Newsgroups: soc.culture.german
Subject: Germany's Yugoslav Policy by Nora Beloff  - Part 1
From: stojanov@husc10.harvard.edu (Milan Stojanovic)
Date: 26 Aug 92 12:39:45 EDT
Organization: Harvard University Science Center




>Nora Beloff spent few years in Yugoslavia.  She was declared 
>persona non grata after publishing her book "Tito's Flawed Legacy."
>
>
>
>Part 1 : 
>
>%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
>          An Analysis of Germany's Yugoslav Policy
>
>                      By Nora Beloff
>
>
>In the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Germany has played a bigger role than any
>other outside country. The German government, having turned its back on the
>past, almost to the point of forgetting it, has intervened unilaterally in
>order to achieve what it hoped would be freedom, democracy and peace.  The
>sequel, indeed to some extent the consequence  has been anarchy, vicious
>inter-ethnic bitterness and bestial violence which, at the time of writing,
>is still going on.
>
>Defying French, British and American views, Germany eagerly promoted the
>collapse of an internationally recognised state, without any apparent concept
>of the future of the diverse communities scattered like a leopard-sin on
>Yugoslavia's ethnic map.  For early two years German policy has been directed
>towards prompt, unconditional recognition of the independent states of Croatia
>and Slovenia.  Other Western powers, anxious not to strain relations with a
>vital partner in the European Community and NATO, and with no clear idea of
>what to do, meekly followed suit.
>
>Few ordinary Germans, now aghast at the violence and cruelty of the current
>civil war, know that Hitler linked the Serbs with the Jews as a people to be
>exterminated; nor that he entrusted this sub-branch of the holocaust to his
>Croat and Moslem proxies.
>
>The slaughter, described in gruesome detail in both German and Italian war
>archives, was perpetrated not only in concentration camps.  Hundreds of
>thousands of Serb men women and children were hacked to death, their villages
>razed to the ground.  Often villagers were packed into barns or churches which
>were then set on fire and several Axis documents report that bodies were
>mutilated.
>
>Hitler merged Bosnia with Croatia and German records indicate that the Moslems,
>who provided 2 SS divisions and a local militia, were no less merciless than
>the Croats.  Both wore on their uniform the chequered insignia of the Ustashi
>(Croat equivalent of the Nazis) which, today, is on the flag of the newly
>Independent State of Croatia.  In whipping up Moslem militancy, the Germans
>brought in the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was mobbed by cheering
>crowds when he visited Sarajevo.  Towards the end of war bands of Serbs reaped
>atrocious reprisals against Croats and Moslems, soldiers and civilians alike.
>But the casualties they inflicted were less than 100th of what they suffered.
>
>After the war there were no amends and the enmities were represed. But this
>historical background makes it less difficult to understand why the Serbs
>in Bosnia, fully supported by the Serbs in Serbia, refused to subject
>themselves to a Moslem-Croat majority.  It also becomes clearer why a rump
>Yugoslavia, deprived of its Catholic components and so overwhelmingly
>dominated by Serbs, would be alarming to the Moslems and Croats.  With these
>blood-soaked memories a centralised 'nation-state' of Bosnia was a
>non-starter.  For if, as the Germans maintained, it had become impossible
>to hold Yugoslavia together, it would be even harder to integrate the Muslims,
>Croats and Serbs crowded into the smaller space of Bosnia, largely cut off
>from he more developed world and obsessed with wartime memories of
>inter-ethnic massacres.
>
>As the crisis worsened the Germans rightly came to disbelieve everything said
>by the Serb nationalist leader, Slobodan Milosevic.  But they remained
>willing to believe the very comforting and conciliatory statements from the
>Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic.  They may not have known that, at the last
>election, a moderate Muslim, representing the live-and-let-live tendency
>common to many members of his community, was trounced by Izetbegovic who
>speaks to his fellow Muslims at home (and presumably during his frequent
>travels to the Middle East) in implacably fundamentalist terms.
>
>In a 70 page Islamic Declaration, which he spent many years compiling, and was
>published, first in 1970 and reprinted in 1990, he expresses anathema against
>the very concept of a nation-state (one of which he is now president), arguing
>that Muslims can be mobilised only in the overriding cause of Islamic unity.
>
>Germany's championship of the Croats has been matched by contempt for the
>Serbs.  Senior German officials have argued that Tito was right in keeping
>them divided and weak, this being the only way of restraining their hegemonist
>impulse.  But the Germans acceptance of the Croat view that the Serbs are
>inherently expansionist and aggressive has boomeranged.  The more the Germans
>despise them, the more the Serbs evoke wartime memories of the Croat-German
>alliance.  And the more the Serbs identify Germany with the Nazi past, the
>more they enrage the Germans.  This vicious circle is obvious to other
>diplomats but, for most Germans, Yugoslavia is too near and the past
>too painful for them to see.
>
>The origin of this anti-Serb bias, which is reflected on German TV and in
>most of the press, can be traced primarily to the influence of the vociferous
>spokesmen of the half-a-million, largely uneducated, Croat guest-workers.
>The Germans have accepted their version of Croat history (which intelligent
>Croat intellectual know to be a fantasy), claiming that the Croats have a
>continuous record of statehood since the middle ages, which a new unified
>Germany is morally bound to support.
>
>What really happened was that Croat chieftains in the eleventh century extended
>their power over several principalities.  But, early in the twelfth, Croat
>noblemen subjugated themselves to a Hungarian king, in return for being able
>to retain their land and serfs.  From then until the Nazis installed the
>Ustasha chief Ante Pavelic at the head of 'an Independent State of Croatia';
>the Croats were never ruled by any of their own compatriots.
>
>Further, the presence of of Serb communities within the confines of Croatia
>goes right back to the seventeenth century, when Orthodox Slavs were
>fleeing North to escape the Turks.  The Habsburg emperors offered the
>ownership of land and a special status in return for military service
>against the Ottoman empire.  Thus Catholic and Orthodox communities lived in
>close proximity and it became impossible, then as now, to draw a single
>line separating the one from the other.


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