Review Article the Serbian Exception

The Serbian exception Review article

The Serbian exception

CHRISTOPHER CVIIC

Serbia under Milosevic: politics in the 1990s. By Robert Thomas. London: Hurst, 1999. 443pp. Index. £39.50.  1 85065 341 0. Pb.: £14.95.  1 85065 367 4.

Heavenly Serbia: from myth to Genocide. By Branimir Anzulovic. London: Hurst. 1999. 233pp. Index. £25.00.  1 85065 342 9. Pb.: £14.95.  1 85065 530 8.

Il dramma del Kosovo. Dall’ origine del conflitto fra Serbi i Albanesi agli scontri di oggi. By Thomas Benedikter. Rome: DATANEWS Editrice. 1998. 138pp. L22.000.  88 7981 125 8.

By its sweep and ferocity, the Serbian campaign of mass expulsions of the bulk of Kosovo’s majority-Albanian population into neighbouring Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro, which started shortly after the collapse of the international conference on Kosovo in Rambouillet, France, in February 1999, stunned the world and provoked widespread condemnation. In Serbia itself, it was followed by a deafening silence: no expressions of sympathy, no public demonstrations, not even any of the individual protests—usual on such occasions elsewhere— from normally quick-off-the-mark and articulate human-rights bodies and concerned individuals. With no dissenting voices being heard, the Serbs seemed to be rallying en masse to the support of the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic, the man who had ordered this genocidal campaign. However, on 19 April, nearly a month and a half into the ‘ethnic dumping’ campaign, Belgrade’s liberals at last came up with a statement circulated by e-mail and entitled ‘Let civility prevail’. The statement condemned NATO’s ‘aggression’ against Serbia and the Kosovo Liberation Army’s (KLA) ‘violence targeted against the Serbs, moderate Albanians and other ethnic communities in Kosovo’, but coupled it with a condemnation of ‘the ethic cleansing of the Albanian popu- lation perpetrated by the Yugoslav forces’ and a call for all the refugees from

International Affairs 75,  () ‒  Christopher Cviic

Yugoslavia to be allowed ‘immediately and unconditionally’ to return to their homes, ‘their security and human rights guaranteed, and aid for reconstruction provided’. Perpetrators of crimes against humanity ‘whoever they are’ had to be brought to justice. The fighting between Serbian forces and the KLA had to be stopped immediately in order to start a new round of negotiations, with all sides putting aside their ‘maximalist demands’. This admittedly belated and carefully balanced statement contrasted unfavour- ably with the much more forthright and courageous condemnation in a series of newspaper articles of his fellow-countrymen’s atrocities—also against Kosovo’s Albanians—by Dimitrije Tucovic, the Socialist leader who served as a reserve officer in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 when Serbia was reconquering Kosovo. But the latest Belgrade statement must, in fairness, be seen against the background of NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which had begun only days after the start of Milosevic’s ‘ethnic dumping’ campaign. To expect any population to protest against its government while it is being bombed is, of course, a tall order. Often, as was illustrated by the Allied bombing offensive against Nazi Germany in the Second World War, such bombing has the opposite effect on the civilian population, making it more defiant. This is so especially when the government keeps from its population the news it does not want the population to have. The Milosevic regime can do this thanks to its control during the past decade and a half over the public electronic media and a part of the press in Serbia, a control that—unfortunately—it has been able to tighten since the start of NATO’s bombing of Serbia. Thus, unlike in the rest of the world, there has, for example, been nothing on Serb state-controlled television about atrocities against Kosovo’s Albanians committed by Serb soldiers and paramilitaries assisted by local Serb civilians, only tales of Serbs’ woes caused by foreign bombs. Is this, then, a simple case of ‘don’t-care- because-don’t-know’? Are today’s Serbs really ignorant about what is being done to Kosovo’s Albanians? Not quite—it is more complicated than that and the implications are quite serious and disturbing. Serbia under Milosevic is not a closed country like, for example, North Korea under Kim Il-Sung. In fact, as Robert Thomas, a young British academic who has made a special study of Serbia’s contemporary politics, stresses in his solid, well-researched and highly informative work, Milosevic’s Serbia—though it cannot by any stretch of imagination be called a democratic and pluralist polity—is not a totalitiarian one either, like, for example, North Korea. This is how the author sums up Serbian politics at the end of 1998:

For all the entrenched power of the ruling elite, Serbia under Milosevic was not a dictatorship in the totalitarian sense of the word. Opposition political parties, and civic organisations, continued to operate throughout the period, and the independent media continued to publish and broadcast. These freedoms ‘granted’ to the opposition groupings and the media were, however, symptomatic of the strength of the ruling party, and the authoritarian nature of its rule rather than its tolerance and a belief in

 The Serbian exception democratic practice. While Milosevic and his associates were safe within the institutional citadel they had created, they showed little concern over the activities of the various opposition groups which existed below those commanding heights (p. 424).

