Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  It is hard not to think, as you stand in shattered graveyards, convents, churches, and homes, that someone derived deep pleasure from all this destruction. All these ancient walls, all these crucifixes, church towers, ancient slate roofs, were demolished by people whose ideologies ceaselessly repeated that they were fighting to defend the holy and sacred past from desecration. In a way, the artillery expressed the essential nihilism of what people called conviction more honestly than all the nationalist pieties about fighting for the sake of the sacred motherland.

  Some quite uncontrolled adolescent lust was at work here. The tank and artillery commanders could not have seen what they were hitting. It was all as abstract and as satisfying as playing the machines in a video arcade. It didn’t even seem to bother the largely Serb commanders that a significant percentage of the population being bombed, perhaps as many as 20 percent, were ethnic Serbs. Now many of them lie on the city’s outskirts beneath one of the bare, nameless crosses in a mass grave.

  The Serbs have inherited the ruins that they themselves have made. One might have expected regret or shame, or failing that, some state of moral confusion about what they had done to the city. But nothing, not a syllable. Only a kind of embarrassed silence.

  It was in Vukovar that I began to see how nationalism works as a moral vocabulary of self-exoneration. No one is responsible for anything but the other side. In the moral universe of pure nationalist delusion, all action is compelled by tragic necessity. Towns must be destroyed in order to liberate them. Hostages must be shot. Massacres must be undertaken. Why? Because the other side started it first. Because the other side are beasts and understand no language but violence and reprisal. And so on. Everyone in a nationalist war speaks in the language of fate, compulsion, and moral abdication. Nowhere did this reach such a nadir as in Vukovar. The pistol-toting hoodlums, holed up in the ruins of the Hotel Dunav, who came out and threatened to kill my translator simply because he was a Hungarian; the Krajinan Information Minister who had no information that was not a lie; the mayor of Vukovar, who went around the Vukovar hospital handing out Serbian flags to men whose legs ended at a bandaged stump—not one of these creatures ever expressed the slightest sense of shame, regret, or puzzlement that the insensate prosecution of their cause had led to the ruination of their own city. For all of them, the responsibility was solely Croat.

  Serbian Krajina calls itself a state, but is more like a feudal kingdom run by small-time warlords, called Deputy Minister This and Supreme Commander That, whose power depends on how many cars, weapons, and men they can commandeer. You soon discover that their writ usually runs out at the next checkpoint.

  Mr. Kojić, the security boss of Vukovar and district, assures you he has the town under control, but there are three impact clusters on the bulletproof windshield of his Passat from a firefight with the local gangsters three nights before. There are guns everywhere: on the backs of old men bicycling out to guard duty on their village checkpoints; hanging from the belts of the militiamen who check your papers at the entrance to the town; behind the counter in the local bar. Everywhere in Krajina, the democracy of violence rules.

  At night, the Serbs of Krajina sit in bunkers at the entrance of their villages with their guns trained down the lonely roads, waiting for the Croats to come at them. It’s a village war, and the front line often runs right between two back gardens. One rainy night I went out to the front lines about thirty kilometers from Vukovar. With the faint glow of the Croat positions in Vinkovci clearly visible, I scuttled to the Serbian trenches under washing lines, over garden fences, past old discarded washbasins and newly hoed vegetable gardens. When I reached the safety of the Serb bunker, I could hear Croatian music from the other side, mixed with the grunting of Serbian pigs in the sty next door.

  From their positions, the Serbs can see the homes they were forced to flee; they can see their neighbors in their gunsights. One paramilitary called Chobi Chetnik, with a sign reading “Serbia: Liberty or Death” on his battledress, got on the CB radio at two in the morning to taunt the Ustashe a hundred meters away. This is a war where the enemies went to school together, worked in the same haulage company, and now talk on the CB every night, laughing, taunting, telling jokes. Then they hang up and try to line each other up in their gunsights.

  And so it goes, night after night, neither peace nor war, the two sides straining at the leash, taunting and testing each other, probing each other’s positions with small-arms fire and the occasional lob of a mortar or artillery shell.

