Demystifying Genocide: an Exploration of Yugoslavia's Bloody Breakdown

On June 28, 1989, at exactly high noon, a helicopter descended from the sky upon the field of Kosovo Polje. From its doors emerged Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian politician and soon-to-be president of Yugoslavia. He mounted the stage, saluted the audience of one million, and set Yugoslavia down a path of bloody genocide not seen since World War Two.

Six hundred years earlier to the day, cavalry, knights and infantry clashed on the same ground now occupied by Milosevic’s supporters. It was the Battle of Kosovo Polje, where, at the “Field of the Blackbirds,” Serbian Prince Lazar mustered his forces to fight a decisive conflict against the Ottoman Empire. By the end of that day in 1389, Prince Lazar lay dead, and the Ottomans proclaimed victory. It marked the beginning of several centuries of Ottoman domination over Serbia.

“Slo-bo! Slo-bo! Slo-bo! Slo-bo!” Chanted the crowd before Milosevic. Prince Lazar’s bones were on display, having just returned from a pilgrimage across the country with the Serbian Orthodox Church. “If our people lost the Battle of Kosovo, it was due not only to the military supremacy of the Turks but to the tragic discord among the leadership of the Serbs,” Milosevic said.

“This discord has dogged the Serb people throughout their history, through both World Wars and, later, when the Serbian leadership in socialist Yugoslavia remained divided and prone to make compromises at the people’s expense… The heroism demonstrated here at Kosovo cannot allow us to forget that at one time our people were brave, and dignified, and stood among the few who went into battle undefeated,” he continued. “Now, six centuries later, we are again engaged in conflicts and disputes. These aren’t yet armed battles, but such things can’t be ruled out.”

Milosevic, consciously or not, came to the same realization Ivan Velikopolsky, the fictional student of a clerical academy, did when Anton Chekhov wrote, “'The past,’ he thought, ‘is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.’ And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.” History is a tool to be wielded by the politically astute, and for Milosevic, Serbian history was not merely a tool, but a weapon. He had touched the end of the chain that lay in 1389, and in the present, the ancestral spirit of the crowd quivered as they sang, “Oh, Prince Lazar, how ill-starred, not to have a Slo-bo marching at your side.”

Within twelve years, Milosevic would be arrested at his home in Belgrade and sent to a UN prison near the Hague to be tried for 66 counts of crimes against humanity, among them genocide. Five years later, before justice could be served, he would be found dead in his cell. He apparently perished by natural causes at the age of 64.

As president of Yugoslavia, Milosevic shed blood from Croatia to Kosovo throughout the 1990s. But the deadliest of his exploits happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which I will simply refer to as “Bosnia.” In 2007, the Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo published a comprehensive study of war casualties in the country between 1992 and 1995. It put the total number of dead at 97,207, with 66% of the victims being Bosniaks, the name for Bosnian Muslims. Only 26% were Serbs, and 8% were Croats.

On the surface, the demographic statistics and quotations by Milosevic tell a story of a state torn apart by ethnic hatred. Such hatred ran deep, six centuries, to be exact, and it is therefore innate to the region. Proponents of this view, which I will call the ethnic hatred school, use all sorts of metaphors; ethnic hatreds are ingrained in the Balkans’ DNA; they are weaved into its fabric; they are etched indelibly into its history. And if this line of reasoning is correct, then since the past is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other, as Chekhov would put it, the south slavs can never bury their ethnic hatreds. They will always resurface, as they have in the past, so to suppress them is futile.

Here, I argue against the ethnic hatred school. The Balkans, and Yugoslavia specifically, are not uniquely hateful, nor is ethnic conflict there inevitable. To espouse such ideas is an ethical and moral hazard, as they induce apathy in the face of preventable horror, such as we witnessed in Bosnia. They may also result in a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the Balkan people themselves relinquish any aspirations for a tolerant, multiethnic future. Since it is as reasonable an assumption that the Earth is not flat, I will proceed with the premise that the inhabitants of the Balkans are not somehow genetically deficient.

Given that, any alleged uniqueness in their tendency toward ethnic strife must come from some other source, such as culture or history. However, the notion of a common Yugoslav culture or history which might explain past or present conflicts is unsupported. The region is characteristically multiethnic, multireligious and multicultural with divergent national histories. Serbia is predominantly orthodox Christian, Croatia is predominantly Roman Catholic, and Bosnia is predominantly Muslim, though it is the most ethnically mixed. All three of these example states have been ruled by different empires at different times.

The obvious objection to this line of reasoning is that the Balkans’ diversity of cultures, ethnicities and histories is itself to blame for its instability. But then why do we not see ethnic conflict erupting all across the world? Of course, there are minor instances of ethnic violence in any country or region, but many areas have achieved a sustained, tolerant peace, even if tensions are present. The United States and western Europe, for example, are relatively peaceful.

