Yugoslavia comes in from the cold
March 14 2003
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AT THE BEGINNING of November 2000 the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was re-admitted to membership of the United Nations after eight years of exclusion. This took place within a month of Vojislav Kostunica replacing Slobodan Milosevic as president of the republic, and it symbolises the western world’s perception that a new Yugoslavia has come into being. While it is agreed that any new president is likely to be better than Milosevic, it is also recognised that there are immense problems to be solved, affecting the whole of the Balkans, and that Kostunica will need western help to deal with them.
Tito’s creation comes to pieces
Yugoslavia (the country of southern Slavs) was created as an independent kingdom in the early twentieth century, after the first world war. It was then occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940, and after Germany’s defeat and surrender was reformed as a communist federal republic under the partisan leader Josip Tito, with six constituent republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia.
With Tito’s death in 1980 the republics, rarely on good terms with each other, began to show signs of disunity. In 1991 two of them, Slovenia and Croatia, declared their independence. Slovenia had an easy enough transition to freedom, but in Croatia the strong ethnic Serb minority of about 12 per cent of the population refused to accept it, and a full-fledged war ensued. It was stopped, after enormous loss of life, by a cease-fire arranged by the United Nations and the European Union.
While the Serb-Croat war was still in progress, Bosnia-Herzegovina also declared independence. After a particularly bloody and long-drawn-out war between Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Muslims, a frail peace settlement was reached whereby one half of the country became a Serb republic and the other half a Croat-Muslim federation. Whether it will succeed in the long run is still in doubt. The republic of Macedonia also achieved independence in 1992 after many alarms, but in the end fairly peacefully.
On 27 April of that year, the two remaining republics, Serbia and Montenegro, announced the formation of a new Yugoslav Federation. It was not acceptable to the United Nations as the successor to Tito’s Yugoslavia because of the Serbian record of aggression in Bosnia, and because of the lamentable pursuit of the Greater Serbian dream by its president, Slobodan Milosevic, later to become president of Yugoslavia. The UN also imposed an arms embargo, trade sanctions and sporting and travel restrictions.
Serbia the dominant partner
Throughout 50 years of the communist-controlled Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Serbia was the strongest of the constituent republics, controlling the army, police, press and virtually all important organs of state, even though Tito himself was a Croat. When the federal republic began to unravel after the death of Tito it was the Serbians who raised the strongest objections and took action to prevent it. In Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina successively, Serbian enclaves called in the Yugoslav army to protect them on the grounds that their communities were being destroyed. The truth was that they wanted armed force to back their programme of what came to be called ethnic cleansing (the modern version of pogroms) to ensure Serbian domination. Serb treatment of Muslims in Bosnia reached the proportions of genocide.
The Kosovo disaster
Ethnic cleansing reached its peak in Kosovo, the southernmost province of Serbia. Under the communists, Kosovo, by reason of its 90 per cent Albanian population, had been autonomous. Serbs have always been anxious to keep it as part of Serbia because of its historical associations: it was the scene of Serbia’s defeat by the Ottoman Turks in 1389, an event which led to Serbia’s 500 years under Ottoman rule.
But in 1992, in defiance of the Serbian authorities, elections were held in Kosovo, resulting in a win for the Democratic League and its leader Ibrahim Rugova. This was unacceptable to the then president of Serbia, Milosevic, who repealed Kosovo’s limited autonomy (which included use of the Albanian language in schools and government) and imposed direct rule from Belgrade. The majority Albanian-speaking element responded by boycotting Serbian-speaking schools and universities and setting up their own parallel Albanian-speaking institutions. Incidents between Serbians and Albanians grew more frequent, and these were backed by operations carried out by the newly-formed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), established to fight for the independence of the province.
The Yugoslav army retaliated, on the pretext of eliminating support for the KLA. Such was their ferocity and brutality that the international community demanded, and got, a renewed arms embargo on Yugoslavia. Villages were burnt to the ground, their inhabitants tortured and raped before being from the cold driven out or killed. This grim process of ethnic cleansing at its worst was accompanied by systematic seizure of Kosovo houses by Serbs encouraged by their government to settle in Kosovo.
NATO strikes back
A conference was called at the chateau of Rambouillet near Paris to discuss a settlement. It was proposed that Kosovo should be offered limited autonomy within Serbia, and that a NATO peacekeeping force should be deployed there. The Yugoslav delegation to the talks refused to agree, and a wave of terror was unleashed on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. On 24 March, after repeated warnings, NATO aircraft began bombing military targets in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Kosovars streamed across the borders into Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, which, although nominally part of Yugoslavia, had refused to take part in the war.
