Christopher Cviic. World Affairs. Volume 156, Issue 2, Fall 1993.
The actions and inactions of the United States and the European Community in the former Yugoslavia have failed to appreciate the aggressive intentions of the Serbs and may have been colored by self-interest. Economic sanctions have not worked, and the arms embargo has made Serbian aggression more successful by hurting the defensive efforts of other ethnic groups. The preoccupation with mediation, reflecting Europe’s preference for the status quo in the region, allowed the Serbs to extend the range of their aggression. Early decisive action by the West might have spared the Balkans much bloodshed.
As the war that has been going on in Bosnia since April 1992 at last approaches its messy end, the debate in the West about the outside powers’ role in the war, far from abating, is becoming more and more acrimonious. It is easy to see why. Victory has many fathers; defeat has none. Of course, not everybody in the West subscribes to the view that the war in Bosnia—as indeed that in Croatia and Slovenia before—had been a disaster for the West and its diplomacy. Government officials in Britain, France, and some other West European countries like to point to the positive role the international community—and Western Europe in particular—has played (and is stir playing) both by making available a diplomatic machinery for negotiations among the warring parties and others in ex-Yugoslavia and by providing humanitarian aid on a massive scale. But even those governmental apologists qualify their defense of the West’s record in ex-Yugoslavia by saying that, by and large, the West—and the outsiders generally—have done all that was possible for outsiders in very complicated and difficult circumstances to mitigate the horrors of this “problem from hell,” as Warren Christopher, President Clinton’s secretary of state has called it on more than one occasion.
This short, interpretive (and inevitably partly also speculative) article will argue that, on the contrary, the Western governments had had, early in the crisis in Yugoslavia, a number of options available to them and that, if some of those had been taken up early on and followed through, armed conflict might have been prevented altogether or, at the very least, reduced both in its extent and its ferocity. The article win also briefly look at the motives of the local antagonists in the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia and the extent to which their interests and policies overlapped or clashed with those of the outside powers, including the neighbors in the South-East European region.
The Gathering Storm
There had been no shortage of warning signals since the late 1980s about a coming political earthquake in Yugoslavia with an epicenter in Serbia. In 1988-89, the Serbian Communist Party under Slobodan Milosevic, with the backing of a new populist alliance with the nationalists, successfully re-annexed the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. Kosovo, with a 90 percent Albanian majority, and Vojvodina, with a large Hungarian and a smaller Croat minority, had been granted in the 1974 Constitution the status just short of that of a full republic of the Yugoslav federation. That meant that each had its own courts, police, and territorial defense and—even more important—an independent vote in top federal institutions alongside Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Serbia. The resistance by Kosovo’s Albanian majority to their province’s loss of autonomy was crushed by force. Most Serbs were delighted with the results of Milosevic’s “anti-bureaucratic” revolution. In January 1989, the pro-Milosevic forces had captured power in Montenegro in a coup that brought the republic into Serbia’s sphere of control. There had been other storm signals, too.
For example, the Milosevic leadership in Belgrade began in 1987-88 to organize the Serbs in Bosnia (31 percent of the total population) in opposition against the tripartite (Croat-Moslem-Serb) government in Sarajevo, calling on Bosnian Serbs to switch their loyalty to Serbia. Be@&e propaganda claimed that Bosnian Serbs faced the danger of being “swamped” by the fast-reproducing Moslems and that Bosnia was heading for a “fundamentalist” Moslem government. A similar campaign, led by Belgrade TV and actively aided by the Serbian Orthodox church, was launched among Croatia’s 12 percent-strong Serb minority. Croatia’s Serbs were being bombarded with propaganda material aimed at reviving memories of the genocide perpetrated against Croatia by the Nazi-installed puppet Ustasa regime, Ante Pavelic, during the 1941-45 period and convincing the local Serbs—without any evidence—that they once again faced the danger of genocide.
