Review | The Death of Yugoslavia
The Balkan war and breaking up of Yugoslavia was eerily recent, dominating world news when I was in lower primary school. The name of the then Bosnian President, Mr Aliya Izetbegovic, would remind me of one great uncle who would often teasingly call me by that name. It became a household name with the frequent news coverage of the conflict, but for children like me at that time, global news wasn’t an immediate concern.
Even when visiting Bosnia some years back, my knowledge of the country and the region was limited to its historical connection to the Ottoman empire and that Sarajevo was once under a multi-year siege, evidence for which can still be seen in bullet marks on its building 15 years on. Of the bigger war surrounding the siege, I know little to none. Silber and Little noted this in the book, that the Sarajevo siege was well covered by the media, to the effect of distracting attention from the war at large.
The book is a tie-in to a BBC documentary series of the same name (which you can find on YouTube), a detailed chronological effort which traces the pace of the conflict from the breakup of Yugoslavia to the war that ensued. This makes “The Death of Yugoslavia” my preferred introduction to the topic compared to “The Fall of Yugoslavia” by Misha Glenny. While the latter gives detailed on-the-ground feel of the conflict, it starts quite abruptly and leaves the uninitiated on Yugoslavia pretty clueless of the bigger picture and the events that led to the war.
In this book, the chilling detail and interviews outline names of individuals and the role they played in the conflict. In fact, these details had been used as evidence in the war crime trials on key figures, with the most recently convicted being Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader. This level of detail is comparable to the one in “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” by Ilan Pappe on the 1948 mass clearance of the Palestinian lands (another important book that I would recommend), but of course none of the names stated in that particular book were brought to trial.
The former Yugoslavia consisted of Bosnia & Hezergovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, united under Tito, a communist leader which managed to keep its brand of communism unique and independent from the Soviet Union. The book starts after his death, when Milosevic, the Serbian Communist Party leader began his unexpected rise by leveraging on events in Kosovo, a region populated by ethnic Albanian but seen as Serb’s ancient homeland. This was followed by his maneuver to secure the Serbs as the controlling party of the union, cracking the delicate balance between the states, thus initiating dangerous responses such as some states wanting to exit the federation. The domino effect was triggered: if states exited the federation, whom by this stage the JNA (Yugoslav National Army) served, should Bosnia remain and risk being a minority or leave and face the backlash seen in Croatia and Slovenia? For these questions Milosevic prepared his solutions, which plunged the region deeper into chaos.
The book points out many still-relevant issues surrounding wars and regional conflicts. Take the politics of intervention. The Bosnian war showed the dark side of intervention where the neutral party (in this case the UN troops) became an accomplice. UN officials found themselves deciding between emptying a village to save the population, thus speeding up the ethnic cleansing, or letting it be shelled and burned to the ground. Some UN officers had to take matters into their own hand, trying to help the locals amidst lack of direction and plan from the higher ups. This ties in with the highlights on how intervening powers’ lack of understanding of the conflict brought more harm than good to the suffering victims.
As the book ended its chronology, war was still raging in Bosnia. We know how it ended, with a peace agreement brokered by external negotiators, which resulted in a peaceful, but complicated political structure in Bosnia today. Despite escaping the war due to her family staying abroad at that time (or perhaps because of that), my friend spoke bitterly about how her fellow Bosniaks gave up too much at the end of the war, and now has to live side by side with those who killed their families, referring to the Serbs and Croats. That they forgive too easily. It was not an easy memory to deal with.
I try to put her statement next to some westerners’ view on the conflict, presented in the book: that the origin of the conflict was due to ancient hatred between the ethnics, going back to the Battle of Kosovo, when the Serbs lost to the Ottoman Muslims. It assumes that the region has always had that undercurrent of animosity, ready to come to the fore on a flip of the switch. (This one probably reminds you of that Obama speech on the Middle East). But both discount the many years of living together, and interracial marriages between the two ethnic groups. The book highlights many instances of common people refusing the racial rhetorics, the most noted being Jovan Divjak, the Bosnian army commander leading the defense of Sarajevo, and is a Serb. There is also an Al Jazeera documentary on his role during the famous hostage exchange of Aliya Izetbegovic (another interesting event during the war, explained in detail in the book). However, plenty were swept by the politics of fear and suspicion, resulting in neighbours turning on each other. The politicians play the race game, and the blood that spills are from the common people.
I find it a very good read as we see the same themes play out in global conflicts through the years. The light of the past often illuminates the present.
