Walter R. Roberts

Mediterranean Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 1992

- Walter R. Roberts is diplomat-in-residence at the Elliott School of International Affairs of George Washington University. He is a retired foreign service officer whose assignments have included the American Embassy in Yugoslavia and is the author of Tito, Mihailovic aruS the Allies, 1941-1945. This article is based on a paper originally presented at a conference on "The Yugoslav Crisis: Implications for Balkan Security," sponsored by Mediterranean Affairs, Inc. in Washington, DC, 4-5 December 1991.-

Yugoslavia as it existed between 1919 and 1941 and between 1945 and 1991 is no more. In the face of mounting divisive tensions, its death knell was sounded in December 1991 when Germany pressured the other members of the European Community into an agreement to recognize the independence of Croatia and Slovenia. Ironically, democratic Germany may have achieved in 1991 what totalitarian Germany failed to accomplish during the Second World War when it smashed Yugoslavia with its military might and created a separate Croatian state, only to see its forces defeated and Croatia's short-lived independence erased in 1945.

There are those who now say that Yugoslavia, as an integrated nation of separate nationalities, was never viable and that it deserved to be partitioned. The Croats and Slovenes, some argue, should not have been united with the Serbs at the time Yugoslavia was first established in 1918: the Allied powers of the First World War made a mistake at Versailles when they created this new country. History does not support this argument.

I

Yugoslavia was not an Allied creation. Croatia and Slovenia were part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and for decades prior to the First World War important Croat and Slovene personalities were agitating to form, together with the Kingdom of Serbia, whose leaders had similar ideas, a union of the South (bug) Slavs. They succeeded in their aspirations when AustriaHungary was defeated in 1918. To ally themselves with the Serbs who, unlike themselves, had fought on the winning side and were thus allies of Britain, France, and the United States, was far preferable for Croats and Slovenes than remaining under foreign rule or having control over only a small piece of territory.

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, as it was initially called before the name of Yugoslavia was adopted in 1929, lasted from 1918 to 1941, but it was not a happy union. As the years went by, the Croats and less so the Slovenes began to oppose more and more the central governmental authorities in Belgrade, who were largely controlled by the Serbs, the most populous nation. Just as the Croats had exercised obstruction and noncooperation in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, so they came to adopt the same tactics toward the new Yugoslav state. Moreover, the Serbs were not very adept‹indeed, often naive‹in handling this intricate situation. And while the king presented himself as a Yugoslav rather than a Serb, giving his three sons Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian names, he was incapable of overcoming the antagonism of the Croats. His assassination by an agent of Croatian fascists during a state visit to France in 1934 made a tense situation even worse. By 1939, however, a sporazum (agreement) was reached between the central government and the Croats, but it came too late. The Second World War was about to engulf Yugoslavia.

When Hitler attacked in 1941, the Croats for the most part welcomed the Nazi troops in their capital of Zagreb, while in Yugoslavia's capital of Belgrade the Germans were received with icy stares. What transpired thereafter is pivotal for today's conflict. The Nazis created a state of Croatia that, during its short existence, massacred hundreds of thousands of Serbs as well as thousands of Jews and Gypsies. Many Croats who were opposed to the fascist regime in Zagreb, along with recruits from other nationalities, joined the leader of the Yugoslav Communists, Josip Broz Tito (himself half Croat, half Slovene), together with his partisans, in opposing the Axis invader. Even earlier, many Serbs under General Draza Mihailovic had organized their own resistance to the Nazi occupier. Soon the two resistance forces fought each other more than the German enemy. Of the one-and-a-half million casualties in Yugoslavia during the Second World War, more than half were the result of this brutal internecine warfare.

II

When the war ended, Tito emerged victorious from the civil strife among Yugoslavs and showed his resentment against his erstwhile internal enemy, the Serbs. Their leader, Mihailovic, was executed, and Tito systematically reduced their power in the new Communist Yugoslavia. Not only the Croats but other nationalities benefited from this diminution in the role of the Serbs.

There was one area, however, in which the Serbs remained dominant: the army. The tradition of the Serbian officer corps, originally built during the years of patriotic struggle against Turkish rule, survived the Communist revolution. Indeed, precisely because other avenues of public service had to be shared with all Yugoslav nationalities, those Serbs interested in government service looked to the army for a career that was apparently less attractive for people from other parts of the country.

