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December
28, 2000
The
Worst of Times
20th
CENTURY IN REVIEW
Historians
have better things to do than debate which century was more
intense or important for certain regions and peoples. The
20th century will, however, enjoy a dubious claim
to fame as one that brought tremendous upheavals and disasters
to the Balkans, leaving the peninsula hardly any better than
at its beginning, or actually worse for wear.
After
centuries of dual control and domination by the Habsburgs
and the Ottomans, the Balkans people began their liberation
struggles in the 1800s. These liberation wars culminated in
1912, ending the Ottoman Turks' role in peninsular affairs,
making Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia into regional powers, and
creating an Albanian state for the first time in history.
The war of 1913 was more of a squabble between the victors,
adjusting the gains of 1912 and sowing the seeds of mutual
distrust that would plague the Balkans for the next fifty
years. But the Balkans Wars of 1912-13 were the first major
realignment of power in Europe since the Congress of Vienna
in 1815, opening the doors to policies that led to the first
Great War.
WORLD
WARS
World
War One began in the Balkans, when a Bosnian Serb shot the
Austro-Hungarian crown prince. Within a month, Austria and
Germany declared war on Serbia and Russia, while France and
Britain chose to support their allies. The war took a great
toll on the Serbs and Rumanians, whose countries were eventually
overwhelmed and occupied – at least until the victorious offensive
of 1918, which demolished the armies of Austria, Germany and
Bulgaria within months.
After
the Great War, Hungary emerged as a weakened but independent
entity, Romania and Greece grew larger, Bulgaria was humbled,
Turkey restructured and Serbia and Montenegro bound in a joint
state with former enemies declared brothers overnight – "Yugoslavia."
The
interwar period was time of hard choices and poverty, giving
birth to Communist movements and Mussolini-style dictatorships
across the peninsula. These regimes joined the Berlin-Rome
Axis by 1941, with only Greece standing firm against the advancing
darkness. Yugoslavia's crumbling government tried to avoid
confrontation by cooperating, but its people revolted and
threw out the March 1941 treaty with the Axis. Hitler's wrath
descended on the Balkans in April, dismembering Yugoslavia,
overwhelming Greece and delaying the invasion of the USSR
by four fatal weeks. And while Serbs and Greeks paid dearly
for their resistance, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Romanians
were paying a price for their alliance with Hitler – first
by bleeding for the Nazis in the frozen steppes of Russia,
then with their freedom at the end of the war.
THE
COLD WAR
No
one came from World War Two the same. Churchill and Stalin
partitioned the peninsula in Potsdam, leaving Albania, Bulgaria,
Hungary and Romania in the Soviet zone; Greece was torn by
a civil war and decades of unrest, finally joining NATO but
always feuding with fellow member Turkey.
Rather
than a focus of Cold War hostilities, the Balkans remained
relatively peaceful – mostly because of Yugoslavia's neutrality.
After 1945, Yugoslavia was ruled by an indigenous Communist
party and a homegrown dictator Josip Broz-Tito. Tensions rose
when Tito was declared a heretic by Stalin in 1948, but simmered
down when Stalin died in 1953. The Communist regime kept the
Yugoslav brotherhood concept, but encouraged ethnic awareness
and federalization of the country. In the end, it turned Yugoslavia
into a confederacy ruled by a committee of Party-appointed
officials after Tito died.
REVOLT
AND REBIRTH
The
1990s brought the violent end of Communism in Romania, a more
peaceful overthrow in Hungary and Bulgaria, and abject poverty
in all three. Though Hungary has fared somewhat better, the
neo-liberal policies of the new regimes proved to be a disaster,
as assets were sold off for a pittance while foreign investors
and local crime lords took over. In Albania, government collapsed
and the country descended into anarchy, starvation and low-level
clan warfare.
Even
so, Yugoslavia fared the worst. Bereft of context that kept
it together, having successfully demolished the ideas that
brought it together in the first place, it ruptured along
ethnic lines and Communist boundaries with great effusion
of blood.
Slovenia
became an independent state for the first time, after successfully
ambushing the halfhearted effort by the Federal Army to prevent
its secession.
Croatia
followed suit, fighting along the way the remnants of the
Federal Army and the native Serbs – determined not to be slaughtered
like they were under the pro-Nazi Croatian regime in World
War Two. In the end, with American help, Croatian government
defeated the Serb insurrection and ethnically cleansed most
Serbs from territory it claimed by 1996.
Bosnia
– an uneasy mix of three distinct ethno-religious groups –
descended into war in early 1992, as its Muslim leaders declared
independence, backed by Croats intending to annex the entire
republic – or choice parts thereof – to Croatia. Bosnia's
Serbs fought both for some 1400 days. In November 1995, the
uneasy Muslim-Croat alliance signed a peace treaty with the
Serbs under American guns, making Bosnia a union of two semi-independent
states in all but name. This chimera has not proven viable
yet. Despite the allegations of horrible atrocities, which
constituted part and parcel of war propaganda, no one knows
for sure the total number of victims the 1992-95 war claimed.
More than half the republic's prewar population is either
in exile or displaced.
Macedonia
separated peacefully, about the same time as Bosnia. For years,
it has battled Greek, Bulgarian and Albanian territorial claims,
and almost collapsed when NATO stationed a large number of
troops, as well as thousands of Albanian refugees, on its
territory during the 1999 Kosovo war.
Albanian
population in Kosovo has grown during the century, eventually
spurring the claims to independence. Kosovo has been in open
revolt against Yugoslavia since 1981, but its separatist leadership
initiated a policy of virtual apartheid once this Serbian
province's semi-independence was constitutionally revoked
in 1989. By 1998, a militant wing of the separatist movement
emerged (KLA), funded by drug money and "taxes"
from the Albanian émigré community. Twice the Yugoslav police
and the military almost crushed the militants, only to be
stopped by US and NATO's threats. When Serbia refused a NATO
ultimatum to give Kosovo independence, at Rambouillet in March
1999, the alliance started bombing its troops, cities, factories
and bridges. For 78 days, virtually unopposed, NATO planes
devastated Yugoslavia, stopping only when its leadership caved
in and allowed a conditional occupation of Kosovo. Some 700,000
Albanians who left Kosovo for Albania and Macedonia during
the war now poured into the province, followed by thousands
of other Albanians. After NATO's arrival in June 1999, over
300,000 non-Albanians, mostly Serbs and Roma, fled or were
expelled at gunpoint from their torched homes by the victorious
KLA.
Montenegro,
though allied with Serbia since before 1918 and made partner
in the new Yugoslavia in 1992, moved towards secession in
1998, after a US-backed former ally of Slobodan Milosevic
was elected President. Aided by hundreds of millions of dollars
from the US, the tiny republic had gained virtual independence
by the time Milosevic fell from power. Though that development
seemed to eliminate the rationale for independence, the regime
of President Djukanovic is now pushing for secession even
harder.
In
October 2000, after an early election called by Slobodan Milosevic's
Socialist coalition, the unified opposition parties of Serbia
forced Milosevic to concede the election and step down as
Yugoslav President. Vojislav Kostunica, the new president,
vowed to reform Serbia but refused to give up Kosovo, Montenegro
or jurisdiction over alleged war criminals. But he is opposed
by NATO, Albanian militants, Djukanovic, and even his strongest
coalition partner, Zoran Djindjic – who does little to hide
his ambition for power.
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