to be President of Czechoslovakia and was reincarnated as President o: shortened Czech Republic.23 Whether divorce was good for the two partners remained unclear for s time—neither the Czech Republic nor Slovakia flourished in the initial post?] Communist decade. Klaus's 'shock therapy' and Meciar's national-Communism both failed, albeit in different ways. But although Slovaks came to regret their dafc liance with Vladimir Meciar, and Klaus's star waned in Prague, nostalgia for Czechoslovakia was never much in evidence. The Czechoslovak divorce wa; nipulated process in which the Czech Right brought about what it claimed seek while Slovak Populists achieved rather more than they had intendc many people were overjoyed at the result, but nor was there lasting regret. As in thjji break up of the Soviet Union, the power of the state and the political machinery it had spawned were not threatened: merely duplicated. The division of Czechoslovakia was a product of chance and circumst. was also the work of men. With other people in control—with different outcomes' at the elections of 1990 and 1992—the story would not have been the same. Coar tagion played a small part as well: the example of the Soviet Union—and events unfolding in the Balkans—made a schism between the two 'national republics' of one small central European state seem less absurd or impermissible than ii otherwise have appeared. Had a federal state treaty been agreed upon by 1992—had Czechoslovakia endured for a few years longer—it is highly unlikely that anyone in Prague or Bratislava would have seen much point in pursuing their quarrels, with the prospect of admission to the European Union absorbing their attention a: bloody massacres in nearby Bosnia concentrating their minds. XXI The Reckoning P there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans'. Otto von Bismarck eems as if these feuding peasants could hardly wait for the invasion of their country so they could hunt down and kill one another'. Milovan Djilas, Wartime (1977) 'We've got no dog in this fight'. James Baker, US Secretary of State (June 1991) 'The worst thing about Communism is what comes after'. Adam Michnik 'Truth is always concrete.' G. W. Hegel "The political split proved easier to manage than the economic one—it was not until ment over the division of Czechoslovakia's federal assets was finally reached. peaceful fragmentation of Czechoslovakia contrasts dramatically with the ca-^phe that befell Yugoslavia in the same years. Between 1991 and 1999 hundreds tousands of Bosnians, Croats, Serbs and Albanians were killed, raped or tor-by their fellow citizens; millions more were forced out of their homes and into t. Struggling to account for massacres and civil war on a scale not seen since i—in a country long regarded by Western radicals as something of a model so-. iety—foreign commentators have typically proposed two contrasting ex-B'ations. One view, widely circulated in Western media and taken up in the public state-jnjs of European and American statesmen, presents the Balkans as a hopeless cauldron of mysterious squabbles and ancient hatreds. Yugoslavia was jCtmed'. It consisted, in the words of a much-cited bon mot, of six republics, five Sins, four languages, three religions and two alphabets, all held together by a sin-prty. What happened after 1989 was simple: the lid having been removed, the jtdion exploded. Bkrording to this account, 'age-old' conflicts—in what the Marquis de Salaberry described in 1791 as 'the unpolished extremities' of Europe—bubbled over ich as the;.- had done in centuries past. Murderous animosities, fuelled by mem- ories of injustice and vengeance, took over a whole nation. In the words of the US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, speaking in September 1992: 'Until the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it'. In a contrasting interpretation, some historians and foreign observers asserted that—on the contrary—the Balkan tragedy was largely the fault of outsiders. Thanks to outside intervention and imperial ambition, the territory of former Yugoslavia had over the course of the past two centuries been occupied, divided and exploited to the advantage of others—Turkey, Britain, France, Russia, Austria, Italy and Germany. If there was bad blood between the peoples of the region it should be traced to imperial manipulation rather than to ethnic hostility. It was the irresponsible interference of foreign powers, so the argument runs, that exacerbated local difficulties: had the German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for example, not insisted in 1991 on 'prematurely' recognizing the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, the Bosnians might never have followed suit, Belgrade would not have invaded, and a decade of disaster could have been averted. Whatever one thinks of these two readings of Balkan history, it is striking to note that despite their apparent incompatibility they have one important feature in common. Both diminish or ignore the role of the Yugoslavs themselves, dismissed as victims either of fate or the manipulations and mistakes of others. To be sure, there was a lot of history buried in the mountains of the former Yugoslavia, and many bad memories too. And outsiders did indeed contribute crucially to the country's tragedy, though mostly through irresponsible acquiescence in local crimes. But the break up of Yugoslavia—resembling in this respect the dismanding of other former Communist states—was the work of men, not fate. And the overwhelming responsibility for Yugoslavia's tragedy lay not in Bonn or any other foreign capital, but with the politicians in Belgrade. When Josip Broz Tito died in 1980, at the age of 87, the Yugoslavia he had reassembled in 1945 had a real existence. Its constituent republics were separate units within a federal state whose presidency comprised representatives from all six republics, as well as two autonomous regions (the Vojvodina and Kosovo) within Serbia. The different regions had very different pasts. Slovenia and Croatia in the north were primarily Catholic and had once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as too, albeit for a shorter time, had Bosnia. The southern part of the country (Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia) was for centuries under Ottoman Turkish rule, which accounts for the large number of Muslims in addition to the predominantly Orthodox Serbs. But these historical differences—though genuine enough and exacerbated by the experience of World War Two—had been attenuated in subsequent decades. Economic change brought hitherto isolated rural populations into sometimes uneasy contact in towns like Vukovar or Mostar; but the same changes also accelerated integration across old social and ethnic boundaries. THE RECKONING Thus although the Communist myth of fraternal unity required turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to wartime memories and divisions—the history textbooks of Tito's Yugoslavia were prudently unforthcoming about the bloody civil wars that had marked the country's common past—the benefits of such official silences were real. The rising post-war generation was encouraged to think of itself as 'Yugoslav', rather than 'Croat' or 'Macedonian'; and many—especially the young, the better educated and the burgeoning number of city-dwellers—had adopted the habit.1 Younger intellectuals in Ljubljana or Zagreb were no longer much interested in the heroic or troubled past of their ethnic forebears. By 1981 in cosmopolitan Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, 20 percent of the population described themselves as 'Yugoslavs'. Bosnia had always been the most ethnically variegated region of Yugoslavia and was thus perhaps not typical. But the whole country was an interwoven tapestry of overlapping minorities. The 580,000 Serbs living in Croatia in 1991 were some 12 percent of the population of that republic. Bosnia in the same year was 44 percent Muslim, 31 percent Serb and 17 percent Croat. Even tiny Montenegro was a mix of Montenegrins, Serbs, Muslims, Albanians and Croats—not to speak of those who opted to describe themselves to census-takers as 'Yugoslavs'. Residents of ethnically mixed regions often had little sense of their friends' or neighbors' nationality or religion. Tnter-marriage' was increasingly common. Indeed the 'ethnic' fault-lines within Yugoslavia were never very well defined. The linguistic distinctions can serve as a representative illustration. Albanians and Slovenes speak distinct languages. Macedonians speak Macedonian (i.e. Bulgarian, with minor variations). But the differences between the 'Serb' and 'Croat' forms of 'Serbo-Croatian' as spoken by the overwhelming majority of the population were, and are, small indeed. Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet and Croats (and Bosnians) the Latin alphabet; but beyond some literary and scholarly terms, occasional spelling variations and a different pronunciation of the letter 'e' ('ye' in the 'Ieka-vian' or Croat form, V in the 'Ekavian' or Serb variant) the two 'languages' are identical. Moreover, Montenegrins write in Cyrillic (like Serbs) but pronounce in the 'Iekavian' manner, like Croats and Bosnians—as do the Serb residents of Bosnia. Only the historical inhabitants of Serbia proper use the 'Ekavian' variant—and when Bosnian Serb nationalist leaders sought after 1992 to impose official 'Serbian' (i.e. 'Ekavian') pronunciation on their fellow Bosnian Serbs in the zone they had carved out of Bosnia, they encountered overwhelming resistance. Thus the 'Croat' language recognized in 1974 as the official language of the republic of Croatia—meeting the demands of a 1967 'Declaration on Language' drawn up by a group of Zagreb intellectuals—was above all an identity tag: a way 'Zagreb, Belgrade and Skopje (the capital of Macedonia) were all among the fastest growing cities of Central Europe between 1910 and 1990. for Croats to protest against Tito's suppression of all expressions of national identity in his federation. The same was true of certain Serb writers' obsession with preserving or re-affirming 'pure' Serbian. It seems fair to conclude that—in contrast to conventional differences between dialects of a single national language, where indigenous usage varies widely but educated elites tend to share a common 'correct' form—in former Yugoslavia it was the mass of the population who actually spoke an interchangeable single language, while a minority of nationalists sought to differentiate themselves by accentuating the narcissism of small differences. The much invoked religious differences are no less misleading. The distinction between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, for example, mattered far more in earlier centuries—or in World War Two, when the Ustashe in Zagreb wielded Catholicism as a weapon against Serbs and Jews alike.2 By the 1990s religious practice in the fast growing cities of Yugoslavia was on the wane and only in the countryside did the correspondence between religion and national sentiment still count for something. Many ostensibly Muslim Bosnians were thoroughly secularized— and in any case had little in common with Muslim Albanians (by no means all Albanians were Muslim, though this fact passed largely unnoticed by their enemies). Thus while there is no doubt that the old Ottoman practice of defining nationality by religion had left its mark, mostly by exaggerating the place of Orthodox Christianity among the southern Slavs, the evidence of this was increasingly attenuated. Although an older generation of Yugoslavs continued to hold many of the prejudices of an earlier time—the future Croatian President Franjo Tudjman was notoriously ecumenical in his prejudices, despising Muslims, Serbs and Jews alike—probably the only generalized discrimination in recent years was the one directed at the Albanian minority in the south, castigated by many Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians and Montenegrins as criminal and shiftless. These sentiments were strongest in Serbia.3 There were various reasons. Albanians were the fastest growing group in the country. Whereas in 1931 Albanians had been just 3.6 percent of the population of Yugoslavia, they were already 7.9 percent by 1948 (thanks to post-war immigration from neighbouring Albania proper). By 1991, thanks to their far higher birthrate (eleven times that of the Serb or Croat communities), the estimated 1,728,000 Albanians in Yugoslavia constituted 16.6 percent of the federal total. Most of the Albanian citizens of Yugoslavia lived in Serbia, in the autonomous region of Kosovo, :"VVe shall kill some Serbs, deport others, and oblige the rest to embrace Catholicism'—thus the Ustashe Minister of Religion in Zagreb, July 22nd 1941. 'On 2 'fact-finding' visit to Skopje just after the 1999 Kosovo war the present author was 'confidentially' informed by the Macedonian Prime Minister that Albanians (including his own ministerial colleague who had just left the room) were not to be trusted: 'You can't believe anything they say—they just are not like us. They are not Christian'. ťOSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 where they made up 82 percent of the local population and vastly outnumbered the 194,000 Serbs—although it was the latter who enjoyed the better jobs, housing and other social privileges. Kosovo had historic significance for Serb nationalists as the last holdout of medieval Serbia against the advance of the Turks and the site of a historic battlefield defeat in i389.The local Albanian predominance was thus regarded by some Serb intellectuals and politicians as both demographically troubling and historically provocative—-especially since it echoed the Serbs' displacement by Muslims as the largest minority in the adjacent Bosnian republic. Serbs, it appeared, were losing out—to hitherto subservient minorities who had benefitted from Tito's rigorous enforcement of federal equality.4 Kosovo was thus a potentially expjosive issue, for reasons linked only tenuously to 'age-old' Balkan feuds: as André Malraux shrewdly advised a Yugoslav visitor to France back in the Sixties, 'Le Kosovo cest votre Algérie dans VOrléanais'. Whereas Serb dislike of Albanians fed on proximity and insecurity, in the far north of Yugoslavia the growing distaste for feckless southerners was ethnically indiscriminate and based not on nationality but economics. As in Italy, so in Yugoslavia, the more prosperous north was increasingly resentful of impoverished southerners, sustained—as it seemed—by transfers and subsidies from their more productive fellow citizens. The contrast between wealth and poverty in Yugoslavia was becoming quite dramatic: and it correlated provocatively with geography. Thus while Slovenia, Macedonia and Kosovo all had approximately the same share (8 percent) of the national population, in 1990 tiny Slovenia was responsible for 29 percent of Yugoslavia's total exports while Macedonia generated just 4 percent and Kosovo 1 percent. As best one can glean from official Yugoslav data, per capita GDP in Slovenia was double that of Serbia proper, three times the size of per capita GDP in Bosnia and eight times that of Kosovo. In Alpine Slovenia the illiteracy rate in 1988 was less than 1 percent; in Macedonia and Serbia it was 11 percent. In Kosovo it stood at 18 percent. In Slovenia by the end of the 1980s the infant mortality rate was 11 deaths per 1,000 live births. In neighbouring Croatia the figure was 12 per 1,000; in Bosnia, 16 per 1,000. But in Serbia the figure was 22 per 1,000, in Macedonia, 45 per 1,000 and in Kosovo, 52 per 1,000. What these figures suggest is that Slovenia and (to a lesser extent) Croatia already ranked alongside the less prosperous countries of the European Community, while Kosovo, Macedonia and rural Serbia more closely resembled parts of Asia or Latin America. If Slovenes and Croats were increasingly restive in their common Yugoslav home, then, this was not because of a resurfacing of deep-rooted religious ■"This was not, of course, the way things appeared to Croats and others, who could point to Serb domination of the national army (60 percent of the officer corps was Serb by 1984, a fair reflection of Serb presence in the population at large but no more reassuring for that) and Belgrade's disproportionate share of investment and federal expenditure. THE RECKONING or linguistic sentiments or from a resurgence of ethnic particularism. It was because they were coming to believe that they would be a lot better off if they could manage their own affairs without having to take into account the needs and interests of underachieving Yugoslavs to their south. Tito's personal authority and his vigorous repression of serious criticism kept such dissenting opinion well out of public view. But after his death the situation deteriorated fast. During the Sixties and early Seventies, when the West European boom was sucking in Yugoslav labor and sending back substantial hard currency remittances, over-population and under-employment in the south posed less of a problem. From the end of the Seventies, however, the Yugoslav economy started to unravel. Like other Communist states Yugoslavia was heavily indebted to the West: but whereas the response in Warsaw or Budapest was to keep borrowing foreign cash, in Belgrade they resorted instead to printing more and more of their own. Through the course of the 1980s the country moved steadily into hyper-inflation. By 1989 the annual inflation rate was 1,240 percent and rising. The economic mistakes were being