From: kovacevic@qut.edu.au
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia
Subject: REPETITIO MATER STUDIORUM EST
Date: 15 Oct 92 12:06:57 EST
Organization: Queensland University of Technology

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	REPETITIO MATER STUDIORUM EST

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          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.

The Origins of Yugoslavia

The Germans eagerly accepted the Croat nationalist fiction that the creation
of Yugoslavia after the First World War, like the division of Germany after
the Second, was imposed by force and consequently lacked international validity.
Yet the concept of Yugoslavia a union of South Slavs, was originally a Croat
idea.  In the heyday of romanticism, a Croat philosopher in Vienna propagated
the proposition that the Slav subjects of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires
should free themselves from their imperial masters and create a new state.
Though this would incorporate different religions, the emancipationist mood
was expected to eliminate the risk of conflict.

Later in the nineteenth century other Croats were attracted by a more
pernicious form of nationalism, precursor of National-Socialism, in which
the exigences of nationhood transcend all considerations of morality.  It was
this ideology which influenced Franjo Tudjman, who was to become President
of Croatia.  After being released from Tito's prisons he blamed all Croatia's
miseries not on the corrupt and cruel communist regime which had locked him
up, but solely on the domineering Serbs.  From his three books, Big Ideas and
Little Nations, 1969 Nationalities and contemporary Europe, 1981, and The
Wasteland of History, 1989, it is clear that he regards the Jews as well as
the Serbs as racially inferior.  Herr Eberhard Dingels, head of the
international department of the SDP, recalls a fraternal socialist meeting in
1959, attended by Tudjman: having been a Partisan, he was still in General's
uniform, dedicated to Titoist communism, but already unashamedly expressing
his hatred of Jews.

Tudjman's defenders abroad argue that his works only record history but the
texts not only cite antisemites but applaud their talent and endorse their
verdict.  He also claims that the Jews, by their internationalist
egalitarianism, "directly help to maintain and even to incite anti-Jewish
sentiment."  Since he became President, Tudjman has sought recognition and
respectability.  He tried and failed to induce Jewish intellectuals to join
his government and he declared that Croatia dissociates itself from the UN
resolution equating Zionism with the Nazis.  But in his books, the state of
Israel is declared 'Judeo-Nazi'.  In present day Germany, any German who
flaunted these sentiments would be excluded from civilised society.  Tudjman
is heralded as the liberator of an oppressed people.

Tudjman has applied the German-ethnic concept of citizenship to his own
country in which, at the last census, 17 of the population declared
themselves non-Croat.

Most Westerners are surprised that under the German system, any ethnic German
can claim citizenship and its attendant benefits, regardless of where they
come from and even if their families had become part of another state
centuries ago.  And those whom the British and French call immigrants, but
the Germans call guest-workers, cannot be naturalised, even if their fathers
as well as themselves were born in Germany.

Imitating the German model Tudjman's 1992 law of citizenship extends passports
only to ethnic Croats.  For others, this concession would be at the discretion
of the Croat authorities.

The Serbs from Serbia itself were modernised under French rather than German
influence and never incorporated this racial tenet, either in their ideology
or behaviour.  But the concept of Yugoslavia has always divided them.  The
Serb novelist Dobrica Cosic, in a semi-documentary historical novel,
convincingly recounts passionate arguments in 1914 between the older
generation  who yearned to link up with the Orthodox world and the young,
eager to join a Western-type union with the Slav subjects of the
Austro-Hungarian empire.

The proposition widely held in Germany, that the Serbs and Croats are
innately hostile, contradicts the historical record showing centuries of
peaceful coexistence: they fought each other only when outside rules
recruited them into rival armies.

The first Yugoslavia, under the Karadjordjevic dynasty disappointed
politically conscious Croats, who had expected some degree of autonomy.
Instead they were subject to a centralised state, on the Jacobin model:
though Zagreb became its financial and industrial capital, and the Slovenes
played an active part in government and administration, all decisions
ultimately rested with the Serb king.

