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Balkan ghosts awakened
Balkan ghosts awakened
William Pfaff
THURSDAY, MAY 25, 2006
PARIS Milovan Djilas was one of Tito's closest associates in the Yugoslav partisan resistance to the Nazis in World War II. He became a major figure in the postwar Communist government and was considered the likely successor to Tito, but he actually became Yugoslavia's first and most important dissident.
He published a critique - essentially a moral critique - of what he called the "new class" of privilege and indulgence formed by the Communist officials ruling Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact countries during the early postwar period.
This was the most important early critical examination of Marxist rule from inside the system, which was to culminate four decades later in Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika and the collapse of the Communist system from its "internal contradictions."
Djilas was a Montenegrin, which is why I am writing about him here. In another book ("Land Without Justice," 1958), he recounted his early life and the cruel historical burden of Montenegrin existence, saying that his family was "typical in one respect, the men of several generations have died at the hands of Montenegrins, men of the same faith and name.
"My father's grandfather, my own two grandfathers, my father, and my uncle, were killed as if a dread curse lay on them. ... It seems to me that I was born with blood on my eyes. Generation after generation, and the bloody chain was not broken. My first sight was of blood, my first words were blood and bathed in blood."
In the 14th century Montenegro was a semi-independent principality of Serbia, and it continued to resist the expansion of the Ottoman Turk empire after Serbia itself was conquered. Montenegro was never itself subdued, although parts of it were held by the Turks and others by Venice.
In modern times, Montenegro, incorporating part of Albania, was recognized as an independent state, and in 1918 its national assembly voted for union with Serbia. The two together became the core of a new Yugoslavia - reconstituted after World War II as a Communist people's republic.
Now the Montenegrins have voted for independence from Serbia. As always, their independence is entangled with history, which in the Balkans possesses an intensity and power that warrants William Faulkner's remark on the history of his own American South, that here the past is never past.
Last Sunday, more than 55 percent of the Montenegrin voters - including an estimated 16,000 Montenegrins living abroad, who returned for the election - chose independence. Since the terrible wars and ethnic cleansing that destroyed the old six-nation Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbia and Montenegro had survived in a union largely without substance. The Serbians today appear grudgingly willing to sacrifice their link to Montenegro.
Whether the Serbians inside Montenegro will agree is not entirely sure. They form the largest part of the Albanian-Serb national minority that together makes up nearly half the total Montenegrin population of less than 700,000. The Albanian minority consists of about 50,000 people.
The consequences of Montenegrin independence for the neighboring and largely ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo are also unclear. Kosovo is now under interim UN administration, but its majority wants independence, while Serbia, for powerful historical reasons, is resolved to keep Kosovo.
The Kosovo conflict has already seen much violence by both sides, leading up to the NATO intervention in 1999 that produced 78 days' bombing of Serbia.
The new Montenegro naturally wants early EU membership. It will not get it. The EU leadership does not rejoice in Montenegro's independence: It will encourage Serb separatism in Bosnia, and Hungarian autonomists in the Serbian province of Vojvodina, and it may exacerbate Slav-Albanian tensions in Macedonia.
History lives on in the Balkans, ready to break out in more bloodshed, given a provocation. The international effort to deal with the Balkan situation has involved enormous good will as well as material resources and human commitment. But there are no ultimate resolutions to problems so tortured, where memories are so long.
The Balkans slipped off the main Washington agenda more than a decade ago. The region is unlikely to reappear there at least until a new American administration is elected. This is too bad: Balkan historical and political reality teaches a lesson that Washington should heed as it deepens its commitments in another region, the Middle East.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel has been in Washington hoping for unspoken burial of the road map that was supposed to lead toward a negotiated two-state agreement with the Palestinians, with Jerusalem as capital for both. He did not get it, but may. He still seeks American support for an eventual unilateral declaration of Israel's borders. That would invite a Balkan-like future for the two countries, in which the past will never be put behind - by either.
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