Written in 1996
An “Apology”
Several times I have thought to sit down and just write what I will say to you now. I resisted that urge out of fear that I could not “prove” various of my impressions or allegations. I also feared that I would write simply an anecdotal account of my own experiences and not shed a tremendous amount of light on what is happening (or has happened) in the former Yugoslavia. As a result I have now read enough to conclude that my impressions are as valid as any other anecdotal account of which there have been many. My only justification can be I lived there, I speak the language, in short they are my experiences.
“A Marginalized Intellectual?”
Who am I? I am an American of Anglo-Germanic origins born in Pittsburgh, a town with not a few Serbs and Croats, among other Slavic peoples. I first became aware of Yugoslavia in my last year of high school when I did, strangely enough, a presentation on the causes and outbreak of World War I. Little did I know then how intimately my life would later be related to Yugoslavia. I learned all of the factions: The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Turks, The Serbian Black Hand, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, etc.. I think my classmates had had about all of the knowledge of the Balkan peninsula they cared for when I was done.
In college I studied Russian language and literature. I expected eventually to work among Russian speaking young people as a teacher. After college I continued on to seminary, an evangelical one, to study Bible, theology and related subjects. There in seminary I met several classmates, one of whom was a Yugoslav Slovak from Vojvodina, the northern part of Serbia and another, an American who had been living in Zagreb, Croatia and was the dean of a pastoral training school in Vienna for Yugoslav evangelicals. I was invited, given my background in Slavic languages, to join this faculty and teach there. First I would spend a couple years in language study and then teach in the Serbo-Croatian language.
Three years in Belgrade / The “Glory” Days of Socialist Yugoslavia
We arrived in Belgrade, the capital of the Union of Socialist Federated Republics of Yugoslavia (USFRY), in August of 1986. We spent a year and a half in language study in Belgrade. For another year and a half I traveled extensively throughout Yugoslavia working with student groups and teaching Bible education by extension courses, especially in Skopje, Macedonia and throughout Bulgaria. I did also teach the Yugoslav students in Vienna one semester in 1989.
During the first three years we lived in Belgrade we traveled by train and car all over the former Yugoslavia. Besides frequent travels southward into Macedonia we also visited friends in Zagreb and regularly commuted through Slovenia enroute to Vienna. I spent time on the Slovenian coast at a camp for evangelical college students one summer (1987). We drove by way of the “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity”[1] from Belgrade to Zagreb and then headed south through Karlovac to Rijeka and then crossed over onto the Istrian Peninsula.
“We waited 500 years!”
As I and some students headed west in my car along the “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” we saw many Turks who worked in Germany and Austrian heading east. The Turks were stopped dead, bumper to bumper in a line fifty kilometers long. Some had been in line overnight. As we drove past the seemingly endless line one of my Serbian friends stuck his head out the window and shouted, “You can wait, you Turks! We waited 500 years for freedom! You can wait!”[2]
The Myths
That incident serves to introduce my first main point: the role of myth in the present conflict. Each ethnic group sees itself through its own mythology. The Serbs see themselves as the “Guardians of the Gate”, the protectors of western Christian Europe from the onslaught of the Muslim invasion.
The Serbs: The Defenders of Christendom
Our first stay in Yugoslavia corresponded with the celebration of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, the most fateful and determining event in the collective memory of the Serbian people. In 1389 Prince Lazar, according to national heroic epic poetry, had to choose between a heavenly crown or an earthly crown. If Lazar chose the heavenly crown it would me defeat by Sultan Murat[3] on the battlefield and martyrdom. Lazar chose the heavenly crown.[4] Serbia lost the battle, but still Serbs feel that they slowed the Turks down enough for western Europe to prepare for the Turkish Muslim invasion which eventually reached the very gates of Vienna. (It was, in fact, a Pole, Jan Sobieski,[5] who repelled the Turks, in an alliance with other forces.) However, since during the nearly 500 years of Turkish rule the Serbs harried and frequently rebelled at the cost of being beheaded or impaled. They feel that they remained true to Christendom while others converted to Islam for political or economic advancement. Present day Bosnian Muslims are, in their view, nothing other than Serbs who first, perhaps, became Bogomil heretics and then Muslim heretics. In short, they are traitors to their nation and their God.[6]
If you have never read Ivo Andriæ’s nov el, The Bridge on the Drina[7], I would highly recommend it. It won a Nobel Prize in literature in 1958. Andriæ tells the 500 years of history of the Turkish “yoke” by focusing on a bridge built to cross the Drina river, the border between Serbia and Bosnia, at the town of Višegrad. The bridge was built by Sokolov Pasha,[8] himself a Serb who had been taken as a child to be trained to be a janissary. The tale is full of the cruelty of the Turks and the cunning and deceit of the Serbs in outwitting their Turkish overlords. The most vivid scene I recall is when the Turks impaled a rebel on the bridge to strike terror into the hearts of the populace. Another of Andriæ’s tales, The Pasha’s Concubine, tells the horrific story of a young Serbian girl who is taken to be a concubine of the local beg, or Turkish official. He uses her until he is transferred then he kicks her out. She has no where to go and is rejected by her people though she had no choice. In the end she commits suicide. The hopelessness of Andric’s tale and the Muslim sense of fatalism, “If Allah wills”, has sunk deep into the bones of all the Yugoslav peoples.
A Modern Hadj to Ecumenical Heaven on Earth
In May of 1989 before returning to the States for a year we drove south through Serbia to Višegrad and crossed the Bridge on the Drina. I took pictures of the Arabic script on the inscription in the center of the bridge. We were fascinated as we drove those windy roads to turn a bend and see a blistering newly built, newly painted minaret and a small mosque in many tiny villages. Were we still in Europe? We seemed to have entered a twilight zone of the Middle Ages. Time stood still, except who was paying for the building of these mosques? Surely the tiny villages could not support them. Serbs claimed that oil rich Arab states were funding the building of these mosques and others like the new, large one in a western suburb of Zagreb. The Serbs would not allow building of a newer mosque. Muslims in Belgrade would have to be content with the seventeenth century mosque left there by the Ottomans.
We drove to Sarajevo to see an alumnus of the training college, a Serb. He was pastor of a small Baptist church in a mixed neighborhood near the then and still now defunct Jewish cemetery.[9] This was before any hostilities broke out. Off the tourist trail the hostility of the neighboring communities was evident if checked. Of course, downtown on the main square there stood a new Roman Catholic cathedral, the ancient Mosque and a centuries old Serbian Orthodox church; Sarajevo, Olympic city, show place of Brotherhood and Unity, Tito’s proof to the West of his toleration of religious liberty and the miracle of the self-managed Yugoslav state. One writer described Yugoslavia as the realization of Socialist utopian dreams on earth. That was in the 1987 edition of his book![10]
“Seobe”/ Wanderings/ Flights
Ko se seli, taj se ne veseli! He who moves does not rejoice. An old Serbian proverb.