In the years leading up to the war in 1992, Bosnia looked more auspicious socially than numerous other countries, yet it fell apart and they did not. “It wasn’t a paradise, but the problems were much less than the United States’ racial problems,” Chip Gagnon, professor of politics at Ithaca College, told me. “Most Bosnians had lived together for centuries. There was intermarriage.”

So what caused the genocide in Bosnia? I argue that there were a variety of causes, all of which intersected, all of which were preventable. First, there were the economic causes. Yugoslavia experienced a severe economic decline throughout the 1980s, beginning with the death of Josip Broz Tito and culminating with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hyperinflation kicked off in 1992, closely proceeding the end of the Cold War, which made the Yugoslav state more or less obsolete in the eyes of the United States, one of its major sources of financial assistance. All of these factors contributed to the degradation of civil society and made the populations ripe for manipulation by populist demagogues like Slobodan Milosevic.

Second, there were political causes. As the economic distress reached a high in 1989, a wave of democratic revolutions began to sweep across eastern and central Europe. The six Yugoslav republics failed to compromise in the federal government, and they split ideologically. Furthermore, the Serbian elites wanted to preserve their power. To distract the population from their economic malaise, Milosevic stirred up nationalist passions and scapegoated the Bosniaks and Croats, and meanwhile the elites transfered their basis of power from membership in the communist party to ownership of private property. The Serbian leadership constructed a sophisticated propaganda machine to divert attention away from the economic-political system and toward the war.

There is, of course, much more to be said about the conflict. Genocide is a complex phenomenon. We may also include negative causes such as the shameful absence of any meaningful international intervention, not withstanding the United Nations’ arms embargo and its infamous “safe areas,” both of which arguably did more harm than good. We may also include the broader historical analysis of nationalism and its emergence as a specifically modern phenomenon. That, however, is far outside the scope of this piece. Benedict Anderson’s classic Imagined Communities and the plethora of scholarship which proceeded him do more justice to the subject than I ever could. Instead, we will focus on the most proximate economic and political causes of the war.

Economic Factors

“Tensions along ethnic, racial, or historical fault lines can lead to civil violence, but to explain the Yugoslav crisis as a result of ethnic hatred is to turn the story upside down and begin at its end.”

Here, Susan Woodward is correct. The argument of those who share my disposition is not that ethnic hatreds were not a part of the story in Bosnia. We merely believe that ethnic hatreds were not the prime factor in explaining the conflict. They were a surface manifestation of deeper roots which were entirely avoidable. Pointing to ethnic strife as the sole explanatory variable, then declaring the case closed, provides us with no greater wisdom for preventing similar tragedies in the future.

Of course, ethnic cleansing occured in Bosnia. To take the analysis one step forward and explain why, we must put the country in historical context. For most of its lifespan, Yugoslavia received copious financial aid from one of its primary trading partners, the United States. By 1981, however, Josip Broz Tito had died, and the neoliberal cold warrior Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House. Reagan shifted the US’ policy toward Yugoslavia, adopting a more predatory, subversive stance. In 1990, a “Secret Sensitive" 1984 National Security Decision Directive (NSDD 133) entitled "United States Policy towards Yugoslavia” was declassified. Among its objectives were "expanded efforts to promote a `quiet revolution' to overthrow Communist governments and parties"... while reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into the orbit of the World market.”

By 1982, Yugoslavia was the most indebted country in east and central Europe, with 20 billion dollars being owed to foreign lenders. Throughout the decade, Belgrades creditors, primarily Western countries and the IMF, pressured it to adopt macroeconomic reforms which led to over a decade of severe economic decline and reduced living standards. The government accumulated more and more foreign debt, the currency devalued, and in return for debt restructuring, it cut public expenditures in the pursuit of osterity, weakening the federal state and thus exaggerating political divisions between Belgrade, the republics and the autonomous provinces.

Industrial growth slowed to 2.8% from 1980-1987, hit 0% from 1987-1988, and plummeted to -10.6% in 1990. Despite the economic tailspin, Prime Minister Ante Markovic agreed to a deal with US President George H. W. Bush in 1989 which promised Yugoslavia a financial aid package in exchange for a freeze on wages, a new, devalued currency, cuts to public expenditures, and the privatization of socially owned enterprises.

