Identity Politics

Filling the Gap Between Federalism and Independence

Martin J. Dent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351929059
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive volume examines fifteen cases across the world where a violent or semi-violent conflict exists between a national minority inhabiting a region in a larger independent country and the government of that country. It studies the reasons for the growth of national separatism and the failure of attempts to reconcile the dissident regions to the national government. The book outlines the urgent need for a new 'quantumised' status of a kind that could satisfy the national minorities without alienating the governments; such an agreement could allow the national minority home rule powers over internal affairs, while leaving the management of foreign affairs and the international profile of the larger country to the central government. Identity Politics breaks new ground and challenges several accepted views of the minimum requirement for the existence of a state. Ideally suited to courses on security studies, conflict resolution and international relations, the book will also prove useful for peacemakers in national governments and international institutions.

Chapter 1
States of Former Yugoslavia

The Historical Background of Yugoslavia and of the Constituent Ethnic Groups in it, Especially in their Relations with One Another

The break-up of Yugoslavia and the wars between rival ethnic and historical groups, which accompanied this failure of a once promising state have given rise to four violent conflicts between ethnic groups and the governments of the new independent states, which were created from the six former republics existing as internal entities in Tito’s Yugoslav state. The historical background sets the scene for the future conflicts.

Yugoslavia, first under the name of ‘The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes’, and then under the name of Yugoslavia (the country of the South Slavs) existed for seventy-four years, interrupted only by four years of German military occupation from 1941 to 1945. We should not dismiss all of this period as a vain attempt to unite peoples who were irreconcilably divided, and thus incapable of existing in a common country. It was partly the inability of successive governments of Yugoslavia to develop a proper democratic basis for the state which caused its break-up following the death of Tito and the revolt against rule by the Communist Party. There were, however, deep-seated ethnic and religious tensions reinforced by three different religious beliefs; those of the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, and Islam. The most severe of these during the period of the existence of Yugoslavia was the rivalry between the Serbs and the Croats. These peoples had not come into armed conflict with one another until the First World War, when the Serbs resisted Austrian invasion with great gallantry, and with initial success, while the Croats were part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and many of them fought in its armies. Tito, for instance, who was half-Montenegrin and half-Slovenian, served as a sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian army in the 1914–18 war, before being captured by the Russians in 1916, and taking part in the 1917 revolution. In 1928, he was imprisoned in Yugoslavia for conspiring against the regime. After the German occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, he set up a most effective guerrilla resistance under communist organisation and ideology. Tito’s resistance was supported by many partisans among all the peoples of Yugoslavia, but the rival tradition of the resistance under Mihailovic among the Serbs, and of the collaborators with Hitler under Ante Pavelic among the Croats, who conducted horrific massacres of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, created a tradition of bitter hostility, which was only partly healed by common membership of Yugoslavia.

Their separate identities have deep historical roots, which have gone a long way to shape their subsequent behaviour towards each other. The Serbian people came into the Balkan area some fifteen hundred years ago, and in the ninth century were converted to the Christian faith following the activities of St Cyril and St Methodius, two Greek Macedonians, who translated the Scripture and the church services of the Orthodox faith into Slavonic. Their names are held in the highest respect among Serbs, and they are referred to today as ‘equal to the Apostles’. The autocephalous Serbian church was established within the Greek Orthodox faith by St Slava in the twelfth century, who decided to follow the Orthodox faith of Constantinople rather than the Roman Catholic faith of Rome. This decision, which owed a certain amount to historical accident, was to have momentous political consequences.

