The Balkan wars and ethnic cleansing - solution recommendation; includes historical and sociological analysis

Monthly Review did its readers a great service by publishing an excerpt from "Why Bosnia?" by Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz in the March issue. The article provides an informative defense of the Bosnian cause which forces the entire left to come to grips with the questions raised by the Balkan wars. The authors also make a compelling case for some form of Western entry into the war to halt Serbian and Croatian ethnic cleansing, whether this aid be limited to lifting the arms embargo, as Ali and Lifschultz advocate, or extended to the open-ended application of NATO military might, as others like Bogdan Denitch demand.

Unfortunately, in the end the relatively measured recommendations of Ali and Lifschultz, like the other calls for intervention, add up to a prescription for counter-genocide rather than a lasting just solution to this bloody conflict. The Balkan wars should pose an acute dilemma to those who think through the logic of the current struggle to the probable outlines of a military victory for any side. In their partisanship and understandable desperation, Ali and Lifschultz skirt some important facets of the Balkan wars which the Western left must keep in mind lest we become unwitting accomplices. A brief historical and sociological account will be required to make my case. But let me begin by pointing out a conspicuous omission by Ali and Lifschultz in their account of the murderous forced retribalization campaigns conducted during the Balkan wars.

Ethnic Cleansing and the Lasvanska Valley Campaign

In the spring and summer of 1993, the Bosnian leadership, particularly President Alija Izetbegovic, opted to exploit a general war-weariness in Croatia and launch a surprise military offensive against ethnic Croat enclaves in central Bosnia. The strategic rationale for seizing this parcel of land was to link up mainly Muslim pockets in the north and south. The sole obstacle to Izetbegovic's plan was the roughly 200,000 Croats inhabiting the Lasvanska valley region who bore the brunt of the Bosnian offensive. To conquer the Croat ancestral homelands, the Bosnian army adopted the Serbian and Croatian model of terroristic ethnic cleansing. The Lasvanska campaign culminated in burning dozens of indigenous Croat villages to the ground, razing several cities, frequent massacres, and every form of atrocity that was so rightly condemned by the Western left when it was meted out by Croats and Serbs against Bosnian Muslims.(1) To justify genocide, Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic fell back on the all-too-familiar Serb pretext that these outrages were the militarily justified actions of the Bosnian army on Bosnian territory. As a result of this assault, 120,000 Croats were turned into refugees, fleeing lands that their people had inhabited for centuries.

By pressing its momentary advantage over the Croats, the Bosnian side entered the war as aggressors and can no longer be regarded solely as victims. A top Bosnian defense ministry official spelled out the war aims of the army leadership in a brazenly candid interview to a Croatian newsmagazine. Commander Arif Pasalic declared that the immediate objective of the Lasvanska campaign was to transform central Bosnia into a military-industrial bridgehead for nothing less than the complete liberation of BiH (Bosnia-Hercegovina) from foreign occupation. Indigenous Croat and Serb resistance to the Bosnian advance was trivialized as the work of Utashi or Cetnik terrorist bands with no legitimate claims worthy of consideration. To be fair to Izetbegovic, there remains no other option than a reciprocal ethnic cleansing if the object is to restore a greater Bosnia by military means. The predicament of this war for the Western left is that whichever side wins out, the victor will be forced to drive out the losers, who are sure to resist occupation, as the indigenous Croats did in Central Bosnia.

In any event, the Bosnian campaign not only failed but backfired calamitously. The Croatian army leaped upon Izetbegovic's overextended offensive as a justification to punch a military corridor through to occupy the Lasvanska valley and safeguard its embattled ethnic kin. The moral and military miscalculation of Izetbegovic left the Bosnian leadership with no choice but to reverse course and forge an alliance of convenience with yesterday's enemy, the Croats. The hope was to draw Zagreb into the war against the Serbs or at least free up troops on the Croatian fronts.

