Perception and Reality in the Modern Yugoslav Conflict
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Perception and Reality in the Modern Yugoslav Conflict

Brendan O'Shea

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Perception and Reality in the Modern Yugoslav Conflict

Brendan O'Shea

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About This Book

In this book, the author has tried bridge the gap between the common perception of the Yugoslav conflict as portrayed in the media and the actual grim reality with which he was dealing as an EU monitor on the ground. Drawing on original material from both UN and ECMM sources, he has identified the true origin of Former Yugoslavia's wars of dissolution, and critically examines the programme of violence which erupted in 1991 and eventually culminated in 1995 in the vicious dismemberment of a sovereign federal republic with seat at the United Nations. In doing so, he highlights the duplicitous behaviour of all parties to the conflict; the double standards employed throughout by the United States in its foreign policy; the lengths to which the Sarajevo government manipulated the international media to promote a 'victim' status; the contempt in which UN peace-keepers were ultimately held by all sides; and the manner in which Radovan Karadzic was sacrificed at the altar of political expediency, when the real culprits were Slobodan Milosevic and his acolyte, General Ratko Mladic. This book, the first by an EU Monitor with actual experience of the conflict, tells the real story of the modern Yugoslav conflict, 1991-1995.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2012
ISBN
9781134248674

1 1991

DOI: 10.4324/9780203002988-1

The Karadjordjevo Meeting

Responding to repeated attempts by Slobodan Milosevic to circumvent, and then manipulate the federal presidency in pursuit of his own agendas, Croatia and Slovenia signed a Mutual Defence Accord in February 1991 in what effectively was the first step on the road to secession.1 Identifying the commencement of disintegration, Alija Izetbegovic, the president of Bosnia-Hercegovina, continued to argue the case for a federal state but the architects of anarchy had already moved on. Meeting at Tito's old hunting lodge in Karadjordjevo, Vojvodina, on 25 March Tudjman and Milosevic had already made plans to carve up the region, leaving ‘a little bit of Bosnia for the Muslims', as Tudjman later put it.2
Of course this was not a new idea – a similar proposal had been negotiated back in August 1939 in order to facilitate the participation of the then Croat leader Vladko Macek in a coalition government with his conservative Serb counterpart, Dragisa Cvetkovic.3 The difference in 1991 was that this new deal had been negotiated in secret.4 The only matter remaining unresolved, apparently, was how to implement it. This task was left to the then Croatian prime minister, Hrvoje Sarinic, and Milosevic's counsellor, Smilja Avramov, who met on at least 30 further occasions to discuss the population transfers which would be necessary to effect it.5
In a meeting at the time with Ambassador Zimmerman, Izetbegovic remarked that ‘If Croatia goes independent Bosnia will be destroyed.'6 This was a profound forecast, and together with Kiro Gligorov, the president of Macedonia, he went to a meeting of the federal presidency in Belgrade on 5 April and proposed a new mechanism whereby the Federation could be held together. Notwithstanding the presence at the meeting of an EC delegation, the proposals fell on deaf ears. Milosevic and Jovic had already decided that all Serbs (including the Bosnian Serbs) should now live in one state, and Tudjman was preaching a ludicrous philosophy that Bosnia had always been a part of Croatia and that in fact the Bosnian Muslims really considered themselves to be Croats.