My friend showed us the fountain at which Muslim faithful rinse out their mouths and wash their hands and feet before entering the Mosque. According to local legend, if you drink from this well you will return to Sarajevo and never leave. “Neka bude!” [“Let it be!”], I said and blithely drank. Later he, his Yugoslav Albanian wife, then pregnant with their fourth child and their three daughters had to flee Sarajevo. There was no room for a heretic married to an Albanian in Sarajevo. After “wanderings” in Germany and Macedonia he has returned to his home town of Kraljevo in south Serbia. Odds are neither he nor I will ever see Sarajevo again.
The Western Myth of Sarajevo as Ecumenical Heaven: A Muslim perspective
Though I am sympathetic to Khalid Durán’s views on ecumenical cooperation as stated in his article, “Jews, Christians, Muslims - Working Together for Modernity”[11], he labors with a misconception about the ethnic and religious unity of Sarajevo. As I have indicated Tito used Sarajevo as a show place of “Brotherhood and Unity.” Sarajevo as the Olympic city was mostly a façade. Tito promoted those with whom he agreed and who agreed with him to power in all three of the religious communities. Those who dissented were sidelined to remote monasteries or in the most extreme cases either exiled or sent to the Goli Otok (Bare Island),[12] a penal colony on an island in the Adriatic from which few returned.
Durán says that modernity is being trampled on world wide, but especially in Bosnia and the Sudan.
In what sense is modernity being trampled upon? The answer is that in Sarajevo we had a model case of society for the twenty-first century. Jews, Christians, and Muslims - believers and disbelievers - formed one nationality. They regarded themselves as belonging to three different nations - Croat, Serb, Musliman - but constituting together one nationality. None of them formed a majority; they were all minorities, and they had other, smaller minorities living in their midst, especially Gypsies and Jews.[13] There was frequent intermarriage in every possible combination. They were economically competitive - in fact, thriving, intellectually creative, and productive in the arts.
Their society rested on pillars of pluralism and secularism. ...[14]
I think Durán is idealizing the picture a good bit. Reality on the ground was not so rosy. Though not nearly as bitterly divisive as it is at present, still there were fairly ethnically segregated neighborhoods. Though there was “frequent intermarriage in every possible combination”, as he claims, it was predicated on an abandonment of ethnic identity, usually, or at least religious identity. Secularism and economic advancement were the keys to this coexistence, not religious or ethnic tolerance.
Durán also shows an uncritical acceptance of Bosnian government propaganda. I will quote selectively to show this tendency and then comment on his assertions.
There is general agreement among European intellectuals that Europe would not have allowed the genocide in Bosnia had the Serbs been Muslims and the Bosnians all Christians. In fact, what was foretold has already come to pass. As soon as the Bosnians succeeded in setting up an army of their own (they had none at the time of independence in April, 1992, when they were attacked by Serbia) and reconquered a dozen villages, Britian, France, and Germany became alarmed and began pretending that they wanted to intervene in Bosnia to stop the shelling of Sarajevo by the Serbs. The press did not go along with that, and leading newspapers criticized the planned interventions as an effort to prevent the Bosnians from liberating at least the most vital parts of their country.
...Over a period of two years the same excuses have been repeated over and over again, although they were all rebutted from the very first day. I am referring particularly to the ridiculous argument that there can be no military solution [i.e. “We don’t do mountains. We do deserts.”]...
There is no point here in entering into the details of all the subterfuges and distortions, such as declaring Serbia’s aggression against Bosnia a civil war between “Bosnian Croats,” “Bosnian Serbs,” and the Bosnians themselves.
Durán’s opinions on these issues seem quite one-sidedly pro-Bosnian government, i.e. Muslim. In fact, the US sent military advisors to train a Bosnian-Croat force which did eventually, in summer of 1995, rout the “Bosnian Serbs”. Serbian news media constantly showed the duplicity of the West in sending arms to both the Croats and the Muslims in spite of the embargo.[15] While the European Community may have dithered too long, Durán’s interpretation of their inaction is, excuse me, racist. That there was and is a division in the EC and NATO countries over how to handle the crisis is demonstrable, but Durán’s interpretation of the reason is hardly charitable or in the spirit of ecumenism. Also his assertion that the real difficulty of fighting in the Julian Alps is only a subterfuge to avoid Western engagement ignores the hard realities of the histories of wars in the Balkans. He could ask Hannibal or the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburgs or Hitler’s Nazis about the real difficulties of winning a ground war in the Balkans. Tito survived by hiding in those mountains with Jajce being his major hide-out during the war.[16] Durán also chooses to ignore the fact that Bosnia was a republic of the USFRY and that it did secede unilaterally, and in the eyes of the ruling USFRY government illegally. While his interpretation of the USFRY being only a Serbian puppet may be defensible, one wonders whether Flanders could secede from Belgium without a battle or Texas from the United States. The situation in the former Yugoslavia is much more like the US Civil War than a clear case of aggression, as in Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait.
Durán also gives an example of uncritical acceptance of news media reports of alleged atrocities. Besides quoting uncritically the reports of mass rape[17], he cites at least one atrocity which he does not document, and I doubt he could prove.
..Serb medical doctors operating for hours upon Bosnian women, leaving them with animal fetuses in their wombs, can only be compared to Nazi doctors such as Mengele. The big difference is that this time everybody has known about it, right from the start. Whereas the Nazis tried to hide what they were doing, Serb fascists want the whole world to know what they are doing and give utmost publicity to their crimes.[18]
The demonization of the Serbs is obvious. He cites no source. He calls Serbs fascist. This sort of demonization has been typical of the propaganda of all sides and does not help resolve the conflict. As a representative of his religious community before an ecumenical body, himself interested in ecumenism he should either be more careful or at least cite a source. That such stories abound and that they are unproven is well known. Weingärtner in his report says the following: “We were told that prostitutes have found this a source of revenue. For a fee they will make up stories of how they themselves have been raped.”[19] While I doubt Durán’s allegation, I am not sure that Weingärtner has not been deceived as well, but at least Weingärtner says “We were told...”. He does not make a blanket claim. Mojzes[20] and Weingärtner[21] mention war crimes of Croatian and Bosnian Muslim forces as well as Serb crimes.
Also Durán shows an overly idealistic view of the history of Bosnia. Again I quote:
Bosnia has a long history of religious pluralism. The Arian Christians, and later their Bogomil successors, never enforced their version of Christianity on the Catholic and Orthodox minorities. The Muslim successors to the Bogomils welcomed Spanish Jews in their midst....[22]
Yet in the same paragraph he admits that both the Ottomans and the Serbs interfered from “outside.” I am not sure what period he is referring to. The “Muslim successors to the Bogomils” were the Ottoman Turks and their cruelty is well known, as he himself admits. Also the tolerance afforded religious communities under the Ottomans was at the price of a tax levied only on non-Muslim subjects of the Sultan. Andriæ in his novels has given a historical view of the Turkish Muslim cruelty.