Although virtually unopposed, NATO’s bombing campaign was a failure. Fearful of losing men or aircraft, the pilots found themselves trying to bomb from great heights, through thick cloud. NATO spokesmen regularly reported the destruction of strategic sites, communications centres, missile concentrations or dumps of arms or armour, but more reliable sources told a different story of tanks evading destruction through camouflage, and targets frequently missed altogether. The climax of this saga of incompetence came when NATO bombers destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in the belief that it was a communications centre. A train-load of commuters was destroyed in the belief that they were army reinforcements, and attempts to discover the where-abouts of Milosevic were equally unsuccessful.
After a few weeks, NATO switched to attacking industrial targets, bridges and power stations, and managed to put Belgrade’s main television station out of action. By this time NATO leaders had at last begun to consult the Russians, and the former Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin came to Belgrade to see Milosevic. At the beginning of June 1999 Milosevic accepted a joint NATO-Russian offer, much to the relief of American and British generals who were beginning to fear they would have to send in ground troops. On 10 June Serbian forces began to withdraw from Kosovo, their armour virtually unscathed after two months of bombing. NATO’s losses were virtually nil, but Yugoslav losses ran into thousands, most of them civilians, while the damage to Yugoslav industry and infrastructure is incalculable.
Exit Milosevic
NATO chiefs had optimistically supposed that as soon as the bombing was over a repentant Milosevic would do the decent thing and step down. Once again they were wrong. Milosevic took the opposite course and claimed a glorious victory. He owed his very existence to NATO: had they not attacked, his own people, who had long sought his removal, would assuredly have deposed him. The NATO attack saved his life by persuading his people to support him.
But his luck could not hold forever, and as the horror of the bombing receded the Serbian people gradually swung back to the outright opposition that had prevailed before the bombing. They could no longer tolerate his blatant corruption and nepotism, his use of power to protect and promote his own position and those of his family and friends, the rottenness that he bred and fed within the Serbian state and society. He and his power-hungry wife Mira Markovitz were hated because they left people nothing to hope for. Slowly his support ebbed, until even the Serbian Orthodox Church, which he had taken pains to placate, denounced him from the pulpit.
Elections
Milosevic thought he would be able to recoup his losses by winning the elections scheduled for 24 September. His only opponent was a 56-year old professor of constitutional law, leader of what was called the van party (because all its members could fit in the back of a van). He was virtually unknown to the people, although he had a good record as a democrat and anti-communist, and was a part of the nationalist intelligentsia.
The result was a narrow win for Kostunica, so close that Milosevic and his party demanded a rerun. Within days the country turned against this chicanery and demonstrated en masse in the streets. Milosevic accepted that the game was up, and Kostunica was proclaimed president of Yugoslavia on 7 October 2000.
Looking ahead
Before Milosevic had even quit his office the process of welcoming Yugoslavia back into the family of nations had begun. Countries (including Britain) hastened to restore diplomatic relations, sanctions and embargos were lifted, trade relations were restarted and sporting fixture lists were revised. Thought is being given to Yugoslavia’s membership of European and world institutions. Kostunica is known to favour membership of the European Union, and, with Yugoslav industry and manufacturing in chaos as a result of NATO’s bombing, will certainly welcome advice and help from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Two difficult issues are Montenegro and Kosovo. For some time past, Montenegro has been showing signs of wishing to leave the Yugoslav Federation, as other republics have done. But Kostunica needs Montenegro in the federation for the parliamentary votes it gives him to form a new government, so he may not be pleased to see it leave.
As to Kosovo, it is likely that the ethnic Albanian majority will plump for independence under its self-appointed leader Ibrahim Rugova, in spite of the fact that the Security Council has recommended that Kosovo should have substantial autonomy within the Yugoslav Federation. It is unlikely that the nationalist Kostunica would wish to see an important part of the Serbian heartland being given independence or passing under Albanian influence or rule. The province is at present administered by the United Nations.
Yugoslavia not the enemy
The west must make it clear that the NATO attack was not directed against the Yugoslav people or country. The enemy was Milosevic and his henchmen, who have been indicted as war criminals and must pay the price for their crimes. There is a danger that Kostunica could become the prisoner and puppet of his still unreformed government. To prevent this he will need all the support and advice he can get from the European Union in choosing a new set of ministers and reforming his bureaucracy. A test of his intentions to carry out reforms is the extent to which he cooperates with European governments in surrendering war criminals. He faces a difficult transition.
Updated on October 06 2016