Yugoslav tremors
Denitch, Bogdan
The Dayton accords are in trouble. Their only virtue—it is not a small one—is that they stopped the organized fighting in the former Yugoslavia. But they also partitioned Bosnia and left the...
...Soon there were also marches in other cities...
...As things stand their numbers have been reduced from nearly seven hundred thousand to some two hundred thousand in four years...
...While the size of the demonstrations was heartening, Tudjman's hysterical reaction upon his return from the United States in November probably signals that repression is not far off...
...Many won't want to, since it would mean living as a minority in one of the new states...
...Serbians are clearly no longer afraid to speak out...
...As one of his henchmen said to me at the time, "The opposition may win the vote, but we will win the count...
...But while Serb and Croat nationalists now grudgingly accept their shares of Bosnia and assume that partition is a done deed, the Muslims are greatly tempted to improve their situation, even by arms if necessary...
...Still, the demonstrations were persistent and prolonged...
...The major war criminals and their chief henchmen are unlikely to be punished...
...The West made a bunch of scoundrels into "our sons of bitches," betting that they could guarantee peace...
...None have insisted on the principle of individual guilt (as opposed to collective ethnic guilt) for war crimes...
...Most of them have supported the forced removal of the Serbian minority from the Kraina region...
...disengagement within the next eighteen months...
...How Bosnia's leaders play this out will depend considerably on the economic aid they receive...
...Some military units joined in, as did some of the ever cautious opposition parties...
...It's clear that powerful elements in the HDZ—I can only call them quasi-fascist—won't yield power in mere elections...
...All this is good news for democracy but bad news if you were relying on stability in Belgrade to anchor the Dayton agreements...
...That, of course, means that Croatia's Serbs will never be treated as equal citizens...
...But for the time being, the opposition remains united only in opposition to Milosevic...
...Milosevic won the Yugoslav federal elections last November 5 but lost most of the major cities, including Belgrade, two weeks later...
...whoever succeeds him may be even worse than he is...
...Jobs and housing will then become major issues...
...Otherwise the Dayton accords will die as soon as the NATO forces withdraw, perhaps even sooner...
...International support for fair elections, though finally laudable, smacked of hypocrisy: at the same time as the United States has thundered against violations of democratic norms in Serbia it has been relatively silent about election-theft in Croatia...
...Opinion polls taken by the opposition show that roughly half the demonstrators see themselves as nationalists, and this is confirmed by the widespread use in the marches of nationalist salutes, songs, and symbols...
...It is convenient that Europe and the United States are preoccupied with the dramatic protests against Serbia's Milosevic...
...Two major war criminals, Milosevic and Tudjman, have been embraced by the West as "factors of stability in the region...
...The weakness of the various opposition parties is surely encouraging to him...
...And like its counterparts in Belgrade and Zagreb, it cheated massively in the last elections...
...In the meantime the opposition lacks any sort of economic program besides the familiar cry for markets and privatization...
...The government finally backed down...
...Milosevic and His Foes Milosevic has been blessed in a way...
...The homes of many refugees are now occupied by other desperate refugees—who, in turn, cannot return to their homes...
...Nor will they restrain their comrades in Herceg-Bosnia, the Croatian enclave within Bosnia, which means that a nasty conflict between Muslims and Croatians there is likely...
...Some of them, hard-line nationalists, still attack Serbia's chief for "betraying" the idea of Greater Serbia by accepting Croatia's reconquest of Kraina and signing in Dayton an agreement giving Bosnian Serbs, some 32 percent of Bosnia's population, "only" 49 percent of Bosnia's territory...
...It would, after all, require a sensible policy and a credible exit strategy, neither of which are in evidence...
...If Milosevic is overthrown, he is likely to be succeeded by a fragmented leadership that will have to navigate through a sea of nationalist demagogy...
...Too many of the anti-Milosevic speeches have dwelled on the betrayal of fellow Serbians in Croatia and Bosnia, a theme repeatedly emphasized by the Orthodox church...
...His opponents have allowed him to present himself as a peace candidate representing a vague "left...
...Shaky Croatia Tudjman's ruling party, the Croatian National Community party (HDZ), has lost election after election but has kept power illegally in the capital and most major cities without provoking excessive outrage or substantial pressure from the United States or the European Community...
...But in the meantime the West has done little to foster real alternatives...
...The two major parties in the coalition mix nationalism with royalist Orthodox religious sympathies—all of which leaves little room for pluralist democracy...
...The war of Yugoslav succession, launched by Milosevic in 1991 and lustily abetted by Tudjman, destroyed an integrated economy and left in its wake three barely viable states...
...Army leaders may be unwilling to crack down on peaceful demonstrators, but will they support the overthrow of a government whose federal election victory is as legitimate as that of the opposition in the cities...
...The regime has also been chastised for trying to negotiate a solution to Serbia's longstanding conflict with the Albanian majority in Kosovo...
...Those remaining face considerable discrimination...
...Croatia is in fact more vulnerable to Western pressure than is Serbia...