The Yugoslavia created by Tito was surprisingly free of ethnic problems. The only obvious antagonism was the legacy of the Second World War, pitting Titoites against adherents of Mihailovic. As the years passed, however, even this problem receded into the background. People who today call themselves Croats, Slovenes, and Serbs were only a few decades ago proud to call themselves Yugoslavs. They intermarried (there are today eight hundred thousand Serb-Croat marriages), worked together, and moved and traveled from one part of the country to another. Was this all due to the overpowering personality of Tito? Or to the overarching, if not universally embraced, Communist idea that pushed ethnicity into the background? Or to the fact that Tito was not a Serb, making it easier for the Croats to be cooperative as they had not been in prewar Yugoslavia when the king was a Serb? Whatever the reason, for thirty-five years Yugoslavia existed surprisingly well considering the authoritarian character of Tito's regime.

III

With Tito's death in 1980, the strong unifying force disappeared, and economic difficulties, long shoved under the rug, arose. Submerged ethnic tensions resurfaced, fed by the weak governmental structure Tito had bequeathed. The seeds of disintegration were first planted in Kosovo, where a growing Albanian minority demanded the transformation of its status as an autonomous province within Serbia to that of a republic with the right to secede from Yugoslavia. Kosovo is sacred to the Serbs, who regard it as the cradle of their civilization and religion. It was there, in 1389, that the Serbs finally lost their independence to the Ottomans, something they were not to regain for almost five hundred years. Kosovo today, however, is 90 percent Albanian, a non-Slav and Muslim people, because of immigration and a high birthrate accompanied by continuing Serb emigration from this region.

The Serbian reaction to the Albanian autonomy movement in Kosovo was at first surprisingly mild, but it became more forceful and repressive when the Serbian Communist leadership came under the control in 1986 of Slobodan Milosevic. During an April 1987 rally near Pristina, Kosovo's capital, he personally witnessed Serb demonstrators being beaten up by Albanian Kosovar police, and this event apparently made a deep impression on him. As tension in Kosovo increased, Milosevic ended the special status of this province, as well as the similar status of Vojvodina with its large Hungarian minority, thereby nullifying measures Tito had ordered in 1945 to reduce Serbian influence.

The new aggressive attitude of Milosevic, strengthened by his election as president of Serbia in 1990, in which he was presenting himself as a nationalist rather than a Communist, and compounded by the authoritarian and abrasive manner in which he carried out his policies in Serbia, had ramifications in Slovenia, Croatia, BosniaHercegovina, and Macedonia (created as a separate republic by Tito in 1945). All of these Yugoslav republics, but most notably Croatia, had enjoyed the Tito-imposed capitis diminutio of the Serbs.

IV

In politics as in life, the relationship between action and reaction is often complex and unclear, and so it is in the case of Yugoslavia's disintegration. There is, however, general agreement that the onset of violence that has emerged can be traced to declarations of independence by Croatia and Slovenia on 25 June 1991. Only four days earlier, their leaders had assured the American secretary of state that they would not act unilaterally. Not surprisingly, he regarded their reneging as devious treatment.

The foundation for these independence declarations was laid in the first instance by a Slovenian leadership that was then still Communist, after it had already taken certain steps toward eventual secession. The Croats followed suit. In the spring of 1990, elections in both republics brought proindependence movements to power. These movements were pushed along by strongly nationalist and anti- Communist exile groups, particularly Croats in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States, who portrayed the issue as one of democracy versus communism, when in reality it has been an ethnic clash. The Croats have been fighting not for democracy but for a free Croatia, while the Federal Army and the Serbs have been battling not for communism but for restoration of the former Yugoslavia or at least a new greater Serbia. Yet the anticommunism theme proved effective. The media around the world picked it up, and since the Belgrade authorities and pro-Serb groups abroad were slow in presenting their views, it generally took hold, with some notable exceptions that portrayed the situation in more objective terms.