made in the capital, Belgrade, but their consequences were felt and resented above all in Zagreb and Ljubljana. Many Croats and Slovenes, Communists and non-Communists alike, believed that they would be better off making their own economic decisions free of the corruption and nepotism of the ruling circles in the Federal capital. These sentiments were exacerbated by a growing fear that a small group of apparatchiks around Slobodan Milosevic, the hitherto obscure President of the League of Communists in his native Serbia, was making a bid for power in the political vacuum that followed Tito's death—by arousing and manipulating Serb national emotions. Milosevic's behavior was not inherently unusual for Communist leaders in these years. In the GDR the Communists, as we have seen, sought to curry favor by invoking the glories of eighteenth-century Prussia; and 'national Communism' had been on display for some years in neighboring Bulgaria and Romania. When Milosevic ostentatiously welcomed a patriotic Memorandum from the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986, or visited Kosovo the following year to show his sympathy for Serb complaints about Albanian 'nationalism', his calculations were not very different from those of other East European Communist leaders of the time. In the era of Gorbachev, with the ideological legitimacy of Communism and its ruling party waning fast, patriotism offered an alternative way of securing a hold on power. But whereas in the rest of eastern Europe this resort to nationalism and the attendant invocation of national memories only risked arousing anxiety among foreigners, in Yugoslavia the price would be paid at home. In 1988 Milosevic, the better to strengthen his position within the Serbian republic, began openly encouraging nationalist meetings at which the insignia of the wartime Chetniks were on public display for the first time in four decades-—a reminder of a past that Tito had sup- postwar: a history of europe since 1945 the reckoning Nationalism was Milosevics way of securing a hold over Serbia—confirmed in May 1989 with his election to the Presidency of the Serbian republic. But to preserve and strengthen Serbia's influence over Yugoslavia as a whole he needed to transform the federal system itself. The carefully calculated balance of influence between the various constituent republics had been fostered first by Tito's charismatic leadership and then by a revolving presidency. In March 1989 Milosevic set out to topple this arrangement. By forcing through an amendment to Serbia's own constitution he 'absorbed' the hitherto autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina into Serbia proper— while allowing them to retain their two seats in the federal presidency. Henceforth Serbia could count on four of the eight federal votes in any dispute (Serbia, Kosovo, Vojvodina and the compliant pro-Serbian republic of Montenegro). Since Milosevic's goal was to forge a more unitary (Serb-led) state, something that the other four republics would naturally resist, the federal system of government was effectively stalemated. From the perspective of Slovenia and Croatia especially, the course of events pointed to only one possible solution: since they could no longer expect to advance or preserve their interests through a dysfunctional federal system, their only hope was to take their distance from Belgrade, if necessary by declaring complete independence. Why, by the end of 1989, had matters already reached this pass? Elsewhere the route out of Communism was 'democracy': party functionaries and bureaucrats from Russia to the Czech Republic transformed themselves in a matter of months from nomenklatura yes-men into glib practitioners of pluralist party politics. Survival depended upon re-calibrating one's public allegiances with the conventional party alignments of a liberal political culture. However implausible the transition in many individual cases, it worked. And it did so because there was no alternative. In most post-Communist countries the class' card was discredited and there were few internal ethnic divisions on which to prey: accordingly a new set of public categories—'privatization' or 'civil society' or 'democratization' (or 'Europe', which encompassed all three) occupied most of the new political terrain. But Yugoslavia was different. Just because its various populations were so very intermingled (and had not undergone the genocides and population transfers that had re-arranged places like Poland or Hungary in earlier decades), the country offered fertile opportunities for demagogues like Milosevic, or Franjo Tudjman, his Croat counterpart. In fashioning their exit from Communism around a new political constituency they could play an ethnic card no longer available elsewhere in Europe—and substitute it for a concern with democracy. In the Baltic states, or Ukraine, or Slovakia, post-Communist politicians could resort to national independence as a route out of the Communist past—building a new state and a new democracy all at once—-without having to worry unduly about the presence of national minorities. But in Yugoslavia, the break-up of the federation into its constituent republics would in pvprv rac» <~~-«.«* ci '-- a significant minority or group of minorities stranded in someone else's country. Under these circumstances, once one republic declared itself independent, others would feel bound to follow suit. In short, Yugoslavia now faced the same intractable issues that Woodrow Wilson and his colleagues had failed to resolve at Versailles seventy years earlier. The catalyst, as many had foreseen, was Kosovo. Throughout the 1980s there had been sporadic Albanian demonstrations and protests at Belgrade's mistreatment of them, notably in the local capital Pristina. Their institutions had been closed down, their leaders dismissed, their daily routines constrained by harsh policing and, from March 1989, by a curfew. The Serbian constitutional amendments effectively stripped the Albanians, already a depressed and deprived underclass, of any autonomy or political representation—a course of events celebrated and underscored by Milosevic's visit to the province in June 1989 to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the 'Battle of Kosovo'. In a speech to a crowd estimated at nearly one million people, Milosevic reassured the local Serbs that they had once again 'regained their state, national, and spiritual integrity.... Hitherto, thanks to their leaders and politicians and their vassal mentality [Serbs] felt guilty before themselves and others. This situation lasted for decades, it lasted for years and here we are now at the field of Kosovo to say that this is no longer the case'. A few months later, following bloody clashes between police and demonstrators with many dead and injured, Belgrade shut down the provincial Kosovo Assembly, placing the region under direct rule from Belgrade. The course of events in the far south of the country directly affected decisions made in the northern republics. At best mildly sympathetic to the Albanians' plight, Ljubljana and Zagreb were far more directly concerned at the rise of Serbian authoritarianism. At the Slovene elections of April 1990, although a majority of the voters still favoured remaining in Yugoslavia they gave their backing to non-Communist opposition candidates openly critical of existing federal arrangements. The following month, in neighboring Croatia, a new nationalist party won an overwhelming majority and its leader, Franjo Tudjman, took over as President of the republic. The last straw, revealingly, came in December 1990 when—under Milosevic's direction—the Serbian leadership in Belgrade seized without authorization 50 percent of the entire drawing rights of the Yugoslav federation to cover back pay and bonuses for federal employees and state enterprise workers. The Slovenes—whose 8 percent of the population contributed one-quarter of the federal budget—were especially incensed. The following month the Slovene Parliament announced that it was withdrawing from the federal fiscal system and proclaimed the republic's independence, though without initiating any moves to secede. Within a month the Croat Parliament had done likewise (the Macedonian Parliament in Skopje duly followed suit). Serb minority in south-eastern Croatia—notably in a long-established frontier region of Serb settlement, the Krajina—was already clashing with Croat police and calling upon Belgrade for help against its 'Ustashe' repressors. But Slovenia's distance from Belgrade, and the presence of less than 50,000 Serbs in the republic, gave grounds for hope that a peaceful exit might be engineered. Foreign opinion was divided: Washington, which had suspended all economic aid to Yugoslavia because of the Serbian