Violence Erupts

As summer approached the seeds of conflict began to germinate. Milan Kucan had set mid-June now as his deadline for Slovene secession and he began the organisation of paramilitary units which would be employed to defend the new republic. In Croatia the situation was also tense – but for different reasons. A number of Serb villages had mobilised self-defence militias and on 1 April the village of Glina, 50 km south-west from Zagreb, declared its secession from Croatia.
This was followed by the similar secession of 28 other Serb communities in the municipality of Sisak, and the following day barricades went up around Serb villages in eastern Slavonia in the vicinity of Vukovar, Osijek, Vinkovci and Dalj. Then, to make matters worse, Vojislav Seselj,7 a radical politician and paramilitary leader from Serbia, arrived in Borovo Selo on the outskirts of Vukovar allegedly responding to a request for help from the local Serb militia leader Vukasin Soskocanin. He brought with him a group of paramilitary fighters who had been armed by the Serbian police;8 the relationship here between Seselj and the Belgrade authorities is of critical importance. Reflecting on the matter in 1994 Seselj was unambiguous: ‘Our first contact with the police was in the summer of 1991. Then we began to receive arms directly. The first man who we had such contacts with was [Mihalj] Kertes. Later when the army entered the war the army gave weapons to us. We were given busses [sic], and a barracks and seated on these busses we went to the front.'9
This connection establishes a direct link to Milosevic because Kertes was one of Milosevic's closest aides. It was Kertes who masterminded the mass demonstrations in Vojvodina which led to the collapse of the government there on 5 October 1988; it was Kertes who rose high in the ranks of the new government which subsequently emerged; it was Kertes whom Milosevic appointed as Serbia's chief customs officer in 1994; and it was Kertes who bank-rolled the latter stages of the Milosevic regime until it finally collapsed on 5 October 2001.10 Kertes was there at the beginning and there at the end. He was one of the very few to achieve that dubious distinction.
Of course, Kertes was not operating alone – back in 1991 he was ably assisted in recruiting these so-called ‘volunteers' by the then Serbian interior minister, Radmilo Bogdanovic, the secret police chief, Jovica Stanisic, and his two deputies, Franko Simatovic (‘Frenki') and Radovan Stojicic (‘Badza').11 For the likes of Seselj it was comforting to know that the full weight of Serbia's political apparatus was squarely behind him, and in December 1991 all volunteer units, including the Chetniks, were fully integrated into the JNA order of battle.12
The overall situation in Croatia was now deteriorating by the hour and came to a head on 8 April when it was announced in Zagreb that the courts martial of Martin Spegelj and the ‘Virovitica Four' had been discontinued in response to mass demonstrations and riots on the streets. This sent the wrong message entirely to the simple Serb peasants of eastern Slavonia who genuinely believed that the Croats, aided and abetted by Germany, were now about to attack them. These fears were increased by the rhetoric of Seselj, and gained further credence when they witnessed the hurried arrival of other groups of ‘volunteers'. Both Serbs and Croats in Croatia were now genuinely and legitimately afraid for their lives, and escapades like that undertaken by Tudjman's defence minister served only to confirm their worst nightmares.
On 1 May Defence Minister Susak had gone to Osijek and, enlisting the aid of the police chief, Josip Rechil-Kir, went on a night-time excursion to Borovo Selo in order to fire three missiles into an apartment complex in the predominantly Serb suburb of Vukovar. For many Serbs this legitimised the presence of Seselj's thugs, and the following day two bus-loads of Croatian police were ambushed in the centre of Borovo Selo – 12 died and a further 22 were wounded.
Croatia was now steadily sliding towards full scale civil war as the extremists on both sides took control, a fact evidenced by the death of Rechil-Kir himself, who, having subsequently voiced his objections to what Susak and his colleagues had done, was then murdered by a local HDZ activist, Antun Gudelj, who then made a ‘miraculous' escape from the region notwithstanding that several police road blocks were actually sited in close proximity to him at the time.
Five years later Susak would deny that he had anything to do with the firing of rockets into Borovo Selo. He did, however, admit that he had been in the area at the time, and confirmed that he had ‘visited the Croatian soldiers, and crawled for three hours in the mud towards the barricades'.13 This ‘explanation' serves only to raise further questions, and it most certainly does not rebut the testimony of Jadranka Rechil-Kir in relation to who bears responsibility for the cold-blooded murder of her husband.
From this point onwards the flames of ethnic hatred would be vigorously fanned by political leaders on all sides and at all levels, and literally within days both communities became engulfed in a crisis, the origins of which they barely understood. Harassment, intimidation, tit-for-tat killings and indiscriminate attacks on towns, villages and private houses, quickly became the norm. Law and order effectively died in Croatia on the night that Josip Rechil-Kir was murdered.
In tandem with the growing violence the result of a referendum in Croatia published on 20 May established that 92 per cent of those who voted did not want to remain within federal Yugoslavia, and the unveiling of the new Croatian National Guard on 28 May indicated clearly that Tudjman too had passed the point of no return, notwithstanding that Serb autonomous regions were springing up all over the place – Knin, Plitvice, Pakrac and Vukovar to name but four.14