Exile groups provided money and arms, and later volunteer fighters, to Croatia especially. Statements by political leaders in Austria, Germany, and Hungary were reminiscent of 1914 when antiSerbianism, particularly after the assassination of the Austrian archduke by a Serb, proved to be the immediate cause of the First World War. Their pronouncements could only be regarded by Croats and Slovenes as encouragement for the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The destruction of Yugoslavia as an integrated state was actually accomplished on 25 June 1991, despite warnings from many quarters both inside and outside Yugoslavia, including the United States, that such a step would provoke a fierce reaction from the central government and could lead to bloodshed. The Croatian and Slovenian authorities maintained, however, that the principle of self- determination required their actions. They brushed aside historical antecedents and were unwilling to negotiate possible compromises or delay their measures in order to give international arbitration a chance to head off a tragedy.

It was widely predicted by knowledgeable observers at that time that Belgrade might reconcile itself to Slovenia's secession because hardly any Serbs lived there, but Croatia was another matter. The Serbs bitterly recall that the only time in modern history that Croatia was a quasi-independent entity, in the 1941-45 wartime period, its government was responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Serbs.

Serbian fears have been further heightened by the composition of the Croatian regime. Not only has Croatia's president, former Communist Franjo Tudjman, denied the Second World War massacre of the Serbs and even questioned the full reality of the Holocaust, but he has included in his government some people who look back favorably on the Nazi-created state of Croatia. The fact that Croatia has also adopted an almost complete replica of the old Ustasha-Nazi flag as its emblem has made an explosive situation even worse. How insensitive the present Croatian authorities have been is best demonstrated by the fact that when they announced their secession, and for many months thereafter, they failed to acknowledge the minority rights of the Serbs living in Croatia.

Nevertheless, it is unfortunate that the Federal Army, which was caught by surprise and suffered relatively high losses at the hands of the irregular Slovenian militia immediately after independence was declared, reacted with such force against the secessionists in Croatia. Today, resort to force must no longer be an option in the settlement of even internal disputes and must be strongly condemned. Regrettably, this principle has not yet taken hold elsewhere in the world either, as bloody fighting in other trouble spots (for instance, between Armenians and Azerbaijanis) has demonstrated.

V

Immediately after the outbreak of hostilities in Yugoslavia, international efforts got under way to stop the fighting and find an interim political solution. The UN secretary-general asked former U.S. secretary of state Cyrus Vance to help him obtain a permanent cease-fire and gain the introduction of UN peacekeeping forces. The European Community (EC), together with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), formed the Hague Conference on Yugoslavia and appointed former NATO secretary-general Lord Carrington as its chairman.

United Nations efforts at reaching a permanent cease-fire went through several disappointments with unkept promises on both sides, while the Hague Conference also had a slow start. The announcement of the German government's intention to recognize unilaterally the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, on the grounds that their desire for self-determination must be honored, retarded the peace process. If such an announcement had not been made, UN envoy Vance could probably have achieved a real cease-fire earlier than he did, because the Croats had become fearful that continued fighting would only result in further territorial losses, and the Federal Army had begun to have problems keeping its forces in a fighting mode. The prospect of German recognition, however, encouraged the Croats to stall and the Serbs to gain as much territory as possible. The many cease-fires broke down because, in the first instance, the Croatian authorities consistently reneged on their commitment to lift their blockades of Federal Army barracks within Croatia and allow these troops and their equipment to exit. In turn, the Federal Army continued its shelling of Croatian targets. Overall, the fighting resulted in thousands of dead, tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands homeless, with grave atrocities committed by both of the warring parties.

When it became clear that the German government was determined to go it alone if necessary in recognizing Croatia and Slovenia, the UN secretarygeneral felt impelled to declare in December 1991 "that any early selective recognition could widen the present confiict and fuel an explosive situation." Lord Carrington also warned at the same time that if Germany were to act, it could mean the breakup of the Hague Conference on Yugoslavia.

Brushing aside both the secretary-general and the chairman of the Hague Conference, as well as pleas from the highest levels of the American government, the German foreign minister, in what was described as a most painful and embarrassing session of the European Community's foreign ministers, pressured the EC into recognizing Croatia and Slovenia. At first, however, only Germany established diplomatic relations with the two republics; all the other EC countries adopted a go-slow policy. For its part, the United States withheld the formal recognition offered by the EC states, because it considered such a move premature until more progress was achieved toward a peaceful settlement that would respect the rights of all concerned.