The rationale for this aggressive Great Serbian drive was provided in a memorandum prepared by a working group made up of eminent Serbian economists, political scientists, demographers, historians, and writers for the Serbian Academy of Sciences and leaked to the press in 1986. The memorandum set out a program for a de facto dismantling of the post-1945 Yugoslav federation and the restoration to the Serbs, the majority nation with a 36 percent share of the total population, of the hegemony they had enjoyed in the centralist pre-1941 Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
This Serb campaign of reassertion, increasingly openly backed by the largely Serb-officered Yugoslav army, alarmed opinion in Croatia and Slovenia and led to a dramatic rise in pro-independence sentiment in those two republics. The governments elected at the first multiparty elections in Croatia and Slovenia in the spring of 1990, acting in response to public feeling, embarked on a course that eventually led to independence but for awhile at least kept a door ajar for a possible accommodation with Serbia. However, proposals submitted jointly by Zagreb and Ljubljana in the autumn of 1990 and again in April 1991 for a looser, confederal structure preserving a broad Yugoslav framework but at the same time protecting the non-Serb republics from a Serb takeover were blocked at the federal level by the Serbian bloc (Serbia proper, Kosovo, Vojvodina, and Montenegro), with Bosnia and Macendonia poised uneasily in the middle.
At the time of the multiparty elections in Croatia and Slovenia in April-May 1990, the Yugoslav army tried to disarm those two republics’ territorial defense forces, which had been under their control since the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. However, Slovenia managed to retain about 45 percent of its arms although Croatia was completely disarmed. Predictably, Croatia’s and Slovenia’s new, non-Communist governments’ attempts to buy arms for their new security forces from Yugoslavia’s own defense industry were rebuffed. In January 1991, disagreements about tactics among military chiefs and, even more important, fears of a possible negative Western reaction led to a last-minute cancellation of the army-backed coup in Croatia and Slovenia aimed at replacing the two republics’ new, elected leaders by old Communist “trusties.” But the hardliners in Belgrade need not have worried: the West was moving in their direction.
The West’s Myopia
When Croatia and Slovenia finally realized (Slovenia earlier than Croatia) that a peaceful divorce or even legal separation on the model of that between Norway and Sweden in 1905 would not be allowed by Serbia and its ally, the Yugoslav army, they began to make the first moves toward independence in the spring of 1991, backed by massive pro-independence referendums. The response of individual Western governments and of institutions such as the European Community (EC) was to appeal to all of the parties in Yugoslavia for a peaceful settlement, while leaning particularly heavily on would-be “secessionists.” Croatia and Slovenia were asked to reconsider their intention to declare independence and told repeatedly by Western politicians that a cold welcome awaited them if they disregarded Western pleas not to leave Yugoslavia.
Thus, for example, with the Croats and Slovenes evidently in mind, President Bush wrote to Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante Markovic, at the end of March 1991, warning that the United States “would not reward” those who split off from Yugoslavia without the agreement of everybody else there. This warning was reiterated in even blunter terms by American Secretary of State James Baker in June. During a brief visit to Belgrade en route to Tirana, he said that the United States would not recognize any unilateral declarations of independence by Croatia and Slovenia. Change could take place, he said, only through dialogue among all parties and a final agreement. He repeated that American policy supported a democratic, united Yugoslavia.
The EC followed the same line. Jacques Delors, president of the EC Commission, had visited Yugoslavia in May, carrying the same message. As an incentive to Croatia and Slovenia to stay within Yugoslavia, the EC had signed on 24 June 1991, the day before the two republics declared their independence, a five-year 807m ECU loan agreement with the federal government of Ante Markovic.
All of this was correctly interpreted by Serbian hardliners as the green light for their campaign for re-centralization of Yugoslavia. It could hardly be otherwise in view of the fact that small-print Western appeals for a settlement of the crisis without the use of force did not spell out what the West would do to those who used force in Yugoslavia. As far as Croat and Slovene leaders were concerned, they felt trapped feeling that, between surrender to Belgrade on one side and a risky bid for independence on the other, the latter was preferable—not least because pro-independence, anti-Belgrade opinion had become an important political factor that the political leadership had to take into account both in Croatia and in Slovenia. To the public in the two republics, backing down under pressure of threats from Belgrade was unthinkable. This was known to Western governments, so what lay behind their strong anti-secessionist stance?