The author goes on to point out that on certain specific (and, by his own account, not very numerous occasions), when those opposition activities were perceived as a threat to the regime, they were extinguished. However, due care was taken to ensure that all those actions—though they were understood by all concerned to be ‘manifestations of the naked power of the state’—should nevertheless be ‘clothed in the language of legality’. That was easy because there was nothing to fear from the judiciary, one of the regime’s ‘commanding heights’. In an apt definition, the author describes Serbia under Milosevic, as ‘a country where the laws had fallen silent’ (p. 424). This helps to explain why, under the Milosevic regime, independent information, though not available through the state media, remained relatively accessible to those who wanted to be informed. The regime simply did not feel threatened enough to choke off its supply. As the editor of a respected Belgrade economic weekly very critical of the Milosevic regime and its policies once explained to this reviewer, who was wondering why the paper was not being closed down—and why nobody had even thrown a single brick through its windows—‘So few read us, that we are not worth their bothering about us.’ Strictly speaking, therefore, Serbia under Milosevic has never been isolated in media terms. Even now, as the Serb liberals’ statement of 19 April demon- strates, Serbia is still not completely cut off from outside information. Leaving aside the leaflets showered on Serbia from the air by NATO’s planes, which the Serbs—like populations in similar circumstances everywhere—quite under- standably dismiss as propaganda, hundreds of thousands of (by no means only young) Serbs have access to independent international news via their transistors, via satellite TV and of course via the Internet. The Internet was in fact widely and most imaginatively and effectively used at home and even more abroad by the anti-Milosevic opposition to promote its cause in 1996–97. Now, the most vocal elements of the opposition have put their talents at the service of the Milosevic regime’s anti-NATO propaganda campaign, with the result that it is being conducted with considerable sophistication and even wit. What is most disturbing of all is the absence of questioning among this well-informed elite of the possible reasons behind NATO’s actions against Serbia. The 19 April statement notwithstanding, not a single Serbian voice has been heard asking whether Serbia might perhaps have brought at least some of its present misfortunes on itself by its past policies towards neighbouring peoples, not least by what it has been doing for so long to its own citizens who are ethnic Albanians. This raises fundamental questions not only about the nature of the present regime and of the opposition in Serbia but also about the nature of Serbian society. How has Milosevic managed the feat of staying in power so long after

 Christopher Cviic all the other communist leaders in Europe have been swept from it? And this after the reverses suffered by his expansionist policy in Croatia and in Bosnia and the steady degradation of his population’s living standards coupled with the reduction of Milosevic’s state, even before the latest Kosovo expulsions outrage, to the status of Europe’s pariah? And why has the opposition in Serbia—despite widespread world sympathy and considerable material help it had received from the West (particularly in the media field) - proved so unsuccessful in compari- son with the opposition parties elsewhere in post-communist Europe? (Except of course in neighbouring Croatia, where the opposition has also been specta- cularly unsuccessful against President Franjo Tudjman, who is, like Milosevic, an authoritarian leader but who can—unlike Milosevic—at least claim to be a winner, having presided both over Croatia’s successful defence in 1991 against the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and Milosevic’s Serb paramilitaries and over the return, partly by force and partly by diplomacy, of all of Croatia’s territories seized by the Serbs back in 1991.) What lies at the root of Serbian ‘exceptionalism’? It is difficult to disagree with Thomas that ‘the role of Slobodan Milosevic was critical to the persistence of the ancien régime in Serbia’ (p. 424). By cleverly manipulating the ambiguities of Tito’s federal constitution, Milosevic was able to bypass the processes of transition which were taking root in the other coun- tries of central and eastern Europe. But—and this was the crucial difference between Serbia and the other countries that had been under communist rule— Milosevic used the same energies of popular alienation that had elsewhere served to dismantle the old order to strengthen the defences of the regime. Thomas attributes Milosevic’s success in establishing his hegemony over Serbia to his ‘ability to command potent sources of material and ideological strength’ (p. 422). His analysis of how Milosevic managed to appropriate for his ends the hybrid political system that took shape in Serbia in 1990 is detailed and convincing. The formal structures of democracy (the existence of multiple parties, the holding of elections, and the formation of an operational parliament) had come into being but the separation between the state and the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS, the old Communist Party in a new guise) was not implemented. The state media remained faithful to the party line and were a key element in election victories for 1990 onwards. The police remained under the control of the SPS. Within the framework of the police force, a trusted clique of security service agents was used to construct Milosevic’s paramilitary ‘praetorian guard’. The army, whose loyalty Milosevic suspected, was systematically purged and starved of funds. The SPS controlled key appointments within the judiciary and the diplomatic service and retained control over the economy. A major sector of the economy was controlled by ‘private businessmen’ who owed their posi- tions to the ruling oligarchy’s patronage or were themselves prominent government officials or politicians. Real power was exercised by the President and the political–economic bureaucracy, with the parliament reduced to a hollow shell. The ruling party