This diplomatic somersault required the Bosnians to strike a deal with the odious Franjo Tudjman. As Croatian president, Tudjman was responsible for re-introducing the term ethnic cleansing into the Balkan political vocabulary and issued the first orders to put the notion systematically into practice. The Tudjman government is even now proceeding apace with what it terms "soft ethnic cleansing" against those Serbs remaining in Croatia. After Lasvanska and the Tudjman-Izetbegovic non-aggression pact, Bosnian claims of defending multiculturalism and opposing ethnic cleansing ring very hollow to anybody who is closely following the war. Izetbegovic is on record as telling Tudjman that he intends to turn all of central Bosnia into exclusively Muslim territory. A land-grab of this scale can only mean that his war aims are governed by singlemindedly nationalist aspirations pursued at the expense of the indigenous Croat population.

The past record plainly shows that the commitment of the Bosnian Muslim elite to a multi-ethnic state is not as unequivocal as Ali and Lifschultz would have it. There is indeed a secular current epitomized by Haris Salajdzic. The prime minister fears that the explicit embrace of an Islamic project would lead to the isolation of Bosnia from the rest of Europe and leave no place for westernized Muslim Slavs like himself. On the other hand, Izetbegovic has long had much closer ties to religious militants and Islamic fundamentalists. The Bosnian president was also the co-author of a Muslim nationalist manifesto known as the "Islamic Declaration," published in 1983, which among other things advocated the forcible annexation of Kosovo and the unilateral establishment of an Islamic state in a republic where only 43 percent of the population was ethnic Muslim. This controversial document in many ways prefigured Serbian Pravoslav fundamentalism and Croatian Catholic integrism in its elevation of one Church Militant uber Alles and the desire to incorporate articles of religious faith into law.

Bosnian state-building and the war have provided a powerful leavening for Muslim nationalism. This is especially true in the military, whose top echelons are already asserting themselves as independent political players. In his interview endorsing maximalist war aims, Commander Pasalic made a point of accentuating the Muslim contribution to the military effort: "Muslims inevitably conducted this war in order for them to become one of the decisive factors in the formation of the state of BiH. There is no state of BiH without the Muslims."

These remarks and many others like them immediately bring to mind Stalin's postwar exaltation of Russians as first among multi-ethnic equals in recognition of their singular exploits against the Nazis. A continuation of the war for greater Bosnia favored by Pasalic would only strengthen the hand of the Muslim maximalists in the military and within the intelligentsia. The words and actions of Bosnian leaders over the past year are bearing out the prediction of a generally dispassionate Croatian journalist that the "war in BiH cannot wind down by itself without the emergence of three monstrous ethnic states" in the region.(3)

Ali and Lifschultz pass over in silence the sordid side of the Lasvanska valley offensive and the difficulties it should pose to supporters of the Bosnian struggle for survival. Perhaps they believe that the wholesale slaughter of so many Bosnian innocents by the Serbs and Croats justifies what by implication are treated as excesses unworthy of mention? Or maybe they reason that in a just war, nobody's hands can remain completely clean? If so, their whitewashing can only compound a tragedy which promises to embroil generations of southern Slavs without a radical alteration of the militarized trajectory that Ali and Lifschultz propose.

The strategic logic of this conflict will in the end drag every side down to the same level of depravity. The sympathetic aspects of the Bosnian cause cannot survive many more episodes like the ethnic cleansing of Bugojno, Konjic, Jablanica, Travnik, and the rest of what is coming to be a very long list. Even as I write in mid-May 1994, Belgrade radio self-righteously reports the round-up and expulsion of 1,500 Croats from Zenica by Bosnian troops. The slaughter in the Lasvanska valley was not an aberration but a portent of what is to come, over and over again, if the war continues. Victory on these terms would at best resemble that of the Israelis driving out the Arab population from Palestine after the Second World War. The means will consume the end and Bosnian multiculturalism will go the way of the cosmopolitan socialism of the old Zionist left. Only by going back to the modern sources of the conflict can the Western left gain the perspective needed to make a contribution to a just peace in the Balkans.

