However—and here’s the rub—all of this was still under the political roof of an undemocratic, Titoist Yugoslavia. If you talk to the Croat Catholic Cardinal Puljić of Sarajevo, or to one of the spiritual leaders of the muslim religious community, they both start by explaining how their communities were oppressed under communism. The contortions of Tito’s own nationality policy only made things worse, by identifying the heirs of the Bosniak part of the population as a national group called Muslims with a capital M (as opposed to the faith, with a small m).2 So here, as elsewhere in communist Europe, there was simultaneously the assimilation and the exacerbation of ethnic, cultural, and religious differences by communist rule and repression.
The end of communism was therefore bound to be a critical moment, and there was always only a small chance that the repressed grievances and tensions between the different traditions and communities could, even in the most favorable circumstances, have been negotiated peacefully into a stable democratic state. After all, even in the peaceful, prosperous, democratic West, Switzerland is still a great exception. Look at Belgium. Look at Canada. This was true of Yugoslavia as a whole but above all of Bosnia, which had a Bosniak plurality but no majority.
Even the slim chance that still existed was, however, then denied them. Tito’s heirs, and specifically the postcommunist politicians of first Serbia and then Croatia, either adopted a manipulative nationalist program in order to gain and retain power (Milošević) or used manipulative postcommunist methods of gaining and retaining power in order to realize a nationalist program (Tudjman). As they pulled Yugoslavia apart, they of course found Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat leaders ready to join them in the enterprise. Bosnian politics, especially in the country outside Sarajevo, rapidly divided on these lines. The West, and specifically the EC, then hastened to recognize the independence of the former Yugoslav republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and, yes, Bosnia-Herzegovina, without beginning to think through what it would need to turn this unique and delicately balanced historic entity into a viable independent state.
Of course, Alija Izetbegovic and his Bosniak-led SDA were not blameless in this whole process. Of course, there are many nasty, corrupt, manipulative, and authoritarian aspects of the present SDA regime. Perhaps if you are an UNPROFOR commander or a negotiator on the ground it is the Bosnian government and army representatives who are the most slippery and difficult to deal with, as British and French soldiers in Sarajevo will hasten to tell you. But to jump from that current experience to an assertion of moral equivalence between the three sides is to lose sight of the forest for the trees and to forget how we got to where we are now. In terms of historical responsibility, the position is clear.
There is an important difference in the degree of responsibility between the Serbian and Croatian regimes, but there is a difference in kind between the responsibility of the Serbian and Croatian regimes, on the one hand, and that of the Bosnian regime on the other. Bosnia was the victim of aggression from first one side, then the other. Bosnia and the Bosnians have suffered most, lost most, and are still most likely to lose more.
4
It is important to grasp that the reality on the ground today is a Bosnia split three ways: between areas of Bosnian Serb, Bosnian Croat, and Bosnian-government control. This reality is best represented on paper by an internal UNPROFOR map entitled, pithily, Warring Faction Update. It shows that the Bosnian Serbs—with their “Serb Republic” para-state—control some 48 percent of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in an unwieldy shape like two lungs almost cut off in the middle at the so-called Posevina corridor. The Bosnian Croats control some 21 percent, with the Herzegovinan part relatively coherent and conveniently contiguous to the Croatian fatherland, and then some awkward enclaves in the central Bosnian-government region. Bosnian-government forces themselves actually control less than one third of the territory, and theirs is much the most fragmented part.
Their capital, Sarajevo, is still surrounded by Serbs, with the gunmen still in the surrounding hills and just a stone’s throw across the river Miljacka, in the suburb of Grbavica. Their main portion of central Bosnia is, at this writing, still separated by Croat-held territory from the Bihač pocket in the northwest. And then there is the remaining enclave of Goražde—Bosnia’s Leningrad—separated from Sarajevo by some twenty-five miles of Serb-held land. Following the terms of the cease-fire, I was able to visit Goražde, courtesy of a U.S.-embassy armored Land Rover, but there is still nothing like safe access for ordinary Bosnian civilians. Some call this territory “rump Bosnia,” but at least a rump is one piece. Their territory is also landlocked. Some supplies come in by air (including arms purchased with Arab money), but for the most part they have to come by land via Croatia—and the Croatians have been taking a large cut of the incoming money, goods, and, of course, arms.
In theory, the Bosnian-government and Bosnian Croat parts are united in a “Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” created in last year’s Washington agreements. But the evidence on the ground is all of a continued, almost total, division, with the Croat parts wholly run by the para-state of Herceg-Bosna, having its own insignia, police, armed forces linked closely to the Croatian army, and children taught from Croatian schoolbooks, and even, since Croatia’s parliamentary elections in October, their own “diaspora” representatives in the Zagreb parliament. In a wood outside the Bosnian Croat exclave of Kiseljak, you suddenly come upon two dirty caravans and two disheveled frontier policemen: a Bosnian Croat/Bosnian-government frontier post. Hans Koschnick will tell you how all the peaceful pressure that the EU has so far been able (or willing) to exert has not brought the Bosnian Croat authorities in the western half of the divided city of Mostar even to let people pass freely across the river Neretva from the pulverized and miserable Bosnian eastern half. Even though Croat forces supported Bosnian ones in the recent campaign, they reportedly twice went back to fighting each other. And President Tudjman’s generous offer in an interview with Le Figaro to help “Europeanize the muslims” hardly makes things any better.
