, very comprehensive, four-and-a-half hour BBC documentary on the War in Yugoslavia.