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
May 26, 2006
Kosovo Serb convoy stoned; UN troops fire tear gas
Kosovo Serb convoy stoned; UN troops fire tear gas
PRISTINA (Reuters) - United Nations police in Kosovo fired tear gas to disperse a crowd of ethnic Albanians who stoned a convoy of Serbs in the west of the UN-run province yesterday, police said. A Kosovo Albanian police spokesman said two UN personnel were lightly wounded in the incident in the ethnic Albanian village of Mala Krusa, near Prizren. «A UN police convoy taking Serbs there was stopped and stoned. Police fired tear gas,» said spokesman Fatmir Gjurgjeala. Two UN vehicles were also damaged. Witnesses said the main Prizren-Djakovica road was closed and several villagers had been taken to hospital for treatment for the effects of tear gas. The stoning of Serb convoys in Kosovo is not uncommon.
"The stoning of Serb convoys in Kosovo is not uncommon" .
If the so called "oppression"of Albanians in the nineties was not "uncommon "and was punished by the NATO bombing of Serbia,
today for the stoning and the mistreatment of Serbs,which is not "uncommon", ,the reward is the independence .
Like we say in France: "Les voies du Seigneur sont impénétrables", but the question is who gives wh o the right to act like Allmighty.
Dragan RAKIC
F-Strasbourg
Balkan ghosts awakened
Balkan ghosts awakenedTHURSDAY, MAY 25, 2006PARIS 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.
The Yugoslav jigsaw
Cyprus MailThe Yugoslav jigsaw is not quite over yetLAST SUNDAY'S independence referendum in Montenegro passed with barely a whimper, a majority voting to break away from the union with Serbia in what has been widely described as the final act in the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
Few today dispute Montenegro's right to secession. Even in Belgrade, there is a relief that the will-they-won't-they charade of recent years is finally over. In recent years, Montenegro had in any case been independent in all but name, the remaining link a mere fig leaf to mask a de facto separation.
What's more, coming at the tail end of a 15-year disintegration that saw a decade of savage wars of succession, there is widespread congratulation that the last piece of the Yugoslav jigsaw has been plucked away without bloodshed.
And yet it isn't the last piece of the jigsaw, because in advocating the absolute right of self-determination when it first recognised the secession of Slovenia and Croatia all those year ago, the international community deployed reflecting mirrors of ethnic conflict that cannot be tidily sealed within tidy state borders.
While saying that multi-ethnic Yugoslavia was untenable, the international community created a mini-Yugoslavia in Bosnia. In freeing Bosnia's Muslims from the tutelage of Belgrade, it placed Bosnia's Serbs under the tutelage of Sarajevo.
Today, Bosnia-Hercegovina is a failed state, still run by a foreign governor appointed by the international community. As indeed is Kosovo, whose final status remains undecided. And why should Kosovo's Albanians – a majority in the province but a small minority in Serbia – be allowed self-determination, but not their ethnic brethren in the neighbouring Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia? Or the Serbs or Croats of Bosnia who want to unite with their motherlands? And so the list goes on…
Few today fear a resurgence of the wars that tore apart the Balkans in the 1990s. The region is simply worn out. What is important now is not to allow seeds of resentment to mature to a stage where they might give rise to future conflict. And the best guarantee for that is to ensure that the Western Balkans are integrated into the European Union as soon as realistically possible.
Just as the Greeks of Cyprus feel more comfortable belonging to the same club as Greece, so the Serbs now spread out over half a dozen micro states will feel more comfortable if those are all united in the greater European family.
More practically, the access to European funds and the improvement of people's living standards that has accompanied every European enlargement so far is the greatest promise of future stability in the region. Prosperous countries do not take rash decisions; they have too much to lose. But those that are poor, that feel isolated, unfairly treated, backed into a corner, they wind up with nothing to lose.Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2006
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