Again while I am sympathetic to Durán’s desire that we “build something together” I think he represents, unfortunately, a Western mythological approach to Sarajevo and Bosnia. The Bosnian government through Aleksandar Šaæibej[23] and Haris Siladžiæ and their excellent command of English and knowledge of, at least, the American psychology/mythology: love of the underdog (the minority or weaker party) and democracy, carefully cultivated the image of Bosnia being a “victim”, a status which the news media used finally to force Western military intervention on the side of the Bosnian Muslim government.
Greater Serbia
Another mythology is that of the Serbs who dream of recovering their empire when it was at its height under Tsar Dušan.[24] He ruled only briefly, but established a canon of law unequaled in its time. During the reign of Stefan Nemanja (1169-96) Serbia gained a crown sent by the Pope Honorius III.[25] At the same time his brother, Sava (1170?75?-1199), went to Constantinople or Tsarigrad to receive an ordination as a bishop in the Eastern Orthodox, Byzantine church. This sort of playing off the West against the East has long since become a trademark of the Serbs and Yugoslavia generally.
Greater Croatia
Croats, likewise, dream of their one moment of glory in 910 or 930 when King Tomislav established the only independent Croatian state which lasted all of 150 years.[26] During most of their history Croats have been under the rule of the Austrians or Hungarians or Italians. Having accepted the Roman Catholic faith they feel tied to the West and look westward to the German speaking world and Rome as their spiritual heritage. Culturally they have always considered themselves more refined than the Serbs, whom they consider to be barbaric, lazy easterners.
Aftermath of World War I
After World War I as a reward to the Serbian king for the loyalty of his troops who fought alongside French and British allies parts of Italy (present day Slovenia) , Austria (Bosnia and Slavonia), Hungary (Vojvodina), Romania (Banat), Bulgaria (Pirot) and Albania (Metohija) were given to the newly formed Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.[27] From the list you see that during World War I the Serbs were surrounded by axis powers. The same scenario followed in World War II.
World War II Atrocities
The only other time Croatia has ever existed as a separate state since Tomislav’s time was during the brief rule of the Nazi quisling, Ante Paveliæ, during the Nazi occupation in World War II. Oddly enough, the present Croatian flag is the same, as are the military uniforms and national anthem. That makes Serbs more than a bit nervous.
During World War II Croatian forces, Ustashe, perpetrated horrific war crimes on the Serbian population of the Lika and Knin regions as well as the Serbian villages along the Bosnian border with Croatia.[28] Often the Croatian forces united with Bosnian quisling forces against the Serb Royal Army, the Chetniks. At other times the Chetniks would join forces with the Croat Nazi forces to fight the Communist Partizan guerrilla fighters (Tito et alia). British support of Tito led to the Partizans “liberating” Yugoslavia from the German occupation. Actually Russian forces were allowed to liberate Belgrade.[29]
Živeo Tito! / Long live, Tito!
Tito took power as a war hero and military leader. The Yugoslavs like a king and a fighter. He ruled with the same iron cruelty as did the Turks. Opposition and dissent were crushed. Some estimate that as many as 700,000 people were liquidated during his reign. Many sent to the Bare Island off the Croatian coast, never to return. One could be sent to jail just as easily for being a Stalinist as a Royalist.
Western Myths: 1. Tito the Democrat
At this point Western myths about Yugoslavia come into play. After W.W. II Yugoslavia was the darling socialist state with Tito the daring leader who opposed Stalin. Yugoslavia was the socialist fulfillment of all Marx’s utopian dreams. Yugoslav self-management was praised as being the management system and experts came from all over the world to study the great experiment. Tito expertly played the East off against the West and by his personal charisma attracted much western investment and Yugoslavia took many loans. By the time of Tito’s death Yugoslav indebtedness was incredible (Actually it was 20 billion dollars!)[30], but such was the price of peace during the Cold War.
2. Tito the Architect
With Tito’s death a torturous system of rotating presidency and a complex bicameral congress (elected Roman style) continued haltingly along for nearly a decade.[31] All watched and waited. Just how long would the precarious machinery last? In 1974 with the new constitution Tito had broken up the Serbian voting block by giving Vojvodina in the north and Kosovo and Metohija in the south autonomous province status. Vojvodina and Kosovo had their own judicial (court), legislative (law-making) and executive (presidential) systems. All of the six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the two autonomous regions along with the Army had votes in the Presidium. The presidency of the Presidium rotated among the representatives of the republics and autonomous regions. This complicated and cumbersome apparatus rumbled along for nearly ten years until “Alexander’s Sons” got restless: Who will inherit the empire? Tito was reported by a Time/Life series of books to be the “last of the reigning Habsburgs.”[32]
Alexander’s Sons Divide the Empire
In May of 1989 the Serbian Republican parliament voted to strip Vojvodina and Kosovo of their autonomous status and dismantle their independent judicial, legislative and executive branches. All laws and decisions would come from Belgrade. The constitution of the Serbian Republic was changed, but Serbia retained the two votes of Vojvodina and Kosovo in the Presidium giving Serbia in effect three votes. The Serbs could always count on receiving the vote of the Army’s representative (The Army is composed of the hardest core Communist party members even today.)[33] and the vote of the Montenegrin representative who was (and still is) considered by Serbs to be a Serb cousin. The final result was that Serbia could command five of nine votes in the Presidium. In other words, Slobodan Miloševiæ could dictate policy to the other republics. The BBC has done an excellent, multi-part series on these developments, but, suffice it to say, at this point the Slovenes left the Party Conference in protest followed by the Croats.[34] The declarations of independence followed shortly thereafter. And all of this in the wake of the Fall of the Wall. It was all too complicated and incomprehensible to the West.
* * *
We spent the school year 1989-90 in the States and watched in amazement as the Wall fell. We watched in anguish as Yugoslavia seemed headed to disintegration.
After the “Fall of the Wall”
We returned to Yugoslavia in September of 1990. We first traveled by train to the Montenegrin coast from Vienna by way of Zagreb, Karlovac, Gornji Vakuf, Bihaè, Knin to Split. From Split we took a bus down the coast past Dubrovnik (I have never been in the city!) to Budva, a one time Roman fortress,[35] in Montenegro.
We had been in Budva earlier in May 1987 with my parents. There had been almost no Yugoslav tourists in Budva at that time. Now (1990) it seemed all the Serbs had descended on Budva at once. The Slovenian and Croatian coasts were deemed no longer safe. Cars with BG (Belgrade) license plates had been thrown into the sea or had their windshields bashed. A Serb friend, a Baptist pastor, married to a Croat, who had been working in her home town of Vodice, near Šibenik, in Croatia, had had a brick thrown through their apartment window. The brick had a message attached to it: Go home, Chetnik! Not too much magnanimity in that message!