Moreover, if you look at the population figures you find that, through war, murder, flight, and expulsion, the ethnic separation, like the territorial, is already far advanced. The Bosnian government maintains a commitment to a multiethnic state. There are Serb and Croat members of its presidency. There is a Serb general on the Bosnian general staff, always wheeled out to talk to foreign visitors. The Croat cardinal insists he will stay in Sarajevo, and serve all the Catholics in all of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But the fact is that the Bosnian-government parts are becoming increasingly Bosniak or, to use the misleading term, Muslim. As for “muslim” in the religious sense, I did find some anecdotal evidence of the growth of religious belief—“In times of trouble, man remembers his God”—but nothing remotely resembling “fundamentalism.” (“I consider myself a muslim,” one historian told me, and, as if on cue, someone came in to refill his large glass of local grape brandy.)
What one does find, however, is elements of something that might be described as nascent Bosnian nationalism: for example, the insistence on calling the language “Bosnian.” This is entirely understandable, since one could hardly now expect them to call it “Serbo-Croat,” or “Serb,” or “Croat,” but also rather absurd—for if ever there was an area where the Serb and Croat variants of the common language really were intertwined, together with some regional peculiarities and enrichments, it was Bosnia. In a way, this is a reductio ad absurdum of nineteenth-century nation-building through language. But then what on earth are they to do if everyone else around them is separating out into national states, with nationality defined in a neo-Herderian way by that combination of blood, language, religion, and culture that supposedly makes a Volk?
Moreover, though still chronically short of heavy weapons, they are defending themselves. (Who was it who said that a language is a dialect with an army?)3 They try to make up in numbers of soldiers for what they lack in weaponry. In Goražde, we were told that, of some 57,
000 people crammed into the enclave, as many as 10,000 were now bearing arms. Before the war, the Bosniaks were not famed as fighters. But nor, before the Second World War, were the European Jews. Some Bosnians say despairingly that they are fated to become Europe’s Palestinians. Others are determined, however wildly unlikely it may sound, that they should become Europe’s Israelis.
Contemptuously dismissing my suggestion that Europe might still have anything to offer them, a Bosnian editor enumerated the three things that they now need: a strong army, help for economic reconstruction, and American support.
5
And so to Dayton, Ohio, where, once again, for the—what? third? fourth?—time this century, America is trying to resolve a European conflict which Europe has failed to resolve for itself.
I believe Europe should prepare to take over the leading role in providing the international roof under which the different communities in Bosnia might live side by side and then perhaps, gradually, over many years, grow together again. As a European, I shall do what I can to try to ensure that this becomes a priority for European leaders. But, alas, here, too, I simply don’t believe that it will happen. On the flight out to Zagreb, I read Helmut Kohl telling the Süddeutsche Zeitung, “We will make the process of unifying Europe irreversible in the next two years or so.” On the flight back, nearly three weeks later, I find the West European papers full of passionate debate about European monetary union.
There are quite other priorities here: no sense of urgency about what is happening just an hour’s flying time away; no sense that there is any contradiction between the claim that Europe is peacefully, irreversibly uniting, and the fact that at the very same time a part of Europe is being brutally and, one fears, really irreversibly torn apart. The long tortuous process of polit-bureaucratic negotiation at the EU’s next intergovernmental conference, scheduled to open in 1996, is supposed to produce improvements to the Union’s so-called Common Foreign and Security Policy. But I’m afraid we can already guess what that will mean for Bosnia. More ice-cream men.
6
If a Swiss diplomatic observer had gone to sleep after the Congress of Berlin, which assigned Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary in 1878, and awoke now, he would of course find much to surprise him in the institutionalized cooperation of Western European states. Here, he might exclaim, is a permanent Congress of Berlin! So far as the diplomacy goes, he might wonder a little about the blue helmets and white vehicles of the UN, and about Mr. Carl Bildt representing the EU. But a great deal would seem very familiar.
In the so-called Contact Group, he would see representatives of the same powers—France, Britain, Germany, and Russia—pursuing their national interests through their national diplomats and national armies, in what he would probably still call “the Eastern Question.” Turning to The Times, he would read, in a leading article, of a new Franco-British entente “forged in the Bosnian War.” The only difference is that he would have to substitute the United States for Austria-Hungary.
To him, what has been happening on the ground would probably also make sense, although as a Swiss he would not like it. “Ah yes,” he would say, “this crazy modern passion for separating out into national states has obviously proceeded apace. I remember when the Serbs started it….”
In other words, it begins to look almost as if the whole twentieth-century European story of postimperial federations and communist multinational states was merely an interruption of a longer, underlying process of separating and molding peoples into nation-states. In Western Europe, we did it earlier, by and large, through conquest and forced assimilation. In Central Europe, the first half of the twentieth century saw the job largely done, by war, the redrawing of frontiers, and ethnic “cleansing” on a massive scale (although the two-nation federation of Czechoslovakia still remained, to be finished off in the 1990s). Now this part of southeastern Europe is following suit—catching up, one might almost say, with modern Europe.