Under the shadow of war the British-educated Prince Regent recognised that
Yugoslavia could not hold together unless the Croats were granted home rule.
In 1939 a deal was negotiated with Macek, the popular leader of the Peasants'
Party, who later refused to collaborate with the Nazis.  He spent part of the
war confined in the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp, which he described
in his subsequent memoires.

Though there was no time to see if autonomy would have worked, it seems clear
that, had the westernised monarchy lasted, the kingdom of Yugoslavia would
have had to take a looser, federal form.

Admittedly reconciliation after the events of 1941-5 would have been difficult.
Hitler had carved up Yugoslavia, given Croatia to his malignant puppet Ante
Pavelic, allocated Dalmatia to the Italians and compensated Pavelic with
Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Today, again, this region is being claimed as part of
'historic Croatia'.

Every Serb family would know of the massacres perpetrated by Pavelic who,
after representing the racialist 'Party of Rights' in the Yugoslav parliament
had been expelled in 1929 and became a protege of Mussolini.  He named his
new party, Ustasha and back in Zagreb in 1941 proceeded to implement his
'final solution' against the Serbs.  The numbers slaughtered are still
uncertain but according to the most reliable sources 350,000 is the minimum.
Tudjman and his supporters have flatly refused to examine the war records
from either the Allied or Axis archives and have crossed a naught from the
reputable figure.

But in Yugoslavia, unlike in Germany, the perpetrators of the war crimes were
never exposed and their compatriots never admitted or regretted the atrocities.
Indeed many young Croats have grown up without ever being confronted with the
evidence and when they are told, simply refuse to believe it.

Tito, himself half-Croat and half-Slovene, did his best to propagate the
Partisan mythology that all Croats, barring a handful of collaborators, fought
against the occupiers side by side with the Serbs.  In reality, the Germans
treated the Croats far more humanely than they treated the Slovenes and Serbs
and many Croats fought on the German side until the end of the war.  From
1941 to late 1943, nearly all the guerilla fighters were Serb.  The Partisans
drew their recruits in Croatia and Bosnia from survivors of the Ustasha
massacres whereas Drazha Mihajlovic, faithful to the exiled government, drew
his support from Serbs in Serbia itself.  The protracted civil war between
the pro-communist Partisans and he anti-communist loyalists divided Serb from
Serb: a reminder against treating the Serbs as a monolithic entity.  Today
again the Serb communities are passionately divided.

Tito's Yugoslavia

As things turned out, it was the Russians not the western allies who drove the
Germans out of Belgrade, so enabling Tito to install his own communist
dictatorship over a 'liberated' Yugoslavia.  Tito was still Stalin's disciple
and like Stalin he named his country 'a federation' whereas in fact it was
highly centralised round his own person.  He ruled by decree, collectivised
everything and imprisoned or shot presumed anti communists - or even
communists insufficiently deferential to himself.  Tito had tens of thousands
of fellow-Yugoslavs killed at the end, or soon after, the war and about one
million went through his prisons.  But everything took place behind an
impenetrable iron curtain and when the killing was over and after 1948 when
Stalin excommunicated Tito from the communist block, the Curtain was lifted
on a now petrified and monolithic Yugoslavia.  The West ignored the bloody
record and in the West he found himself cheered from the right for his
anti-Stalinism and from the left for his 'progressive' anticapitalism.

Tito's Flawed Legacy the subject of my last book, showed Tito's virtuosity
in playing ethnic and social groups against each other and in delegating
power and patronage exclusively to those faithful to him.  His most damaging
bequests to his ill-governed and, in many ways bestialised country, was the
colossal federal army, almost the biggest in Europe and his abuse of power
in the reconquered province of Kosovo

In the cold war atmosphere Tito managed to persuade credulous westerners
that the Yugoslav army was the only barrier keeping the USSR from the
Adriatic.  After the breach With Moscow Stalin had indeed prepared an
invading army to get rid of Tito but the 'Truman doctrine' for the protection
of Greece and Turkey indicated that the Americans would not tolerate any
further Soviet advance: Stalin drew back knowing he would not survive an
east west conflict.  The same caution constrained his successors and it
was the existence of NATO and not Tito's inflated army that kept the
super-militarised USSR at bay.