measures in Kosovo, nevertheless publicly opposed any moves to secede. Anticipating President Bush in Kiev a few weeks later, Secretary of State James Baker visited Belgrade in June 1991 and assured its rulers that the US supported 'a democratic and unified Yugoslavia'. But by then a 'democratic and unified' Yugoslavia was an oxymoron. Five days after Baker spoke both Slovenia and Croatia took control over their frontiers and initiated unilateral secession from the federation, with the overwhelming support of their citizens and the tacit backing of a number of prominent European statesmen. In response the federal army moved up to the new Slovene border. The Yugoslav war was about to begin. Or, rather, the Yugoslav wars, for there were five. The Yugoslav attack on Slovenia in 1991 lasted just a few weeks, after which the army withdrew and allowed the secessionist state to depart in peace. There then followed a far bloodier war between Croatia and its rebellious Serb minority (backed by the army of 'Yugoslavia'—in practise Serbia and Montenegro) that lasted until an unsteady cease-fire brokered by the UN early the following year. After the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia voted for independence in March 1992, the Serbs of Bosnia declared war on the new state and set about carving out a 'Republika Srpska', again with the backing of the Yugoslav army, laying siege to a number of Bosnian towns—notably the capital, Sarajevo. Meanwhile, in January 1993, a separate civil war broke out between the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia, with some Croats attempting to carve out an ephemeral statelet in the Croat-dominated region of Herzegovina. And finally, after these other conflicts had been brought to an end (though not before the Croat-Serb war broke out afresh in 1995 with a successful move by Zagreb to recapture the Krajina, lost to Serb forces three years before), came the war in and over Kosovo: having effectively lost everywhere else, Milosevic turned back to Kosovo and was only prevented from destroying or expelling its Albanian population by an unprecedented attack on Serbia itself by NATO forces in the spring of 1999- In each of these conflicts there was both an internal dynamic and external engagement. Slovenian and Croatian independence was driven forward by well-founded domestic considerations, as we have seen. But it was the hasty German—and subsequently European Community—recognition of the two new states that confirmed their official existence for friend and foe alike. Because an independent Croatia now existed, hysterical propaganda on radio and television stations in Belgrade could start to play on the fears of Serbs resident in the new state, THE RECKONING invoking memories of wartime massacres and urging Serbs to take up arms against their 'Ustashe' neighbors. In Bosnia, where Serbs were present in far larger numbers, the prospect of an independent Bosnia with a Croat-Muslim majority aroused similar anxieties. Whether Bosnian independence was unavoidable remains unclear: this was the most integrated of the pre-war republics, with the most to lose from any move to separate by force its constituent communities who were spread like a patchwork all across its territory, and before the rise of Milosevic none of its ethnic or religious minorities had shown any sustained desire for institutional separation. But once its northern neighbors had seceded, the issue was moot. After 1991 the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia were bound to prefer sovereign independence to minority status in what remained of Milosevic's Yugoslavia, and they voted accordingly in a referendum at the end of February 1992. However the Serbs of Bosnia, now exposed for some months to talk from Belgrade not merely of Ustashe massacres but of a coming Muslim jihad, were no less understandably disposed to prefer union with Serbia, or at least their own autonomous region, to minority status in a Muslim-Croat state ruled from Sarajevo. Once Bosnia (or rather its Muslim and Croat leaders—the Serbs boycotted both the referendum and the parliamentary vote) declared itself independent in March 1992 its fate was sealed. The following month Bosnian Serb leaders declared the Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav army marched in to help them secure territory and 'cleanse' it. The Serb-Croat and Serb-Bosnian wars wrought a terrible toll on their peoples. Although there was initially some open warfare between more or less regular armies, particularly in and around strategic cities like Sarajevo or Vukovar, much of the fighting was conducted by irregulars, notably Serb irregulars. These were little more than organized bands of thugs and criminals, armed by Belgrade and led either by professional felons like 'Arkan' (Zeljko Raznatovic), whose 'Serb Volunteer Guard' (the 'Tigers') massacred hundreds in eastern districts of Croatia and Bosnia; or else by former Yugoslav Army officers like Lt. Colonel Ratko Mladic (described by American diplomat Richard Holbrooke as 'a charismatic murderer'), who placed himself in charge of the Bosnian Serb forces from 1992 and helped organize the first attacks on Croat villagers living in majority-Serb communities in the Krajina. The primary strategic objective was not so much the defeat of opposing forces as the expulsion of non-Serb citizens from their homes, land and businesses in the territories claimed for Serbs.5 This 'ethnic cleansing'—a new term for a very old practice—was engaged in by all sides, but Serb forces were far and away the worst offenders. In addition to those who were killed (an estimated 300,000 by the end sSince ethnic identity in Yugoslavia could not be ascertained from appearance or speech, roaming militias relied on villagers 'fingering' their neighbours—families with whom they had often lived at peace sometimes as friends, for years and even decades. of the Bosnian war), millions were forced into exile. Applications to the European Community for asylum more than tripled between 1988 and 1992: in 1991 Germany alone faced requests for asylum from 256,000 refugees. In the first year of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia there were 3 million people from Yugoslavia (one in eight of the pre-war population) seeking refuge abroad. The international community was thus hardly unaware of the Yugoslav tragedy—which in any case was unfolding in real time on the television screens of the world, with harrowing pictures of starving Muslims in Serb prison camps and worse. The Europeans were the first to try and intervene, sending an EC ministerial team to Yugoslavia in June 1991—it was on this occasion that the unfortunate Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg, unburdened himself of the deathless claim that 'the hour of Europe' had dawned. But despite establishing high-level commissions to enquire and arbitrate and propose, the European Community and its various agencies proved quite helpless—not least because its members were divided between those, like Germany and Austria, who favored the seceding republics and others, led by France, who wanted to retain existing borders and states and who for this reason among others were not altogether unsympathetic to Serbia. Since the US (and therefore NATO) remained resolutely above the fray, that left only the United Nations. But beyond imposing sanctions on Belgrade, there appeared little the UN could do. Historically, soldiers under UN command were introduced into war-torn regions and countries to secure and keep a peace: but in Yugoslavia there was as yet no peace to keep, and there existed neither the will nor the means to bring it about on the ground. As in the comparable case of the Spanish Civil War, an ostensibly neutral international stance in practice favoured the aggressor in a civil conflict: the international arms embargo imposed on former Yugoslavia did nothing to restrain the Serbs, who could call on the substantial arms industry of the old Yugoslav federation, but it severely hampered the Bosnian Muslims in their struggles and goes a long way to account for their substantial military losses between 1992 and 1995. The only practical achievement of the international community before 1995 was to install a 14,000-strong UN Protection Force in Croatia to separate Croats and Serbs after the fighting there had subsided, followed by the insertion into selected towns in Bosnia—designated as 'Safe Areas'—of a few hundred uniformed UN peacekeepers to protect the growing numbers of (mostly Muslim) refugees herded into these areas. Later came the establishment of UN-authorized no-fly zones' in parts of Bosnia, intended to restrict Yugoslavia's freedom to threaten civilians (or break UN-imposed sanctions). Of greater long-term significance, perhaps, was the