The lingering death of Yugoslavia

The lingering death of Yugoslavia

Montenegro this week became the latest Balkan region to vote for independence. But what have the trappings of statehood done for the rest of Tito's former empire?

Peter Popham reports

Published: 27 May 2006

Once upon a time there was a plausibly modern, enlightened Communist country called Yugoslavia which manufactured cars called Yugos and staged the Winter Olympics and which for many, including millions of Western holidaymakers, was the acceptable face of Eastern Europe, the bit that worked and that we could do business with - all dominated by the benign Mr Tito.
And today? With the decision for independence last week of tiny Montenegro, Yugoslavia is no more. Instead there is a multiplying proliferation of statelets that belong more to the world of Tintin than to what was once thought of as modern Europe.
Tintin would have felt perfectly at home in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital. The Belgian boy detective, you will remember, arrived in the Balkan kingdom of Syldavia by aeroplane, dropped through a trap door in the fuselage by the dastardly twin brother of Professor Alembick, and landing in a bale of hay. Once there he encountered a world of revolutionaries, spies, moustachioed bandits and anarchists, all in the shade of the gigantic mountains.
Today the grandson of the last king of Montenegro travels regularly to the nation's tiny former capital, Cetinje, by motorcycle, from Paris. He denies he aims to revive the monarchy, but who could be sure? The leader of the country is a musclebound character in a chalk-stripe suit who has been a Communist and an apostle of Serbian expansionism and is now a Montenegrin nationalist. Today he mutters angrily about Serbian "meddling".
In reality (according to the testimony of an Italian gangster) he is a big-time cigarette smuggler. But he is not the only bad hat in town: the Russians are coming! They have bought the country's only factory and huge strips of the beautiful coastline.
It is a country out of comic opera or a period cartoon, with a population one-tenth the size of London. But in a year or two, if Montenegro's tall, sleek, handsome and wily Prime Minister, Milo Djukanovic, gets his way, his sovereign nation will sit alongside the UK, Germany, France and the rest in the councils of the European Union. And jostling behind him in the queue to join will be several other even more improbable specimens.
Yugoslavia ended, but what came into being? We have no handy term for what has replaced the Union of the South Slavs. We are back to the geographical term, the Balkans - from which derives the verb "to balkanise", which means "to break up into small, mutually hostile political units". We are back at the view of the Balkans immortalised by Herg�: a collection of tiny, exotic countries, racked by violence and intrigue, each with their own proud and ancient traditions but ultimately indistinguishable from one another.
And while the end of the Union of Serbia and Montenegro was inevitable, the Balkans have not achieved steady state. That churning, balkanising momentum is still at work. The break-up proceeds. Next up, heartened by the Montenegrins' example, is Kosovo, where the overwhelming Albanian majority favours independence. The Kosovars are expected to get their wish by the end of this year.
And this will set a precedent, because unlike all the bits of Yugoslavia that have broken off so far, Kosovo is not an autonomous republic within the Yugoslav federation but was merely a province within Serbia. When Kosovo breaks away, other disgruntled minorities in other corners of the Balkans will see their moment and hope that time is on their side.
The most universally execrated is Republika Srpska (aka Bosnian Serb Republic), the Serb mini-state that was fashioned by Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic during the Bosnian war as part of the Milosevic fantasy of a Greater Serbia. That mini-state, partially brought into existence by the massacre in Srebrenica, a town that today is firmly within Republika Srpska territory, may have no serious hope of international recognition, but it remains a thorn in the flesh of the High Representative in Sarajevo. And it remains a semi-spectral presence within the immensely complicated polity of Bosnia. It provides, for example, one of the republic's three presidents.
And there are others waiting in the wings. As Kosovo prepares to go independent, the Serbs who constitute the overwhelming majority of the population of the region of northern Kosovo called Mitrovica dream of getting their own state, too. Serbs clustered in the north of Montenegro who resent the decision to break away from Belgrade have separatist dreams of their own, as do Albanians in the south of that republic, and as do Albanians in Macedonia, where a civil war boiled up in 2001.