The character of the Serbian people in those times was formed by the two strands of religious devotion and dynastic and military aggrandisement. Serbs are very conscious of the living tradition of their history, and this explains quite a lot of their modern political behaviour. This ancient history is, for many Serbs, not merely a chronicle of past events, but a living tradition of ethnic loyalty. The Serb people were welded together by their first strong leader, Stephen Nemanja. Their history at that time is described by H. A. L. Fisher, in his ‘History of Europe’ as that of a ‘brave, spirited, but temperamental people’,¹ characteristics that have not entirely disappeared. At a time when the Eastern Empire, based on Constantinople, was in considerable decline, they emerged as an expansionist force under the leadership of King Stephen Dushan. H. A. L. Fisher describes their advent on the scene of European history as that of a ‘raw vehemence’. Dushan was a forceful but ruthless commander, who conquered large parts of Bulgaria, Albania and Macedonia, who showed considerable political skill as a ruler and a law-giver, but was noted for ruthless action as typified by his nickname of ‘Dushan’ (as ‘the strangler’ or ‘the smotherer’ — relating to the ruthless way he cleared rival members of his family out of the way of his dynastic ambition. Other authorities, however, suggest that Dushan was a kind of surname coming from the root Dusha — wind or spirit). Though he has been regarded as a great Serbian hero by some, his tradition has been seen by others as that of a ruthless conqueror of other peoples, a forerunner of the Kingdom of the ‘Greater Serbia’, seen in terms of empire rather than of mere ethnic self-expression. A great army of Balkan peoples, under his command, marched against Constantinople, and was only turned back when Stephen Dushan died just before the attack.

Stephen’s son, King Lazar, led a large army of various Balkan Christian peoples against Murid, the Turkish invader, but he was defeated and killed at the Battle of Kosovo Polye in 1389. Murid in turn was killed by a Serbian patriot Milos Obilic after the Serbian defeat in the battle. From this military failure, Serbian historians, led by Karadzic, the ancestor of the future Serbian leader in Bosnia, subsequently created a heroic myth of the ‘Serbian Golgatha’. The Serbs passed under Turkish rule, and remained subjected for four hundred years until the liberation of Serbia and other Balkan peoples in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Turkish rule was authoritarian and, at times, brutal, but it was probably no more oppressive than that of the Protestant British hegemony in Ireland in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, it created in the Serb mind a deep-seated hostility to Muslim rule.²

In his Nobel Prize-winning historical novel entitled The Bridge over the Drina,³ Ivo Andric, himself a Croat, has written a brilliant and sympathetic account of the relationships between the various ethnic groups living in the little town of Visnegrad in Bosnia under Turkish, and later under Austro-Hungarian rule. Ali Hodja, who kept a small shop in the town, was a Muslim, but established working relations with people of other communities, Serbian, Jewish, Croat and Turkish. There was no unified ethnic culture in the town, but somehow a sub-culture existed, centred around the vibrant life of the bridge itself, with its booths occupied by traders and others of all communities. This local ability to get on together was also reflected in the multi-cultural life of Sarejevo, founded originally as a Muslim city, but by the twentieth century, a place where different groups and faiths interacted peacefully. It was pointed out to the author by a senior diplomat representing the former Yugoslavia in Britain, himself a Serbian native of Sarajevo, that in that city and in the elite society under Tito, the politics of religious difference was forbidden. His own best man had been a Muslim from Sarajevo. In the villages, however, he suggested that darker animosities of an ethnic kind existed among the mass of the less-modernised rural people.

For many centuries, the Croats were, to a large extent, encompassed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; their religious faith was that of the Catholic Church, which had quarrelled so disastrously with the Orthodox Church in the eleventh century. Although both Serbs and Croats spoke virtually one language, Serbo-Croat, they wrote it in different alphabets — the Croats in the Roman Script, and the Serbs in the Cyrillic. From such unimportant details, a whole corpus of rivalry and differentiation was created in the popular mind, despite the existence of quite a large number of marriages between individuals of the two communities. Some interesting research by the Institute for the Study of Nationalities during the period of Tito’s rule found that the self-description of Serbs, Croats and Muslims was made in religious terms. The Serbs described themselves as Greek (i.e. adherents to the Greek Orthodox faith); the Croats regarded themselves as Catholics and Muslims assumed the religious self-description of their faith as ‘Muslim’. When however the interviewer went on to ask each of these groups when they last went to worship, he found that the majority had not been to their church or their mosque for many months. The religious description was in part a mere label but in part a secular remainder of a once vibrant religious adherence. As such, it had the ability to be reignited into a profound sense of ethnic distinction.

The Croats were never conquered by the Ottomans, and acted as a kind of frontier guard for the Hapsburg Empire as subjects of Hungary. Some Serbs also emigrated to Croatia and served as the defenders of the military frontier against the Turks. The Croats had formed their own nationalist movement demanding autonomy or independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This movement, together with that of the Slovenes, made common cause with the Serbs when the latter were expelled to Corfu by German forces in 1917. From this island refuge Serb representatives came to London, and from this emerged the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which was recognised by the allies at Versailles, under the formal rule of the King of Serbia. The Croats were restive in this Kingdom, particularly after their leading political figure Stjepan Radic of the Croat Peasant Party, was assassinated in Parliament by a Serb delegate in 1928. In revenge, Ante Pavelic of the Croat Ustasha hired a Montenegrin gunman, who killed King Alexander of Serbia in 1934, during his visit to France.

