Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark
Glass: Politics, Media and the Ideology of Globalization This article is divided in three parts. Each part fits in one email. Please feel free to send it far and wide, but please copy it in full including copyright information at the end. Reprinted from: Covert Action Quarterly Diane Johnstone was the European editor of In These Times (from 1979 to 1990, and press officer for the Green group in the European Parliament from 1990 to 1996. She is the author of The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe in America’s World (London/New York: Verso/Schuchken) and is currently working on a book on the former Yugoslavia. This article is an expanded version of a talk given on May 25, 1998 at an international conference on media held in Athens, Greece) Years of experience in and out of both mainstream and alternative media have made me aware of the power of the dominant ideology to impose certain interpretations on international news. During the Cold War, most world news for American consumption had to be framed as part of the Soviet-U.S. contest. Since then, a new ideological bias frames the news. The way the violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia has been reported is the most stunning example. I must admit that it took me some time to figure this out, even though I had a long-standing interest in and some knowledge of Yugoslavia. I spent time there as a student in 1953, living in a Belgrade dormitory and learning the language. In 1984, in a piece for In These Times, (1) I warned that extreme decentralization, conflicting economic interests between the richer and the poorer regions, austerity policies imposed by the IMF, and the decline of universal ideals were threatening Yugoslavia with “re-Balkanization” in the wake of Tito’s death and desanctification. “Local ethnic interests are reasserting themselves,” I wrote. “The danger is that these rival local interests may become involved in the rivalries of outside powers. This is how the Balkans in the past were a powder keg of world war.” Writing this took no special clairvoyance. The danger of Yugoslavia’s disintegration was quite obvious to all serious observers well before Slobodan Milsoevic arrived on the scene. As the country was torn apart in the early nineties, I was unable to keep up with all that was happening. In those years, my job as press officer for the Greens in the European Parliament left me no time to investigate the situation myself. Aware that there were serious flaws in the way the media and politicians were reacting, I wrote an article warning against combating “nationalism” by taking sides for one nationalism against another, and against judging a complex situation by analogy with totally different times and places. (2) “Every nationalism stimulates another,” I noted. “Historical analogies should be drawn with caution and never allowed to obscure the facts.” However, there was no stopping the tendency to judge the Balkans, about which most people knew virtually nothing, by analogy with Hitler Germany, about which people at least imagined they knew a lot, and which enabled analysis to be rapidly abandoned in favor of moral certitude and righteous indignation. However, it was only later, when I was able to devote considerable time to my own research, that I realized the extent of the deception - which is in large part self-deception. I mention all this to stress that I understand the immense difficulty of gaining a clear view of the complex situation in the Balkans. The history of the region and the interplay of internal political conflicts and external influences would be hard to grasp even without propaganda distortions. Nobody can be blamed for being confused. Moreover, by now, many people have invested so much emotion in a one-sided view of the situation that they are scarcely able to consider alternative interpretations. It is not necessarily because particular
journalists or media are “alternative” that they free from the dominant
interpretation and the The Serbs and Yugoslavia Like other Christian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, the Serbs wereheavily taxed and denied ownership of property or political power reserved for Muslims. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Serb farmers led a revolt that spread to Greece. The century-long struggle put an end to the Ottoman Empire. The Habsburg monarchy found it natural that when one empire receded, another should advance, and sought to gain control over the lands lost to the Ottoman Turks. Although Serbs had rallied to the Habsburgs in earlier wars against the Turks, Serbia soon appeared to Vienna as the main obstacle to its own expansion into the Balkans. By the end of the nineteenth century, Vienna was seeking to fragment the Serb-inhabited to prevent what it named “Greater Serbia,” taking control of Bosnia-Herzegovina and fostering the birth of Albanian nationalism (as converts to Islam, Albanian feudal chieftains enjoyed privileges under the Ottoman Empire and combated the Christian liberation movements). Probably because they had been deprived of full citizens’ rights underthe Ottoman Turks, and because their own society of farmers and traders were relatively egalitarian, Serb political leaders were extremely receptive to the progressive ideals of the French Revolution. While all other liberated Balkan nations imported German