The German action and EC acquiescence have raised important legal problems. Under international law, only internationally established borders are inviolable and cannot be changed by force. The legal status of internal borders is an entirely different matter: for example, the border between California and Oregon is not subject to international law. The present internal borders of Yugoslavia were drawn by Tito in 1945. Croatia and Slovenia were never independent countries with internationally recognized boundaries. Even the puppet Croatian state created by the Nazis had borders totally different from the present ones. In the interwar years, Yugoslavia was divided into eight administrative districts, none named Croatia; all were given the names of local rivers. Before the First World War, Croatia, then combined administratively with Slavonia, was part of Hungary, while Dalmatia was separate and attached to Austria. So where are the real borders of Croatia as now recognized by the EC countries and several other states?

It continues to be a mystery why Germany has stood in the forefront in administering the final blow to a united Yugoslavia. Precisely because of Nazi Germany's sinister role in the Balkans during the Second World War, today's Germany should have been the last to flex its muscle, particularly with regard to Croatia under its present leadership. There are those who say that the German move only proves what many have feared: once unified, Germany will push its weight around again. Others ascribe the German action to the important role played by Croatian immigrants and guest workers in German politics. Still others give weight to the Vatican's support of Catholic Croatia and Slovenia, which has some influence in Germany, particularly in largely Catholic Bavaria. While all these factors have undoubtedly played a role, the best explanation is that German‹as well as Austrian and Hungarian‹ policy has been driven foremost by historic anti- Serbianism. And Milosevic's inept and imprudent behavior, which stubbornly and ill-advisedly ignored Western concerns and the advice of many well-meaning Yugoslavs, Europeans, and Americans, only encouraged this animosity against the Serbs.

The Germans say that their action hastened the peace process. In reality, the opposite is true. There is no doubt that German recognition, as Lord Carrington had predicted, set back the efforts of the Hague Conference to reach an interim political solution. That conference could succeed only if both sides, Serbia and Croatia, were willing to compromise. With recognition a reality, however, motivation for compromise on either side greatly diminished. Surely the German government must have anticipated this. At the same time, in the aftermath of the EC decision to recognize Croatia and Slovenia, two other Yugoslav republics, Macedonia and BosniaHercegovina, also applied for recognition, thereby further complicating Lord Carrington's task. Greece, for one, has strongly opposed the recognition of Macedonia as a sovereign state. As long as Macedonia was an integral part of Yugoslavia and Athens dealt with Belgrade directly, Greece was relatively at ease. But a separate Macedonia, when extremists in Skopje demand the annexation of Thessaloniki in Greek Macedonia, is an entirely different matter. The Greeks assert that if, as today's leaders in Yugoslav Macedonia claim, the country is Slav and has no territorial ambitions, it should assume a Slav name rather than one that has been associated with Greece for more than two thousand years.

VI

In conclusion, while in Western Europe countries are drawing together and are willing to shed important aspects of their sovereignty for the sake of mutually beneficial integration, in Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union the trend has been the reverse. In Croatia and Serbia particularly, the most nationalistic elements have been allowed to control the agenda. Where this will lead, nobody knows, but it seems clear that further dissolution of the formerly integrated Yugoslavia is inevitable.

Once nationalistic passions have reached their peak, however, it can be expected that economic exigencies will take over and perhaps cooler heads will emerge. So far, without exception, the independence declarations have had a devastating effect on the economies of all concerned. If the individual entities cannot survive economically on their own, then a reemergence of some kind of Yugoslavia, on a completely different basis than before, of course, may yet be a possible outcome. Such a development would presuppose the replacement of the present leaders, particularly in Serbia and Croatia, and a great deal of local autonomy in the different republics, but it may also bring about some kind of coordinated economic and human rights policies, at the very least, and perhaps some form of foreign policy and defense cooperation.

The president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegovic, said last year that his republic was proof that Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Slavs could live under one roof. The same coexistence should be possible in all of Yugoslavia, given intermarriage and in-country migration, particularly since this is probably the most viable economic solution. It is surely the approach that the international community should further in the interest of European peace.