.A. Jugoslavia 1919 to the present. The Inter-War
Period.
a. Born out of the ruins of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empire, Jugoslavia
had been created by the treaties of 1919 and 1920.
1. Serbia really wanted
its own empire that would include that which had fallen away from Austria-Hungary
and which it had taken in the Balkan Wars.
2. Jugoslav ideal was promoted
by Croats who escaped the Austro-Hungarian Army on the eastern Front and
who made it to London and Paris.
a. Yugoslav Committee promoted
the old Illyrian ideal.
b. Its President, Ante Trumbic
went to meet Serb President Pasich on Corfu in 1917 who hoped for an agreement
that would stimulate Croats and Slovenes to revolt against Austria-Hungary.
i. Pact of Corfu promoted the idea of a Jugoslavia
in which all three peoples would be equal.
ii. Pasich later declared this agreement to be without legal status.
iii. Nevertheless, the Treaties of Paris went ahead to create a Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The principle was not to be ethnic cleansing
as had been practiced by England in Scotland in the early 19th century,
in the U.S. (e.g. Cherokees), by Turks against the Armenians in the early
20th century, but rather to leave the peoples in place and adjust the borders
in line with Wilson's ideal of national self-determination. (Tony Judt
article, "A New World Disorder: A Century of Ethnic Cleansing Comes Home
to Roost in Kosovo." Los Angeles Times, April 11, M1-2)
3. Serb demands for more of Hungary,
Austria, Albania and Bulgaria were turned down on the grounds of national
self-determination.,
B. The illusion of a nation.
1. South Slavs (83%) were ethnically similar,
but with totally different histories, e.g. Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Slovenes
2. Jugoslavia included also: about half-a-million
each of Germans, Hungarians and Kossovo-Albanians; Turks (150,000+) and
smaller numbers of Slovaks, Czechs, Bulgarians, Rumanians and Italians
all who had historic roots in the lands they occupied.
3. Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
renamed Jugoslavia in 1929. Became in fact "Greater Serbia" under the centralized,
dictatorial rule of Belgrade, alienating most everyone else.
a. Croat
exiles took refuge in fascist Italy and organized the terrorist Ustasche
with bases also in Hungary..
b. Macedonian
separatists organized terrorist I.M.R.O. with support of Bulgaria --- assassinated
King Alexander in 1934 with the support of the Hungarian-based Ustasche.
c. Worried about the support given by fascist Italy and Germany and their
puppets Hungary and Bulgaria, the Jugoslav government attempted conciliation.
i. Autonomous Croatia was to be created and the moderate Croatian peasant
leader Machek was to be included in the government as a means of going
around the quaisi-fascist Croatian Radical Union.
ii. Slovenes and Moslems immediately pressed for the same.
C. World War (April 1941-April 1945) both
confused and then simplified the problems.
1. [Image]Croatia placed under Ustashe leader Pavelich.
a. Catholics and Muslims
massacred Serbs estimates run from 70,000 to Serb contentions there may
have been as many as 700,000.
b. Other Serbs subjected
to Croatization and forced conversion to Roman Catholicism. .
2. Serbia under direct German military rule and
in conjunction with a puppet Serb government "ethnically cleansed the occupied
territory of Jews and Gypsies while non-Serbs and Communists were interned
in concentration camps. .
a. Kossovo-Albanians organized into fascist-led bands and massacred Serbs.
b. Hungarians and Germans massacred Serbs in their areas.
D. The Resistance and the
germ of a reborn Jugoslavia.
1. Chetniks led by regular
army officer, Col. Mihailovich ---- organized among Serbs in Bosnia in
response to the Ustashi --- Greater-Serb, Monarchist and anti-Communist----
fought the Croats and the Germans -- but mostly laid low, hoping for British
invasion to restore the Monarchy.
2. Partisans organized by
Communists under Tito --- fought the Germans, the Ustashi and the Chetniks,
but cut across nationality lines using an anti-fascist, anti-German appeal
that mobilized not only Serbs, but Bosnian Muslims, Slovenes and Croats
who constituted 40% of forces by the end of 1943.
a. Guerrilla warfare centered in the Dinaric Alps mobilized 150,000 men
that posed a constant threat behind German lines.
b. By the time of the collapse of fascist Italy in September 1943, they
had liberated large parts of Slovenia, the Croatian littoral, Dalmatia,
Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
c. Executed tens of thousands of Croats and Slovene militiamen as well
as Serb Chetniks. For a highly partisan and probably exaggerated version
of these massacres click here.
d. Forged a genuine sense of Jugoslav nationalism.