setting up in The Hague, in May 1993, of an International Tribunal for War Crimes. The mere existence of such a court confirmed what was by now obvious—that war crimes, and worse, were being perpetrated just a few score miles south of Vienna. But since most of the presumptive criminals, including Mladic and his fellow Bosnian Serb Radovan THE RECKONING Karadzic" (President of Republika Srpska), were actively pursuing their crimes with impunity, the Court remained as yet a ghostly and irrelevant side-show. The situation began to change only in 1995. Until then all talk of foreign intervention had been stymied by the claim—energetically propounded by French and British officers in and out of the UN forces—that the Bosnian Serbs were strong, determined and well armed. They should not be provoked: any serious attempt to enforce a peace settlement in Bosnia against their will or their interests, it was suggested, would not only be unfair but could make matters worse ... a line of reasoning slyly encouraged from Belgrade by Milosevic, who nevertheless claimed somewhat implausibly to play little part in the decisions of his fellow Serbs in Bosnia. Thus accorded a virtual free hand6, the Bosnian Serbs proceeded nevertheless to overplay it. Even though it was broadly agreed by the international community (including a 'Contact Group' of foreign diplomats tirelessly seeking an agreement) that a 'Muslim-Croat' Federation (formed in March 1994 in a ceremony in Washington that put an end to Croat-Muslim fighting) should receive 51 percent of a newly federal Bosnia, with the Serbs getting 49 percent, the Serb leaders based in the town of Pale took no notice and continued their attacks. In February 1994 their forces had lobbed a mortar shell from the surrounding mountains into the marketplace of Sarajevo, killing sixty-eight people and wounding hundreds more. Following this NATO—with UN backing—threatened air strikes in the event of further attacks and there was a temporary lull. But in May of 1995, in retaliation for some Bosnian military advances and Croatia's successful recapturing of the Krajina (putting the lie to the myth of Serbian military prowess), Serbian shelling of Sarajevo resumed. When NATO planes bombed Bosnian Serb installations in response, the Serbs seized 350 UN peacekeepers as hostages. Terrified for the fate of their soldiers, Western governments importuned the UN and NATO to desist. The international presence, far from constraining the Serbs, now offered them additional cover. Bolstered by this evidence of Western pusillanimity, on July nth Bosnian Serb forces under Mladic brazenly marched into one of the so-called UN 'Safe Areas', the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, by then overflowing with terrified Muslim refugees. Srebrenica was officially 'protected' not just by UN mandate but by a 400-strong peacekeeping contingent of armed Dutch soldiers. But when Mladic's men arrived the Dutch battalion laid down its arms and offered no resistance whatsoever as Serbian troops combed the Muslim community, systematically separating men and boys from the rest. The next day, after Mladic had given his 'word of honor as an officer' that the men would not be harmed, his soldiers marched the 'Between 1992 and 1994 the UN agencies in the Balkans were all but complicit with the Bosnian Serbs-allowing them, for example, an effective veto over what and who could enter and leave the besiesed ritv of Sarajevo. Muslim males, including boys as young as thirteen, out into the fields around Srebrenica. In the course of the next four days nearly all of them—7,400—were killed. The Dutch soldiers returned safely home to Holland. Srebrenica was the worst mass murder in Europe since World War Two: a war crime on the scale of Oradour, Lidice or Katyn, carried out in full view of international observers. Within days the news of what appeared to have taken place at Srebrenica was broadcast worldwide. Yet the only immediate response was an official warning from NATO to the Serbs that there would be a resumption of air strikes if other 'safe areas' were attacked. It was not until August 28th, a full seven weeks later, that the international community finally responded—and only because the Bosnian Serbs, assuming reasonably enough that they had carte blanche to commit massacres at will, made the mistake of shelling the Sarajevo marketplace for a second time: killing another thirty-eight civilians, many of them children. Now, at last, NATO acted. Overcoming a lingering reluctance on the part of the UN leadership, certain European leaders and even some of his own military, President Clinton authorized a serious and sustained bombing campaign designed to reduce and ultimately eliminate the Serbian capacity to cause further harm. It was late in coming, but it worked. The much-vaunted Serb fighting machine evaporated. Faced with a prolonged, open-ended assault on their positions and with no backing from Milosevic (who now took great care to emphasize his distance from the men of Pale) the Bosnian Serbs folded. With the Serbs out of the picture and the US now very much in, it proved surprisingly easy to introduce peace—or at least the absence of war—into the Balkans. On October 5th President Clinton announced a cease-fire, declaring that the parties had agreed to attend peace talks in the US. On November 1st the talks began, at a US Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. Three weeks later they concluded with an agreement signed in Paris on December 14th 1995.7 Tudjman represented Croatia, Alija Izetbegovic spoke for the Bosnian Muslims and Slobodan Milosevic signed on behalf of both Yugoslavia and the Bosnian Serbs. The objective of Dayton, from the American perspective, was to find a solution to the Yugoslav wars that did not entail a partition of Bosnia. Partition would have represented a victory for the Serbs (who would then have sought to join their share to Serbia proper and forge the Greater Serbia of nationalist dreams); and it would have put an international imprimatur on ethnic cleansing as state-making. Instead, a complicated tripartite system of governance was established, in which the Serbs, Muslims and Croats of Bosnia all had a degree of administrative and territorial autonomy but within a single Bosnian state whose external boundaries would remain unaltered. Formally, then, Bosnia survived its civil war. But the effects of terror and ex- m was at French insistence that the signing ceremony was held in Paris-an exercise in ceremonial overcompensation that only drew attention to France's previous reluctance to act against the Serbs. pulsion could not be undone. Most of those expelled from their homes (Muslims, above all) never returned, despite assurance and encouragement from local and international authorities. Indeed there were to be further 'cleansings'—this time of Serbs, systematically expelled by Zagreb from the newly retaken Krajina or else pressured by their own armed militias to leave their homes in Sarajevo and elsewhere and 'resettle' in predominantly Serb areas. But on the whole the peace was kept and Bosnia held together—by a 60,000-strong NATO army acting as an Implementation Force (later Stabilization Force) and a civilian High Representative empowered to administer the country until it could assume responsibility for its own affairs. Both the High Representative and the international troops are still in Bosnia and continue to oversee its affairs at the time of writing (ten years after Dayton)—an indication of the calamitous condition of the country following the war and of the continuing ill-feeling and lack of cooperation among the three communities.8 Bosnia became host to a raft of international agencies: governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental. Indeed the Bosnian economy after 1995 depended almost entirely upon the presence and expenditures of these agencies. A World Bank estimate of January 1996 suggested that in order to recover Bosnia would need S5.1 billion over three years. This has proven wildly optimistic. Once the Bosnian war ended, and with the various international agencies in place to help secure the peace, international interest subsided. The European Union, as usual, was transfixed by its own institutional concerns; while Clinton, taken up first with domestic election issues and then with NATO expansion and the instability of Yeltsin's Russia, ceased to focus on the Balkan crisis. But even though Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia were now ostensibly independent states, the Yugoslav problem had not been resolved. Slobodan Milosevic was still in control of what remained of his country and the issue on which he had ridden to power in the first place was about to explode. The Albanians of Serbia had continued to suffer