Who Was to Blame for the Tragedy of Yugoslavia: A Selection from Tony Judt’s Postwar (2005)
“Yugoslavia was different. Just because its various populations were so very intermingled (and had not undergone the genocides and population transfers that had re-arranged places like Poland or Hungary in earlier decades), the country offered fertile opportunities for demagogues like Milošević, or Franjo Tudjman, his Croat counterpart. In fashioning their exit from Communism around a new political constituency they could play an ethnic card no longer available elsewhere in Europe—and substitute it for a concern with democracy. . . .
Who was to blame for the tragedy of Yugoslavia? There was certainly enough responsibility to go around. . . . But in the end the primary responsibility for the Yugoslav catastrophe must rest with the Serbs and their elected leader Slobodan Milošević. It was Milošević whose bid for power drove the other republics to leave. It was Milošević who then encouraged his fellow Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to carve out territorial enclaves and who backed them with his army. And it was Milošević who authorized and directed the sustained assault on Yugoslavia’s Albanian population that led to the war in Kosovo.
Belgrade’s actions were a disaster for Serbs everywhere. They lost their land in the Krajina region of Croatia; they were forced to accept an independent Bosnia and abandon plans to carve from it a sovereign Serb state; they were defeated in Kosovo, from which most of the Serb population has since fled in justified fear of Albanian retribution; and in the rump state of Yugoslavia (from which even Montenegro has sought to secede) their standard of living has fallen to historic lows. This course of events has further exacerbated a longstanding Serb propensity for collective self-pity at the injustice of history and it is true that in the longer run the Serbs may well be the greatest losers in the Yugoslav wars. It says something about the condition of their country that today even Bulgaria and Romania rank above Serbia in present living standards and future prospects.
But this irony should not blind us to Serb responsibility. The appalling ferocity and sadism of the Croat and Bosnian wars—the serial abuse, degradation, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens—was the work of Serb men, mostly young, aroused to paroxysms of casual hatred and indifference to suffering by propaganda and leadership from local chieftains whose ultimate direction and power came from Belgrade. What followed was not so unusual: it had happened in Europe just a few decades before, when—all across the continent and under the warrant of war—ordinary people committed quite extraordinary crimes.
There is no doubt that in Bosnia especially there was a history upon which Serb propaganda could call—a history of past sufferings that lay buried just beneath the misleadingly placid surface of post-war Yugoslav life. But the decision to arouse that memory, to manipulate and to exploit it for political ends, was made by men: one man in particular. As Slobodan Milošević disingenuously conceded to a journalist during the Dayton talks, he had never expected the wars in his country to last so long. That is doubtless true. But those wars did not just break out from spontaneous ethnic combustion. Yugoslavia did not fall: it was pushed. It did not die: it was killed.”—Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005)