...Instead, they sensibly proposed disarming the Croatian and Serbian militaries, to create a "level playing field...
...The Europeans always opposed Washington's policy of arming the Bosnian army...
...Only Vesna Pesic's Civic Alliance, by far the smallest party in the Zajedno, defines itself as nonnationalist...
...Certainly it has the freest non-electronic media...
...But they also partitioned Bosnia and left the consequences of "ethnic cleansing" intact...
...This has been justified by pointing to the bankruptcy of the major opposition parties in Serbia and Croatia...
...Still, there is a lot of political diversity among 32 • DISSENT Politics Abroad the demonstrators...
...At most we can hope for a return of Croatian refugees to Eastern Slavonia without too great a displacement of the Serbs from Croatia who now live there...
...Its backing was nonetheless welcomed by "democratic" and "secular" oppositionists...
...A new regime will find it more difficult to repress independent unions and popular pressures from below...
...Demands began to widen from certification of the municipal election results to an end to the regime altogether...
...Tudjman, who is seventy-four, recently discovered that he has cancer...
...No wonder that an election in Bosnia in which 103 percent of those eligible voted was certified...
...Soon afterward, massive and increasingly bitter protests began in Belgrade...
...Initially the West and its media were silent about the growing opposition to Milosevic, but by the year's end Western governments were backing the call to certify the municipal elections...
...So don't bet much on U.S...
...Along the way, Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, Croatia's Franjo Tudjman, and Bosnia's Alia Izetbegovic, three presidents who share different degrees of responsibility for the carnage in the region and who are all hostile to democracy, became the accepted "relevant" political players...
...On the other hand the organized opposition is internally divided and mistrusted by many students and workers...
...War, of course, will put everything at risk once again, and their Croatian allies are quite unreliable...
...Leaders of Zajedno (Together), the major opposition coalition, congratulated Serbian nationalists on their election "victory" in Bosnia...
...The Open SociSPRING • 1997 • 31 Politics Abroad ety Foundation has been the most important source of support for alternative media and human rights organizations in Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia, spending millions on medical aid, education, and fellowships...
...It won't work...
...Among the angry protestors were students, pensioners, human rights and peace activists, and even members of the "Bad Blue Boys," the hugely popular and nationalist soccer fan club...
...Unfortunately, Croatia's opposition parties are highly susceptible to demagogic calls for national unity...
...Still, President Izetbegovic governs the best, or rather the least bad, of the three domains in what Washington calls the "Bosnian Federation...
...All three face increasingly frustrated populations who are burdened by authoritarian bureaucratic repression, the consequences of the wholesale looting of their societies, and economic immiseration...
...While the war criminals walk, the majority of Muslim, Serbian, and Croatian refugees will never be able to return to their homes...
...Dayton did achieve one aim brilliantly— keeping the lid on the former Yugoslavia until Clinton's re-election...
...The HDZ has called repeatedly for a crackdown on internal enemies...
...The three new "entities" in Bosnia are now unashamedly based on ethnic homogeneity, real or imagined...
...SPRING • 1997 • 33...
...In these circumstances, the few liberal democrats are unlikely to come out on top...
...The record of Western governments, in the meantime, is miserable...
...Western toleration of Tudj man's authoritarianism, combined with the lack of determined political opposition, so emboldened Zagreb that it even cracked down on the philanthropist George Soros's Open Society Foundation, indicting its top local staff...
...The United States will now be held responsible for any Muslim military initiatives...
...Given the difficult economic situation in Serbia today, these pressures are inevitable...
...Bosnia's Questionable Peace The Bosnian government is increasingly losing its secular characteristics and it has disgraced itself by encouraging a mass exodus of some seventy thousand Serbs from the Sarajevo suburbs...
...Step by step it has turned away from multiculturalism—once its moral calling card in contrast to Serbian and Croatian chauvinists...
...Here the fate of the refugees links with that of the general population...
...For that matter, Croatia itself is close to being ethnically homogeneous, with a broad consensus among Croatian parties that this is a good thing...
...The space is wide open for a romantic nationalist identity politics...
...On the other hand, stormy and unpredictable democratic processes will be opened up...
...In the meantime, Milosevic retains a huge police apparatus and is unlikely to go quietly into oblivion...
...The Serbian Orthodox church, which threw its support to the protestors, has been a major supporter of Greater Serbian nationalism and "ethnic cleansing...
...It did, in November, provoke the largest and broadest demonstrations since Croatia's declaration of independence, when over 160,000 people gathered to denounce the regime's refusal to renew the license of the last truly independent radio station in the country...
...Short of that it's unlikely that they will get the loosely confederal Bosnia imagined in Dayton, or any large-scale return of refugees...
...Not only should the recent decision to admit Croatia to the European Council be reexamined, but Washington should reconsider its shameful, prolonged affair with Zagreb's ugly regime...
...Moreover, mass protests can politicize ever widening groups of people and teach difficult lessons...
Vol. 44 • April 1997 • No. 2
