The Elephant

Every visitor who comes to the Balkans invariably asks the question: what happened here? It's the elephant in the room. Since Plitvice was the scene of the first conflict with fatalities between Croatians and Krajina Serbs, it's a good place to start. Sorry no pictures for this post, it's all text. You've had too many pictures in yesterday's post anyway. I feel very inadequate to condense Balkan history to one post, not having any particular expertise, so please regard this as one person's attempt to make sense of a complex story.


At one of the entrances to Plitvice NP is a shrine to Josip Jović, the Croatian policeman who was the first casualty of what Croatians call the Homeland War or the War of Independence. On Easter weekend 1991, when a bus of Croatian police went to expel Serb paramilitaries from the park which is in the Krajina, a sparsely settled but majority Serb area, they were ambushed. The Serbs also lost one man in the gunfight. One each, very nice symbolic propaganda for both sides. (At that time, the Croatian Army was small and the police took much of the brunt of the fighting.) After that the war dragged on for 4 years until Croatia was able to muster enough firepower to retake the occupied territories and expel the rebel Serbs, and exact revenge on them. That Serbia withdrew its support for the Krajina Serbs was also a factor.


The War was sparked by the splintering of the states of the former Yugoslavia with the desire of the nations to leave the Yugoslav union, but there is a long checkered history preceding. Here are some contributing factors:


Yugoslavia had fault lines running along religious boundaries. The Slovenes are mostly Catholic though the percentage is dropping, the Croatians are mostly Catholic, the Serbs are mostly Serbian Orthodox, and Bosnia has a mix, of which a non-absolute majority are Muslim. Further south, there are more Muslims. The state of Yugoslavia tried keep the state secular, but the old divisions were latent, to be exploited by demagogues.


While the constituent peoples may claim they are different, in fact they are related. Serbo-Croat is regarded as one language, though written in different scripts (Cyrillic and Latin). Yugoslav means southern Slav, which indicates where the tribes came from.


This region has been the scene of tussles between powers over the centuries and sides have been played off against each other. The Roman, Venetian, Ottoman and Austrian empires, as well as Italy, have governed over parts at one time or other. Recall that WWI was sparked in Sarajevo by the assassination of Austrian royalty. WWII brought more division when fascist elements sided with the Nazi occupiers while others fought with the partisans. Some of the mass murders committed by both fascists and partisans are no doubt were within living memory of people in 1991. There was a relative calm for decades after Tito, who had led the partisans, created the Yugoslav umbrella, but after his death in 1980, the union unraveled. Doubtless old scores were resurrected, by the urgings of demagogues. I remember that in the years when sadly on too many days Mary Kostakidis would be reading the evening news about some atrocity or other, and I couldn't tell which side was which, a newspaper cartoonist echoed my perceptions in his drawings. There are two antagonists in the frame, armed with clubs. One clubs the other, saying this is for (some injustice centuries in the past). Bunk! The other retaliates, saying, and this is for (another injustice). Bunk! And so they go clubbing each other down the frames, bunk! bunk! bunk! Caption of the cartoon strip: History Is Bunk!


Unfortunate as the casualties in the attacks on Dubrovnik and Šibenik were, I knew that those were picnics compared to the nightmare of horrors in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. I have in fact chickened out and stuck to the scenic and less scarred areas of the Balkans. It is after all a holiday, not a history expedition. Still one cannot help being curious about the history. And I hear Sarajevo is worth visiting. Perhaps some day...


There is one other factor that I think isn't much mentioned and that is geography. The Balkans are mountainous, which impedes travel and communication between peoples. China is essentially a great plain sloping towards the sea, so it could be unified early in history. Many borders in Europe are along rivers or mountain ranges where separate cultures have evolved on each side. Tribalism persisted into the 20th century with catastrophic results. Ironically these divisions may have helped Columbus discover America because he was able to appeal to a rival monarch when he could not get finance for his expedition. When the Chinese Emperor shut down expeditions in the early 16th century, no one could take a contrary course.


However, one notion that I reject is that somehow the people of the Balkans are less civilised or more barbarous, whatever that might mean, than those of Western Europe. This has always been a prejudice of the West; in novels the unsavoury characters are Bulgarian or Romanian or Albanian or some country that little is known about. No, I think what happened here could happen anywhere else, where behaviour breaks down and thugs take over. That's why the West was so dismayed when this war happened on their doorstep. They thought they were over it 50 years ago.


Slovenia is in the EU now and Croatia is pursuing membership. Sooner or later, Serbia and the others will join. One can only hope that future conflicts will be no more deadly than fists thumped on tables and voices raised in the European Parliament. History might be more boring but far better such boredom than the exciting 20th century we've had.