 The Serbian exception through its control of the state apparatus was able to determine conditions under which elections would be fought. These conditions were so designed as to guarantee a continued socialist grip on power. Serbia’s weak and divided opposition was no match for the formidable strengths of the SPS political machine. The opposition faced the choice, as the author elegantly puts it, ‘between participating in elections in which they would, in all probability, be defeated … or boycotting the elections in which case they would risk political marginalisation’ (p. 423). Not suprisingly, the defining moments in Serbian political life under Milosevic tend to occur not in parliament but in the streets (the big demonstration in Belgrade on 9 March 1991, the spectacular but—like other such events in Milosevic’s Serbia—ultimately unsuccessful winter protest of 1996/97 and others). How did Milosevic accomplish this feat of power? The author notes that the techniques of power deployed by Milosevic include the use of unifying national symbols that blur or cross ideological boundaries. ‘By adopting such symbols, and particularly the Kosovo “master- symbol”’, he writes, ‘Milosevic was able to transcend the normal, profane considerations of politics’ (p. 425). To begin with, Milosevic’s original strategy had been formulated within the framework of federal Yugoslavia, in which Serbia, under him as the next Tito, would play the leading role. But by 1990 the Croats and the Slovenes wanted out: they had taken fright at the brutal liquidation by Milosevic of the as-near-as-dammit republican status Tito had given to Kosovo in 1974 over strong objections even from normally faithful Serb apparatchiks like Draza Markovic. In 1991 Milosevic ‘converted’ to the concept of a Greater Serbia that had previously been the preserve of nationalists like Vuk Draskovic and Vojislav Seselj. This was a political master-stroke because it completed the process of Milosevic’s transformation into a national icon. But what made this possible? Why did the Serbs respond to him so well? Roberts writes that Milosevic rose to power by playing on the frustrations of the Serb minority in Kosovo after 1974 and that in 1990–91 he ‘utilised the situation of the Serb populations in Croatia and Bosnia’(p. 425) but he does not go on to explain sufficiently why the Serbs found the change from the position of a dominant people they had been in Yugoslavia since its formation in 1918 to that of a minority one, as in the autonomous, majority-Albanian Kosovo after 1974 and in Croatia and Bosnia after Yugoslavia’s breakup in 1991, quite so traumatic. Concentrating as he does on current Serbian politics, Roberts does not emphasize enough the role of the expansionist Greater Serbia concept as one of the leading (if not the leading) themes of Serbian politics ever since in 1844 Ilija Garasanin, then Serbia’s interior minister, penned his Nacertanije (Outline), a programme for a large Serbian state carved out of parts of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires inhabited not only by Serbs but also by other southern Slavs. The causes behind the drive for Greater Serbia and ways in which the Serbs rationalized and rallied support for it are explored by Branimir Anzulovic, a former academic at Indiana University, Bloomington who now lives in Wash- ington. As the author of this highly informative, path-breaking study points out,