The old fear of the Soviet Union regaining control over a part or, indeed, the whole of Yugoslavia had, since the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern and Central Europe in 1989-90, ceased to be a factor in Western reasoning. But there was still a reluctance to contemplate the (inevitably messy and complicated) breakup of a state into which so much Western money and effort had been poured since its break with Moscow in 1948. The EC, which had extended to Yugoslavia a high degree of preferential treatment since the mid-1960s, had convinced itself that its protege was, by and large, a success story and, therefore, a worthy candidate for early association and, eventually, membership. There was an understandable reluctance to face new costs involved in setting up the successor states, which the Community would likely have to bear.
Another worry for the United States and Western Europe was that Croatia’s and Slovenia’s secession would set a precedent for secessions elsewhere—in the Soviet Union with many attendant nuclear complications, but also in Western Europe (in France, Spain, Italy, and, of course, Britain). Allied to this was the fear that the breakup of Yugoslavia would plunge the whole of South-Eastern Europe into a crisis by reopening a number of old territorial disputes centering on Kosovo and Macedonia and involving most of Yugoslavia’s immediate neighbors, as well as Turkey. To sum up, what was going on in Yugoslavia in 1989-90 was for the West, quite simply, the wrong crisis (one of disintegration in an integrating Europe) at the wrong time (when it had to cope in Europe with the aftermath of Germany’s unification and dramatic changes in the Soviet Union and in the Middle East with Iraq) and in the wrong place (the Balkans, which had ceased to be a region of high strategic importance). The status quo in Yugoslavia was what its immediate neighbors, too—from Austria and Italy to Albania and Greece—were keen to preserve. Most of them had in the pre-1941 era harbored designs on Yugoslavia’s territory but had since 1945 become reconciled to its existence and even come to see it as advantageous to themselves. There was then a good case for hesitation on the part of the outsiders, but was the pro-status quo policy the right one for the Yugoslav challenge?
It was not, for the simple reason that the old Titoist order in Yugoslavia had irretrievably broken down. Those in the West backing the status quo in Yugoslavia were chasing a phantom. Given the irreconcilable differences between Croatia and Slovenia on one side and Belgrade (meaning Serbia and the army) on the other, it must have been clear to anybody who knew the situation that Yugoslavia could no longer be kept together except by force under a government enjoying strong political, diplomatic, and economic support—such as Tito had enjoyed during the cold war years. But Western governments were no longer sufficiently interested in Yugoslavia to pay a high price for its continued existence—whatever some in the West might have felt privately about the attractions of a “Chile-in-the-Balkans” solution, a “transitional dictatorship” while the free-market system was running itself in. The plain truth was that the strong glue made up of several ingredients, which had kept post-1945 Yugoslavia together, had dissolved during the 1980s:
- Tito, the charismatic leader and a skillful political manipulator of different groups and nationalities whom British historian A.J.P. Taylor had aptly compared to a Habsburg emperor, had died in 1980.
- Yugoslavia’s economic prosperity, based on massive external assistance in the 1950s and 1960s and in the 1970s on a massive borrowing spree (and with Tito acting as the country’s apparently irresistible credit card) had ended.
- The sense of external danger from the East that had helped forge a sort of national unity in 1948 and maintain it for many years afterwards had disappeared in the late 1980s, making it possible for the peoples of Yugoslavia to start looking for other arrangements and alignments without fear of opening the door to the Red Army and the KGB.
This was a particular cause of worry for the army, a Titoist institution not at all keen on being divided into several statelets linked in some sort of loose confederation. Of equal importance to the army leaders (90 percent of officers were Party members) was the continuation of the socialist order in the country, which they saw threatened by the arrival to power of new non-Communist governments in Croatia and Slovenia (and the coalition ones in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia) and the possibility that such a non-Communist (and also anti-army) government could eventually come to power in Serbia, too. Serbia’s leadership shared the army leaders’ dedication to socialism, but it was primarily interested in rolling back Yugoslavia’s federal system, as enshrined in its 1974 Constitution, and in restoring Serbia to the kind of dominant role it had enjoyed in the pre-1941 monarchist Yugoslavia but had gradually lost under the post-1945 Tito regime.
