Amid rising tensions between Kosovo and Serbia, ethnic and religious battles once again prove how ethnonationalism has threatened democracy in the past, and will continue to do so.
In the streets of Kosovo tension rung through the air right after local mayoral elections declared ethnic Albanian candidates the winners. Shortly after, on May 30th in northern Kosovo, dozens of NATO peacekeepers were injured in a clash with ethnic Serbs. However, this is not an isolated case-- political violence has erupted in the past-- and the roots reach farther into the Balkans.
A Yugoslav tourist film from 1990 begins with footage of former Yugoslavia, and opens with jaunty music- showing a small town on the edge of a cliff above deep blue waters, then panning to lush mountain terrain near a thin strip of golden beach and posing the question, “Can you imagine a country where you can still find ancient towns when by crystal-clear sea?” The film continues, switching to a more informational tone, “Yugoslavia is a country with a long turbulent history. After WWII, it became a socialist federation comprising six republics and two autonomous regions. It speaks five official languages and prays to an Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim god.” It ends, “This is no imaginary land. This is Yugoslavia.”
The Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, also referred to as the Yugoslav Wars, became the first European conflict since World War II. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, nationalism and ethnocentrism surfaced within the member states of Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia after the death of Josip Broz Tito, a Croatian communist revolutionary, and the installation of his protégé, Slobodan Milošević. The communist revolutionary's policy to hold the country together was referred to as “brotherhood and unity.” It ensured any surfacing nationalism from a specific ethnic or religious group that threatened the collective Yugoslav identity would be crushed. However, his protégé’s political ideology was less centered on communism and focused on Serb nationalism– a destructive, all-consuming tool that brought about death and destruction, scarring the future of the Balkans.
In the face of the imminent dissolution of the USSR in 1990, the Slovenian government in Ljubljana declared its sovereignty from Yugoslavia at a December independence referendum, stating in a parliamentary declaration that Slovenian law took precedence over Yugoslav law. Just five months later, Croatia declared sovereignty, and Bosnia and Herzegovina in August. Macedonia, to the south of Kosovo and Serbia, officially became the Republic of North Macedonia in September 1991.
In particular, after the collapse of communism, Croatia and Serbia were forever marked by opposing nationalisms. Serbian nationalism was inflamed by the then-president of the Socialist Republic of Serbia (now the Republic of Serbia), Milošević who was president from May 8, 1989, until July 1997. As a response, Franjo Tuđman was elected in Croatia’s first free elections. Tuđman’s political ideology was heavily based on non-Communist nationalism. However, ethnic Serbs in Croatia felt threatened after the election of Tuđman, partly due to tensions in the aftermath of the Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945.
On June 25, 1991, the Croatian and Slovenian governments declared independence from Yugoslavia. Following the independence declaration, in August, an armed insurrection begun by various Croatian Serb militias and paramilitary forces, supported by the Serb-majority Yugoslav army, Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija (JNA), launched a full-scale attack on Croatia, referred to as the 87-Day Battle of Vukovar. From 1991 to 1992, 15,000 Croatians were displaced and the city of Vukovar was 90 percent destroyed. However, the Croatian War of Independence continued until 1995– accompanied by policies supported by Milošević of ethnic cleansing of Croats and other non-Serbs from Krajina, massive deportations and executions under the military leadership of Milan Martić, a former Croatian Serb chief of police.
Around the same time, the JNA attempted to come between Slovenia and their independence but effectively failed to crush the insurgency, withdrawing from the Ten-Day War, or the Slovenian War of Independence. In the BBC Documentary The Death of Yugoslavia, Borisav Jović, Milošević’s close ally, confidant, and advisor admitted, “With Slovenia out of the way, we could dictate the terms to the Croats.”
In 1991, the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, consisting mainly of three ethnic groups, Bosnian Croats (17 percent Roman Catholic), Bosnian Serbs (32.5 percent Serbian Orthodox Christians), and Muslim Bozniaks (44 percent), was pursuing independence. At the time, Sarajevo, the capital, was predominantly governed by Muslim Bozniaks, whose urge for independence aggravated the Bosnian Serb political figure, Radovan Karadžić. During the breakup of Yugoslavia, Karadžić cautioned that bloodshed would result from the pursuance of independence. Assisted by the Serbian JNA and the Bosnian Serb Army, in 1992, Karadžić launched the Bosnian War, a bloody, barbaric war of genocide and ethnic cleansing of Bozniaks and Bosnian Croats, forever marring the world.
The Siege of Sarajevo, lasting 1,452 days (almost four years), was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare and left upwards of 13,950 dead. The infamous Sniper Alley, streets that were lined with Bosnian Serb snipers who fired upon anyone crossing, were one of many life-threatening and life-ending environments civilians in Sarajevo faced when moving about the city to survive. Some estimations assert the total population of the city before the siege was 435,000. The population of Sarajevo after the siege ranged from 300,000 to 380,000. NATO’s sustained air campaign, Operation Deliberate Force, started on February 14, 1994, and brought about an end to the siege.
From 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb army wartime methods ranged from indiscriminate shelling, systematic mass rape, ethnic cleansing, brutal fighting, and genocide. A notable example was the Srebrenica genocide wherein more than 8,000 Muslim Bozniaks were massacred in a systematically organized series of summary executions, chiefly men of fighting age (13-64). The Srebrenica genocide was the deadliest and only genocide in Europe since the end of World War II.
After the end of World War II, the present-day region of Kosovo had been a territorial dispute between Serbia and Albania. The ethnic makeup of the majority of the region was Muslim Kosovar Albanians, with Christian Kosovar Serbs being the minority. However, in 1991, Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, was governed by Christian Kosovar Serbs, setting the scene for Milošević’s Kosovar Albanian ethnocide through increased Serb control of the state. A Kosovar Albanian non-violent separatist movement ensued, and a declaration of independence from Yugoslavia came in 1992. Three years following the end of the Bosnian War, the Kosovo War began with fighting between the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), and the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA (their major objective being to unite Kosovo into Greater Albania). Unrest was widespread in areas of Kosovo, however it was only until 1998, when NATO began to assist the KLA, is when the the conflict escalated into a full-blown war.
In March 1999, NATO intervened in the Kosovo War after peace talks failed, beginning an arial bombing campaign on Serb military bases in Kosovo, and Belgrade that brought about an end to the fighting. The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, proclaimed in an announcement to the German public on March 24, 1999, the day the campaign started, “We are not going to war, but we are called upon to implement a peaceful solution in Kosovo, including by military means!”
A body of the United Nations, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague, Netherlands, was formed to investigate war crimes that had been perpetrated in former Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić, Milan Martić were convicted and found guilty of crimes against humanity, with Karadžić, Mladić, and Martić currently serving life sentences in prison. However, Milošević died while in custody without his trial being concluded, indicted on counts of:
"genocide; complicity in genocide; deportation; murder; persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds; inhumane acts/forcible transfer; extermination; imprisonment; torture; willful killing; unlawful confinement; willfully causing great suffering; unlawful deportation or transfer; extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly; cruel treatment; plunder of public or private property; attacks on civilians; destruction or willful damage done to historic monuments and institutions dedicated to education or religion; unlawful attacks on civilian objects" (ICTY).
The aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars not only left physical scars on the millions that were displaced, the 140,000 killed, but victims were dealt immense psychological pain– trauma incurable and forever ingrained not only in the history of the region, but the present-day of the world. Tensions will not simply disappear, but lest we forget the harm nationalism and ethnonationalism has already been done to democracy, cultures, religions, nations, and peoples.
Jinane Ejjed is a senior editor for The Historian's Tribune who specializes in American politics and global affairs.
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