The Ethnocratic Roots of the Balkan Wars

The sad fact of the matter is that the death warrants on the innocent victims of the Balkan wars were drawn up years if not decades before the actual fighting began. The true authors of the carnage were the ethnocratic elites who gradually consolidated their power in the various republics from the late 1960s onward and tore the country apart in the process. In his definitive study Yugoslavia: The Structure of Disintegration, Laslo Sekel singles out 1968 and the government crackdown against the student movement as the real turning point when the country slowly started to unravel.(4) From the intellectual fringe, the Yugoslav new left had surged to prominence on the strength of a trans-ethnic democratic socialist vision with enormous potential popular appeal. The power elite and its various republican components responded to this challenge with an obscurantist and chauvinist ideological counteroffensive. This was most explicitly the case in Zagreb, where many of those responsible for crushing the student insurgency are today the chiefideologists of Croatian nationalism.

This crucial juncture set off a long series of political mutations and recombinations which over the next two decades transvalued the basis of legitimacy of the Yugoslav dominant class and promoted a cartelization of its power along republican lines. From this point onward, all social and political conflict began to be transposed into a nationalist idiom while autarchic tendencies within the national economy provided a material basis for the rise of ethnocratic rule. The inability of the various ethnocracies to reach agreement on the new political rules allowed a structural economic crisis to escalate into a general crisis of the Yugoslav state. These tendencies assumed regionally specific forms within a spectrum ranging from the neo-liberalism embraced by the Slovenian oligarchy to the authoritarian populism of the Serbs and Croats. Not all the republics were equally guilty in extinguishing the dream of a federal southern Slav community, but each aspiring ethnocracy contributed substantially to undercutting the political foundation of ethnic and cultural pluralism. When the crisis of the Yugoslav state finally came to a head, the authors of these competing ethnocratic nationalisms gravitated toward radical separatism to mobilize their chief constituencies.

Cynical gamesmanship at the top was accompanied by the failure of successive governments to fully integrate the rural population into the political system. The result was a profound alienation of large segments of the agrarian strata across all the republics, but especially in the most ethnically diverse. A series of monetarist reforms in the late 1980s poured gasoline on this tinder by striking hardest at farm dwellers. Long-standing marginalization and mounting impoverishment left the rural population primed for a demagogic mobilization along ethnic lines.

The Balkan wars resist easy solutions because Yugoslavia was torn apart from within by ethnocratic elites and its own intrinsic structural handicaps. No thin blue line of UN peacekeepers or barrage of U.S. napalm was going to hold back this avalanche once it began. There was too much at stake for ambitious politicians on all sides not to run huge risks and brave massive losses in the pursuit of their state-building objectives. Too much of the rest of the population outside the major cities nursed grievances and simmering animosities that were easily ignited.

The republican ethnocracies pushed Yugoslavia to the edge but the final push came from the outside. As Radmila Nakarada recounts, the Western European powers were ambivalent if not quietly opposed to the preservation of the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia.(5) In particular, Germany was reckless in recognizing the first breakaway republics of Slovenia and Croatia in December 1991. The power play of Helmut Kohl scotched any hope for a negotiated settlement and lent credence to the charge of the Serb leadership that Bonn was bent upon establishing a "monocentric system in Europe" anchored by client states digging their way out from under the debris of Yugoslavia.(6) From the outset, the prime motive of the Great Powers bickering on the sidelines has not been peacemaking and integration but expansion and domination in a region that was previously non-aligned. In the first stage of the Balkan crisis, national self-determination was seized upon as a weapon of old-fashioned imperialist aggrandizement. Military intervention and an externally imposed settlement will be manipulated in the same manner and for the same ends.

Few outside of Yugoslavia stopped to consider the paradox of relativizing external borders while continuing to absolutize internal boundaries. The effect was of course to transform each ethnic group living outside its kindred republic into a minority group within a foreign sovereign state. The 1.4 million Serbs living in Bosnian enclaves were overnight deprived of the protection of a federal system and rightly or wrongly felt themselves vulnerable to Muslim hegemony.