3. A true Jugoslav nation-state
seemed to emerge from the ruins of the war, built on pride in the anti-fascist
victory, the charisma of Tito and the strength
of his army. .
a. JCL won a genuinely popular electoral victory in 1945 and organized
a, socialist federal republic based on 6 member-union republics which supposed
to recognize "cultural and historic" not "national" in the new, supposedly
nation-state of Jugoslavia.
b. Split with the Soviet Union ultimately opened the country to the West
and a prosperity unknown in the Soviet bloc.
c. The military victory and the "national communist"settlement again "froze"
the nationality conflict.
4. Charisma of Tito
--- economic boom seemed to have created a stable (nation-) state. Widely
apparent on my trip there.
a. Tito recognized potential
problems that might follow his death (1980) and attempted to circumvent
them by granting more autonomy to the Republics, with a collective, rotating
presidency. This has turned out to be the source of the current problems,
not the solution.
b. The heirs to Tito turned
to nationalism to bolster their own careers, with the election of "Greater
Serb" nationalist Milosovich as President in 1987 as a catalyzing event.
c. Dissolution of Jugoslavia
actually started with Milosovich's movement to scrap the federal constitution
and consolidate a strong central state under Serbian domination.
5. Kossovo. 28.
June 1989, 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kossovo Pole,
withdrawal of national autonomy of Kossovo Albanians.
a. Ethnic Albanians were
fired from government jobs, harassed by the police and forced to speak
Serbo-Croatian in schools, courts and other public functions.
b. The Kossovo Albanians
circumvented this purge by effectively establishing parallel institutions:
private schools, a shadow government, separate tax and health care systems
-- virtual independence under Republic President Rugova -- ignored Belgrade.
c. Milosovich, preoccupied
with the wars against Slovenia (1991)), Croatia (1991-1995) and Bosnia-Herzegovina
(1992-Dayton in 1995), tolerated Kossovo autonomy.
d. The change came in 1997,
when radical Kossovo-Albanian nationalists (KLA)
acquired arms smuggled out of Albania during its civil war, and began to
shoot Serbian police, government officials, civilians and even Kossovo-Albanian
moderates.
i. Serbian police responded with increasingly active crackdowns onthe Albanians
who are perceived by Serbs as holding the territory they regard as the
cradle of their nation.
ii. According to Brookings Institute Scholar, Alan J. Kuperman, Sec."U.S.
policy ( criticizing the Serbian governments actions against KLA terrorism)
emboldened the rebels, radicalized the Albanian populace, marginalized
Rugova and prompted Milosevic to escalate his crackdown." See L.A. Times,
"Support of Rebels Was a Misrtake," April 11, 1999, M5. 3. Violence on
both sides escalated until NATO bombing, under the urging of the U.S.,
gave Milosovich the excuse to turn repression into expulsion to "cleanse"
the territory of all non-Serbs.
6. Secession or National Self-Determination?
The Question has been resolved through a new spate of Balkan Wars since
1991 which has produced the new countries of:
a. Slovenia.
1989. With the strains that were showing in all the Communist regimes of
Eastern Europe, the Slovenes began to move towards independence which they
declared 25. June 1991. . For a chronology of the Slovene path to Independence
since 1991 and access to a web-history of the Slovenes including the war
of 1991 click here.
b. Croatia.
Beginning in 1988, Croatia began to move toward independence, eliminating
controls over the media and permitting multi-party elections in 1990. Croatian
nationalist, Franjo Tudjman was elected President and began to move towards
reducing the number of ethnic Serbs in the police and the government.
c. Bosnia.
In December 1991, Bosnia's Serbs proclaimed a Bosnian-Serb Republic, separate
from Bosnia. March 3, 1992, Bosnia's Muslims and Croats voted for independence
from Yugoslavia. ( Andras Riedlmayr of Harvard University, click "A Brief
History of Bosnia-Herzegovina." . It is part of the extensive Cal Tech
site on Bosnia and covers the history from the Middle Ages through 1993.
For a wide variety of matrials on Bosnia, also from the Cal RTech site)
d. Macedonia.
Closely related to the Serbs, Macedonia was alowed to slip quietly into
independence in 1991 in a Balkan version of the "velvet revolution" that
divided Czech(o)Slovakia.
It is important to remember that the conflicts are political, territorial, economic, religious affiliation and historical and not ethnic.
check the web for information on the new nation states by country.