The Myth of Ethnic War

Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s

V. P. Gagnon

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801468872
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe de l'Est

"The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of their timing. This violence erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the west. In trying to account for this outburst, most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern west. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground."—from The Myth of Ethnic War V. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict.Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon's view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon's noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.

CHAPTER 1

THE PUZZLE OF THE YUGOSLAV WARS OF THE 1990s

The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the Western world not only because of their ferocity (over 200,000 people killed and more than 3 million displaced or expelled from their homes) and their geographic location (in the heart of Europe), but also because of their timing. Spanning the entire decade of the 1990s, this violence erupted at the exact moment when the confrontation of the Cold War was drawing to a close, when Westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the West. In trying to account for this outburst, most Western journalists, academics, and policy-makers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern West.

Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the Western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground. Here are three brief stories that illustrate this point:

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Ethnic Solidarity as a Mobilizing and Motivating Force

The images were horrific: there were mutilated corpses of women and children, whole villages of burnt-out houses and churches, and evil hordes of men in black masks carrying out the atrocities. Official Serbian television bombarded its viewers with these visuals in 1991 with accompanying discourse to highlight the horrors. Drawing on the atrocities of the Nazi-imposed Ustaša regime during World War II, which had sought to destroy Serbs in its “Independent State of Croatia,” Belgrade newsreaders made it clear that Croats were trying to wipe out Serbs once again. The broadcasts were psychologically powerful. Anyone who watched these scenes, hearing a discourse of genocide night after night over a period of years, could easily become convinced that at a minimum the new nationalist government of Croatia was responsible for these horrible atrocities. After all, didn’t this government use some of the symbolic imagery of the Ustaša, and didn’t some of its members openly admire it?

Given this background, the Serbian government in the summer and fall of 1991 called up reservists to defend the innocent Serb women and children who were being slaughtered by the Ustaša. Yet, despite these heart-wrenching and quite convincing images, the result of this call-up was what may be one of the most massive campaigns of draft resistance in modern history. The vast majority of young men who were called up went into hiding, spending each night in a different place in order to not be caught by the military police sent out to bring in draft evaders. Others, by some estimates over 200,000, left the country rather than fight, fleeing to western Europe, North America, Australia—anywhere to avoid being sent to the front. The figures for Belgrade are more than striking: according to the Center for Peace in Belgrade, 85 percent to 90 percent of the young men of Belgrade who were called up to fight refused to serve. In Serbia as a whole, that figure was between 50 percent and 80 percent. And even among those who did serve, there were massive desertions from the battlefield.1

When war came a year later to Bosnia, Serbia did not rely on reservists, but rather on Serbs originally from Bosnia but then living in Serbia. But again, it relied not on ardent young men seeking to defend Serb lands in Bosnia. Rather, it sought out and forcibly drafted Serbs living in Serbia who had connections to Bosnia, often quite tenuous, hunting them down, packing them into buses, and shipping them off to the Bosnian front against their wills.

Later that year, in another striking contrast to official imagery, the Serb-American, Milan Panić, ran against Milošević for the presidency of Yugoslavia on an anti-nationalist platform. He called for an immediate end to the war in Bosnia and called on Serbs to look to the future rather than the past. Milošević responded to this challenge by stressing ethnic tolerance and equality of all citizens of Serbia regardless of ethnicity, and by portraying himself as a moderate who wanted peaceful coexistence with other Yugoslav nations and republics. Panić was at a disadvantage: over 200,000 of his natural constituents, young Serbs who had refused to fight in the wars, had fled the country. Official media accused Panić of being a CIA agent, and the regime, feeling very threatened, initially tried to legally block his candidacy. Because of legal challenges by the Milošević government, Panić began actively campaigning only a week before the election. On the day of elections, 5–10 percent of voters were turned away at the polls, mostly younger voters, who favored Panić. Yet in the election itself, according to exit polls, Panić received about half of the vote.2

The massive draft-dodging and desertions, the campaign discourse of both candidates, and the electoral behavior of Serbian voters all belie the image of a powerful, emotional attachment to Serb identity that over-powered all other concerns and interests, and that provided a powerful tool for “ethnic entrepreneurs.” Indeed, the contrast between Western images of a war driven by nationalist politicians whipping up the masses by playing the nationalist card, and the actual situation on the ground, is striking.