New Heroes / Old Traitors
I was shocked by what I saw on the newsstands. Every magazine it seemed proclaimed some misdeed of the previously hallowed Marshall Tito: Tito’s cars, Tito’s villas, Tito’s women. Between 1986-1989 one would not have dared to utter such things even secretly. Now here they were on the front of news magazines. I was more greatly shocked to see a book for sale entitled, Draža Mihailovich, Traitor or Patriot?. Draža Mihailovich had been the Royalist General and leader of the Chetniks during W.W. II. In 1987 I had innocently and unwittingly shown a picture taken in America in the yard of the Serbian Orthodox seminary in Libertyville, IL to a guest at my landlord’s son’s birthday party in Belgrade. The man I asked blew up: “What?!? Are you a provocateur, a spy? Don’t you know who that is?!? That’s Draža Mihailovich, the greatest traitor in Yugoslav history!” I was saved from lynching on the spot and/or possible imprisonment by my own naïveté. “He’s an American! What would he know about Draža Mihailovich?!”[36]
So much for Americans’ knowledge of Yugoslavia. By the time the crisis broke out in 1991 we had already moved (January 1991) to Vienna to teach at the training college. Many people asked us if we had left to avoid the coming war. We were perplexed. What war? What do you mean? Of course not, we hoped the college would even move into Yugoslavia soon. We were greeted with polite stares of disbelief. We were horrified when the tanks were sent rumbling to Slavonia to the borders between Serbia and Croatia. We prayed for them to stop and were relieved when they did. Little did we realize that Slovenia was being “allowed” to secede. Croatia would not secede so easily.
More Mythology
The myths of other countries, western and eastern, then began to enter the tale. Germany, long a friend (or ruler) of Slovenia and Croatia immediately recognized the independence of these two break-away republics and pressed the international bodies to do likewise. American love of the “underdog” (the weaker party) and “democracy” pushed the administration to agree. The British and the French were cautious and calculating. They both forgot their war debts to the Serbs.[37]
New World Order?
Perhaps the greatest myth reigning in the West was threatened with extinction: the New World Order following the Fall of the Wall. An ethnic war in the backyard of the newly forming European Community was a disgrace and unthinkable. Yet that did not stop the hypocritical sale of arms to the various parties. While the world bodies dithered CNN determined world public opinion and eventually US and UN policy. The Serbs were labeled Communists and aggressors while the seceding republics were labeled democracies in spite of a demonstrable intolerance of the rights of minorities in their own republics.[38]
A Croatian friend of Italian descent from Rijeka was living with his wife and two daughters in Zagreb in early 1992. When I visited them he remarked that there was no real democracy in Croatia. There was only one serious political party, the HDZ. Censorship was still strict and dissent resulted in closed newspaper offices. He said that he could not speak to his daughters in Italian on the streets of Zagreb without fear of being mobbed.[39] Eventually they had to return to Rijeka. Zagreb was too intolerant of a Croatian of Italian descent who wanted to speak Italian with his children for them to stay. At some time during that year I saw a report on the relative freedom of the press in various countries, as assessed by an independent Swiss agency. Serbia and Croatia were listed one next to the other at about 50% acceptability. Both were criticized for their tight censorship of the news media. The US was somewhere closer to 80 or 90%, but not 100% due to the commercial interests of the media which skews the reporting, i.e. sensationalizes it.
Media and Propaganda
Radio
We were in Vienna when the first hostilities, the secession of Slovenia, took place. I recall being obsessed with listening to the news. It wasn’t hard as Radio Oesterreich International was broadcasting reports on the half hour in Serbian or Croatian and Slovenian. In the early days the reports were so fresh that they proved embarrassingly inaccurate at times. Eventually, probably due to pressure from the UN not to meddle in Yugoslavia’s internal affairs these broadcasts stopped. The reporting was uncritical of anything reported by Croatian or Slovenian sources. The Serbs were aggressors. Full Stop.
I took to listening to short-wave broadcasts. I listened regularly to Radio Beograd. After a while I began to question my sanity. Radio Oesterreich said, “Black”, and Radio Beograd would say, “White.” Occasionally I would tune in Radio Sarajevo or Radio Zagreb. They tended to agree with Radio Oesterreich. I got fed up with all of them and began to listen to the BBC, a policy I followed from then on, though even the BBC was not “unbiased”, just less biased. Voice of America was even less unbiased. I never could get my friends in Yugoslavia to tune in to either BBC or VOA neither in English nor Serbian. After listening to them for two years in Novi Sad, I now know why they would not bother.
Media effect on one multi-ethnic Yugoslav community
Throughout the 1991 Spring semester and the 1991-92 school years the students in the college worried and listened to the radio and prayed, as we all did. They often fell silent. Though they got along fine together, Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, and Macedonians, there were occasional problems, mostly cultural differences. Sometimes, however, they joked predominantly at the expense of the lone Albanian student or later the lone Serb. Even those of us on the faculty found it difficult to remain impartial. Those who had studied in Zagreb naturally favored Croatia, those who had studied in Belgrade, Serbia.
Radio TV Beograd
Occasionally during this period (1991-92) I traveled into Serbia to Belgrade and to Macedonia. While in Belgrade friends would regale me with the horror stories of their Bosnian Serb relatives who were being attacked and forced from their homes. I would watch RTV Beograd and be shocked at the footage and more shocked at the completely opposite interpretations given of the same pictures by Tanjug and CNN. “You must tell them the Truth!”, friends often said. “You must write to the President [Bush]! He should come to the aid of the beleaguered Serbs!” They were saddened if not angered by my steadfast refusal not to take sides.[40] What was so maddening to me was that I was accused in Vienna of not being impartial enough!
Mixed Marriages
One of the students returned from the Easter break in 1992 in tears. Her aunt and cousin both Serbs had been “sent home” by their Croatian husbands. The aunt had been married for twenty five years. The student’s relatives lived some in Slavonia, some in Baranja and some in Lika near Gospiæ. In August of this past year (11/VIII/1995) the first Serb refugees from Baranja and Lika were entering Vojvodina as I was driving into Serbia with a friend.
Church and State: A Return to Power
The rising power and involvement of the Croatian Roman Catholic church and the Serbian Orthodox church was felt indirectly by all of us. With the break-up of Yugoslavia evangelicals were quick to show allegiance to their new states. Slovenian and Croatian Baptists were quick to set up new and separate unions in their respective countries. Who would remunerate whom for the camp properties was debated, etc.. Later as both the Roman Catholic and Serbian Orthodox authorities sought permission to reintroduce enforced catechetical classes into public schools, evangelicals scrambled to train teachers for “religion” classes, only to find that only officially ordained and government recognized clergy would be allowed to teach such classes. For once the divided evangelical community (which dates back at least to the seventeenth century in Slovenia, Croatia and Vojvodina) finally organized an ecumenical body, the Evangelical Alliance of Clergy and Laymen to counteract the hegemony of the incipient “state” churches.[41]
As early as the summer of 1987 a Serbian evangelical was asked in my presence by another Serb, “What kind of Serb can you be? A Serbian Baptist? To be a Serb is to be Orthodox.” That same summer Serb evangelical students spoke less than half seriously about “our Patriarch” (German) while Albanian and Croatian evangelical students were shocked and defensive. Ethnicity defines religion and religion defines ethnicity.