These neoliberal reforms, which were designed to shrink the government as much as possible and effectively service debt to foreign creditors, came at a time of dramatic, monumental transformations in the Yugoslav economic and political system. During such a volatile transition, when the established powers of competing pluralities are extraordinarily vulnerable, a strong state is especially needed to maintain civil order and stability. In Yugoslavia, the federal state had been degraded for many years, with extensive social effects. “A sense of community under these circumstances is highly prized, but not because of the historical persistence and power of ethnic identities and cultural attachments…” said Woodward. “but because the bases of existing communities have collapsed and governments are radically narrowing what they will or can provide in terms of previously guaranteed rights to subsistence, land, public employment, and even citizenship.” Thus, outside pressure to neoliberalize helped set the stage for the hysterical nationalism that would grip a minority of the Serb population in the early 1990s.

Unsurprisingly, worker strikes and protests broke out across Yugoslavia from the early 1980s onward. They were organized by the communist party in Serbia, so appropriately, they called for government leaders to live up to the ideal of Yugoslav socialism. But in 1990, their grievances shifted direction, taking aim at the socialist system itself and the political-economic elites who profited from it. By this time, Slobodan Milosevic had become president. He desired to preserve the socialist system of self-management with an added emphasis on efficiency and managerial expertise, while recentralizing the confederation around Serbia and turning toward authoritarianism. Other republics such as Slovenia and Croatia had swung towards political liberalism with multi-party elections, and Markovic was headed down the same road with the liberalizing reforms he had been implementing. Markovic was also quite popular, and the vision for Yugoslavia Milosevic had in mind was not.

Political Factors

To push through his unpopular policies, Milosevic had to turn the public’s head in another direction. There is only so much space for discourse in the public sphere, and if there happened to be an existential threat capturing everyone’s attention, then unwanted economic policies could be enacted without too much of an outcry. The distraction Milosevic chose was war. First, the spotlight was put on Croatia. Fear was drummed up about the return of the fascist Ustace, who were supposedly preparing to carry out genocide against the Croatian Serbs. When that war ended, popular mobilizations against Milosevic stirred back up, so another target was chosen.

This time, it was Bosnia. In 1992, members of Milosevic’s party worked with allies in the Serbian Democratic Party in Bosnia to purge moderates and replace them with extremists. Municipalities were claimed as Serb territory, Serb members of non-ethnic parties were discredited, and violent provocations with the civilian population began.

“This violence along ethno-nationalist lines was thus not the result of hatreds from below; rather it was the result of a political strategy on the part of Serbia’s ruling elites to demobilize mass movements at home and to restructure the demographics of parts of Yugoslavia in a way that would enable Serbia to plausibly claim those territories,” Chip Gagnon said. Thus, the nearly 100,000 Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats who lost their lives between 1992 and 1995 were merely expendable pawns in a petty political game. They were a small price to pay for Milosevic and the rest of the Serbian elites to preserve their power.

In fact, neither Milosevic nor Radovan Karadzic, political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, were really nationalists. In a speech at Kosovo Polj in 1987, Milosevic said the following: “We can't allow ill-wishing people to misuse nationalists which every upstanding person must oppose. We must protect brotherhood and unity like the pupil of our eyes. But because of exactly that, today when brotherhood and unity are jeopardized, we must and can win. Neither do we wish, nor are we able, to divide people into Serbs and Albanians, but rather we must create delimiters both for the upstanding and progressive ones that fight for brotherhood and unity and national equal rights and for the counter-revolutionaries and nationalists on the other side.” While he does talk about Serbia, he emphasizes Yugoslav togetherness. His most famous speech at the same location two years later, which opened this article, was very similar.

Karadzic, too, was ideologically inconsistent. In 1992 at a press conference, he told a group of reporters, “The Muslims want to force Serbs to live under sharia. Our women would be forced to wear chadors… ”We do not want to conquer Sarajevo. We should divide the city with the Muslims.” And yet, only two years prior, in the fall of 1990, he sounded like a completely different person. “Most Muslims here are not fundamentalists,” he told reporter Chuck Sudetic, referring to the Muslim population in Bosnia. “These Muslims are used to the European way of life, an emancipated way of life. These Muslims oppose the fundamentalists.”

In order for these fake nationalists to protect their political and economic status, they required some genuine popular support. To obtain this, Milosevic and his party embarked on a massive propaganda campaign to whip up fear and anger among the Serb population. When the Serb militias encircled Sarajevo in 1992, they immediately took over and destroyed the post, telegraph and telephones. This action minimized the amount of incriminating testimony coming out of the city.

Back home, Milosevic held a strong grip over the media landscape. He refused to let any independent television stations have a national frequency, his state television enjoyed a monopoly, and he replaced the director of Radio Television Serbia as he wished. And with the ongoing economic collapse and hyperinflation, few people could afford to read newspapers or magazines.