Declarations of Independence

Against this volatile political backdrop James Baker, US secretary of state, arrived in Belgrade on 21 June fresh from the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE later OSCE) meeting in Berlin where a resolution had been adopted calling for the ‘democratic development, unity, and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and continued dialogue between all parties'.15 The message he delivered to Milosevic was straightforward – the US and OSCE did not support dissolution and all parties should work to find a resolution.
Ambassador Zimmerman is clear that there was no ambiguity. The message was simple', he says. ‘Baker told him dissolution was not an option.'16 This was consistent with what President Bush had already told Federal Prime Minister Markovic on 28 March when he said that the US would not encourage or reward those who broke up the country. Baker then went to Tudjman and Kucan and told them the same story, emphasising that the US would not support unilateral secession – but his message fell on deaf ears.17
Four days later, on 25 June, Slovenia and Croatia declared themselves sovereign and independent states and at 8 p.m. that evening, on the tenth anniversary of the alleged apparition of the Virgin Mary in the Bosnian-Croat town of Medjugorge, and speaking to a packed Croatian Sabor in Zagreb, President Tudjman declared that he was ‘calling on all parliamentary democracies to recognise the will of the Croatian people to join the society of free and independent nations'.18 Later that evening the Slovenes did the same, and fighting began almost immediately when at Milosevic's bidding the remnants of the Federal State Council, presided over by Jovic, approved Federal Prime Minister Ante Markovic's directive that the JNA intervene in order to protect Yugoslavia's international borders. And thus the dissolution of Yugoslavia commenced when all the old border crossings and customs posts with the West fell into direct Slovene control and goods in transit and customs revenue became forfeited to the Slovene exchequer.
The ten-day war which followed was a half-hearted affair with neither the JNA nor Milosevic having the stomach for all-out conflict. Armoured units did move into Slovenia on 27 June following a main axis from Karlovac and Zagreb to Ljubljana, with a second axis further north from Varazdin, but the fighting which ensued could only be described as ‘patchy', given that all main roads into Slovenia were mined and the secondary routes were covered by fire at critical points.19
Eventually, after an ill-fated ten-day adventure in which little military progress was made, and 37 Yugoslav army and 12 Slovene deaths were recorded, the JNA gave up. That the campaign concluded as quickly as it did was an interesting story. Five months previously, on 24 January to be exact,20 Kucan and Milosevic had discussed a potential Slovene breakaway and the Serbian president agreed to allow the Slovenes to depart on condition that Kucan supported Serbia's claim to incorporate all Serb-populated areas elsewhere in Yugoslavia into Serbia proper. ‘We both know what is going to happen', Milosevic said. ‘You Slovenes want to leave, so let's make a deal. Let's rewrite the constitution and extend the right to secede, not just to the republics, but to all ethnic groups as well.'21
But Kucan knew that a promise from Milosevic was all but worthless and was aware that armoured columns were on the way from Croatia. At 5 a.m. on the morning of 27 June he went on Slovene Television to confirm his decision to fight. ‘The Republic of Slovenia will take all necessary measures to defend our independence against the Yugoslav army', he said.22 In the first few hours the JNA had tried to deploy just under 2,000 troops (mostly untrained conscripts) to the border crossings, but this had been resisted. The bulk of JNA troops garrisoned in Slovenia remained confined to their barracks, which from the army's perspective proved to be a huge tactical mistake because very quickly the ad hoc Slovene militia (perhaps 35,000 lightly armed volunteers) encircled these barracks and effectively trapped the occupants inside. Colonel Aksantijevic, a JNA commander in Ljubljana, admitted as much later on, and when it became clear that any resupply by air would almost certainly be shot down, the only options open to the federal troops were to fight their way into the country, and out of their barracks, if in fact they had the stomach for it – and in the majority of cases they did not.
The Slovenes also scored a major victory in the propaganda war and quickly had the international media reporting Serb atrocities when nothing of the sort was taking place. This was achieved by skilful media manipulation, and the hundreds of journalists who descended on Ljubljana were made most welcome. Thereafter they were corralled into a bunker beneath the Ministry of Information (allegedly for their own safety) and fed a steady diet of events taking place above ground – from the Slovene perspective.
The Serbs were portrayed as violent communists who dropped cluster bombs on innocent civilians, the struggle being thus portrayed as one between Good (in the guise of Slovenes and Croats) and Evil (personified by the Serbs). In this way a fictional blow-by-blow account of the ten-day war was fed to the media by a team of young multilingual patriotic volunteers (mostly university students aged between 20 and 30), and, unable (and/or unwilling) to venture over-ground to confirm these stories, when editorial deadlines arrived the official Slovene version of events was broadcast as fact.23 Equally, when selected journalists (i.e. those disposed to the Slovene struggle) were allowed to venture up into the streets much of what they witnessed was stage-managed and choreographed.24 Not for the first time in the Balkans truth had become the first casualty of war – and it would not be the last occasion either.
As an EC delegation of foreign ministers was dispatched to Zagreb, General Kadijevic was proposing massive military intervention in Slovenia at the Yugoslav State Council in Belgrade. On the verge of ratifying this course of action, Serbia's representative, Borisav Jovic, then voted ‘no' and vetoed the plan. He later admitted that ‘Serbia had no territorial claims there. It was an ethnically pure republic – no Serbs. We couldn't care less if they left Yugoslavia. With Slovenia out of the way we could dictate terms to the Croats.'25
However, this admission contains a number of truths. First, it would have been impossible to justify a military clamp-down in Slovenia on...

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