  The Serb positions are defended by ex-Yugoslav army officers, Dad’s Army village volunteers, and wild Chetnik paramilitaries. Without the UN, they know, they would be quickly overrun. You can see their desperation in the way they drink, and in the listless fatalism that steals over their faces when the bravado of the bunker dies away.

  The Croat forward lines, which I visited at Osijek, thirty kilometers from Vukovar, look altogether more impressive. They are dug in behind a stretch of dynamited motorway, and they seem to be both more disciplined and more belligerent than the Serbs. They believe the UN is ratifying the permanent occupation of a third of their country, and the men in their flak jackets and helmets wave their Zastava automatics in the direction of the Serbian lines and tell you the Croatian flag will soon be flying over Vukovar. More front-line bravado perhaps, but I left both sides feeling that the cease-fire in eastern Slavonia hangs by a thread.

  The Serbs in their bunkers have a case that deserves to be heard. In Yugoslavia, they were a protected constitutional nation. In an independent Croatia, they were reduced to a national minority in a state with a genocidal past. Without a state of their own, the Serbs repeat over and over, they face extermination again. The Serbian war in Bosnia is designed to give them such a state, by providing a unified land corridor from Serbia proper, connecting up the Serbian lands in western, central, and southern Croatia. Without such a corridor, the Croatian Serbs know they will not survive, and until such a corridor is secure they live from day to day in a state of armed paranoia. There is a currency and there is a flag, but there is no state in Krajina, merely a jungle. And they have no sure protector. For all their bravado, they know they cannot count on Milošević. If the price of their defense becomes too high for Serbia proper, the Krajinans know they will be sold down the river.

  The Serbian case would be more convincing if they were less persuaded that the whole world, especially foreign journalists, is against them. After you have had your car commandeered by drunken paramilitaries, after you have been shot at and had your life threatened, a certain indifference to their cause tends to steal over you.

  The war zones of eastern Slavonia, and Vukovar in particular, leave behind an unforgettable impression of historical retrogression. Graveyards where Jews and Ruthenes, Germans, Croats, and Serbs once were buried together now lie desecrated by the bombs of both sides. Elegant episcopal palaces and monasteries, delicately arcaded squares left behind by the Austro-Hungarians, lie in ruins. Time has slid back through five centuries here. One of the richest and most civilized parts of Europe has returned to the barbarism of the late Middle Ages. Such law and order as there is, is administered by warlords. There is little gasoline, so the villages have returned to the era before the motorcar. Everyone goes about on foot. Old peasant women forage for fuel in the woods, because there is no heating oil. Food is scarce, because the men are too busy fighting to tend the fields. In the desolate wastes in front of the bombed-out high-rise flats, survivors dig at the ground with hoes. Every man goes armed. No one ventures beyond the village. No one trusts anyone they have not known all their lives. Late-twentieth-century nationalism has delivered one part of the European continent back to the time before the nation-state, to the chaos of late-feudal civil war.

  A week spent in Serbian Krajina is a week spent inside a nationalist paranoia so total that when you finally cross the last Serbian checkpoint and turn on the radio, and find an aria from Puccini playing, and look out of your win
dow and see the wet fields in the rain, you find yourself uncoiling like a tightly wound spring, absurdly surprised to discover that a world of innocent beauty still exists.

  BELGRADE

  On the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, you never tell anybody where you’ve really come from or where you’re really going. At the Croatian checkpoints, you say merely that you’re going to the next Croatian town. At the Serb checkpoints, you smile, let them search your trunk, rummage through the dirty underwear in your luggage, offer them Marlboros, and tell them over and over that you are heading toward the bosom of Mother Serbia.

  At the first tollbooth on the Serbian side of the highway, you do not hand them the toll card you picked up at the Zagreb entrance. You say, instead, that you’ve come from the Serbian Krajina, and then you negotiate your toll fee in deutsche marks. This is the only tollbooth in Europe where, with laughter, exchange of cigarettes, and displays of mocking disbelief at what they propose to charge you, you can barter your toll fee down to a reasonable sum.

