340
Since 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.
341
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 besieged city of Sarajevo.
342
It 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.
343
The NATO-led Stabilization Force was replaced by the European Union’s EUFOR on December 2nd 2004.
344
The ageing 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 apply to only the northernmost region of Greece itself. If the Slav state carved out of southern Yugoslavia called itself by that name it must harbour irredentist ambitions. What Papandreou could not acknowldge was that many of the ‘Greeks’ of Greek Macedonia were themselves of Slav descent—albeit officially Hellenized for patriotic ends.
345
In the winter of 1996, following palpably fraudulent results in local elections, Serb students demonstrated for three 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 Milosevic as a stabilizing factor in the post-Dayton years and did nothing to weaken his position.
346
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.
347
Janvier’s performance aroused demands in France and elsewhere that he be co-indicted for responsibility in the subsequent massacre.
348
Among a younger generation, business-oriented and impatient to escape their country’s encumbering past, it even brought forth a new conformism to substitute for the wooden public language of Communism: uncritical adulation for the mantras of neo-classical economics blissfully unclouded by any familiarity with their social cost.
349
Giving rise to nationalist jitters at the prospect of Prague’s re-absorption into a Greater German Co- Prosperity Sphere—and a popular joke: “I have some good news and some bad news about Czechoslovakia’s post-Communist prospects.” “What’s the good news?” “The Germans are coming!” “And the bad news?” “The Germans are coming.”
350
A notable exception to this story is Estonia, which has benefitted hugely from its virtual adoption by its Scandinavian neighbours. In 1992, when it left the ruble zone, 92 percent of Estonia’s trade was with the former Soviet Union. Five years later over three quarters of that trade was with the West, much of it across the Baltic.
351
And inefficiency—one irony of ritualized privatization in eastern Europe was that once collective farms were broken up into tiny plots they could no longer be worked by tractor but only by hand.
