Yugoslavia
did not fall: it was pushed.
Yugoslavia
did not die: it was killed.
But
in the end the primary responsibility for the Yugoslav catastrophe
must rest with the Serbs and their elected leader Slobodan
Milošević. It was
Milošević whose bid for power drove the other
republics to leave. It was
Milošević who then encouraged his
fellow Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to carve out territorial
enclaves and who backed them with his army. And it was
Milošević who authorized and directed the sustained assault on Yugoslavia’s
Albanian population that led to the war in Kosovo.
Belgrade’s
actions were a disaster for Serbs everywhere. [...] This course of
events has further exacerbated a longstanding Serb propensity for
collective self-pity at the injustice of history and it is true
that in the longer run the
Serbs may well be the greatest losers in the Yugoslav wars. [...]
But this irony should not blind us to Serb responsibility.
The appalling ferocity and sadism of the Croat and Bosnian wars -
the serial abuse, degradation, torture, rape and murder of
hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens - was the work of
Serb man, mostly young, aroused to paroxysms of casual hatred and
indifference to suffering by propaganda and leadership from local
chieftains whose ultimate directions and power came from Belgrade.
What followed was not so unusual: it had happened in Europe just a
few decades before, when - all across the continent and under the
warrant of war - ordinary people committed quite extraordinary
crimes.
There
is no doubt that there was a history upon which Serb propaganda
could call - a history of past suffering that lay buried just
beneath the misleading placid surface of post-war Yugoslav life.
But the decision to arose that memory, to manipulate and to
exploit it for political ends, was made by men: one man in
particular. As Slobodan
Milošević disingenuously conceded to a
journalist during the Dayton talks, he had never expected the wars
in his country to last so long. That is doubtless true. But those
wars did not just break out from spontaneous ethnic combustion.
Yugoslavia did not fall; it was pushed. It did not die: it was
killed.
Tony
Judt: Postwar, A history of Europe since 1945, The Penguin
Press, New York, 2005. |