On the 15th of September 1992, Sgt. James Davis’ armored personnel carrier struck a TMA-3 anti-tank mine. Although his comrades thought they were dead, they both survived the ordeal with little or no injury. The next day, a Combat Engineer by the name of Sgt. Mike Ralph was killed on the same road while clearing the road for mines by another anti-tank mine laid by one of the opposing factions to destroy their enemy’s vehicles. Sgt. Mike Ralph left behind his wife and two daughters. This story has been told countless times in the former Yugoslavia, not only by Canadians, but also by the French, British, Nepalese, and dozens of other countries committed to ending the bitter fighting in the former Yugoslavia. The fight for independence by various ethnic and religious factions has gone on in what is now known as the former Yugoslavia since the early 19th century; fighting to gain control of the Balkan state has gone on since the late 13th century.
For over 700 years, there have been large-scale conflicts fought in the former Yugoslavia (a communist state). There is now a large concerted effort to end the centuries of fighting by the international community. The root of the problem in the Balkans is the longevity of the issue and centuries of ethnic and religious hatred that have been passed along from generation to generation. Is it really possible for the international community to quell this hatred? Sober second thoughts suggest that the type of peace imposed on the Balkans by the Dayton Accord continues to fuel these flames of discontent.
This political agreement was quickly crafted in the waning days of the Clinton Administration’s first mandate. To understand the weaknesses of the current peace accord, it is necessary to examine the past in more detail. As with many complex historical issues, the problems that are in question stem not from recent history but lie in the seeds of the past. This is the case in the former Yugoslavia. One can date back the fighting in the region to 1371 at the battle of Maritsa and the battle of Kosovo in 1389. Both were critical battles fought by the rising Ottoman-Turkish empire, which subdued the then-Serbian state.
In 1453, Constantinople (Istanbul) fell, and the Turks established their foothold in Europe decisively. On two occasions, the new European power laid siege on Vienna. Although they drove that far north, their success against the Austrians and Hungarians was futile, largely due to a large military frontier populated mainly by Serbs. Those Serbs were largely the same Serbs who had fled from the Turks in the past two centuries. The Hungarians, especially, had a keen liking for the Serbs, whom they gave refuge to. The Hungarians gave them land, freedom of religion, and the power to elect their own officials. All this came at a price, the Serbian willingness to fight the Turks. The favorable conditions produced by the Hungarians produced a large flux of migration from the Serbian population, and thousands left their homeland.
At the same time, most South Slavs living under Turkish rule were forced to convert to the faith of Islam, mostly under threat of death. This is the point where one can begin to see the beginnings of the large split in the Balkan state. In the early 19th century, the subjugated Serbs started two uprisings against the waning Ottoman-Turkish power, in 1805 and 1815. By 1850, there was once again Serbian rule, and in 1878, Serbia received international recognition. The South Slavs, being politically conscious because of foreign rule, became aware of the new Serbian self-rule. As a result, many Slavs visited the new state.
These visitors discovered that they spoke a cousin language, very similar to Serbo-Croatian, which was spoken in Serbia. Next, they discovered that they were Christian, themselves being mainly Roman Catholic and many Islamic. Among all the Slavs, there was a strong sense of subjugation which was a uniting power.
These similarities were also seen by the two powers at the time (Austria-Hungary, Ottoman-Turkey). At this time, the two powers sowed the seeds of distrust into the southern Slavs who craved for independence that Serbia had. This was directed mainly at Serbia, whom both empires feared. At the same time, the then-young and fragile Serbian state realized that large populations of Serbs and other Slavs were living not in the state of Serbia but mainly abroad. They also realized that in order to strengthen themselves, in 1844, the Serbs created a foreign policy document known as the “Outline,” which was a call to unite all the neighbors of Serbia into one united country. This plan never materialized formally but was in the back of the minds of many Serbs and ambitious southern Slavs. By the end of the century, Serbia thought they would come to realize their dream of total rule of all Serbs. Towards the end of the 19th century, the large group of southern Slavs began to split into three major groups: the Croatian, Muslim, and of course, Serbian groups of people.
These three groups all had their own ideas of what a unified country should be. This made the job of unification three times more difficult. The goals of Serbia were courageous and valiant, but they were never meant to succeed because Austria and Hungary wanted the whole Balkan region to themselves. Austria and Hungary wanted control of the region. To accomplish this, they gave themselves the right to annex the region of Bosnia and Herzegovina into a new province. The Alliance was so keen on this because it drove a wedge between the strong Serb area of Montenegro and Serbia.
