Petersen – Ethnic Conflicts

Steven Burg and Michael Berbaum made a survey research.

Focusing on the increasing numbers of those declaring themselves as “Yugoslav” on census forms, rather
than some specific nationality, the authors, with some important qualifications, came to the following
conclusion: “These findings support an interpretation of Yugoslav identity as evidence of diffuse
support for the existence of a shared political community”.

Tim Judah on the beginning of the conflict:

“Most men who found themselves on the Serbian side of the frontlines were mobilized whether they
liked it or not, but there was also enthusiasm. Not only did most genuinely believe they were waging
war to prevent a ‘new genocide’ of the Serbian people but they were borne aloft by their early
victories, intoxicated with the joy of the military triumphs which they believed were their generation’s
contribution to Serbian martial history. These were the illusions that only gradually began to fade”.

“Rapid structural change produced new information and beliefs”.

Critically, emotions resulted in direct actions that could not have been predicted from previously held
attitudes. In the study of ethnic conflict, emotional mechanisms are often more important than
knowledge of attitudes.

In large part, this book is about regional homogenization through violence and
discrimination

After presenting the historical material, the chapter addresses three puzzles:

1. What explains the outbreak of the Croatian War in 1991?

2. What explains Bosnian Croatian, as well as Bosnian Serb, violence and discrimination against
Muslims in Bosnia?
3. What explains Serbian participation and tacit mass approval in the expulsion of over a million
Albanians in Kosovo?
 Method – The emotions-based approach

Historical Background

The main axis of Yugoslav politics has always rotated around the relationship between Croats and Serbs;
centralization of power has usually been the main battlefield. The question of federalism vs unitarism
dominated the first Constituent Assembly of 1920 and then again, several times during the 1930s, 1960s
and 1980s.

For many Serbs, the first Yugoslavia was an extension of the Serbian state. One-fifth of the Serbian
nation had perished during the First World War. For Serbs, this sacrifice helped liberate their fellow
south Slavs. Serbs expected a measure of gratitude as well as the right to build new state upon the
government, bureaucracy, and military of prewar Serbia. For Serbs, it was only natural that the king of
the new state would come from the Serbian dynasty. Combined with an ideology of unitary state and
centralized governance, this reliance on the foundations of the prewar Serbian state was a recipe for
Serbian dominance. In turn, almost 90% staff of the Yugoslav state were Serbs.

As Serbian gendarmes and military personnel replaced that of Austro-Hungary, Serbian police
administrative techniques replaced those of their predecessor. During one event, occurring in January
1921, Serbian gendarmes in Topusko went from house to house forcing Croatian peasants strip naked
and kiss a picture of Nikola Pasic, the Serbian unitarist political leader, while repeating that Pasic’s
picture was “God the Father”.

Having lived as second class citizens under Austro-Hungary, Croats were not ready to accept a similar
status under the less-developed Serbs. Joseph Rothschild sums up the relationship between Serbs and
Croats when they were first joined in the interwar state:

“The former subjects of the late “Central European” Habsburg Empire considered themselves more
advanced, in terms of all such cultural and socioeconomic criteria, than the “Balkan” Serbs to the south,
by whom they were politically dominated to their lasting ire. The Serbs of the prewar Serbian Kingdom,
in turn, repudiated the cultural pretensions of the northerners and dismissed their political legacies as
Austrophile, formalistic, and irresponsible. They viewed themselves as “doers” and these others as
“carpers”.

For Croats and Serbs, perceptions of status were inherent in the new state. Croatians transferred their
previous resentments to the new relationship.

In 1904, Stjepan and Ante Radics founded the “Crotian Peasant Party” which rapidly emerged as the
leading force for Croatian rights as well as agrarian interests.

Several reorganizations of the state attempted to solve the Croatian problem (revolts of peasants in
1920s over animal draft law). In 1925, King Alexander granted substantial autonomy to Croatians. In
1929, shortly after the assassination of Radic on the floor of Parliament, King Alexander attempted to
change the very ethnic consciousness of the country by creating new administrative units cutting across
historical and ethnic boundaries. These units were called banovinas, an ancient Croatian term, to pacify
Croats; they were named after rivers to avoid any ethnic or national favoritism. No Serbian and Croatian
national symbols were to have a connection to the government. In 1939, after the rise of the Ustasha
(Ante Pavelic), a Croatian political and terrorist organization that managed to assassinate King
Alexander in 1934, Prince (Regent) Paul again recognized Croatian authority in the form of the
Sporazum. This agreement ceded to Zagreb a variety of budgetary and administrative powers. After
signing the reform, the Prince Regent visited Zagreb, the first time the Royal House had paid a visit there
in over ten years.

The Sporazum did not go far enough for many radicalized Croatian nationalists, thousands of whom
participated in the genocidal Nazi puppet regime under Ante Pavelic.

The goals and achievements of the Ustasha (Croatian Revolutionary Movement) regime are well
known: a particular solution to the Serbian problem (one-third to be killed, one-third deported, and one-
third converted); tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies killed at the
Jasenovac death camp; countless massacres, many of a primitive and horrific nature. So many corpses
had been thrown into the Naretva River that the government paid peasants a bounty for each body
pulled out of the water.

Furthermore, the Ustasha lacked a coherent ideology. As Aleksa Djilas sums up:

“The Ustashas combined modern totalitarianism with primitive traditions of rebellion and revenge.
They were terrorists first. Fascism only came later, and it was never fully absorbed, let alone
developed.”

After considering the deployment of troops, Tito decided on wholesale removals from the Croatian
Party. The resulting purge was massive. Fifty-thousand members of the Croatian League of Communists
lost their party cards; up to five thousand were imprisoned; fifty-thousand students were identified as
“class enemies.” The imprisoned included Franjo Tudjman, who would emerge later as independent
Croatia’s first president.

Kosovo and Vojvodina could veto Serbian Republic initiatives but the Serbian republic could not veto the
initiatives of these internal federal units. Undoing this relationship became on of Milosevic’s earliest,
and most popular, political moves.

The Croatians’ demands for higher autonomy led Muslims, both Slavic Muslims, and Albanians, to seek
greater ethnic power as well. Rankovic had subscribed to the theory that Bosnia’s Muslims were in
reality Serbs who had converted through force or opportunity during Ottoman rule; he was adamantly
opposed to granting any significant recognition to this collectivity.

By 1983, Yougoslavian authorities uncovered illegal Muslim organizations tied to Islamic groups abroad.
Eleven members were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, one of them being Alija Izetbegovic who
would go on to become the first president of Bosnia.