discrimination and repression—indeed, with international attention deflected to the crisis farther north they were more vulnerable than ever. Following Dayton, Milosevic's international fortunes had decidedly improved: although he had not succeeded in getting all sanctions removed (his chief purpose in cooperating so readily with the American peace moves in Bosnia), Yugoslavia ceased to be quite the pariah it had been. And so, with a series of defeats to his name and Serb nationalist politicians in Belgrade criticizing him for compromising with Serbia's 'enemies', Milosevic turned back to Kosovo. By the spring of 1997 Elisabeth Rehn, the UN special rapporteur for human rights, was already warning of impending disaster in the Kosovo province, as Bel- "The NATO-led Stabilization Force was replaced by the European Union's EUFOR on December 2I1Q 2.004-- grade pressed down upon the Albanian majority there, rejecting all demands for local autonomy and depriving the local population of even the minimum of institutional representation. Bypassing the helpless and humiliated moderate leadership of Ibrahim Rugova, a younger generation of Albanians—armed and encouraged from Albania itself—abandoned non-violent resistance and turned increasingly to the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army). Originating in Macedonia in 1992, the KLA was committed to armed struggle for Kosovo's independence (and perhaps union with Albania). Its tactics— consisting mostiy of guerilla attacks on isolated police stations—offered Milosevic an opportunity to condemn all Albanian resistance as 'terrorist' and authorize a campaign of increasing violence. In March 1998, after Serb forces—armed with mortars and backed with combat helicopters—killed and wounded dozens of people in massacres at Drenica and other Albanian villages, the international community at last responded to pleas from Rugova and began to pay closer attention. But when both the US and the EU expressed themselves 'appalled by the police violence in Kosovo', Milosevic's belligerent response was to warn that 'terrorism aimed at the internationalization of the issue will be most harmful to those who resorted to these means.' By now all the Kosovo Albanian leadership—most of it in exile or in hiding-had decided that only complete separation from Serbia could save their community. Meanwhile the US and the ongoing 'Contact Group' countries continued to try to mediate between Milosevic and the Albanians—partly to broker a 'just' solution, partly to head off a broader war in the south Balkans. This was not an unreasonable fear: if Yugoslavia could not be brought to treat its Albanian citizens decently—-and they opted to secede—this could have serious consequences for neighboring Macedonia, with a large and unhappy Albanian minority of its own. Newly independent Macedonia, known at Greek insistence as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)9, was a historically sensitive zone. Its frontiers with Bulgaria, Greece and Albania had all been disputed before and after both World Wars. It was looked upon with suspicion by all its neighbors—on whom the landlocked little state is utterly dependent for trade and access to the outside world. And its survival following the break-up of Yugoslavia was by no means a sure thing. But if Macedonia were to collapse, then Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and even Turkey might be drawn into the conflict. Thus Milosevic's continued mistreatment—massacres—of the Albanians in Kosovo was bound to bring down upon him the disapproval and ultimate inter- 'The aeeine Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, manipulating nationalist sentiment for electoral advantage, claimed that the term -Macedonia was part of his country's ancient heritage and could applv to onlv the northernmost region of Greece itself. If the Slav state carved out ot southern Yugoslav* called itself'by that name it must harbour irredentist ambitions. What Papandreou could not. ac-knowidge was that many of the 'Greeks' of Greek Macedonia ^yere themselves of Slav descent-aibM officially Hellenized for patriotic ends. vention of the Western powers. Curiously, he seems never fully to have grasped this, despite serial warnings through the summer of 1998 from the US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who said she would hold Milosevic 'personally responsible'), President Jacques Chirac of France, and NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana. Like Saddam Hussein a few years later, Milosevic was isolated and insulated from Western opinion and over-confident of his own ability to manipulate foreign statesmen and maneuver between them. This was not entirely Milosevic's fault. Flattered by frequent visits from certain American diplomats—vaingloriously over-confident of their negotiating prowess—Milosevic had good reason to think that he was seen in the West not as an intransigent foe but as a privileged interlocutor.10 And the Yugoslav dictator was well aware of the international community's overarching concern to avoid any further redrawing of international boundaries. As late as July 1998, despite clear evidence that the situation in Kosovo was now desperate, the Contact Group of foreign ministers publicly ruled out independence as a solution. What Milosevic quite failed to grasp was the transformative impact of the Bosnian catastrophe upon international opinion. Human rights—ethnic cleansing in particular—were now high on everyone's agenda, if only out of a gnawing collective guilt at the world's previous failure to act in time. In June 1998 the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague declared itself competent to exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed in Kosovo—Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor, claiming that the scale and nature of the fighting in the province qualified it as an armed conflict under international law—and on July 19th the US Senate urged the Hague officials to indict Milosevic with 'war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide'. The plausibility of such charges was mounting fast. Not only were hundreds of Albanian 'terrorists' now being killed by special police units drafted in from Serbia, but there was growing evidence that under the cover of this conflict Belgrade was planning to 'encourage' the departure of the Albanian population, forcing them to flee their land and livelihoods in order to save their lives. Throughout the winter of 1998-99 there were reports of Serb police actions—sometimes in response to KLA attacks, more typically involving mass executions of one or more extended families—intended to terrorize whole communities into abandoning their villages and fleeing across the borders into Albania or Macedonia. The international response was now increasingly divided. The US and most of its NATO partners openly favored some form of military intervention on behalf of the besieged Albanians as early as October 1998. But at the UN (which would have had to authorize such intervention in the ostensibly 'domestic' affairs of a sover- "In the winter of 1996, following palpably fraudulent results in local elections, Serb students demonstrated for ihree months in the streets of Belgrade, protesting Milosevic's dictatorship and demanding change. They received no support or encouragement from the Western powers, however, who looked upon Milo&vic as a stabilizing factor in the post-Dayton years and did nothing to weaken his position eign state) there was strong opposition from China and Russia—whose parliament passed a resolution labeling any future NATO action as 'illegal aggression. Within the EU and NATO itself Greece, for its own reasons, opposed any intervention in Yugoslav affairs. Meanwhile Ukraine and Belarus offered 'unconditional solidarity' and 'moral support' to their fellow Slavs in Serbia. The apparent stalemate might have continued indefinitely had Belgrade not upped the ante with a series of brutal mass murders in early 1999, first on January 15th at the village of Racak in southern Kosovo and then in March all across the province. The Racak attack, in which 45 Albanians were killed (23 of them apparently executed), served finally—like the marketplace massacre in Sarajevo—to stimulate the international community to action.11 After fruitless negotiations at Rambouillet between Madeleine Albright and a Yugoslav delegation, which ended with a predictable refusal by Belgrade to withdraw its forces from Kosovo and accept a foreign military presence there, intervention became inevitable. On March 24th, and despite the absence of formal UN approval, NATO ships, planes and missiles went into action over Yugoslavia, in effect declaring war on the Belgrade regime. The final Yugoslav war lasted just under three