It should have been clear to all in the West that, given the victory of non-Communist forces in much of formerly Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe and the fact that 1990 multiparty elections had eliminated the Communists from sole power in four out of Yugoslavia’s six federal republics, an anti-pluralist, centralist, and Serb-led restoration could not succeed—certainly not without a good deal of bloodshed—and that if it did succeed, such a success could be only temporary. The Yugoslav Humpty Dumpty could perhaps be put together again but could not hold together—except by force and even then not for long.
But Western perceptions were clouded, partly as a result of the dubious political role played by Ante Markovic, the federal Yugoslav prime minister, a Croat who had formerly been prime minister and president of Croatia and was one of the few remaining non-elected political figures in Yugoslavia appointed under the old nomenklatura procedures in 1989. Markovic continued to hold out to his many Western backers—erroneously as it turned out—the possibility of squaring all the conflicting interests under his leadership. But Markovic was unable to fulfill this promise. By making too many secret concessions to Serbia and the army in order to keep their support, he had completely lost the trust of Croatia and Slovenia without gaining the full backing of those he had done his utmost to appease: Serbia and the army.
The West’s Response to the War
The Yugoslav army’s intervention in Slovenia in June 1991, immediately after the Slovene declaration of independence on 25 June (the same day as Croatia’s), marked the start of the first war in Europe since 1945. It was undertaken without legal constitutional authority. Yugoslavia’s federal collective presidency, the army’s commander-in-chief (and the only body authorized to declare a state of emergency), had been since May paralyzed by the Serbian bloc’s refusal to allow the routine election of Stipe Mesic, a Croat member of the presidency, as its 1991-92 chairman. The war in Slovenia set the alarm bells ringing and galvanized various European governments and institutions into action. But the action they took, though ostensibly aimed at defusing the Yugoslav crisis, in reality followed other unstated agendas that had more to do with the outside protagonists’ current preoccupations than with the situation on the ground in a disintegrating Yugoslavia.
The EC, which took the lead, saw the crisis as an opportunity to demonstrate to the world (not least the United States) in the wake of its own hesitant, disunited performance during the Gulf war that the Community was capable of conducting a coherent foreign and security policy. The fact that the crisis was in Yugoslavia, the Community’s long-standing protege, made it difficult to resist the temptation of telling the Americans that this particular spot of bother could be dealt with by the Europeans alone, without America’s help, which had seemed so important during the cold war years.
But the EC’s willingness to involve itself in Yugoslavia was based on a conviction that all that was wanted was diplomatic mediation. The use of force was not contemplated. This had a lot to do with the example of what had then been happening in Eastern and Central Europe. The reluctance of Mikhail Gorbachev to use force to preserve the Soviet sphere of control there had fed the fatal Western illusion that everybody had come to share its belief in the effectiveness of multilateral diplomacy and its fundamental revulsion against the use of force. The attribution of Western values and preconceptions to those not sharing them had bedeviled the EC’s (and later UN’s) peacemaking in the Balkans from the beginning. Those concerned with the peace process—from the early EC ministerial troikas to Lord Carrington and Cyrus Vance and, finally, Lord Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg—had presumed that sooner or later, given the right diplomatic framework, the “warring factions” would sit down with each other and negotiate a settlement.
What this attitude, born of the years of successful nuclear deterrence in the East-West conflict, completely left out was the fact that in the Yugoslav conflict the stronger party—the army and the Serbs—was too confident of its strength to pull back simply as a result of moral exhortation by outsiders. On the other hand, the weaker party—first Croatia and Slovenia and then, after April 1992, Serb aggression in Bosnia, the Moslems and the Croats there—understood that armed resistance was the only alternative to total surrender to a vengeful enemy and chose to fight—despite the adversary’s overwhelming military superiority.
Pessimists who dominate Western discussions about the war in ex-Yugoslavia claim that, given that the locals were determined not to compromise, the war was inevitable. There was nothing, according to current conventional wisdom, that could be done in 1991 to persuade all the protagonists in Yugoslavia to sit down together to work out a peaceful solution of the conflict leading either to the new Yugoslav arrangement or, if that was impossible, to Yugoslavia’s peaceful dissolution, like that between Norway and Sweden in 1905. This line of argument conveniently ignores the very real possibilities that the West had, under certain preconditions, of influencing the Yugoslav conflict in a constructive way short of undertaking an armed intervention using Western ground troops.