A Return to the Red Planet
With the closing of the training college in Vienna in the summer of 1992 we decided to move back into Serbia, but chose Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina, over Belgrade. While living in Novi Sad we experienced life under sanctions and saw many NGOs, such as the Red Cross, working close at hand.
Life Under Sanctions[42]
One of my most vivid memories of our two school years, 1992-94, in Novi Sad was of crossing the Hungarian-Serb border at Herzeg Szanto / Baèki Breg, not far from Bezdan (The Abyss, i.e. Hell!) and driving down through the towns on the Serbian side of the Danube headed south and then east to Novi Sad. I had driven up to Budapest to pick up a guest lecturer who had flown in from Amsterdam. Due to UN sanctions he could not fly to Belgrade, 75 km from Novi Sad, but had to fly into Budapest, some 500 km from Novi Sad. We decided to drive at night starting in Budapest about 10:00 PM arriving at the Yugoslav border at midnight. As usual I was loaded with the necessary provisions: tetrabricks of shelf milk, canned goods, flour, sugar, pasta, etc.. Stores even and especially in Vojvodina, the richest farm land in Serbia, were always nearly empty and even what was there was exorbitantly overpriced due to rampant inflation, as much as 2500% per year. (According to Mojzes, in 1993 the official inflation rate was 197.7 billion percent! I hadn’t wanted to exaggerate!)[43] Vojvodina had voted overwhelmingly against Miloševiæ.
On the Hungarian side of the border I was asked by the Hungarian customs official/border guard if I had any western currency.
PAG Of course!
Guard You’re not supposed to you know.
What can I do?
OK, but don’t do it again. You know the sanctions.
Yeah, I know.
Do you have any gasoline?
No. (My colleague had a false bottom in his van so he could take 30 twenty liter cans at once.)
OK. Proceed.
On the Yugoslav side we went through the usual “litany.”
Passport control Where do you work?
PAG I work at the Christian Evangelistic Center in Baèki Petrovac.
Gottschalk, you’re German?
No, I’m American.
So you work at the Christian Evangelical (Lutheran) Center in Backi
Petrovac.
(Made sense to him Slovaks and Germans are Lutherans.)
OK, after you clear customs, pay the road tax and get the insurance
and then come back for your passport
As I stopped for customs inspection I did my usual “toe dance” with the inspector.
Customs officer Who are you?
PAG I work at the Christian Evangelistic Center in Backi Petrovac.
What do you have here?
Food.
Do you have any gasoline?
No.
OK. How much is the food worth?
Oh, I don’t know exactly. 500 DEM?!?
OK since you have children I will let you off easy. You pay 65 DEM in
tax and you can go.
OK.
I then paid the customs tax and then the obligatory 35 DEM of road tax for a foreign (Austrian) registration (I couldn’t drive a Yugoslav plate in Austria!) and 200 DEM for double insurance coverage since Austria and Yugoslavia had revoked their mutual recognition pact. Then I returned to get my passport and finally we were on our way. Total time lost one hour. “Not bad! It pays to cross at night.”, I told him. “That was easy?!”, he asked. “Yeah, I’ve waited nine hours and that was a miracle. Some people have spent 24 hours at the border waiting. Sometimes the Hungarians won’t work. Before the Yugoslavs added the per car and per person tax as well as the gasoline tax the line of cars crossing the border could take a day. People drove back and forth all day filling their tanks.”
Runaway Inflation
As we pulled away from the border station we are accosted even at 1:00 AM by money changers. “Devize, Devize.” ”What’s the rate?”, I asked. “150,000 dinar to a hundred marks.”,[44] said the girl. “No thanks!”, I replied. “She’s a thief!”, I told my friend. “The rate was 1.5 million this morning. She lopped off a zero. She figured we just came in from Austria and didn’t know.” As we talk we pass hordes of people selling šlivovica, hams, salamis, cheeses, wool sweaters. “What are they all doing here at this hour?”, asked my friend. “The factories can’t sell things at a market price so they let the employees take the products on commission. The black-market is the only industry flourishing here, except for the money changers. We never change more than 10 DEM at a time. The rate changes three times a day. They are printing money in Belgrade three shifts a day.”, I told him. He can’t believe it. “All of these money changers are government or Mafia, everyone says it’s the same thing. It is the only way the government can get its hands on western currency to pay its bills. People who’ve saved all their lives to retire in comfort after twenty five years in German factories have to trade their hard currency in for worthless paper. Almost everyone is dependent on relatives in the West to bring them money.” “What if they have no relatives?”, he asked. “Then they live off their gardens and what country cousins bring them after they slaughter their livestock.” “What if they have no country cousins?”, he asked. “They scrounge or black market.”, I said. “Malo se radi, puno se krade, nekako živi.” [Work a little, steal a lot, one way or another get by.], I told him. “It’s an old Serbian proverb.”
Occupied by “our own”
Blissfully and stupidly I drove along through villages, like Srpski Miletiæ and Odžaci where fresh graves mark those fallen in combat in Slavonia. It was about three o’clock in the morning. We were stopped by a group of blue camouflaged military police toting automatic rifles. “What are you doing on this road?”, asked one officer. “Going home”, I replied “to Novi Sad.” “Why aren’t you on the highway?”, he asked. “My friend in Baèki Petrovac where I work told me this was faster.” “What’s all this stuff you’ve got here?”, asked another. “Food for my family”, I replied. “So much! You’ll have to pay some customs!”, he said. “I already paid it.”, I replied. “I don’t believe you.”. he said. “Let him alone!”, said a third, “You’re not a customs officer.” “Your friend will have to pay a fine.”, said the second addressing me again and pointing with the tip of his rifle to my friend. My friend nearly jumped out of his skin. He didn’t understand a word. “Why’s he pointing that rifle at me?”, he asked. “He says your seat belt isn’t fastened. You’ll have to pay a fine, he says.”, I told him. “I have it on!”, my friend said and opened his jacket so they could see he is strapped in. “OK, enough!”, said the third, “Let him go.” We drove on home to Novi Sad arriving around 4:00 AM. Only after returning to America a year later did it dawn on me that that road is a half a kilometer from the front.
It had been a mild winter, thankfully.
Thankfully, it’s summer. In the winter our apartment in Novi Sad had been cold. The natural gas was turned off at night. We heated with small electric space heaters in the bedrooms, but frequent overloads and black-outs and brown-outs meant there may not have been electricity either. At the height of the sanctions even electricity was turned off for several hours a day. Natural gas was available two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. I had to go down to the basement twice a day to relight the furnace. But at least we had heat part of the day. If our system had been on fuel oil we would have had no heat. Sanctions meant no heating oil, except for those who lived in exclusive areas of Belgrade or who had “connections.”