During the Second World War, Hitler invited Ante Pavelic and the Ustasha, who had been violent opponents of the government, to come back from exile in Italy and assume power under Hitler in Croatia. These fascist proteges of the Nazis introduced a truly horrific programme of persecution and extermination of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, murdering some 500,000 Serbs, and forcing a further half million either to be forcibly converted to the Roman Catholic Church or to flee from Croatia. So great was the devastation that they produced that even the German army commanders asked them to behave with more moderation. The Nazi occupation was opposed by two groups of Partisans fighting for their freedom. General Draza Mihailovic, a Serb officer in the Royal Yugoslav Army, raised the banner of resistance among Serbs, while Tito, a communist of Montenegrin-Slovian stock, who had been imprisoned by the Royal Government before taking refuge in the Soviet Union, raised a revolt by guerrilla warfare all over Yugoslavia. Tito, as the more ruthless and the more determined of the two, won the support of the allies. Churchill, in his speech in Parliament, had welcomed the Serb coup against the Regent, and the abrogation of their treaty with Hitler, saying ‘today at nine o’clock, Yugoslavia found its soul’. Serbs, however, have felt bitterly that the subsequent shifting of British support to Tito was a betrayal of their people.

After the liberation of Yugoslavia, a new Republic was formally declared under Tito in 1945. After severe initial punishment of those who had collaborated with the German and Italian invaders, the Republic settled down to thirty-five years of peace before the death of Tito. This unity was partly the result of the suppression of opposition by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, but was also partly due to the personal charisma and popularity of Tito himself, who could not be identified with the Serb majority, and went out of his way to cultivate the support of other groups.⁴ Yugoslavia described itself as a Federal Socialist Republic, but it failed to develop any real democratic or constitutional foundations for lasting federalism.

The break-up of the Yugoslav Federation, in the years following 1992, gave rise to five years of disastrous inter-ethnic conflict, first in the former republic of Croatia, and then in that of Bosnia. Subsequently, armed conflicts have occurred between rival ethnic groups in Kosovo and then in Macedonia. This sad experience illustrates many of the most important features of the need for a status intermediate between federalism and independence, where particular national minorities which cannot achieve independent statehood can be granted a sovereign land status, managing their internal affairs, but with no separate external recognition or role in international relations. It is conceivable that the unity of Yugoslavia itself could have been saved if the stark alternative had not been one of strong, centralised government under party control for the whole of Yugoslavia, or break-up into independent states. The system of sovereign lands in a single larger independent country is now of great relevance to the disputes in four of the five republics into which Yugoslavia has been divided; the same system of home rule could also have been used to preserve the unity of the former Yugoslav Republic before its formal division into independent republics. The constitutional situation under Tito was one of considerable devolution of power to the six constituent republics of Yugoslavia, but in practice, the strong control of the party, the army, and the security services enhanced the power of the central government.

During the thirty or so years of Tito’s rule nationalism was a forbidden concept, the professed goal of the regime was ‘brotherhood and unity’, all emphasis upon the symbols of the past history of the various nationalities was suppressed and Tito made a special point of counterbalancing the numerical dominance of the Serbs by the encouragement of less numerous groups. All the evidence is that Tito succeeded in creating a very considerable level of support both for himself and for the concept of Yugoslavia as the true country of all its inhabitants. However as soon as the communist faith began to lose its appeal, and the leadership at the centre, after the death of Tito, became a collective one with insufficient power to hold the Yugoslav state together, strong forces of support for separate national identities arose to challenge and ultimately to overthrow the unity of Yugoslavia. The process was begun by Franjo Tudjman who, whilst still nominally a Yugoslav communist challenged the official figures as to Croat casualties in the 1941–45 war and it was further continued and immensely accelerated by the actions of Slobodan Milosevic who spoke to a vast Serb gathering on the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, which occurred in 1389, and laid claim to Kosovo as a Serb historical possession.