Peter Maas, a reporter for The Washington Post, observed the propaganda machine at work when he visited Banjaluca during the war. He spoke to Vera Milanovic, a Serb woman who had to flee her village because of fighting. In the first days of the war, all of the Muslims in her village were “cleansed.” When Sudetic asked her why they had been arrested, she replied, “they were planning to take over the village. They had already drawn up lists. The names of the Serb women had been split into harems for the Muslim men.” He pressed her on how she knew this, to which she replied, “It was on the radio. Our military had uncovered their plans. It was announced on the radio.”

It was all fiction, of course. Bosnia’s Muslims were relatively moderate in their faith; there were no plots to kidnap Serb women and place them in harems. In fact, Alija Izetbegovic, president of Bosnia at the time, was far less threatening than Milosevic in Serbia or Tudjman in Croatia. During an election campaign in 1990, he advocated for the preservation of Bosnia as a multiethnic, multireligious republic. He even supported a federal Yugoslavia with Bosnia integrated into it. Declaring independence was not his first preference; it was merely a means of survival in a crumbling Yugoslavia.

Vladimir Micic, a Bosnian Serb who was just finishing high school when the war started, experienced what it was like to be on the receiving end of the propaganda machine. Growing up near Sarajevo, he was instilled with the values of brotherhood and unity, writing poems about famous battles from the Second World War. “I was thinking about the partisans as these heroes, not national heroes, but heroes of Yugoslavia,” he told me. He truly believed in the Yugoslav experiment. Until just weeks before the start of the war, he held onto his faith that Bosnia would hold together.

But as the city, the country, and the region fragmented along ethnic lines, he was forced to leave Sarajevo with his family. They joined his grandparents in the countryside, firmly in Bosnian Serb territory. His brother went to fight in the war, and he was left to watch television with his grandparents. Whenever it was on, the screen broadcasted Serb propaganda. Soon enough, Micic’s prior commitment to brotherhood and unity gave way to fear-induced nationalism. “I was told my brother could die. I was worried about him,” he said. “I was worried for my uncles, both of my mom’s brothers, who were recruited and were actively fighting in the war. So my brain was actively switching and supporting one side. And there was not much space for dissent in the territory. I remember the news would talk and they would say they are ‘cleaning the territory.’ Now I know what that means.”

Television and radio were not the only channels through which propaganda flowed. Disinformation also spread like a contagion through informal social channels. Put simply, people told rumours. One person might have heard something on the radio, took it at face value, then passed it onn to their neighbor as fact. Chip Gagnon experienced this phenomena personally when he travelled to Belgrade in 1995. The war was still unfolding, and he was conversing with a Serb friend who had originally come from Bosnia. “She said, ‘You know, We heard that the Muslims had lists drawn up to kill the men and put the women into harems. We couldn’t believe they were going to do that. It’s so horrible!’ Like she actually believed it, because what they did was they drew on social networks, like friends and relatives, to spread these rumours.” Gagnon’s friend seemed to echo the story told by Vera Milanovic years earlier in Banjaluca. They existed in two different times, two different places, and yet they were both exposed to the same myth.

Looking Forward

A 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 73% of adults in Bosnia, 66% in Serbia and 65% in Croatia agreed that “it is better for us if society consists of people from different nationalities, religions and cultures.” Bosnia is still the most ethnically mixed state in the former Yugoslavia, and it lives in relative peace. Whether or not it will remain that way depends on the willingness of not just the south slavs, but the international community to learn from Bosnia’s history.

The war, at its heart, was not about ethnicity. It was not about ethnic hatreds, or religious hatreds, or ancient hatreds. It was not about avenging Prince Lazar. It was not about getting revenge for the dead Serbs in fascist Croatia. It was not about preventing the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic state in Bosnia. It was not about protecting vulnerable Serb minorities in the east. The war in Bosnia was about power and whom deserved to hold it.

Milosevic and Karadzic were not nationalists; they used nationalism for their own ends. In a rapidly liberalizing, fragmenting Yugoslavia, the only way they saw to ride out the wave was war. After Bosnia, it would be Kosovo. Throughout the 1990s in the Balkans, three separate countries saw their formerly jovial neighbors throw each other into concentration camps, slit each other’s throats, and rape each other’s wives, all to preserve the status of a plutocratic elite who felt their status threatened.

Let us not forget, however, that the stage was set years before the Serbian elites knew what their plan would be, years before Karadzic learned the meaning of nationalism. Yugoslavia, as complex a story as it contains, is part of a much bigger tale about financial imperialism, about predatory capitalism, about class warfare. A global wave of neoliberal ideology swept across Yugoslavia, bringing with it IMF loans, structural adjustment programs, cuts to welfare spending, mass unemployment, economic decay, political disintegration and social upheaval. The Yugoslav leadership were complicit in the gutting of their own state, and Tito’s experiment with brotherhood and unity was wasted away as a result.