Benzin (Gasoline): No shortage in spite of the embargo
The next morning my friend asked, “What do you do for gasoline?”. “I go out to the village (Baèki Petrovac)and buy it from a student at the electro-technical faculty. He has rigged his car with a propane burning device so that he can run his car on propane. He has a propane tank in the trunk and he drives back and forth across the border on propane and fills the gas tank with gasoline . An ingenious lad. He has usually around 60 liters of Shell Super gasoline in the shed.” “Isn’t that a fire hazard?”, asksedmy friend. “I wouldn’t smoke in the yard.”, I teased. Fortunately for us Slovak Brethren do not smoke.
Autotheft and rising crime
As we drove around town so he could sightsee I parked the car near the wharf on the Danube. “What you doing?”, he asked as I opened hood and stripped the distributor cap of its main cable. “Burglar-proofing”, I replied, “One car every thirty seconds is stolen in Belgrade, according to the news. I’m not sure how bad it is in Novi Sad.”
Past atrocities
I took him to look at the monument to the victims of the Croatian and Hungarian Nazis. “During the winter of 1942[45] the Nazis rounded up 3000 Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and Communist sympathizers and cut a hole in the ice and pushed them through one by one. See the Star of David and the Orthodox Cross as well as the Red Star? The fortress across the river was originally built by the Romans. Diocletian had his summer residence in what’s now Sremska Mitrovica (Sirmium), that’s near the front now. The Austro-Hungarian empire kept their frontier garrison in that fortress up until W.W. I. Novi Sad was the last civilized outpost of the Austro-Hungarian empire.”
Mercenaries and other ološ (scum)
As we drove home my friend noticed new construction of palatial looking homes and lots of new western cars: Mercedes, and ever popular Land Rovers and Jeep type vehicles. [46] “Where in the world did they come from?”, he asked. “They’re money changers or gun runners or mercenaries.” “Mercenaries?!?”, he asked in disbelief. “Sure, everyone has allowed them in. Serbia has its famous Kapetan Dragan[47] and his Knindza. The Croats have various Nazi war criminals who have returned. The Muslims have mujaheddin from all over. The refugees say they don’t even know the people who attacked their villages. ‘They aren’t ours.’, they say.”
Humanitarian Aid
We passed a skeletal looking, gray haired man in a suit picking in the garbage dumpster. “What is he doing picking in the dumpster?”, asked my friend. “Retired people stand in line all day to get the equivalent of 2 DEM in pension.”, I told him. “But didn’t you say that a hamburger costs 3.5 DEM”, he asked. “Yeah.” “Now I know why he’s picking in the garbage! Isn’t that dangerous? Won’t he get sick?”, he asked. “Maybe.”, I answered, “At least he won’t starve.” “Why don’t you give him something?”, he asked. “He won’t take it. He’s too proud.” “But isn’t anybody doing anything to help such people?”, he asked. “Sure”, I reply, “The Center in Baèki Petrovac has distributed tons of aid brought in from Austria, England and America. Our church here in town also distributes daily packets of food aid. The UNHCR packets are for sale all over the open air market.” “For sale?”, he asked incredulously, “There not supposed to sell them!” “Sure, they’re not”, I answered, “But if you have to choose between selling one allotment of food and paying your electric bill so you have heat you sell it. Besides that the gengsteri (gangsters) control everything. One guy I know who distributes aid says they UNHCR doesn’t trust any other organizations, except the Baptists and Adventists to distribute food anymore.[48] Even the Red Cross is considered corrupt.”
Refugees everywhere
When we returned home my wife was talking to a middle aged lady dressed in black. She was a refugee squatter in a neighboring house abandoned by a Croat earlier. She is a Serb who was forced to leave her new home in Osijek. “We had to leave or they would burn us out.”, she said. Her husband has turned to wild drinking and chasing women. “Ne pije se, ne puši, ne juri ženske; Nikakav èovek nije.” [He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t chase women. He ain’t no sort of man.] “So goes another old Serbian proverb.”, I told my friend. “I guess you ain’t much of a man.”, he joked. The doorbell rang. It was a young man from a Bosnian Serb village of Bijelina. We talked a while and then I gave him 5 DEM and he left. “He’d like to stay here.”, I told my friend. “He is a deserter. If he is caught they will send him back to the front or worse.” “What could be worse?”, asked my friend. “You don’t want to know. He has to stay one step ahead of the military police. If the MPs catch him he will simply disappear.”
“One night I was sound asleep. About two am in the middle of the night the doorbell rang. I jumped out of my skin! I went out on to the balcony to see who would be ringing at two am. It was a police van with a swarm of military police. ‘Are you Milanoviæ?’, roared the officer. ‘No.’, I said, ‘I’m a foreigner.’ ‘Where is Milanoviæ?’, he shouted. ‘His apartment is in the back, the dentist.’, I answered. ‘Is he in?’, the police man asked. ‘I don’t know. Do you want me to call him?’ ‘Yes’ I tried, but there was no answer. ‘I don’t get any answer.’, I told him. Disgruntled they drove off. Milanoviæ’s son doesn’t want to show up for his mobilization orders. He circulates between his grandmother’s house in the village, a weekend villa and Belgrade. He is only one of thousands.”
That evening we taught a Bible study in a cramped room packed with teenagers. “Where are they from?”, my friend asked. “Many are refugees.”, I answered, “Some are here to go to school in peace. That girl and her sister are from Brèko. Those two twins are from Sarajevo. Their father is a Muslim. He can’t leave Sarajevo. Their mother is a Serb from near Novi Sad. Here they can continue school. They haven’t seen their father or heard from him in a year. The only way to get a letter out of Sarajevo is to ask a UN soldier to hand carry it home and mail it from his home country. The last letter came from Norway.”
“Who’s the middle aged man there?”, my friend asked. “He is an engineer. His wife is a lawyer. They had just built a home in Goražde. One night the phone rang. ‘Quick. Pack your car and head for the hills the village is being attacked by Muslim forces.’, they are told. They watched from the next hill as their new home went up in flames. He made his way here and found a place to live. A Croatian man met him in town and heard his story. ‘I have a small mud wall house with no central heat. It was my mother’s place. Two rooms, wood floors, no in door plumbing, but you can have it rent free.’, the Croatian man told him. They live there now, he, his wife and two children. He has a job in an ammunition factory now. She works in the national forest.” “An ammunition factory?”, asked my friend. “Yeah, you don’t get choosy if you’re offered work these days. Most people either work for free just to stay in the pension plan or to keep their places. If you quit now you won’t get a job after the war ends.”