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The Strength of Ethnic Solidarity and
Sense of Belonging and Togetherness

From 1991 onward in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo, refugees, especially from rural areas, flooded the cities. The refugees were, ethnically, “correct”: refugees in Zagreb were Croats (from Krajina and Bosnia); in Belgrade they were Serbs (from Krajina, Bosnia, and Kosovo); in Sarajevo they were Bosnian Muslims (from eastern and northern Bosnia). Yet in all of these places the most striking topic of conversation among locals was bitter complaints about the refugees: at Easter Mass in Zagreb, native Zagrebers complained about all of the refugees who were crowding the church; in Belgrade, there was grumbling about the “Croats” and “Bosnians”—that is, Serb refugees from Croatia and Bosnia who speak in the fluid accents of their native regions rather than with the flat, nasal Belgrade pronunciation; in Sarajevo, there were very bitter complaints about all the “hicks”: Bosnian Muslims from the rural regions of the country who were seen as “destroying” Sarajevo. This concerned not the physical infrastructure, but the spirit of what locals saw as the cosmopolitan city it had been before the war but which was now, thanks to the Muslim refugees, viewed as just a large rural village.

In all of these cases, instead of the expected ethnic solidarity and bonds of emotional attachment, people behaved in a very different way, expressing resentment and even bitterness toward the newcomers. And in all cases, the main complaints were cultural but not ethnic. Rather, the focus of resentment was on the rural nature of the newcomers who were seen as out of place: as invaders and “others” who threatened the culture of the city dwellers. The feeling of cultural superiority drew on pre-existing prejudices and was powerful in that it contradicted the images and theoretical notions of ethnic solidarity that underlie much of Western scholarship on ethnicity and ethnic conflict.

The assumption that people were sacrificing for the idea of an ethnically homogeneous polity, that the wars were driven by an overwhelming bond of ethnic solidarity, seems hollow when those who suffered the most for the cause—by being the worst victims of the “evil others” who had expelled them—were seen not as heroes by their fellow ethnics but rather as undesirable refugees who were degrading the cities in which they sought refuge.

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Violence as Caused by Ethnic Solidarity

From the summer of 1991 onward, forces of Croatia’s Serb nationalist party (SDS) together with the Yugoslav Army (JNA) ethnically cleansed “Krajina,” the parts of Croatia that were claimed as Serb lands. This included regions that did not have a clear Serb majority before the war. Striking images of innocent civilians being used as human shields, people being forced to sign over all of their property, and whole villages destroyed, were only visual representations of what was a radical restructuring of the ethnic composition of the regions. But the violence and terror did not end with the expulsion of the non-Serbs. Indeed, even after Krajina was cleansed, the violence mounted, as moderate Serbs in the region who criticized the Belgrade-allied Krajina leadership were harassed, threatened, and even killed. Consistently in the four years of the existence of the Krajina Republic, extremists in the ruling political parties used terror and violence against those Serbs who called for a more moderate policy that reflected the values and priorities of the Serb population of Croatia prior to the war.

A strikingly parallel situation was seen in neighboring Bosnia, where the hard-line faction of the Croatian nationalist party, the HDZ (supported by Zagreb), undertook a violent campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Croats in order to create an ethnically homogeneous Republic of Herceg-Bosna. But here too, the terror did not stop once all the non-Croats were eliminated. Indeed, the atmosphere in HDZ-controlled Mostar was described in terms that were strikingly reminiscent of Stalin’s terror, given that anti-regime intellectuals and politicians were made fearful for their lives if they were suspected of speaking out against the regime, daring to express what polling before the war indicated were the preferences of the large majority of Bosnia’s Croat population.

