Forward to part 4, From Above"Collapse or Destruction? The Construction of the Yugoslav
Wars"
Chip Gagnon
Paper presented at National Convention of AAASS, Boston, Mass., November 15, 1996
Draft: Please do not cite without author's permission
The most common form this argument takes is the ethnic hatreds thesis. Here the violence along ethnic lines is itself taken as evidence of affective solidarity, in particular of sentiments of hatred and resentment (often described as “ancient”) between ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia. These affective sentiments of solidarity and hatred were quiescent in the past because of the repressive nature of the communist regime. But once democracy came to Yugoslavia, this fault line surfaced as the overriding and natural cleavage of interest in Yugoslav society. Ethnic politics therefore quickly degenerated into violence, again as a “natural” or logical expression of (ancient) grievances and/or affective solidarity.
The argument that democracy enabled the population to express its preferences and sentiments, which were then reflected in the policies of violent conflict along ethnic lines, is in fact a distorted one. First, the view of ancient hatreds is an inaccurate one; the Balkans were not wracked by the kinds of religious wars seen in western Europe. Although WWII is often portrayed as part of this supposed historical trend, this four-year period was an anomaly. The violence was a purposeful policy imposed by small extremist groups not representative of Serbs or Croats in the areas affected.[8] In addition, the multiethnic Partisans were very popular in exactly these regions.
And despite the atrocities, postwar Yugoslavia saw quite high intermarriage rates and levels of tolerance in the most ethnically mixed regions of the country: parts of Croatia, Bosnia- Hercegovina and Vojvodina.[9] In areas marked by ethnically-based hostilities, for whatever reason, communist rule was no hindrance to their expression, as was seen in Kosovo from the mid-1960s through the late 1980s. Yet this type of conflict was notably absent in Croatia and Bosnia (as well as in multiethnic Vojvodina). So the violence of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia from 1990 through the present was not based on some long-repressed mass sentiment.[10] While the first multi-party elections in Yugoslav republics were indeed won by ethnic nationalist parties, what is revealing is the kind of appeals that the successful parties made in these elections.
In Serbia, the ruling communist party (renamed the Serbian Socialist Party, SPS) under Slobodan Milosevic had undertaken a policy from 1987 to late 1989 of constructing images of and then appealing to existential threats to Serbs outside of "inner" Serbia. This was a time when power was concentrated within the communist party, and the wider population was not directly politically relevant. The wider population became of direct importance only when democratic elections were to be held; significantly, the political rhetoric of the SPS shifted markedly at this time. In election campaigns from 1990 onward the SPS stressed the importance of peace and prosperity and condemned nationalist parties in Serbia as being primitives who sought to drag Serbia into war. This kind of shift was seen in every subsequent election campaign in Serbia. Rather than ethnic outbidding--a process whereby competing political parties try to outdo each other in nationalist rhetoric and policies in order to appeal to and thus receive the support of the ethnic voters, which spirals to more extreme positions--in these cases we saw a process of ethnic underbidding, of parties trying to seem more moderate and less nationalistic, and of the SPS’s strategy of ethnic underbidding consistently succeeding.[11] Those parties that were extremist (most notably the Serbian Radical Party, SRS) received a small percentage of the vote.[12] The regime, using its complete control of the mass media, also consistently portrayed the war as defensive and vehemently denied atrocities; information about the violence against civilians by Serb forces was consistently hidden from the Serbian public. This fact alone indicates that such policies can hardly be qualified as responding to or being driven by the demands of major segments of the Serbian electorate.
Similarly in Croatia, the extremist nationalist party (HSP) consistently received small amounts of votes in elections and support in opinion polls, while the most extremist and nationalistic members of the ruling HDZ are consistently the least popular politicians in polls.[13] In Croatia, as in Serbia, election campaigns brought about a marked shift to moderation and nonethnic themes on the part of the ruling nationalist party. In 1990, though the HDZ was clearly for reformulating Yugoslavia and distancing from Belgrade, the main spokespeople were mostly moderates (for example Stipe Mesic, one of the founding members of the HDZ and the first HDZ prime minister of Croatia), while the more extremist emigré elements linked to the WWII Ustasha regime were notable by their absence from public forums. In addition, the HDZ in 1990 benefitted from the general sentiment throughout the former socialist world that the ruling communist parties should be removed from power after a 50 year monopoly, even if they were now reformist and democratically-oriented.[14] During the Serbian war in Croatia in 1991, the Croatian regime denied the atrocities undertaken by extremist Croat forces linked to the ruling party, and portrayed Croats only as innocent victims who were defending themselves against Serbian attacks. During the Croatian war against the Bosnian Muslims in 1993, Croatia's state- controlled media seriously distorted the actions of Croat forces, presented the violence as a defensive war and denied that Croat forces were carrying out atrocities. And when atrocities of Croatian forces against Muslim civilians became public through independent media, HDZ support plummeted until Tudjman became a "peacemaker" and signed the February 1994 Washington Accords ending the war and setting up the Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Likewise, during the invasions of Krajina in May and August 1995, the state-controlled media vehemently denied that Croatian forces had undertaken any atrocities, and constantly repeated that the rights of all Serbs from the region would be fully respected.[15] Once again, rather than a means to appeal to or mobilize the population, policies of provoking violence were hidden from public view and denied.
In Bosnia too nationalist parties won the elections of 1990. But their platforms in 1990 were focused on assuring the rights of each group to its own culture; the emphasis was on cooperation of the three nationalist parties. For example Alija Izetbegovic, president of the Bosnian Muslim party (SDA) attended the founding congress of the Bosnian Serb nationalist party (SDS); and Radovan Karadzic , head of the SDS, often publicly referred to Bosnian Muslims as brothers of Bosnia's Serbs. During the election campaign none of the main nationalist parties called for dividing Bosnia or for war, even though by this time violence and extremist Serb and Croat forces in Croatia were pushing Serb refugees into Bosnia. Only after the 1990 election did extremists and extremist lines come to the fore in Bosnia itself. For example moderates who'd won election to local and regional bodies on the SDS line in Bosanska Krajina (NW Bosnia) were pressured after the election to shift to extremism by the SDS leadership, which had very close ties to Belgrade. Those who refused were replaced in elected institutions by extremists. The violence itself began with the work of Serbian paramilitaries sent into Bosnia by the Belgrade regime, as well as the Yugoslav army.[16]
Likewise the moderate leadership of the Bosnian Croat party (HDZ-BH) called for negotiations and a tolerant approach to national questions. Reflecting the moderate and tolerant position of the large majority of Bosnia’s Croats, especially those who lived in ethnically heterogeneous regions outside of Western Hercegovina, the HDZ-BH advocated a single (decentralized) Bosnian state and opposed partition. This moderate leadership, reflecting the preferences of the large majority of Bosnia’s Croats, was in the fall of 1992 ousted on order of the HDZ in Croatia, which imposed on the HDZ-BH nationalist extremists from Western Hercegovina. These extremists, working on Zagreb’s orders, proceeded to open war in Central Bosnia and perpetrate atrocities against Muslim civilians.[17] Again, the image they constructed was one of innocent Croats as victims of Muslims who began the war, and they consistently and vehemently denied that Croat forces had undertaken any atrocities.
These wars were thus not the expression of grassroots political sentiment of the Bosnian population. They were far from being the democratic expression of political and cultural preferences. Rather, the violence and wars were imposed from outside by political and military forces from Serbia and Croatia.
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