In 1991, following a referendum where the overwhelming majority voted for independence, Slovenia, followed by Croatia, and then, at an interval, by Macedonia and by Bosnia, declared themselves independent and were recognised by the international community, with a celerity that was probably ill-advised. These declarations of independence were preceded by referenda in all four republics in which the vast majority of voters opted for independence. However, in Croatia and in Bosnia, the sizeable Serb minority boycotted the referenda, and clearly opposed the creation of independent republics in place of the Former Yugoslavia. It was probably unwise to have created these independent republics within the boundaries of the former republics as they existed in Yugoslavia. In that state, as Djilas pointed out to Lord Owen in a conversation, the boundaries of the republics had been decided upon ‘during a march’ in the tempestuous development of Yugoslavia, in the years during and immediately after the end of the Second World War.⁵ They had not been based on any consultation with the ethnic groups concerned, and were never intended to be international boundaries.

When the Republic of Yugoslavia foundered on the rocks of ethnic and religious separatism, the international community decided to recognise four of the five republics within the country as independent states on their own — Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Serbia-cum-Montenegro. David Owen, in his detailed account of his mission as the representative of the European Community, empowered to work in tandem with Cyrus Vance, on behalf of the UN, for the establishment of peace among the republics of Former Yugoslavia, has described how this initial presupposition was a wrong one. Owen relates how, in 1991, just eighteen days after Slovenia and Croatia had made declarations of independence, the Dutch government,⁶ who held the Presidency of the European Community at that time, unsuccessfully put forward the case for allowing change in the boundaries of the existing republics.

‘The principle of self-determination’, the Dutch paper maintained, ‘cannot exclusively apply to the existing Republics while being deemed inapplicable to national minorities within those Republics. It is not possible for Yugoslavia to continue to exist with its present constitutional structure intact. It is equally difficult to imagine that Yugoslavia could peacefully dissolve into six independent Republics within their present borders. Both Serbia and Serbian elements in the federal administration — not least the JNA — have made it plain that they will never tolerate the emergence of an independent Croatia with 11% Serbs within its borders. The foregoing seems to point in the direction of a voluntary re-drawing of internal boundaries as a possible solution.’

This dilemma has been briefly examined in the Introduction. The firm conventions of international law and practice seemed to present a position rather like that of people pulling a rope attached to the top of a tree that is being felled. Before it has been cut through at all, one cannot move it, and after it has fallen, the mass of the tree is too great to be shifted. The direction of fall can only be changed by pulling on a rope (attached high up in the tree) at the time that it is actually falling. The opportunity to re-draw the internal frontiers of Yugoslavia and thus to make it possible to create more viable entities for independence existed only for a short time, and it was missed. After independence had been established, it was too late to change the new international boundaries without the agreement of the republics that would lose territory from such a change. From this folly sprang a great deal of the subsequent conflict and bloodshed. It is common for the break-up of colonial empires to be followed by independence, where the internal boundaries fix the extent of the new states, but there are exceptions. India was divided by the British Raj just before independence in order to avoid even worse bloodshed between Hindu and Muslim than actually occurred after independence.

Another instance is that of British rule in Ireland, which was conducted for the island as a whole. It was for the whole of the island that the Liberal government of 1906 envisaged home rule and after the 1910 elections, when the Liberals were dependent on Nationalist votes, pushed home rule with vigour. Home rule was clearly the vestibule to independence. However, in 1914, under the intense pressure of the Ulster Protestants, who were supported by the Conservative opposition in Britain, and who had made a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 States of Former Yugoslavia
• Chapter 2 India: The Achievements of Federalism and the Two Cases of Continuing Dissidence, the Vale of Kashmir and the Naga Hills
• Chapter 3 The Tamils in Sri Lanka
• Chapter 4 The Union of Myanmar: The Karens
• Chapter 5 The Kurdish Areas in Turkey, Iran and Iraq
• Chapter 6 The Turkish Areas in the Republic of Cyprus
• Chapter 7 The Basque Provinces in Spain
• Chapter 8 Chechnya in the Russian Republic
• Chapter 9 The Case of the Sudan: North and South
• Chapter 10 Taiwan and the People’s Republic of Mainland China
• Chapter 11 Dealing with Marginal Cases
• Chapter 12 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index