In the long run, the Alliance could easily take the whole region. Although there were subtle differences between the native inhabitants, such as language, religion, and ethnicity, the differences were only minimal, and because of the seeds of distrust which were sowed earlier, these differences began to grow into a small shrub. On the 28th of June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Bosnian-Serb student. The Archduke was the heir to the throne of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. He was on a state visit to the Austrian territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Austria and Hungary immediately sent an ultimatum to Belgrade that they must give Austria the power to investigate the assassination and prosecute any Serb citizen. Serbia agreed out of a feeling of remorse.
Austria found that there had been no plot to assassinate the Archduke, and the action was strictly a one-person effort. Only weeks before the assassination, Austria had asked for the support of Germany in a preemptive strike on Serbia. The Austrian government argued to the German government that it was needed for Serbia’s own salvation. Germany agreed and would support any move made by Austria and Hungary. The Serbian Prime Minister Pasic realized that Austria was going to invade eventually and went to the Russian Tsar pleading for protection. Russia agreed and became Serbia’s new ally. On July 28, 1914, just one month after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, Austria declared war on Serbia. However, Austria did not inform Berlin of their rash decision, and Berlin did not want to proceed this way, but they then also declared war on Serbia. The rest, of course, is history.
Britain, feeling tied to Russia, supported them, and thus the First World War began, all over Austria’s greed over Serbia. When Austria invaded, the native population fought back and resisted until 1915. In 1915, Germany committed troops to the region, and Serbia fell. After the war, with the defeat of Germany and Austria, the Slavs could once again try to form a united country. Great Britain mediated the talks between the different factions in the region, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian.
The mediator found that the Serbs just wanted control of everything, especially other Serbs, and if the Croats wanted to join voluntarily, that was just fine because it meant a larger empire. The Croats did not see things the same because if they were under Serb rule, they would once again be under foreign rule, not their own. With all this said and done, it was still in the best interest of the Croats and Slovenes to sign on; it gave them the best chance of self-rule. On October 29, 1918, it was announced that a state would be created named the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.
In February 1919, the state gained international recognition from the United States of America. It quickly became clear that the Kingdom existed primarily for Serbs and not for the Croats and Slovenes. Everything from foreign policy to the running of local constabularies was run by the Serbs. The Croats, entering the state believing they would be granted home rule, had none. In 1928, chaos broke loose in the national parliament when two Croatian politicians were shot dead. King Peter I immediately closed parliament and took dictatorial power of the state. In 1929, the name of the state was changed to Yugoslavia (state of South Slavs). This was done to give the people the idea of not being Serbian, Muslim, or Slovenian but being Yugoslavian.
A new political party was formed called the Yugoslav National party. The attempts to melt the different groups failed, and after the cloud settled, Serbs considered themselves Serbs, and Croats considered themselves Croats. By the mid-1930s, attempts were being made to settle the rivalry between the Serbs and the Croats. In August 1939, the State of Croatia was put on the map. This move by the country’s leader infuriated the Serb population. Before anything else could be done, the Second World War began, and all hopes of settling the fuming rivalries died. In April 1941, the massive German war machine rolled into the Balkans and took the region in decisive two weeks, overcoming any hasty resistance with ease. This marked the beginnings of one of the country’s darkest hours. The Nazi party installed puppet governments in Croatia and Serbia. The Germans chose anybody who would follow their orders, and this resulted in the rising of fanatics who would do anything for power.
In Croatia, a fascist government was put into place named the Ustasa. The Ustasa went on a killing spree. The Croatian government persecuted and killed over a quarter of a million Serbs. As in any military occupation, resistance groups began to surface. There were two main guerrilla groups: one, the Chetniks, made up mainly of Serbs, whose goal was to re-establish the Serbian royal family, of which all fled abroad, and create a new Serbian state. The other group was the Partisans, made up mostly of Serbs and non-Serbs.
The Partisans were organized by their leader, a communist named Joseph Broz Tito. Tito, being a member of the Communist Party in Yugoslavia, nourished it from a couple of dozen clubs with low membership to a party with over 10,000 members. With this experience in mind, he raised an army of well over 150,000 resistance fighters in fifteen months. As a surprise, the Chetniks did not fully engage the German forces. This was in large part due to the German reprisal method all over its occupied territory, from France to Norway.
The order issued stated that for every German soldier killed by the local population, one hundred citizens would be killed. This order deterred the Chetniks from engaging the Germans. The Partisans had their own doctrine. They believed that killing the local population would only swell their ranks. This doctrine also included a limited war against the Ustasa government and the puppet government in Belgrade. Toward the end of the war, Tito’s forces were mainly fighting a civil war, not a war of resistance. Tito’s ingenuity set him up as the next leader of the region, and this was his goal from the time he joined the Communist Party.
In October 1945, a joint Soviet-Partisan force liberated Belgrade. The Soviets left it up to the Partisans to mop up the remaining German forces. After the war came the most drastic political swing the region had ever experienced. In March 1945, the Allies compelled the royal family to appoint Tito as leader. This was done, and immediately Yugoslavia became a communist state with absolute dictatorial power given to Tito. Tito was an admirer of the then-powerful Soviet Union.