  About twenty-four kilometers from Belgrade, you see your first sign of the impact of Western sanctions: enormous queues of small Zastavas, Fiats, Renault 5s stretching down the motorway from the service stations, and large crowds of men gathered around the empty pumps, waiting for the occasional delivery. They play cards, talk politics, sing along to a harmonica to pass time, but when you come up to talk and they discover that you are a Western writer, an angry knot of men soon surrounds you. A short, stubby man with a porkpie hat on his head, mud-encrusted boots, and the hands of a farmer pokes you in the chest and says, “What the hell were we supposed to do with those Croats? Stand there and wait for them to cut our throats? And what do you do? You give us these sanctions. You call that fair?” And so it goes, with themes and variations, that soon have them blaming Churchill and the British for supporting Tito rather than Draža Mihajlović. So apparently it is the fault of the British that Yugoslavia had fifty years of Communism.

  Their anger would be more threatening if it were not accompanied by a certain comic ritual. The men in the queue approach, say they don’t want to have anything to do with a Westerner, turn on their heels, so that their friends can see what a splendid gesture of defiance they have made, and then they return anyway and start talking, pausing to let you take notes, peering over your shoulder to see how you write their names and so on. This, I learn in the days ahead, is part of the ritual style of Serbian nationalism itself. The dance has its opening quadrille: we won’t talk, the West never understands; we despise you, you tell nothing but lies; then they start talking and never stop. Ask anybody a simple question and you get that telltale phrase: “You have to understand our history …” Twenty minutes later and you are still hearing about King Lazar, the Turks, and the Battle of Kosovo. This deep conviction that no one understands them, coupled with the fervent, unstoppable desire to explain and justify themselves, seemed to define the style of every conversation I had in Belgrade.

  Next morning, when I visit a bank queue, the same rituals repeat themselves. People violently and vehemently refuse to talk, only to start into a stream of Serbian self-justification that begins with their immemorial struggle against the Turks and concludes with their defense of Serbian Bosnia against the Muslim fundamentalists. Along the way, the invective sweeps up the anti-Serbian crimes of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Tito into a rhetorical flow as muddy as a spring torrent.

  Bank queues are as fundamental a part of Belgrade life as the petrol queue. The economy is in a state of advanced hyperinflation—running at 200 percent per month. In the restaurants, the price stickers on the menus change overnight. The only reliable hedge against inflation is a hard-currency account. Many private banks have opened for business and promise to pay 10 percent per month on such accounts. How they manage to do so is a mystery. The rumor is that the private banks are deeply engaged in the nether-world of smuggling, illegal oil imports from Ukraine, and arms trading with Russia, together with the laundering of Western drug money. Some of these banks have gone bust, and the fear is that if more of them do, the Milošević regime itself might be swept away in the ensuing economic chaos.

  So anxious are the small depositors about the fate of their accounts that many of them queue all night long in order to be sure to be able to withdraw their hard currency. These queues stretch hundreds of meters down the streets, a pushing, shoving mass of cold, deeply unhappy old-age pensioners, some of them weak with tiredness.

  You might have thought such queues would be full of anti-Milošević grumbling. Belgrade, after all, never voted for him and has always resented its demotion from a world capital of the nonaligned movement, as it was under Tito, to an isolated, embargoed Balkan provincial capital. Yet, again, all the anger that might be directed at Milošević is directed at the West—at Churchill, at Mrs. Thatcher for having supported the Croats, at the Americans for aiding the Bosnian Muslims, and so on.

  DJILAS

  He answers the door of his Belgrade flat himself. His hair is white now, and age has loosened the sharp, aquiline features I remembered from the book jacket of his Conversations with Stalin. He is eighty-two, and seems stooped and frail as he leads me down the corridor to his study. He tells me which of the low green velvet armchairs to sit in, and asks me whether I want tea or a drink. When I decline, he laughs and remembers the time he led a Yugoslav delegation to meet Stalin in 1944. The Russians offered them vodka, and when the Yugoslavs turned them down, the Russians shouted, “What kind of people are you?” “We were partisans,” says Milovan Djilas, with a thin, watchful smile. There is something of the puritanical partisan in him still.