Obviously, this thought can be pushed too far. There are quite specific reasons why former Yugoslavia and Bosnia were pulled apart as they were. Even in former Yugoslavia, Macedonia still fragilely holds on as a multiethnic state. There are parts of the former Soviet Union where ethnic groups still coexist. Nor does it follow that “Bosnia is our future.” What we have witnessed on our television screens over the last four years is precisely the simultaneous theater of continued peace, normality, and further (though halting) steps of integration in one part of Europe and bloody disintegration in another.
Before 1989, Europe was like Berlin: divided between east and west by a single wall. Now Europe is like a great American city, with prosperous and relatively peaceful neighborhoods, such as Georgetown or the Upper East Side of Manhattan, existing just a few blocks away from violent and miserable ghettos. There are no concrete walls across the streets. In theory, you can drive anywhere. But in practice the two are still worlds apart. This should shame us in Europe, just as that should shame America. But somehow we live with it.
Yet this simile, too, is misleading. For the crudest twist is that the formation of postcommunist nation-states with clear ethnic majorities, through policies that combine the philosophy of Fichte with the methods of Stalin, probably does not condemn them to the fate of being Europe’s permanent slums. They are not doomed forever to be chronically backward states, with corrupt one-party regimes maintaining their hold by television brainwashing, xenophobia, and force. For example, I would say that Croatia has a reasonable chance of evolving gradually into a reasonably liberal, pluralistic, and democratic nation-state over the next ten to twenty years. It might even, in the still longer term, develop a genuine acceptance of minorities and, who knows, eventually a civic rather than an ethnic definition of nationality.
With the Polish experience in mind, Konstanty Gebert sarcastically puts the lesson thus: “If you want to ‘return to Europe,’ first do your ethnic cleansing, then wait a generation.” One can turn it around another way and put it more mildly. Trying to describe the ethnic and cultural mélange of Sarajevo before the war, the painter Edo Numankadić said to me, “We were Europe before Europe.” Hyperbole perhaps, but with an element of truth. The democratization of Yugoslavia, and of Bosnia in particular, would, had it worked, have been a unique example of a part of Europe moving peacefully from a truly multiethnic society under an undemocratic (imperial, then communist) political roof to such a society within a democratic framework. That it failed there does not mean it has to fail everywhere or that we should give up trying—let alone that we should accept ethnic cleansing as a necessary evil. But—alas, alas for Europe!—it does seem to be the case that almost nobody has yet been able to avoid the painful path that has led through the formation of nation-states, to—if one is lucky—the securing of human and civil rights by a democratic nation-state, and thence—if one is very lucky—to the peaceful cooperation and integration of those nation-states.
So this is not just a matter of confronting Europe’s failure and Europe’s continued responsibility in this part of Europe. Properly understood, Bosnia does, I believe, compel us to reexamine some of our most basic assumptions about the shape and direction of European history.
Of course, the view of Europe you get from Sarajevo is partial as well as bitter. But I trust that my hijacked European leaders will by now have seen the point of their involuntary stopover.
We are now coming in to land at Brussels Airport. Please fasten your safety belts and extinguish all easy speeches.
I return to and develop further this argument in “Cry, the Dismembered Country,” below, p. 318.
CHRONOLOGY
1995
18 OCTOBER. The Czech parliament approves the new “lustration” law, overriding the veto of President Havel.
29 OCTOBER. Franjo Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) wins parliamentary elections in Croatia.
1 NOVEMBER. Bosnia peace negotiations begin at a U.S. air-force base in Dayton, Ohio.
5 NOVEMBER. Eduard
Shevardnadze is reelected president of Georgia.
16 NOVEMBER. Populist left-winger Oskar Lafontaine is elected leader of the German Social Democrats.
19 NOVEMBER. Presidential elections in Poland.
NOVEMBER-DECEMBER. In France, the Juppé government announces cuts in welfare spending, designed to meet the Maastricht criteria for participation in monetary union. Widespread popular protests follow.
ABNORMAL NORMALITY
THE POLISH PHILOSOPHER LESZEK KOŁAKOSKI HAS A LAW OF THE Infinite Cornucopia. This states that there is never a shortage of arguments to support whatever doctrine you want to believe in for whatever reasons. The historian’s version of this law is that causes can invariably be found for any event or phenomenon, however extraordinary or unexpected. Whatever happens will be explained.
The election of the postcommunist Aleksander Kwasniewski as president of Poland, on 19 November 1995, perfectly illustrates this law. Numerous articles have immediately explained, with clarity, vivid supporting detail, and persuasive arguments, why “Poland chose” a former communist apparatchik in preference to the former Solidarity leader, Nobel Prize winner, and incumbent president, Lech Wałȩsa. Never mind that if just 2 percent of the votes had gone the other way we would have read numerous articles explaining, with equal clarity and persuasiveness, why Poland had reelected Wałȩsa. Thus is history written.
History of the Present Page 23