Nevertheless Tito and his successors continued to receive the military,
financial and diplomatic backing which was to produce the present overarmed
federal military monster.

Finding Yugoslavia too diverse to run as a single entity, Tito divided the
army into two: a federal force to defend the fronters and the system, and
local militias available to his trusted chleftains.  Now the militias have
ganged up with the local ethnic groups while the federal army has shown
itself desperate to preserve the union which alone gave it legitimacy.  Some
generals thought that, as the US owes its own existence to victory in a long
and bloody civil war, they could count on American sympathy.

The Kosovo Catastrophe

The beginning of the end of Tito's Yugoslavia came when the Serb communist
leader sent troops to deprive Kosovo of its status as 'Autonomous Province'.
Previously, for all practical purposes, the province of Kosovo had the same
rights - and deprivation of rights - as the six republics of which Tito's
federation was composed; all of which were compelled to implement his brand
of communism.

Having ordered his partisans to reconquer Kosovo regardless of cost, Tito
initially reincorporated it into Serbia allowing Rankovic, his police-chef
to hold down the Albanian majority by tested Stalinist methods.  But after
riots in 1968, Tito changed tack, giving power and patronage to his Albanian
nominees and prohibiting the Belgrade press from reporting the vengeful
harassment to which the vulnerable Serb minority were then being subject.

Milosevic's reassertion of Serb rule over what Serbs treasure as the cradle
of their medieval empire, was just what he needed to revive his battered
authority at a time when Communism everywhere was crumbling.  But his reckless
use of force and his overt manipulation of the Federal presidency enabled the
Croats and Slovene ex-communists to retaliate, by whipping up their own
nationalist sentiments.  The repression of Kosovo justified the proposition,
echoed in Germany, that Milosevic would soon be turning his guns to the West.

But though Milosevic committed himself to defending Serb minorities outside
Serbia, there is no evidence he ever contemplated Serb military dominance
over the whole of Yugoslavia

The Federal army, which did have a vested interest in preserving the union,
was manifestly divided about what to do.  They would hardly have launched
a massive attack with tanks and heavy armour had they not been deliberately
insulted and provoked.

Confident of German and Austrian support, the nationalists in both territories,
some anti communist but most of them ex communists, came to feel they could
safely tear up the Yugoslav constitution and declare unilateral secession.

Origins of Civil War

The killings began in the summer of 1990, after Tudjman had been elected
President of Croatia.  The Serbs shot at his armed followers, who had been
sent in to take over town halls and police stations previously manned by them.
Violent skirmishes produced the beginnings of an exodus of civilians from
both sides, which at the last Red Cross count number over a million.

Serb irregulars managed to cut communications between Zagreb and the coast,
tourism collapsed and, had it not been for vociferous German encouragement,
Tudjman would probably have settled for a negotiated arrangement,
restoring Serb autonomy.

Even then, Tudjman might have been reluctant to take on the Federal Army had
he not had his hand forced by the usually conciliatory Slovenes.  In June 1991
the nationalist leaders, defying sensible advice from wiser compatriots,
not only broke off relations with Belgrade but also sent their militia to haul
down the Yugoslav flag from the international frontier with Austria.

Understandably the Federal army intervened.  They sent in, and very soon
afterwards pulled out - a highly inappropriate convoy of tanks and heavy
armour along with a small number of infantrymen, easily outnumbered by the
local Slovene militia.  The surrender was all the swifter as the general
commanding the operation happened to be Slovene.

International opinion has too readily assumed that the Federal army was always
a tool of the Serbian government: they were indeed often in collusion but
Milosevic's complete control dates only to May 1992, with the purge of senior
officers.  Under Tito's system, the highest ranking officers were chosen
according to an ethnic key, ensuring all the communities were represented.
Junior officers on the other hand were always mainly Serb: indeed it would
rarely occur to an educated Croat, Slovene or Muslim to choose a military
career.