* * * * *

Such anecdotes, as well as much of the rest of what happened during the wars, seem very puzzling from the perspective of much of the literature on ethnic conflict and on the Yugoslav wars in particular. Journalistic accounts that dwelt on “ancient ethnic hatreds” tended to ignore stories that contradicted that view. Academics who focused on cultural or economic “backwardness,” or who took a neoprimordialist approach focusing on the power of cultural identities or symbols to mobilize people to violence, dismissed such stories as irrelevant to their culturally framed accounts, or else subordinated them to what they assumed to be the more important “cultural” dynamics. Similarly, rational choice approaches ignored factors that did not seem to fit into their neat models of ethnic groups in conflict. Yet these anecdotes are much more typical of the Yugoslav wars than the stories focusing on ethnic hatreds, on ethnic solidarity, and historical or cultural determinism, or on security dilemmas among ethnic groups. The challenge then is to explain the violence and the framing of that violence: to explain the massacres and expulsion of people along ethnic lines while also explaining the kinds of events described above that put into question the importance of ethnic identity.

From a broader perspective, too, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s are puzzling in a number of ways. Why did such apparently irrational violence break out in the one eastern European country that only a few years before had been seen as the “shining star” of Eastern Europe, the one most open to western ideas, the one whose citizens traveled freely to the West, the one which was mentioned as the prime candidate to join the European Community? As will be shown, explanations that focus on the pre-modern nature of the Balkans, or on the supposed primitiveness of rural culture in the Balkans, completely miss the point that these wars were the creation of modern, urban elites; that they occurred in a relatively open and cosmopolitan society; and that they were a direct response to the very strength of economic and political trends of liberalization in the country.

This in turn leads to another puzzle. During the Cold War the Yugoslav communist party (League of Communists of Yugoslavia—SKJ) was the most politically diverse of the ruling communist parties. Long before the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the SKJ actively and openly debated such heresies as popular participation in decision making, the legitimacy of minority factions within the party, and multiple candidates in elections. Yet these wars emanated from elites within this same SKJ.

An additional puzzle is that while other regions of post-socialist east-central Europe and the former Soviet Union were just as ethnically heterogeneous as Bosnia and Croatia, in the vast majority of those places there were no sustained, violent ethnic conflicts. Likewise, in Yugoslavia itself, ethnically heterogeneous Macedonia, long described as a potential powder keg because of its ethnic mix, has remained generally peaceful, even when the Macedonian nationalist party was in power. Vojvodina, one of the most ethnically heterogeneous regions in Yugoslavia, also did not experience sustained violence despite its mix of Serbs, Croats, Hungarians, and twenty-five other nationalities. Why have other ethnically mixed regions, many of which have histories of tensions that Bosnia and Croatia do not have, avoided ethnic conflict? And why were Bosnia and Croatia peaceful for so long? How can we account for the predominance of ethnic coexistence prior to the wars?

And, moreover, there is perhaps the “metapuzzle” of why the discourse of ethnic conflict has been so prevalent in the West, unifying political, ideological, and theoretical approaches that seem quite disparate. Why, among people who were so skeptical of the communist parties’ claims to be the voice of the working class, is there such a willingness to accept unquestioningly nationalist parties’ claims to be the monolithic voice of the nation, rather than seeing that as something to be empirically tested? Why is there the focus on irrationality and emotion, rather than on the clearly strategic rationales behind the wars themselves?

One clue may be the way in which Western observers in particular often cite the Yugoslav case as confirming the qualitatively different security environment of the post-cold war era, portraying it as a resurgence of the primordial and emotional, as evidence that the new threat to international security comes from regions where ethnic difference is still the fundamental social cleavage and thus the main cause of violence. From this perspective, the key to peace and security in regions like this lies in removing the perceived cause of conflict: cultural difference. For some, partition and transfer of populations is the best way to secure peace. For others, the spread of universalistic liberal ideas and institutions, along with assimilation or consociational political structures, is the solution. For virtually all observers in the West, the problem lies in the power of ethnicity to mobilize people to violence.

This book tells a very different story. Rather than pre-rational sentiments or bonds of ethnicity causing violence, in the Yugoslav cases violence was part of a very modern story. The violence in the former Yugoslavia was a strategic policy chosen by elites who were confronted with political pluralism and popular mobilization. A segment of the Yugoslav elite responded to such challenges by inflicting violence on diverse, plural communities, with the goal of demobilizing key parts of their population by trying to impose political homogeneity on heterogeneous social s...