That will come as a surprise to the rest of the world. A year of Serbian “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims in Bosnia has brought to light murder, rape and expulsion on a scale not seen in Europe since the Nazi era. Appalled by the carnage but unable to find effective means to stop it, the Clinton administration and fellow Western governments are stepping up the pressure on the Serbs to sign a Bosnian peace plan they have so far rejected. This week more than 50 American, French and Dutch warplanes begin patrolling a no-fly zone over Bosnia, with orders to force down–or shoot down–any Serbian combat planes that take to the skies. The West is also exploring ways to tighten the economic noose on Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s nationalist government, which is already reeling from 225 percent monthly inflation.
Perhaps Western policymakers should pay a visit to the Genocide Museum. As its celebration of patriotic gore suggests, Serbian protestations of innocence in Bosnia cannot be dismissed as empty posturing by Milosevic’s corrupt, formerly communist government. Milosevic, who showed little interest in nationalism until he saw that it was a potent emotional force he could ride to power himself, knows the Serbian identity is rooted in an age-old feeling of victimization. Because they have suffered in the past, Serbs believe their actions today are, by definition, defensive-no matter what “lies” powerful foreigners may tell about them. This belief may not be accurate, but it is a fact of life. Serbian motivations must be taken into account by anyone who thinks pressure short of direct military intervention can get the Serbs to back away from the war in Bosnia. Sanctions or not, patrons at restaurants along the banks of the Sava River in Belgrade last week were still singing, “Who Says Serbia Is a Small Nation?”
Serbia’s sense of grievance dates back long before World War II, to the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, at which invading Turks defeated an army of Serbian nobles under King Lazar. Embroidered by myth, poetry and the writings of modern Serbian intellectuals, Lazar’s last stand has long stood for the end of a glorious Old Serbia that must, and will, rise again. It was a 1987 Serb rally at the Kosovo battle site that propelled Milosevic to national pre-eminence. “No one will ever beat you again!” he told the ecstatic crowd. The next year he launched a Serb clampdown on Kosovo’s majority-Albanian population that has continued, punctuated by police brutality, ever since.
“The Serbs define themselves by who their enemies are,” says a Belgrade-based Western diplomat. And if Kosovo established the Turks as one object of deep Serbian suspicion, this century’s two world wars confirmed Germans and Croats as the others. The assassination by a Serb nationalist of Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914 was part of the Serb campaign to rout both the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires from the Balkans; it triggered a war in which, Serbs are now taught, half of all Serbian men perished. The Serbs were seen in the West as plucky fighters for self-determination-allies against Prussian militarism and Turkish Islam. The Serbs, French, Americans and British were on the same side again in World War II, in which the Germans, Italians and the Ustashe were harassed by both Marshal Tito’s Communist partisans and Chetniks, a Serbian nationalist force.
Serbs say Tito-who was half-Croat, half-Slovene-made life hell for them. Never mind that they dominated the ranks of both the Yugoslav People’s Army and the Communist party. “We were not allowed to sing our traditional songs,” laments Dobrosav Veizovic, Serbia’s deputy foreign minister. “Tito had Serbs build up factories in Bosnia and neglected Serbia itself. Suffering is part of our lives.” The fall of communism left a great moral void, and Serbs searched for someone to pay back for their 50 years of alleged cultural humiliation and economic deprivation. Unlike other Eastern Europeans, Yugoslavs couldn’t blame the Soviets. Instead, they focused on old national hatreds-only some of them based on reality.
The West’s response to the Bosnian war has only reinforced Serb paranoia. Serb leaders saw the secular Muslim-led government that came to power in Bosnia in 1991 as an Islamic threat requiring strong selfdefense. That same reasoning underlies their view that the U.S.-backed Vance-Owen plan to parcel out the republic’s territory along ethnic lines-a plan many critics saw as rewarding ethnic cleansing-is a formula for genocide against the Serbs. “The plan puts 2 million Serbs in an impossible and tragic position-completely surrounded and cut off from Serbia, deprived of any help and exposed to inevitable suffering, massive killing, assimilation or emigration,” Milosevic adviser Mihailo Markovic recently told the Belgrade paper Politika. And the fact that German crews in AWACS planes may help guide the fighters enforcing the no-fly zone only confirms Belgrade’s suspicion of an alliance between its ancient enemies Germany and Croatia.
Powerful as these myths and fears are, it required skillful manipulation to awaken them and channel them so brutally. “Serbs and Croats lived together after World War II, except for broken noses in bar brawls,” says opposition journalist Milos Vasic. “It took propaganda to scare both sides enough to start shooting.” Throughout the war in Bosnia, the Belgrade press has run virulently anti-Muslim stories: charges that Sarajevans fed Serb children to starving animals in the zoo, allegations that Croats and Muslims raped their own women in order to blame the crime on Serbs. Belgrade media, controlled by Milosevic and manned by Communist-trained propaganda experts, are a crucial source of support for the regime and a catalyst for antagonism toward the West. When the U.S. airdrop of humanitarian supplies began, Belgrade TV reported–without offering evidence–that machine guns and mortars were included with the freeze-dried food.
Not all Serbs fall into the extreme camp. Some dissidents, mostly middle-class Belgraders, have publicly said that Milosevic’s policies are immoral and are leading the Serbs to disaster. In Sarajevo, thousands of ethnic Serbs have borne up under the siege led by artillerymen who claim to represent them. But Serbian opposition politicians are hobbled by their own internal disputes and by the fact that they are usually only slightly less nationalistic than Milosevic. They, too, refuse to admit what Serbs are really doing in Bosnia. Opposition politician Vuk Draskovic, for example, lost five relatives during World War II-a period in which, he says, 30 percent of all Serbs were killed. “The Serbs of Bosnia are on their own land,” he says. As for Serb brutality? “Survival motivates us.”
Denial cements the Serbs’ wartime rationalizations–that and inat, or “stubbornness.” What might break them of the pattern? Perhaps a show of force by the West. “Many would be strengthened in their belief in a worldwide conspiracy against the Serbs,” says Srdja Popovic, a dissident Belgrade lawyer. “But a considerable part of the population would be shocked into their senses.” For now, the West isn’t willing to test the proposition-leaving the Serbs to continue their battle over old grievances.