princelings as their new kings, the Serbs promoted their own pig farmers into a dynasty, one of whose members translated John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” into Serbian during his student days. Nowhere in the Balkans did Western progressive ideas exercise such attraction as in Serbia, no doubt due to the historic circumstances of the country’s emergence from four hundred years of subjugation. Meanwhile, intellectuals in Croatia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire increasingly rankling under subordination to the Hungarian nobility, initiated the Yugoslav movement for cultural, and eventually political unification of the South Slav peoples, notably the Serbs and Croats, separated by history and religion (the Serbs having been converted to Christianity by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Croats by the Roman Catholic Church) but united by language. The idea of a “Southslavia” was largely inspired by the national unification of neighboring Italy, occurring around the same time. In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seized the pretext of the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand to declare war and crush Serbia once and for all. When Austria-Hungary lost the war it had thus initiated, leaders in Slovenia and Croatia chose to unite with Serbia in a single kingdom. This decision enabled both Slovenia and Croatia to go from the losing to the winning side in World War I, thereby avoiding war reparations and enlarging their territory, notably on the Adriatic coast at the expense of Italy. The joint Kingdom was renamed “Yugoslavia” in 1929. The conflicts between Croats and Serbs that plagued what is called “the first Yugoslavia” were described by Rebecca West in her celebrated book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first published in 1941. In April 1941, Serb patriots in Belgrade led a revolt against an accordreached between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany. This led to Nazi bombing of Belgrade, a German invasion, creation of an independent fascist state of Croatia (including Bosnia-Herzegovina), and attachment of much of the Serbian province of Kosovo to Albania, then a puppet of Mussolini’s Italy. The Croatian Ustashe undertook a policy of genocide against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies within the territory of their “Greater Croatia,” while the Germans raised SS divisions among the Muslims of Bosnia and Albania. In Serbia itself, the German occupants announced that one hundredSerbian hostages would be executed for each German killed by resistance fighters. The threat was carried out. As a result, the royalist Serbian resistance (the first guerilla resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe) led by Draza Mihailovic adopted a policy of holding off attacks on the Germans in expectation of an Allied invasion. The Partisans, led by Croatian communist Josip Broz Tito, adopted a more active strategy of armed resistance, which made considerable gains in the predominantly Serbs border regions of Croatia and Bosnia and won support from Churchill for his effectiveness. A civil war developed between Mihailovic’s “Chetniks” and Tito’s Partisans – which was also a civil war between Serbs, since Serbs were the most numerous among the Partisans. These divisions between – torn between Serbian and Yugoslav identity – have never been healed and help explain the deep confusion among Serbs during the breakup of Yugoslavia. After World War II, the new Communist Yugoslavia tried to build “brotherhood and unity” on the myth that all the peoples had contributed equally to liberation from fascism. Mihailovic was executed, and school children in post-war Yugoslavia learned more about the “fascist” nature of his Serbian nationalist Chetniks than they did about Albanian and Bosnian Muslims who had volunteered for the SS, or even about the killing of Serbs in the Jasenovac death camp run by Ustashe in Western Bosnia. After the 1948 break with Moscow, the Yugoslav communist leadership emphasized its difference from the Soviet bloc by adopting a policy of “self-management,” supposedly to lead by fairly rapid stages to the “withering away of the State.” Tito repeatedly revised the Constitution to strengthen local authorities, while retaining final decision-making power for himself. When he died in 1980, he thus left behind a hopelessly complicated system that could not work without his arbitration. (4) Serbia in particular was unable to enact vitally necessary reforms because its territory had been divided up, with two “autonomous provinces,” Vojvodina and Kosovo, able to veto measures taken by Serbia, while Serbia could not intervene in their affairs. In the 1980s, the rise in interest rates and unfavorable world trade conditions dramatically increased the foreign debt Yugoslavia (like many “third world” countries) had been encouraged to run up thanks to its standing in the West as a socialist country not belonging to the Soviet bloc. The IMF arrived with its familiar austerity measures, which could only be tak en by a central government. The leaders of the richer Republics – Slovenia and Croatia – did not want to pay for the poorer ones. Moreover, in all former socialist countries, the big political question is privatization of State and social property, and local communist leaders in Slovenia and Croatia could expect to get a greater share for themselves within the context of division of Yugoslavia into separate little states. (5) At that stage, a gradual, negotiated dismantling of