  Djilas was at Tito’s side throughout the partisan guerrilla campaigns against the German occupiers and their Serbian and Croatian collaborators. Better than anyone else, he knows that the mutual loathings of 1993 all go back to the massacres and countermassacres among Yugoslavs between 1941 and 1945. As the last great partisan leader left alive, he is the last one who still remembers the Yugoslav dream that the next generations tore apart.

  He tells me about setting off in an American Willys jeep in the summer of 1945, as Vice President of the new Yugoslavia, to establish the border between Serbia and Croatia. “I was a Montenegrin, after all,” he says with a smile, “and so I was supposed to be impartial.” What principle, I ask him, did he use to decide which villages were to go to the Croats, which to the Serbs? “The ethnic principle,” he says, and he describes how he counted up the ethnic percentages in each village along the border before deciding which ones would belong to Croatia, which to Serbia. This was the border the war was fought over, and to this day Serb nationalists accuse Djilas of selling out Serbian interests to the despised Croatians.

  He was both a key architect and map-drawer of postwar Yugoslavia and the first Communist dissident in Eastern Europe. He broke with Tito in 1953 for betraying the ideals of the partisan movement and for allowing the new Communist state to be taken over by a new bureaucratic,privileged class. For this, Tito had him imprisoned for nine years. It was in prison that he learned his meticulous, heavily accented English, using a dictionary to translate Milton’s Paradise Lost into Serbo-Croatian.

  I expect him to blame his old enemy, Tito, for failing to understand ethnic nationalism, but he shakes his head vigorously. Tito’s handling of nationalism could not be faulted. He gave each republic just enough autonomy to satisfy nationalist demands, without compromising the unity of Yugoslavia. His fundamental mistake was that he never managed a democratic succession. He never created the institutions and the state of mind necessary to make democracy work. The minute the Communists began to disintegrate, Yugoslavia itself began to fall apart.

  I ask him whether democracy and nationalism are compatible. In the Yugoslav case, could a democratic system have held the country together? Yes, he insists, gradual democratization, gradual relaxation of one-party rule, might have resulted in the kind of democratic culture that could have allowed the nationalisms of the region to
share power together. And why didn’t he democratize in time? “Because he was both the master and the slave of the privileged Communist class,” Djilas says, with the relish of a man who has lived to see his original heresy proclaimed the truth.

  By failing to democratize in time, Tito threw away all of his achievements. In the end, the Communists proved no more successful than the Austro-Hungarians or the Turks in mastering the region. “We Communists,” he says, “were the last empire.”

  How does he understand the nationalism that has torn his Yugoslavia apart? Balkan-nationalism, he argues, was an imported Germanic ideology, which reached these regions only in the 1870s. Immediately, it had a fatal impact, tearing apart the complex ethnic tissue of peoples and nations who had grown together as neighbors over the centuries. He thinks of nationalism still, not as an intrinsic folk emotion, but as an alien virus, the work of city intellectuals who stirred up unlettered people and pushed a successful multi-ethnic experiment over the precipice. Few people I meet in Belgrade believe Milošević himself has any deep nationalist convictions. He merely knows that when he shouts from a podium, “Nobody will ever beat the Serbs again!” they applaud him to the rafters.

  The West’s greatest mistake, Djilas then says, is that it has “satanized” the Serbs. This comes as a surprise from someone constantly vilified in Serbian nationalist propaganda as a betrayer of Serbian interests. Yet Djilas is insistent: by placing exclusive blame on the Serbs for both the Croatian war of 1991 and the Bosnian war of 1993, the West has delivered the Serbian population into the hands of Milošević and the nationalists.

  Thus far, the Balkan sorcerer Milošević has turned all of the brew of resentment toward the West to his own advantage. Sanctions are turning the daylong queue into a way of life for ordinary people, but the regime seems more secure than ever. Although Belgrade itself voted against Milošević in last autumn’s elections, street demonstrations against the regime fizzle out almost as soon as they begin. Opposition parties are weak and divided, and even more nationalistic than Milošević. All in all, the scene is bleak confirmation of Djilas’s essential point: a society with no democratic tradition has filled the post-Communist void with persecution mania directed toward the West and delusions of grandeur directed at their fellow Serbs.