Many Germans, thinking along ethnic lines, defend the independence of the
homogeneous state of Slovenia as inherently virtuous.  But the Slovenes
themselves are already coming to the conclusion that, as long as there is
fighting in their backyard, they will be short of investment, tourism and
access to the captive market, which their industry previously enjoyed.
Under the flag of independence, life has become a lot more difficult.

Some Slovenes privately deplore the independence fervour: old ones remember
the Nazi treatment of Slovenes and dread renewed subordination.  Many young
Slovenes, less alarmed by Austro-German dominance, have lived their lives as
Yugoslavs, travelled freely, exchanged people and ideas and are shocked by
the narrow chauvinism of their current leaders.  Perhaps this was why,
before the independence referendum, the Slovene Minister of Information sent
a directive ordering the Ljubljana press 'to mobilise' for an affirmative
answer.  Among the list of obligations was the fanning of racial hatred:
editors were told to play up anything disagreeable said by a Serb about
Slovenes.

Slovene chauvinism would seem to be only skin-deep.  The prima ballerina of
the Slovene national ballet was born in Nish (Serbia), and educated at the
Zagreb school of ballet.  At a recent reception Slovene leading personalities
saw nothing odd in toasting the success of this prototype of Yugoslav talent.

At the end of last year, Slovene leaders were in desperate haste to acquire
a constitution in time for the scheduled German recognition.  The communists
and anti-clerical liberals informed the leading Christian democrats that they
would withhold the necessary majority unless the projected constitution
legalised abortion.  It did.

According to the Archbishop of Ljubljana, there is no country in the world,
with the possible exception of one African state, which has abortion written
into its constitution   This did not prevent the Pope from promptly
recognising the newly independent state.

Tudjman, who could hardly let himself appear less resolute than his Slovene
colleague, vainly ordered the Federal army to leave Croatia and proceeded
to try and blockade and starve out military garrisons, stationed around
Croatia - legally, under the old regime.  The army often, but not always,
has supported the Serb irregulars.  One exception was at Gospic, capital of
the mainly Serb province of Krajina, which was commanded by a Croat.  When he
surrendered it is reported that his Serb second-in-command committed suicide.
In subsequent revenge killings in Gospic the Serbs who had taken refuge in a
cellar were dragged out by uniformed Croats and Some 75 have remained
unaccounted for.

According to a local Orthodox bishop and other Serb survivors, the Croats
demolished the Orthodox church and wiped out the adjoining cemetery.  As
Zagreb closed the area to Red Cross and Amnesty personnel, there was no Western
confirmation and no TV programmes.

This does not, of course in any way justify the viciousness on the Serb side
nor the wanton killing and destruction of whole Croat communities and the
devastation of so many villages and towns.  But the Croats have been quick to
see that if they use their churches as convenient high-points from which to
shoot attackers and as ample spaces to store weapons, this has the additional
usefulness of provoking attacks on sacred and often historically precious
Catholic places of worship: the ruins make excellent television.

The area of Dubrovnik, form which the federal garrison had withdrawn several
years previously, was turned in 1990 into a Croat stronghold and the Croat
marksmen had no compunction in shooting from behind the ancient walls.  Serious
damage has been done to the front and windows of some buildings, though Western
visitors expecting to see a city in ruins have, on the contrary, found the old
city is still virtually intact.

Reasons behind German Policy

In supporting Croatian and Slovene independence the Germans have seemed to be
defending the principle of self-determination: giving each ethnic group the
right to form its own nation-state.  But German policy makers, who have studied
the ethnic map of Yugoslavia, recognise that the intermingling of communities
makes self-determination impossible: it would produce hundreds of mini-states.
Nor is there any international criteria for deciding how big a group must be,
nor how substantial the majority, in order to qualify its people for the
statehood.