Yugoslavia into smaller States was not impossible. It would have entailed reaching an None was ever held. The first multiparty elections in postwar Yugoslavia were held in 1990, not nationwide in all of Yugoslavia, but separately by each Republic – a method which in itself reinforced separatist power elites. Sure of the active sympathy of Germany, Austria, and the Vatican, leaders in Slovenia and Croatia prepared the fait accompli of unilateral, unnegotiated secession, proclaimed in 1991. Such secession was illegal, under Yugoslav and international law, and was certain to precipitate a civil war. The key role of German (and Vatican) support was to provide rapid international recognition of the new independent republics, in order to transform Yugoslavia into an “aggressor” on its own territory. (6) Political Motives The political motives that launched the anti-Serb propaganda campaign are obvious enough. Claiming that it was impossible to stay in Yugoslavia because the Serbs were so oppressive was the pretext for the nationalist leaders in Slovenia and Croatia to set up their own little statelets which, thanks to early and strong German support, could “jump the queue” and get into the richmen’s European club ahead of the rest of Yugoslavia. The terrible paradox is that very many people, in the sincere desire to oppose racism and aggression, have in fact contributed to demonizing an entire people, the Serbs, thereby legitimizing both ethnic separatism and the new role of NATO as an occupying power in the Balkans on behalf of a theoretical “international community.” Already in the 1980s, Croatian and ethnic Albanian separatist lobbieshas stepped up their efforts to win support abroad, notably in Germany and the United States, (7) by claiming to be oppressed by Serbs, citing “evidence” that, insofar as it had any basis in truth, referred to the 1920-1941 Yugoslav kingdom, not the very different post-World War II Yugoslavia. The current campaign to demonize the Serbs began in July 1991 with a virulent barrage of articles in the German media, led by the influential conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). In almost daily columns, FAZ editor Johann Georg Reismuller justified the freshly, and illegally, declared “independence” of Slovenia and Croatia by describing the “Yugo-Serbs” as essentially Oriental “militarist Bolsheviks” who have “no place in the European Community.” Nineteen months after German reunification, and for the first time since Hitler’s defeat in 1945, German media resounded with condemnation of an entire ethnic group reminiscent of the pre-war propaganda against the Jews. (8) This German propaganda binge was the signal that times had changed seriously. Only a few years earlier, a seemingly broad German peace movement had stressed the need to put an end to “enemy stereotypes” (Feindbilder). Yet the sudden ferocious emerge of enemy stereotype of “the Serbs” did not shock liberal or left Germans, who were soon repeating it themselves. It might seem that the German peace movement had completed its historic mission once its contribution to altering the image of Germany had led Gorbachev to endorse reunification. The least one can say is that the previous efforts at reconciliation with peoples who suffered from Nazi invasion stopped short when it came to the Serbs. In the Bundestag, German Green leader Joschka Fischer pressed fordisavowal of “pacifism” in order to “combat Auschwitz,” thereby equating Serbs with Nazis. In a heady mood of self-righteous indignation, German politicians across the board joined in using Germany’s past guilt as a reason, not for restraint, as had been the logic up until reunification, but on the contrary, for “bearing their share of the military burden.” In the name of human rights, the Federal Republic of Germany abolished its ban on military operations outside the NATO defensive area. Germany could once again be a “normal” military power – thanks to the “Serb threat.” The near unanimity was all the more surprising in that the “enemy stereotype” of the Serb had been dredged up from the most belligerent German nationalism of the past. “Serbien muss sterbien” (a play on the word sterben, to die), meaning “Serbia must die” was a famous popular war cry of World War I. (9) Serbs had been singled out for slaughter during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. One would have thought that the younger generation of Germans, seemingly so sensitive to the victims of Germany’s aggressive past, would have at least urged caution. Very few did. On the contrary, what occurred in Germany was a strange sort of mass transfer of Nazi identity, and guilt, to the Serbs. In the case of the Germans, this can be seen as a comforting psychological projection which served to give Germans a fresh and welcome sense of innocence in the face of the new “criminal” people, the Serbs. But the hate campaign against the Serbs, started in Germany, did not stop there. Elsewhere, the willingness to single out one of the Yugoslav peoples as the villain calls for other explanations. 1)“The Creeping Trend to
Re-Balkanization,” In These Times, Oct. 3-9, 1994, p. 9. 5) For an excellent and detailed account of the
economic and constitutional factors leading to the breakup of Yugoslavia, see Susan |