months, in the course of which NATO forces wrought serious damage in Serbia proper but had only limited success in preventing the ongoing expulsion of the Albanian population from Kosovo: in the course of the war 865,000 refugees (half the Albanian population of Kosovo) fled into makeshift camps across the border in Montenegro, Bosnia, Albania and the ethnically Albanian regions of western Macedonia. But in spite of President Clinton's imprudently public insistence that there should be no NATO ground troops engaged-—obliging the alliance to conduct a war from the air with inevitable mishaps that played into Yugoslav propaganda and the Serb cult of victimhood— the outcome was a foregone conclusion. On June 9th Belgrade agreed to remove all its troops and police from Kosovo, NATO attacks were suspended, and the UN duly mandated a 'temporary' occupation of the province by a NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR). The occupation of Kosovo marked the end of the decade-long cycle of Yugoslav wars—and also the beginning of the end for Milosevic himself. His credibility undermined by this latest and worst setback for the Serb nationalist project, Milosevic was overwhelmingly defeated in the Yugoslav presidential election of September 2000 by an opposition candidate, Vojislav Kostunica. When Milosevic cynically conceded that Kostunica had more votes, but declared that the margin was so close that a runoff was needed, he at last aroused a storm of popular protest among the longsuffering Serbs themselves. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Belgrade and on October 5th Milosevic finally conceded defeat and stepped down. Six months later the government of Serbia, increasingly desperate for West- I ern economic assistance, agreed to arrest Milosevic and hand him over to the Hague Tribunal where he was charged with genocide and war crimes. Who was to blame for the tragedy of Yugoslavia? There was certainly enough responsibility to go around. The United Nations showed little initial concern—its inadequate and unconcerned Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, described Bosnia as 'a rich man's war'—and when its representatives did arrive in the Balkans they spent most of their time blocking any decisive military action against the worst offenders. The Europeans were little better. France in particular displayed a distinct reluctance to place any blame for the course of events upon Serbia—and indeed a marked disinclination to get involved at all. Thus when, in September 1990, Washington sought to place Yugoslavia on the agenda of an upcoming OSCE summit in Paris, Francois Mitterrand accused the Americans of 'over-dramatizing' and refused. Four months later, when the issue arose again, the French foreign office now claimed that it was 'too late' for foreign intervention . . . Paris remained similarly uncooperative even after international forces had been obliged to engage in the region: the French General Bernard Janvier, commander of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, personally forbade air strikes against the Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica.12 As for the Dutch government, it went so far as to veto any NATO strikes on Bosnian Serb strongholds until all Dutch soldiers were safely out of the country. Other countries performed a little better, but not much. Although London eventually backed American pressure to intervene, the British authorities spent the first crucial years of the Yugoslav conflict quietly impeding any direct engagement on the part of the EC or NATO. And the British treatment of Yugoslav refugees was shameful: in November 1992, as the flow of desperate, homeless Bosnians built to its peak, London announced that no Bosnian could travel to the UK without a visa. This was perfidious Albion at its most cynical. Since there was no British embassy in Sarajevo to issue such visas, the only way a Bosnian family could secure them was by making its way to a British embassy in a third country ... at which point the UK government would and did claim that since they had found asylum somewhere else, Britain need not admit them. Thus whereas Germany, Austria and the Scandinavian countries played generous host to hundreds of thousands of Yugoslav refugees between 1992 and 1995, the UK actually saw a decline in the number of asylum seekers in these same years. Although it took Washington an extraordinarily long time to focus upon events in the Balkans, once the US did engage there its record is distinctly better. Indeed the fact that it was American initiative that drove forward each stage of interna- "And as with the Sarajevo atrocity, Belgrade and its apologists insisted either that it never happened or, when that became untenable, that it was a staged 'provocation' by the victims themselves. "Janvier's performance aroused demands in France and elsewhere that he be co-indicted for responsibility in the subsequent massacre. tional intervention was a source of serial humiliation for the Western European allies. But the US, too, dragged its feet—for the most part because the American defense establishment was reluctant to take any risks and because many US politicians continued to believe that their country had 'no dog' in this war. The idea of deploying NATO in these novel circumstances—or that the US might unilaterally intervene in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state with which it had no quarrel—was not an easy sell. It was, as Secretary of State Warren Christopher observed at the height of the Bosnian war, 'a problem from hell'. As for the Yugoslavs themselves, no-one emerges with honour. The failure of the Yugoslav federal system was precipitated by Belgrade, but Ljubljana and Zagreb were not sorry to see it go. Bosnian Muslims, it is true, had only restricted opportunities to commit war crimes of their own—for the most part they were on the receiving end of other people's aggression. Theirs is the saddest loss of all—and the destruction of Sarajevo a particular source of grief. On its restricted scale the Bosnian capital was a genuinely cosmopolitan city: perhaps the last of the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, ecumenical urban centers that were once the glory of central Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. It will be rebuilt but it can never recover. Armed Croats, on the other hand, were responsible for innumerable acts of violence against civilians—under direction from Zagreb and on their own initiative. In Mostar, a town in western Bosnia with an unusually high percentage of inter-faith marriages, Croat extremists deliberately set about expelling Muslims and mixed families from the western half of the city. They then replaced them with Croat peasants driven into the town and radicalized by their own experience of ethnic cleansing in the villages, and set siege to the Muslim eastern districts. In the meantime, in November 1993, they systematically destroyed the sixteenth-century Ottoman bridge across the Neretva river, a symbol of the town's integrated and ecumenical past. The Croats, then, had little to boast of—and of all the post-Communist leaders who emerged from the rubble, Franjo Tudjman was one of the more egre-giously unattractive. More than anyone else he made it a personal project to erase the Yugoslav past from his fellow citizens' memory: by March 1993 the very word 'Yugoslavia' had been removed from textbooks, readers, encyclopedias, book titles and maps published in the new Croatia. Only after Tudjman's death could the Croat state he had founded begin credibly to re-position itself as a candidate for membership of the international community. But in the end the primary responsibility for the Yugoslav catastrophe must rest with the Serbs and their elected leader Slobodan Milosevic. It was Milosevic whose bid for power drove the other republics to leave. It was Milosevic who then encouraged his fellow Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to carve out territorial enclaves and who backed them with his army. And it was Milosevic who authorized and directed the sustained assault on Yugoslavia's Albanian population that led to the war in Kosovo. Belgrade's actions were a disaster for Serbs everywhere. They lost their land in the Krajina region of Croatia; they were forced to accept an independent Bosnia and abandon plans to carve from it a sovereign Serb state; they were defeated in Kosovo, from which most of the Serb population has since fled in justified fear of Albanian retribution; and in the rump state of Yugoslavia (from which even Montenegro has sought to secede) their standard of living has fallen to historic lows. This course of events has further exacerbated a longstanding Serb propensity for collective self-pity at the injustice of history and