 Christopher Cviic

Garasanin’s programme outlined the steps necessary to make all south Slav territories in the Ottoman Empire and northern Albania parts of Greater Serbia or dependent of it (p. 90). Serbia must destroy, stone by stone, Garasanin had written, the edifice of the Turkish state, taking from it whatever is salvageable, and upon the solid foundation of the old Serbian state erect a great new Serbian state. Garasanin was well aware that Serbia’s plan ‘to absorb all the Serbian peoples round her’ meant conflict with Austria and described Austria as ‘the eternal enemy of a Serbian state’. Not everybody agreed with Garasanin. As Anzulovic points out (p. 198), Svetozar Markovic (1846–1875), the most prominent Serbian nineteenth-century socialist, was opposed to Garasanin’s idea of a unitary Greater Serbia. Realizing that the attempt to bring all the Serbs into one nation-state would lead to a conflict with analogous attempts by other nations, he advocated a federation of Serb lands within a wider federation including the Bulgarians and other peoples on the Balkan Peninsula and even beyond across the Sava and Danube Rivers. But, like Garasanin and other proponents of the Greater Serbia idea, Markovic regarded Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and some Habsburg-ruled south Slav territories as Serb lands. To him, Bosnia was ‘the land where the Serbian people are divided into three religions’. Anzulovic sees the roots of Serbian expansionism in Serbian national mytho- logy whose dominant myth - that of ‘Heavenly Serbia’ - appeared soon after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. This myth attributed the Serbs’ defeat by the Turks and the loss of the Serbian medieval state to the Serbs’ preference for moral salvation over military victory. By emphasizing the Serbs’ commitment to the heavenly kingdom and promising an eventual restoration of the Serbian medieval empire, the Kosovo myth helped keep up the Serbs’ morale during nearly 500 years they spent under foreign rule. The Serbs clung to the Kosovo myth even after achieving their independence from the Turks in the nineteenth century. There was nothing spontaneous about this. The Kosovo myth was actively promoted by political and religious leaders (with the Serbian Orthodox Church very much to the fore), historians, writers, journalists and artists. For a variety of reasons the Kosovo myth was accepted even abroad among non-Serbs, inspiring among others Rebecca West to write in 1941 her modern classic Black lamb and grey falcon: a journey through Yugoslavia. According to Anzulovic, the Kosovo myth provided the Serbs with a feeling of superiority over their neighbours as well as with a sense that higher destiny had ordained them to become the dominant power in the Balkans. He analyses the elements that have gone into the myth’s making - from the pre-Christian Slav pagan religion and the identification of church, state and nation to the long interruption of independent statehood and the Romantic glorification of the nation-state. This powerful mix of myth, religion and literature manipulated by politicians helped to produce an aggressive nationalist Greater Serbia ideology that has triumphed among the Serbs towards the end of the twentieth century and helped push aside groups and individuals in Serbian society working for the

 The Serbian exception establishment of the civil society. In Milosevic’s Serbia, even political parties, as Thomas notes, which were ‘civic’ or ‘democratic’ in their orientation, accepted that the borders of Serbia should ‘correspond to the boundaries of the Serbian national group’ (p. 429). At the end of his book Anzulovic provides some interesting reflections on the role of myths in society, distinguishing between dangerous millenarian and nationalist myths like the Kosovo one which can be used to justify collective crimes, and more benign ones that provide important insights into aspects of the human condition like, for example, the classical Greek myths of Sisyphus and Prometheus. Unfortunately, the harmful effects of decades of indoctrination of generations of Serbs with the myth of Heavenly Serbia will not be easy to eradicate. But there are good—let’s not say myths but rather traditions for the Serbs to go back to for inspiration like those of pre-1914 Serbia, its ‘golden age’ of parliamentary government under the rule of King Peter I Karadjordjevic. Although he came to the throne in 1903 as a result of a bloody coup, he was a man of liberal bent who counted among his achieve- ments the fact that he had translated John Stuart Mill’s On liberty into Serbian. Meanwhile, there remains the mammoth task—for the Serbs, the Albanians, the neighbours and the others—of not only settling the bloody Kosovo conflict with justice but also of rebuilding not only Kosovo but also Serbia and indeed the whole region. Italy as an important regional power with strong economic as well as humanitarian interests—not least in Albania but also in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—will be closely involved. It is not surprising that the Italian media have provided some of the closest and most objective coverage of the conflict. This is no accident because those writing in Italy about the Balkans have a good tradition of expertise about the region at their disposal. Italy has an excellent magazine on geopolitics called Limes edited by Lucio Caracciolo which has over the past few years provided in-depth coverage of the region not least in its special issue entitled Kosovo. Il triangolo dei Balcani published in the autumn of 1998. An excellent example of this Italian expertise on the Balkans is the short book on Kosovo’s drama, well-written and packed with information, by Thomas Benedikter, an academic from Bolzano in South Tyrol (Alto Adige) who is also the local chairman of the Association for Endangered Peoples (Assosiazione per i popoli minacciati). Anticipating current developments, Bene- dikter argues that Kosovo is not, as so many had been repeating parrot-fashion for years, an ‘internal problem’ (un problema interno) of Serbia but one for the whole of Europe and indeed the whole of the international community. His concise book tells us the sad story of how we got there, what was involved and who did what to whom. This is important lest we forget.

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