The next day we went out to Baèki Petrovac to visit the refugees who lived in the old office building of the abandoned brick factory. Three generations lived in one room: grandmother and grandfather, mother and kids. The fathers were on the front fighting or protecting their homes. The refugees barely survived on humanitarian aid or pick fruit in season in the neighboring fields. “How long have they been living like this?”, my friend asked. “Two years now.”, I answered. “How much longer will they be here?”, he asked. “Who knows?!”, I answered, “They have nowhere to go. There are empty houses in the village, but they have no money for buying anything nor for rent. They are here until the government resettles them.”
Back to the West and sanity?
My friend was glad when the two weeks were over to return to Holland and normal life. He was brave enough, or crazy enough, to return with his whole family for a month in the summer of 1993 while we taught a few more classes. Life went on like that for the two years we lived under sanctions. After we returned to the States in June of 1994 our friends in Yugoslavia reported to us that the shortage of natural gas had gotten worse and the brown-outs and black-outs more frequent.
Return again to the Red Planet
I was last in Yugoslavia in August of 1995. I went to arrange for the shipping of our belongings from Belgrade here to Leuven. As I drove into Vojvodina with a friend we were stopped on the highway by a farmer who had his wagon stopped in the roadside rest area. “That’s weird.”, I thought. “He’s not allowed on the highway with his tractor.” “Is this the road to Subotica?”, he asked me. I thought he was joking. “What kind of Vojvodina farmer is he?”, I thought. “I don’t know. Ask the police man there.”, I told him. He cursed and walked away. As we drove off I realized that he was not from Vojvodina at all, but was one of the newly arrived refugees from the Baranja region which had fallen to combined Croatian and Muslim forces. We counted thirty five tractors on the highway that day and saw many auto registrations from Knin, Bjelina, Glina, etc. Police were not allowing any tractors or cars with Republic Serbia (Republika Srpska) licenses into Belgrade. Later we were told that only first generation relatives were allowed to come out to the highway to identify and claim their relatives. Grandmothers could not claim grandchildren; only mothers - their sons or brothers - their brothers. One Serb friend whose family origins were in Baranja had ten relatives in his small apartment: Mother, Father, brother and family, and sister and family.
More refugees
Later I heard first person accounts of the arrival of some of these refugees in Serbia after traveling eight to twelve days by tractor and wagon. They had been driven out by their “own” forces. They had been pelted with rotten tomatoes and rocks by angry Croatian villagers while passing through Croatia. They had been robbed by bandits. They had been flown over by Croatian jets flying so low that the Serb refugees could read the print on the fuselage. On arrival in Serbia the family members were often unintentionally, but willy-nilly separated. One lady described how she was herded onto a box car and only later found out where she and her daughter were headed: south for Kosovo. Her other daughter and mother were sent north to Vojvodina. Her husband was sent back to the front. He returned home some weekends to recuperate then reported back to the front. Only through the Baptist relief agency had she learned where her mother and other daughter were and they were reunited in Vojvodina. Her husband called from time to time, but never could say where he was or when he would return.
No end of corruption
I spent a month trying to get permission to give away some of our furniture and belongings. I only wanted to be freed of paying customs duties. “Impossible”, said one inspector. “No problem, give it to the Red Cross.”, said another. “Don’t give anything to the Red Cross!”, said a Serb friend, “No one trusts them.” Finally a Serb friend and I went together to the Belgrade customs dock. “No problem”, said the inspector, “You just need a formal affidavit from the relief organization.” I got the required forms and gave the things away. When I presented the forms in Novi Sad, the inspector there accused me of selling my things. “You must pay the customs duty and tax for selling that stuff.”, he declared. “But I have the affidavits!”, I protested. “You’re lying.”, he replied, “You sold it. You must pay or go get it and bring it here.” He knew the latter was now impossible. I had to borrow $1200 from my friend to pay the taxes for giving our larger furniture to a Serbian refugee from Sarajevo!
More humanitarian aid
During my last visit there I was present when a tandem trailer semi-truck arrived from England with humanitarian aid for the church to distribute. I helped the students unload the truck. Most of the stuff is old merchandise donated by shopkeepers in London: out of style shoes, odd colored clothes, seventies styles, but useable and much canned goods. The next day we sorted and the third day we held a bazaar in the yard of the church building (which is a small house on a dirt road!). “Don’t let anyone in without an invitation.”, said the pastor. “You know some people are making a living by pretending to be refugees and then they sell the things at the open air market. Only allow in people we know and have interviewed.” It was sickening to imagine how callused people can be to steal from refugees, but the economy was in shambles. There was near 95% real unemployment. Even if the sanctions ended that day the economy would take 20 years and billions of dollars to recover, I was told.
One of the first refugee families through the gate was the uncle and aunt of a former student of mine in Vienna. “This is my uncle from Knin.”, she told me. “Pleased to meet you!”, he said. “They spent twelve days getting here by tractor.”, she said. “He has never been east of Zagreb before.”, she continued. “My family has lived in the Lika region for over five hundred years. You know Vojvodina better than they do.”, she told me. Her uncle was looking at dress shirts. When they fled there was no time to pack. He had literally only the shirt on his back. “Take two!”, she told him. “What would I do with two shirts?”, he asked. He would not take it.
The people came all day long for five days. They were not all grateful. All had horrifying stories of the war. Many had gone gray in only two years. Many had buried loved ones. Many were widowed or orphaned.
“You know”, said a Bosnian Serb friend who had spent time in the Prisoner Of War camp near Zagreb because he was a student at the police academy there when the war broke out. “They used to tell all of the jokes on us, Bosanci. [Bosnians]”, he said. “But look around you, man. To su ti ljudi, a nitko se ne mara za njih. Nitko se ne mara za njih. A to su ti ljudi, èovjeèe. To su ti ljudi.”
“Those are people, but no one cares about them. No one cares about them. But those are people, man. Those are people.”
[2] Mojzes, Paul (1994) Yugoslavian Inferno: Ethnoreligious wars in the Balkans., New York: Continuum; cf. chapter 3 “Destructive Use of Memory”, pp. 45-63.
[3] Kinross, Lord (John Patrick Douglas Balfour, Baron) (1977). The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, pp. 57-60 Yet Kinross says that Vuk Brankovitch, Lazar’s son-in-law , withdrew from the battle of Kosovo, perhaps in a prearranged deal with Murad. However, others say that Vuk Brankoviæ was merely late in arriving to battle. Milne Holton (1988) and Vasa D. Mihailovich, Serbian Poetry from the Beginnings to the Present. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, p. 98, footnote, give two possible interpretations of the way this idea of Vuk’s betrayal may have arisen: either due to mistaken identity (another Vuk; so Subotiæ) or due to his loyalty to the Bosnian Catholic “King” Tvrtko (so Kostelski). On the fact that the Serbian heroic, epic ballads are often historically inaccurate and represent a selective memory all are agreed! This might explain popular misunderstanding of historical events and their feelings about the peoples in question, though which came first, the hatred or the selective memory, is difficult to judge.