The first precondition was for the West to adopt an open-minded attitude: ruling out no solution—not even Yugoslavia’s demise—instead of clinging to an untenable status quo. The second was Western political win to mediate a settlement and then to help enforce its implementation in an effective and credible way. As it was, neither of those preconditions was met. The West stuck too long to the fiction—for that was what it was—that the conflict in Yugoslavia was a civil war, thus offering Serbia and the army the chance of presenting themselves as defenders of legality and constitutionality, which they most emphatically were not (see above) and to present Croatia and Slovenia as law-breaking secessionists—a term that has bad connotations in the United States, for example. By offering diplomatic mediation on that basis—instead of immediately de-recognizing Yugoslavia—the West gave Serbia valuable extra time to extend and consolidate its conquests in Croatia.
Worse than that, by imposing—once the armed conflict had started—an arms embargo on the whole region of Yugoslavia, Western governments (later followed by the United Nations) handed a huge advantage to the stronger side—the Yugoslav army and its Serb paramilitary allies who had no need of foreign imports relying as they did on Yugoslavia’s large arms industry, much of it situated in Serbia and Bosnia. To a certain extent, the Serbian army’s advantage was offset in Slovenia by the Slovenes’ success in keeping some of their territorial defense weapons, but there was nothing like that in Croatia (and later, Bosnia’s multi-ethnic territorial defense force was also disarmed while Bosnian Serb supporters of Belgrade were given arms by the military). In short, the way to make Belgrade pause and then negotiate was for the West to state, right at the start of the crisis when it still enjoyed enormous credibility after the victory in the Gulf war, that the use of force against any of the republics would lead to those republics’ instant diplomatic recognition as independent states by Western governments, implying their full freedom as sovereign states to arm themselves for self-defense.
It is often said in Britain, France, and some other Western states that, on the contrary, the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia by the EC in January 1992, for which Germany had been pressing since the summer of 1991, had been “premature” and that it would have been wiser to wait for the resolution of all the outstanding problems (including that of the protection of the minorities, notably the Serbs in Croatia). That view ignores the fact that, while the talking was going on under the EC’s auspices in the Hague and later in Brussels, Serbian forces were continuing to wage war on Croatia and destroy its cities. Croatia could be asked to wait for diplomatic recognition only by those who were ready to protect it from the aggression then in progress. But Western governments offered no such help—not even naval protection for the city of Dubrovnik while it was being shelled by Serbian forces—only diplomacy.
It has to be said, however, that what really stopped the war in Croatia eventually—after the Yugoslav army and its allies, the Serb paramilitaries, had occupied nearly a third of its territory and caused death and destruction on a massive scale—was the Croats’ defense—ironically, with weapons captured from the Yugoslav army or imported in breach of the international embargo. As for the minority issue, it was actually the majority nation, the Croats, who needed protection, not the Serb minority—a part of which had taken up arms against Croatia quite early in the second half of 1990 without waiting to discuss their status and rights in Croatia with the new, non-Communist (and admittedly sometimes crassly insensitive) government of Franjo Tudjman, whose readiness to give the Serbs in Croatia genuine equality was never put to the test. Thus, international recognition in January 1992, once the EC had gone through a lengthy procedure (the Badinter Commission) of establishing that Yugoslavia had truly disintegrated, probably came too late to make a difference on the ground.
Why recognition has become such an issue has had less to do with ex-Yugoslavia than with internal EC rivalries, exacerbated by Germany’s unification in October 1990. Unification fueled fears (particularly in Britain and France) that Yugoslavia’s dissolution would open the way for Germany’s entry into South-Eastern Europe as a dominant force and protector of a bloc of states—a sort of Kleinmitteleuropa—made up of Austria, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. But this was to misunderstand the real reasons for Germany’s advocacy since July 1991 of Croatia’s and Slovenia’s recognition. That had, above all, to do with the pressure on the German government by domestic opinion and sections of the press (notably papers like Die Welt and the Frankfruter Allgemeine Zeitung) for something to be done to stop the slaughter in Croatia. There is no evidence that it was inspired by a new version of the old pre-1914 Wilhelminian Drang nach dem Sudosten. Today, Germany’s focus of economic and diplomatic interest is Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, not the Balkans.
