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 dismantling 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.
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.[336] 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. ‘Inter-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 ‘Iekavian’ or Croat form, ‘e’ 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 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.[337] 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.[338]
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, 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 1389.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.[339] Kosovo was thus a potentially explosive issue, for reasons linked only tenuously to ‘age-old’ Balkan feuds: as Andre Malraux shrewdly advised a Yugoslav visitor to France back in the Sixties,
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