No one imagines the balkanisation of the Balkans will go that far. But then 15 years ago no one predicted the independence of Yugoslav republics such as Slovenia and Croatia, which are now on their way to joining the European Union. And what's wrong, after all, with states the size of Elephant and Castle or Maida Vale? Perhaps we should all live in countries that size.
From the cane chairs of the long pavement caf� of the Crna Gora Hotel in the centre of Podgorica, it's hard to disagree. On first blush Montenegro seems an excellent idea, and a very satisfactory little country.
Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, formerly one of Yugoslavia's several Titograds, was bombed flat by the British during the war, though a small Ottoman old town survived. But although the architecture is not up to much (the Communists did their best to vandalise it with tower blocks), it is a bewitching town in the May sunshine, full of parks with mature trees, with two fast-flowing, azure rivers and a caf� life to rival anywhere else in the Mediterranean (and reinforcing the Montenegrins' reputation for idleness).
Rising behind the town are the mountains for which the country is named, and which account for the fact that this was the only corner of the Balkans that the Turks never conquered ("They were lazy, too," explained a Belgrade friend). Go up into the mountains and you find ski slopes, the deepest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon, rivers that are fantastic for rafting; head for the coast and there is a fjord, bizarrely misplaced from Scandinavia, and picturesque islands and inlets reminiscent of Japan's Inland Sea. There is the huge Skadar lake, shared with Albania, that is home to hundreds of exotic varieties of birds.
All this and no Serbia: by severing the link with Big Brother, Montenegro at a stroke removes the taint of war crimes and expansionism (even though both Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic came from Montenegro). But Serbia has hospitals and colleges and universities far more advanced than those in Montenegro. Ambitious and clever Montenegrins head to Belgrade to study. Sick Montenegrins head to Belgrade to get better. Till now they have not paid a bean for the privilege. Negotiations on the future status of clever or sick Montenegrins in Serbia have not yet started, but everyone expects the Montenegrins will henceforth have to pay. Hence at least a proportion of the 45 per cent of votes against independence.
Which brings us to the key question: where is the money coming from? Montenegro has only one productive factory, a belching Soviet-style aluminium manufacturing complex outside Podgorica - recently bought by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. The nation's tourism potential is obvious - but long stretches of the coast have been bought up by Russians. There is no guarantee that this bewitching corner of the Adriatic will not be destroyed by hideous hotels within a few years.
During the war, when the Yugoslav economy ground to a halt, Montenegro fell back on what has long been an important standby, smuggling. In particular the large-scale smuggling of cigarettes, very cheap here and expensive everywhere else in Western Europe, became rampant - and according to the testimony of an Italian mafia supergrass, Gerardo Cuomo, the trade involved Milo Djukanovic himself, the formerly Communist politician who has run Montenegro for 16 years.
Mr Djukanovic denied the allegations flatly, and cannot be questioned in court because of parliamentary immunity. But the claimed involvement of the most powerful man in the country in organised crime is only the most glaring irregularity. Of Montenegro's population of 650,000, only 120,000 are formally employed, the rest working in the black market or in smuggling. Hence the spectre of the new mini-states, even the pretty ones like Montenegro, becoming what one diplomat called "sovereign kleptocracies", states run by and for the benefit of wealthy criminals.
Kosovo presents a far starker example. Criminal gangs "operate with impunity," according to Marek Antoni Nowicki, who was the UN's international ombudsman in Kosovo until 2005. "You have a criminal state in real power. It needs underground illegal structures to survive. These networks can rely on the weakness of the public institutions to sanction their operations."
And while in Montenegro the smuggling is counter balanced by the new hotels and resorts, Kosovo has nothing else to fall back on. International aid is complemented by the profits from cigarette, cement and petrol smuggling.
Prostitution is the other core business, catering to the peacekeepers. What happens when they leave is anybody's guess.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article620190.ece