By the time Bosnia arrived on the agenda—once a cease-fire had been arranged in Croatia in January 1991 under the so-called Vance Plan—the opportunities for constructive outside intervention had diminished considerably—even though the need for such an intervention had become even greater, not least because so much blood had been spilled and material destruction caused. The truth of the matter is that, by its failure to act sensibly and decisively in Croatia, the West had lost much of the credibility it had with all sides to begin with. Regrettably, it never adopted as its policy aim the only real alternative to abandoning most of Bosnia to Slobodan Milosevic and to his local client, Radovan Karadzic, which would have been a firm international guarantee under an international trusteeship to underpin either a decentralized Bosnia unitary state or a form of “cantonization.”
Once again, as in the case of Croatia and Slovenia before, there was nothing wrong with the perfectly proper and legal recognition by the EC of Bosnia as a sovereign state following its referendum on independence on 29 February and I March 1992—except that it was backed by no such guarantee of an international solution. There was a model for such a solution, agreed on at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, that was in accord both with Bosnia’s needs and international political imperatives. Placing Bosnia in 1878 under Austro-Hungarian management was a masterstroke that for a few decades gave Bosnia excellent government and at the same time helped avert international rivalry and war.
A determined Western push early in 1992 for such a solution, backed by a firm offer to dispatch an international force to implement it, would have found a lot of support among members of all three groups in Bosnia—not just the Moslems and the Croats but also the Serbs. An international trusteeship formula for Bosnia would have helped isolate both Serb and Croat extremists agitating for partition as well as the (at the beginning not very numerous) Moslems favoring a centralized, Moslem-dominated state. Along that path, the disastrous Croat-Moslem conflict, a tragic feature of the present endgame in Bosnia, could also have been avoided. A clear Western stand would also have made the essential opportunistic leadership in Belgrade pause and, at least for the time being, abandon its plan to capture Bosnia as too risky and would have persuaded it to settle instead for a compromise solution.
But there was no need for second thoughts or restraint by Belgrade. Once again, as in 1991 in Croatia, Western governments ignored the danger signs as well as possible sensible ways of dealing with the situation and recognized Bosnia on the basis, it is widely (and I think correctly) believed, of vague promises by Slobodan Milosevic given to the United States that Serbia would not invade Bosnia. This was a promise that Belgrade formally kept: Bosnia was invaded in April by paramilitary groups coming from Serbia but not officially linked with the authorities there; and from within Bosnia by the old Yugoslav army in its new guise as the army of the Serbian Bosnian state.
Epilogue
Having recognized Bosnia in April 1992, Western governments sat back to await events. The only purely symbolic gesture of support for the newly recognized Bosnia state was the decision to station in Sarajevo the headquarters of UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) set up to police the cease-fire in Croatia. What has happened since—the whole sorry, inconclusive military intervention versus humanitarian aid debate—has simply been the logical extension of the Western governments’ original decision back in 1991 to forego the use of any (even indirect) form of military coercion against the aggressor in the war in former Yugoslavia. Economic sanctions imposed by the UN in May 1992 against Serbia following its formal identification as aggressor in Bosnia, though they may prove effective in the long run as a means of enforcing an eventual settlement, were not an appropriate instrument for stopping the aggression. Hardest to justify even for a most determined defender of the West’s stance towards ex-Yugoslavia has been the denial, first to Croatia and then to Bosnia, of the means of self-defense in the framework of the continuing arms embargo. By this means, Western governments—above all the British and the French but also, reluctantly, that of the United States—actually helped aggression in the former Yugoslavia to succeed. The claim that everything that could be done was done and that anything else possible simply does not stand up. History will pass its own verdict, but our own age will have to live with the consequences—as had happened once before with the policy of appeasing the Nazi and Fascist aggressors in the 1930s. The parallel is exact. History does repeat itself, it seems.