it is true that in the longer run the Serbs may well be the greatest losers in the Yugoslav wars. It says something about the condition of their country that today even Bulgaria and Romania rank above Serbia in present living standards and future prospects. But this irony should not blind us to Serb responsibility. The appalling ferocity and sadism of the Croat and Bosnian wars—the serial abuse, degradation, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens—was the work of Serb men, mostiy young, aroused to paroxysms of casual hatred and indifference to suffering by propaganda and leadership from local chieftains whose ultimate direction and power came from Belgrade. What followed was not so unusual: it had happened in Europe just a few decades before, when—all across the continent and under the warrant of war—ordinary people committed quite extraordinary crimes. There is no doubt that in Bosnia especially there was a history upon which Serb propaganda could call—a history of past sufferings that lay buried just beneath the misleadingly placid surface of post-war Yugoslav life. But the decision to arouse that memory, to manipulate and to exploit it for political ends, was made by men: one man in particular. As Slobodan Milosevic disingenuously conceded to a journalist during the Dayton talks, he had never expected the wars in his country to last so long. That is doubdess true. But those wars did not just break out from spontaneous ethnic combustion. Yugoslavia did not fall: it was pushed. It did not die: it was killed. Yugoslavia was the worst case, but post-Communism was difficult everywhere. The path from authoritarianism to democracy in Portugal or Spain accompanied the accelerated modernization of a backward agrarian economy—a combination with which the rest of Western Europe was familiar from its own past. But the exit from Communism had no precedent. The much-anticipated passage from capitalism to socialism had been theorized ad nauseam in academies, universities and coffee bars from Belgrade to Berkeley; but no-one had thought to offer a blueprint for the transition from socialism to capitalism. Of Communism's many encumbering legacies, the economic inheritance was the most tangible. The obsolescent industrial plant of Slovakia, or Transylvania, or Silesia, coupled economic dysfunction with environmental irresponsibility. The 1 he reckoning two were closely related: the poisoning of Lake Baikal, the death of the Aral Sea, the acid rain falling across the forests of Northern Bohemia represented not just ecological catastrophe but a huge mortgage on the future. Before there could be investment in new industries the old ones would need to be dismanüed and someone would have to make good the damage they had wrought. In the eastern Länder of Germany the bill for undoing the damage of Communism was assumed by the Federal government. The Treuhand (see Chapter 17) spent billions of Deutschmarks over the next four years buying up and selling off obsolete industrial plants and factories, paying off their redundant employees and making good—so far as possible—the consequences of their activities. But even though the results were patchy and nearly bankrupted the Federal treasury, the former East Germans were fortunate nonetheless: their transition qut of Communism was paid for by Western Europe's strongest economy. Elsewhere the cost of reinventing economic life had to be borne by the victims themselves. The basic choice facing post-Communist governments was either to attempt a one-time, overnight transformation from subsidized socialist economies into market-driven capitalism—the 'big bang' approach—or else proceed cautiously to dismantle or sell off the more egregiously malfunctioning sectors of the 'planned economy' while preserving as long as possible those features which mattered most to the local population: cheap rents, guaranteed jobs, free social services. The first strategy conformed best to the free-market theorems beloved of an emerging generation of post-Communist economists and businessmen; the second was more politically prudent. The problem was that either approach must in the short term (and perhaps the not-so-short term) cause significant pain and loss: in Boris Yeltsin's Russia, where both were applied, the economy shrank dramatically for eight years— the biggest peacetime setback for a major economy in modern history. It was in Poland, under the determined supervision of Leszek Balcerowicz (first as finance minister, later as head of the country's central bank), that the 'big bang1 approach was applied earliest and with the greatest consistency. Obviously, Balcerowicz argued, his country—insolvent in all but name—could not recover without international aid. But that aid would not be forthcoming unless Poland put in place credible structures of the kind that would reassure Western bankers and lending agencies. It was not the International Monetary Fund that was forcing harsh measures on Poland; rather, by anticipating IMF strictures, Poland would merit and receive the help it needed. And the only way to do this was fast, during the post-Communist honeymoon and before people realized how painful the process would be. Thus on January ist 1990 the first post-Communist government of Poland embarked on an ambitious program of reforms: building up foreign reserves, removing price controls, tightening credit and cutting subsidies (i.e. allowing enterprises to fail)—all at the expense of domestic real wages, which immediately fell some 40 percent. Except for the explicit recognition of the inevitability of unemployment (softened by the establishment of a fund to support and help retrain those forced out of work) this was not very different from what had twice been unsuccessfully attempted during the 1970s. What had changed was the political climate. In neighboring Czechoslovakia, under the guidance of finance minister (later Prime Minister) Vaclav Klaus, a similarly ambitious program was pursued—with an additional emphasis upon currency convertibility, the liberalization of foreign trade, and privatization, all in keeping with Klaus's openly avowed 'Thatcherism'. Like Balcerowicz and some of the young economists in the Kremlin, Klaus favoured 'shock therapy': finding nothing worth preserving in socialist economics he saw no benefit in delaying the switch to capitalism. At the other extreme stood men like Slovakia's Meciar, Romania's Iliescu or Ukraine's Prime Minister (and subsequently President) Leonid Kuchma. War)7 of upsetting their constituents they delayed the introduction of change as long as possible—Ukraine's first 'economic reform program' was announced in October 1994—and proved singularly reluctant to liberalize domestic markets or reduce the state's share in the economy. In September 1995 Kuchma would defend his position—in terms familiar to historians of the region—by warning against 'blindly copying foreign experience'. After passing through a slough of economic despond in the early 1990s the first tier of former Communist states re-emerged on a more secure foundation, able to attract Western investors and envisage an eventual ascent into the European Union. The relative success of the Polish or Estonian economic strategies when compared to the fortunes of Romania or Ukraine is obvious to any visitor—indeed, at the level of small business activity or even public optimism, the more successful eastern European countries have fared better than former East Germany, for all the latter's apparent advantages. It is tempting to conclude that the more 'advanced' post-Communist states like Poland—or the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia and perhaps Hungary—were thus able in the course of a few uncomfortable years to bridge the gap from state socialism to market capitalism, albeit at some cost to their older and poorer citizens; meanwhile a second tier of countries in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union was left to struggle in their wake, held back by an incompetent and corrupt ruling elite unable and unwilling to contemplate the necessary changes. This is very broadly true. But even without Klaus or Balcerowicz or their Hungarian and Estonian counterparts, some former-Communist states were always going to do better than others in the passage to a market economy: either because they were already embarked upon it before 1989—as we have seen—or else because their Soviet-era distortions were not as pathological as those of their less fortunate neighbours (the comparison between Hungary and Romania is telling in this respect). And of course the miracles of economic transformation on offer in the capital cities of certain countries—in Prague or Warsaw or Budapest, for example—are not always replicated in their distant provinces. As in the na<;t <=<-> *r