Croatian and Serb nationalists justify their campaigns against Bosnia with the claim that they are resisting the "dragon of Islam" and preventing radical Muslim fundamentalism from gaining a foothold on the European continent. But Ali and Lifschultz proffer an equally untenable characterization of the Bosnian war by treating the resistance to the Izetbegovic government as masterminded entirely from without. This is no more true in Bosnia than it was in South Vietnam a generation ago. Roughly 265,000 of the half-million Serbian refugees in this war were forced to flee Bosnia over the past two years. Obviously, the exodus of one-fifth of the Bosnian Serb population is mainly due to the ravages of war. But this outflux is also indicative of the genuine fears of an ethnic minority about its future prospects in a predominantly Muslim state. The arbitrary inclusion of large pockets of Serbs and Croats within the confines of a state created without their consent is what makes the Bosnian conflict a civil war and accounts for its sustainability.

Like Ali and Lifschultz, at least half of the Western left seems determined to treat the Balkan wars as a replay of the run-up to the Second World War and a chance to nip a new Naziism in the bud. The other half looks into the maw and sees the prelude to the First World War in a knot of regional conflicts as vicious as they are imbecile and strategically combustible. Each side is trying to draw in the Great Powers against its adversaries.

The Lessons of the Balkan Wars

The first lesson to be learned from the Balkan wars is that no outside force can do much to prevent the self-destruction of multiethnic states beyond providing humanitarian aid. The emphasis of the left has to be on prevention by resisting racist demagoguery wherever it arises and opposing neo-liberal economic experiments, generally dictated by Western financial institutions. Signing onto far-fetched military solutions will only leave the left hostage to the predilections of the U.S. national security state and render it more difficult for us to mobilize against the foreign armed interventions that lie in store.

The first priority in the case of Bosnia is to stop the bloodletting and the prospect of greater Western military involvement. Escalation plays into the hands of the war lobby in Belgrade. The Serbian oligarchy has fomented war hysteria to weld public opinion into a solidary mass and render it more amenable to manipulation. The regime of Slobodan Milosevic initially scored a spectacular success in its alarmist mobilization against the outside world, with polls showing 68 percent of Serbs subscribing to xenophobic sentiments in October 1992 and 74 percent in May 1993.(7) But the tide began to turn toward the end of last year with evidence of a growing popular desire for an end to the war and political normalization. The Milosevic government responded by ratcheting down the war propaganda, sending out peace feelers, and orchestrating a very public split with Serb maximalists.

The price of putting an immediate end to the war will be an interim confederal solution unfair in terms of territorial concessions and elementary retributive justice to the Bosnian side. But quibbling on the specific terms of an agreement is beside the point because such a peace cannot last. This armistice would at worst set the stage for another round of Balkan wars a few years hence. Then again, there is also a chance that a pause might radically revise the overall political equation in a postwar situation which, despite all the horror, still remains protean and inconclusive.

The best hope for all concerned is that a cessation of hostilities will allow war-related tensions to abate in Serbia and Croatia. This could lead to a popular backlash against a series of futile and prohibitively destructive wars with the certainty of more to follow. Nationalism in Eastern Europe has been primarily an elite ideology used as a weapon in top-level power struggles around the division of the spoils inherited from the old regime. The grassroots have been drawn in by a combination of appeals to greed and fear. The Western left has no choice but to support those indigenous forces seeking to resurrect the multicultural promise of Yugoslavia from the ashes and forge another southern Slav community of people. This gamble is admittedly a longshot, but giving peace a chance remains the only alternative to decades of war.

NOTES

(1.)M. Barisic, "Call-up for a General War," Danas ["Today"] 18 January 1994.

(2.)Arif Pasalic, "Interview," Danas, 22 February 1994.

(3.)F. Svarm, "Two Brides, One Bridegroom," Vreme, 7 March 1994.

(4.)Laslo Sekel, Jugoslavija: Struktura Raspadanja ["Yugoslavia: Structure of Disintegration"] (Belgrade: Rad, 1990), p. 146.

(5.)Radmila Nakarada, "Critical Thought and the Lessons of War," in D. Kovacevic, ed., Raspad Jugoslavije: Produzetak ili Kraj Agonije ["The Collapse of Yugoslavia: Protraction or End of the Agony"] (Belgrade: IES, 1991), p. 96.

(6.)M. Milosevic, "Thousand Days of Misfortune," Vreme, 11 April 1994.

(7.)D. Pantic, "Interview," Vreme, 2 May 1994.

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