Tito realized, as Stalin did, that industrialism was needed in order to equalize the gap between the peasantry and the aristocrat. Tito formulated a five-year plan similar to that of the Soviet Union. This plan included industrializing the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro. This plan was done in large part to modernize Yugoslavia, but also to equalize the Yugoslav economy. Joseph Stalin became increasingly irritated by Tito’s actions. He wanted Yugoslavia to become a grain farm for the Soviet Union.
In 1948, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Soviet Union and left to flounder. Tito was a leader and had great ambitions for his kinsmen. After Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the union, Tito went to the West for help. The West gave him loans, new trade alliances, and armaments. With the loans and new trade, Tito could build the country of his dreams. The state of Yugoslavia was a dream. The economy was subsidized by massive international loans, the inflation rate was always rising, and unemployment was rampant. Tito hoped that the new prosperity would calm the waters of the past. He envisioned that Serbs, Croats, and Macedonians would think of themselves not by their ethnicity but as consumers.
During the 1970s, Yugoslavia’s economy began to falter. In Tito’s great equalized Yugoslavia, Croats and Slovenes earned twice the wages of a Serb, and three times as much as a Macedonian and Montenegrin. The Slovenians and Croats became resentful of the fact that they had to support the poorer south. The Serbs and other Slavs felt they deserved more from the rich Croats and Slovenes. Tito’s idea and ambition had failed, like so many others in the region before.
Halfway through the decade, calls for renewed nationalism by Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrins led Tito to reorganize the state into six republics. This move only widened the divisions in the region, as every republic had resentment toward one another. After the death of Tito in 1980, the situation in the region went from bad to worse. During the 1980s, Europe experienced an economic resurgence, and its economies grew. Yugoslavia, on the other hand, never felt this and went further into debt. To divert the blame, most Yugoslav politicians began to convince their respective peoples that the other groups were at fault. Serbians blamed Albanians, Croatians blamed Muslims, etc.
One such politician was Slobodan Milosevic. He was the president of Serbia, and he was, in essence, a fear-monger and propaganda machine. He told the Serbian people that Croatia was planning a war of genocide against them and that Albania was going to invade the province of Kosovo. The divisions in Yugoslavia went from the size of a creek to the size of the Atlantic overnight. After the crumble of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the pot of water which was Yugoslavia boiled over. In 1990, the communist party dissolved, and politically the country split. Croatia and Slovenia decided to move in their own direction. In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia held referendums to decide whether they should each form independent states. Each republic did and broke away from Yugoslavia.
Bosnia-Herzegovina followed suit in 1992. Serbia and Montenegro stayed in Yugoslavia and claimed that what Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia had committed was illegal. At the heart of the issue was that ten percent of Croatia’s population was Serbian. In June 1991, under the authority of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav army was sent into Krajina and had control of it by January 1992. At that point, a ceasefire was signed. In the aftermath, thirty percent of Croatia was left to the Serbs. In 1992, when Bosnia-Herzegovina separated from the Serbian republic, Serbia was outraged. Bosnia, like Croatia, had a large Serb population and therefore must belong to Serbia. Croatia made this argument too. As a result, both armies entered Bosnia, with the premonition of gaining more territory.
Serbia wanted a link to the sea and Krajina, and Croatia wanted to gain what it had lost to the Serbs in Krajina. Caught in the middle was the Muslim population of Bosnia, which fought to hold their land. Each faction committed horrendous atrocities, ethnic cleansing was rampant, and it was not committed only by the Serbs, as the media has shown, but also by Croatians and Muslims. The conflict grew and grew until the international community said, “Stop.” In August 1991, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution, calling for a force to enter the embattled region and separate the warring factions. The force was doomed to fail from the beginning for three main reasons. The first was that they entered the regionassuming that the boundries of Tito’s yugoslvia were adequete, and sustainable.
This was not true because in Bosnia and Croatia, there were large Serb populations. So when the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) entered the region, they were defending the wrong borders and separating people at the wrong borders. Secondly, UNPROFOR had no right to intervene in the conflict unless their personnel or equipment were at risk. Even if they did, attacking one side would make the other resentful to the UN, thus expanding the problem. Thirdly, the force sent was outnumbered and outgunned.
In 1991, there was no artillery available for the defense of UN soldiers. There were no helicopters for medical evacuation, and the UN possessed no heavy armor, such as main battle tanks. The force was only a glorified police force with lightly armored APCs. This set the stage for disaster, little to nothing was accomplished except losing the lives of our soldiers. Most aid convoys were sacked, and the food was used to feed soldiers.
