Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jasminka Udovicki is Professor of Sociology at the Massachusetts College of Art.

James Ridgeway is Washington correspondent for the Village Voice.

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"This glorious and expertly edited, collaborative volume is one of the best guides to understanding the Yugoslav war of 1991-1995, providing readable historical background and balanced analyses of the war."--Sabrina P. Ramet, HMJ School of International Studies, University of Washington, Seattle

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BURN THIS HOUSE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface, James Ridgeway.......................................................................................1Introduction, Jasminka Udovicki...............................................................................11The Bonds and the Fault Lines, Jasminka Udovicki..............................................................43The Making of Yugoslavia: 1930–1945, Branka Prpa-Jovanovic..............................................64Tito: 1945–1980, Mirko Tepavac..........................................................................80The Interlude: 1980-1990, Jasminka Udovicki and Ivan Torov....................................................109The Media Wars: 1987–1997, Milan Milo?evic.........................................................131The Army's Collapse, Stipe Sikavica...........................................................................154Croatia: The First War, Ejub ?titkovac...................................................................175Bosnia and Hercegovina: The Second War, Jasminka Udovicki and Ejub ?titkovac.............................217International Aspects of theWars in Former Yugoslavia: 1990–1996, Susan L. Woodward.....................247The Resistance in Serbia, Ivan Torov..........................................................................267The Opposition in Croatia, Sven Balas.........................................................................281Neither War Nor Peace, Jasminka Udovicki......................................................................314Kosovo, Jasminka Udovicki.....................................................................................367Bibliography..................................................................................................373Contributors..................................................................................................375

Chapter One

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It took almost a century, from the emergence of the South Slavic unification movement in the early nineteenth century to the end of World WarI, to create Yugoslavia. It took only a few years to destroy it. In 1919 visions of national liberation and modernization brought together the South Slavs—the Yugo-Sloveni—excluding only the Bulgarians. Seventy years later a retrograde, mythical, antimodern vision tore them apart.

At the heart of Balkan history lay the experience of plural ethnic communities fought over for hundreds of years by competing foreign rulers: Roman popes, Byzantine emperors, Hungarian and Hapsburg kings, and Ottoman sultans. Their separate histories under foreign domination divided the local populations and united them through a shared desire to rid themselves of their overlords. After World War I Yugoslavia encompassed six Slavic nations: Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Muslims (although the latter three groups were at that time effectively counted as Serbs). The country's population also included two large non-Slav minorities, Albanian and Hungarian, and a number of smaller ones. The foundation of Yugoslavia followed the long, slow collapse of the decadent empires, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian, resulting from the work of intellectuals and political leaders throughout the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. The most enlightened of these leaders hoped the bonds of a common origin and close linguistic ties would prove stronger than differences in habits of heart and mind and in ways of life imposed under foreign influence. The unification of the South Slavs into a single state, according to nineteenth-century advocates, offered the only way to overcome the alien powers and secure the survival of small and economically disadvantaged nations in a harsh environment ruled by the great powers.

Today, separated from each other by a decade of terror and massacres, most of these nations seem even smaller, their environment even harsher and more unjust. The vision of a common future that so profoundly marked the previous century has been torn asunder, perhaps forever.

Their turbulent history involved a number of parallel historical trajectories. Each group—Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and the Indo-European Albanians (the latter are the peninsula's original settlers)—found its own way to adjust to, and overcome, foreign rule. The same ethnic pride and resilience that helped each group retain its identity within the Ottoman or the Hapsburg Empire turned out to be the most formidable obstacle to their twentieth-century pan-Slavic unification.

Most groups built their sense of identity around the same core: the period of medieval prosperity and statehood preceding foreign hegemony. Different ethnic communities enjoyed periods of independence and prosperity at different times, but memories of past glory were preserved in the national folk songs, myths, and legends, and in each case came to constitute the heart of national consciousness. Slovenia—formed in 623 in the Eastern Alps as the independent duchy of Karantania—found any possibility of a medieval political identity erased after 745 by the Frankish invasions. Croatia was constitutionally absorbed into the Hungarian realm four hundred years later. Serbia, which contended with Bulgaria for Macedonia, was overwhelmed in the fifteenth century by the Turks, who conquered Bosnia soon after.

Only two South Slavic entities remained semi-independent. On the Adriatic, the Dubrovnik Republic maintained itself as a trading city-state (earlier called Ragusa) under the remote and light-handed suzerainty of Venetians, Hungarians, and Turks, and flourished in its curious isolation. Montenegro (The Black Mountain), touching on the Dubrovnik Republic along the Adriatic coast, remained free until 1699, when it finally fell to the Turks. But even so, it remained almost impenetrable. Its mountains, covered with dark, thick forests that gave the land its name, were too high to subdue. The shepherds and free peasants of Montenegro retained throughout the times of Turkish occupation considerable self-rule—the source of the remarkable local tradition of courage and honor (cojstvo i juna?tvo). Albanians, heirs of the Illyrians who only once in their history formed an independent state, have been called by different names over the centuries (Shqipetare in Albanian; Arbanasi in Serbian; Arnauti in Turkish). The Ardaei, one of the ancient Illyrian tribes, founded a state underking Agron in the third century B.C. Soon after, the Romans defeated them and formed the protectorate of Illyricum in the eastern Adriatic.

For the other groups, the dream of eventually resurrecting their states offered the only basis for resistance, endurance, and hope. In the late 1980s, in a development utterly at odds with the times, the resurrection schemes were reborn along the fault lines separating the ethnic territories.

Few of the fault lines were of local making. Most had formed through the designs of outside powers, whose intersecting Balkan interests fragmented the fabric of indigenous life in a pattern contradicting the vital needs of the Balkan peoples, and leaving among them a thick, haunting deposit of tensions and mutual suspicions.

THE MILITARY FRONTIER

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