[4] Mojzes (1994), op. cit., cf., pp. 15-23; cf. also generally on the Battle of Kosovo, Weinberg, Bill and Dorie Wilsnack, “War at the Crossroads: An Historical Guide Through the Balkan Labyrinth” in The Tragedy of Bosnia: Confronting the New World Disorder, ed. Erich Weingärnter (1994) Geneva: Unit on Justice, Peace and Creation, World Council of Churches, p. 85.
[5] Dvornik, Francis (1962) The Slavs in European History and Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Rutgers University Press, pp. 480, 481 “John” Sobieski, king of Poland, saved Vienna on September 12, 1683.
[6] Mojzes (1994), op. cit., pp. 29-31.
[7] Andriæ (1969), Ivo. De brug over de Drina. Brussels: AP-Reinaert, available at KADOC, Vlamingenstraat 39, call no. KW199/200. Also several of Andriæ’s other works are available in Dutch and German in the KUL Central Library: De Kroniek van Travnik, Die Brücke über der Drina, Die Geliebte des Veli Pascha (Mara Milosnica).
[8] Kinross (1977), pp. 259-277 on Sokollu Pasha and Dvornik (1962), p. 356 on Mehmed Pasha Sokoloviæ
[9] I wish I had the slides of the desecrated chapel in the Jewish cemetery to show. They are in the US. Sorry.
[10] Kalin, Boris (1987) Povijest Filozofije Zagreb: Školska Knjiga, p. 162 quoting Petar Vranicki “This brilliant anticipation [of Engel’s that the state would die away] is being realized today. In fact, we can assert that the realization of these historical requirements compose a whole historical epoch, and it is not surprising that it is difficult to attain, with frequent reversals and defeats: from the heroic effort of the Paris Communards through Lenin’s workers’ and other soviets, German, Austrian and Italian workers’ unions the first lasting and historically effective realization is being experienced in Yugoslav praxis.” In the 1987 edition Kalin has a whole section on Classic Marxist Thought with ten pages devoted to Marx and three to Engels. He ends his account of Western philosophy with Contemporary Marxist Conceptions including Lenin, Lukács, Lefebvre, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Bloch. In his 1991 edition he dropped the “Classic Marxist Thought” and the “Contemporary Marxist Conceptions” sections and included Marx, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Bloch among “Directions in contemporary philosophy” and ends with existential philosophy! Engels, Lenin, Lukács, Lefebvre, and Adorno were completely dropped. Needless to say he dropped the quote of Vranicki’s about the realization of the “first lasting and historically effective realization” of Engel’s view of the dying out of the state being realized in Yugoslav praxis.
[11] Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 30:3-4, Summer-Fall, 1993 (though apparently the article was written and presented sometime in 1994).
[12] Mojzes (1994), p. 2.
[13] Gypsies are the Negroes of Yugoslavia and almost universally despised. There were not enough religious Jews in Sarajevo to form a minion, i.e. the ten men required to have legitimate prayer services, as far as I know.
[14] Durán (1993), pp. 426, 427.
[15] cf. Jean Paul Nuñez “The Continuing Drama on Our Doorstep” in Wiengärtner, esp. pp. 69-70 “The Arms Traffic.”
[16] cf. MacLean, Fitzroy. Eastern Approaches.
[17] cf. Weingärtner (1994), pp. 32-36 on the issue of the reality of campaign of “systematic” rape.
[18] Durán (1993), p. 429.
[19] Weingärtner (1994), p. 35.
[20] Mojzes (1994), p. 171.
[21] Wiengärtner (1994), pp. 30,31.
[22] Durán (1993), p. 431.
[23] Mojzes (1994), PP. 92,93.
[24] Mojzes (1994), pp. 18, 19, cf. also Dvornik (1962), pp. 111-113.
[25] Gottschalk, Linda S. (1990) Sava Nemanjic and his role in the creation of an autocephalous Serbian Orthodox church. An unpublished Master’s thesis. Ambridge, PA, USA, pp. 9-11; cf. also Ostrogorsky, George (1969). History of the Byzantine State. New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Rutgers University Press, p. 431.
[26] cf. Ostrogorsky (1969), pp. 266, 267, also Mojzes (1994), p. 24.
[27] cf. for example briefly, Weinberg and Wilsnack in Wiengärtner (1994), p. 87.
[28] Ibid., p. 87.
[29] Ibid., pp. 87, 88.
[30] Weinberg & Wilsnack in Weingärtner, p. 88.
[31] cf. Mojzes, pp. 76-81, esp. 78.
[32] Stillman, Edmund (1964). The Balkans. New York: Time Inc. I am sorry I can’t find the reference, but I’m sure it’s in this book. The book’s cover has a beautiful picture of the bridge in Mostar which Croat forces destroyed during the present conflict.
[33] Mojzes (1994), p. 81.
[34] Ibid., p. 81.
[35] Ortogorsky (1969), p. 94.
[36] Mojzes (1994), p. 1.
[37] Weingärtner (1994), p. 27.
[38] Mojzes (1994), p. 132 A concrete example of the Croatian Roman Catholic church not speaking out on behalf of other repressed minorities. Other examples, passim.
[39] Mojzes (1994), p. 205 “Nevertheless, Croatia has its own ethnofascists, as does Serbia. In Croatia these groups harass and bully those whom they perceive as enemies, and the government offers no effective protection. Croatia may aim to be a democratic state bound by law but it has a long way to go.”
[40] Mojzes (1994), p. xx, “My efforts not to take sides appear to them as a copout - a moral failure to make a decision. But I did make a decision, which I still do not see fit to change: namely, to avoid being an advocate of any one of the contentious ethnoreligious groups.
[41] Mojzes (1994), pp. 145-146 on the role of Free Church Protestants.
[42] Though I will put some footnotes in, since these are at this point personal reflections I will not document them. However, chapter 9 “Will UN Sanctions Topple the Regime in Yugoslavia?” in Mojzes’ book will verify my examples, pp. 176-185.
[43] Mojzes (1994), p. 121.
[44] Weingärtner (1994), p. 26 notes that when they entered Yugoslavia in May of 1993 the rate was 50,000 YU dinar to 1 DEM and three weeks later when they left it was 150,000 YU dinar per 1 DEM. It got much worse later with the rate changing even hourly. Once we cashed 20 DEM and received 750, 000, 000, 000 YU dinar. When we tried to buy food in Belgrade the rate had shot up in the hour and a half the travel time from Novi Sad to Belgrade took. We cashed another 20 DEM and paid a total of 1.5 trillion YU dinar for our meal at McDonald’s.
[45] Novi Sad Petroviæ, Boško (ed). (1987) Novi Sad: Matica Srpska, p. 241 Horthy’s Hungarian forces liquidated these people in a three day spree, January 21st - 23rd, 1942.
[46] Weingärtner (1994), p. 26.
[47] Mojzes (1994), pp. 48, 49 on Dragan, Arkan and other “ološ* (scum at the bottom of the wine glass) and p. 142 on the presence of mujahedin in the Bosnian army.
[48] Ibid., p. 150.