Instead, top officials say, German policy is guided by support for the
immutability of frontiers and the rights of the majority, within these
frontiers, to decide their future.  No one has explained why the present
frontiers of Croatia, drawn by the Communists during the war and englobing
large numbers of non-Croats, should be any more immutable than, the frontiers
of the previously recognised Yugoslavia.  Nor is there any moral reason why
the Croats have a better case for rejecting rule from Belgrade than the Serbs
of Krajina from being governed from Zagreb or the Serbs from Bosnia from
submitting to Moslem/Croat rule from Sarajevo.

Some German officials have justified the speedy recognition of Croatia as a
way of establishing a Western presence in Zagreb which could exercise
restraint.  But so far, no restraining influence has been apparent.  The
Germans have stood by and sustained support, though descendants of the Ustashi
families, who had fled to the US, Canada, Australia, Austria and Germany had
returned to Croatia to re-animate the racist ideology.  'U' for Ustashi (the
Croat equivalent of the Swastika) is scrawled on Zagreb walls.  One
manifestation has been a cult of Mile Budak, Pavelic's minister of education
who was the first to announce Ustashi intentions.  At a rally in Gospic (where
fifty years later Serbs were again being massacred) he promised Croatia would
be cleared of Serbs: one third by expulsion, one third by killing and one
third by forced conversion to Catholicisim, which would turn them into Croats.

Further, there seems to have been no German objection, or reduced support,
when Tudjman passed an anti-Serb law of citizenship, when he raised exorbitant
taxes on Serb-owned property or when he failed to enforce existing law to
protect Serb residents from arson, confiscations and assault.  The consequence
of German conspicuous support for the regime has had disastrous consequences
on the Serbs: in Serbia itself Milosevic has been able to whip up frantic
hysteria, by alleging German complicity with the Croats.  And the Serb
minorities, in both Croatia and Bosnia, often with Milosevic's support,
are willing to perpetrate any crime or bestiality, in what they perceive as
a last-ditch fight for their own survival.

Many educated Serbs are appalled at the frenzy and violence.  Liberal Serbs
are currently engaged in demythologising Titoism and it was recently suggested
to them that there is new material available, showing that the targets for
the Royal Airforce were selected by the Partisans.  This means that Tito was
responsible for the notorious bombing of Belgrade on Eastern Monday, 1944.
Serb liberals preferred to hold back the evidence: Tito was a Croat and it
would only further inflame anti-Croat passions, already out of control.

Germany's best contribution to restore tolerance and trust between their
respective churches, would be to persuade their proteges to follow the German
example, and openly and unconditionally disassociate themselves from those who
committed the wartime genocide.  So far the Vatican has colluded with the
communists in covering up the past, in part, perhaps, because of the
unassailable evidence that some Fransican monks incited and participated in
the Ustashi massacres.

The entrenched hierarchy may never have allowed the present Pope to know what
was done in his Church's name and the Germans Catolic leaders would be
uniquely competent to tell him.

Senior German officials claim credit for having got Tudjman to sign the
Carrington deal, admitting UN troops into the minority areas.  But what has
happened is the reverse of a solution: as Tudjman's Consul General in Munich
said, the Croats need the UN troops to negotiate the departure of the Federal
army: once the federal soldiers had left the Croats would ask the UN to
withdraw.  If the Serbs in Croatia behaved according to Croatian law, they
would have nothing to fear.  This is quite different from what Carrington had
promised the Serbs: the UN would stay until some formula was agreed in which
the minorities could appeal for protection to some international tribunal.
Only the Germans could have forced Tudjman to clear up this dangerous
misunderstanding, in advance of the arrival of the UN troops.

The Croats are once again assuming that the Germans will be on their side and,
indeed, on May 11th 1992 Herr Genscher was the first to proclaim the EC
diplomatic rupture with Belgrade, designed to end the siege of Sarajevo. But
the restoration of peace depends first and foremost on he reconciliation
between Croats and Serbs in which neither would be humiliated and in which
blame would be fairly shared.  Perhaps a change of German foreign minister
will lead to a more balanced policy.

May 13th, 1992
London
Xref: sparky soc.culture.yugoslavia:9139 soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna:343