From the August 2002 issue

THE HAGUE AND SERB HISTORY

R.K.Kent

Raymond K. Kent is Professor Emeritus of History at the University  of

California in Berkeley

     For over a decade now it has been fashionable among some Western 'intellectuals' to satanize 'the Serbs' by re-interpreting their history through basically the same set of guiding principles and methods. With certain members of this parasitic and self-congratulatory ilk, "the Serbs" have  been  established, quite viscerally, as the fin-du-siecle neo-Nazis. They are roundly accused by proclamations to be guilty of genocide in Bosnia and in Kosovo. They are 'found' to be  incapable of sharing the same space with other ethnicities. They held all the power in Belgrade. Their 'real mission' in the 20th century has been to create a 'Greater Serbia' by incorporating into the 'Inner Serbia' all those Yugoslav territories inhabited by substantial numbers of 'Serb colonists' and then get rid of all the non-Serbs. The methods used to promote such  guiding  fare minimize  anything that would or could favor the Serbs. They involve the suppression of any evidence that could exculpate 'the Serbs' from the sins attributed to them.

     The latest example of this mindset comes from a study by one Audrey Helfant Bading, who seems to be in some way connected with the Harvrad University. We have received a resume of her study entitled Serbian Nationalism in the Twentieth Century. What is truly remarkable is that this "study" was commissioned by the International  Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague. The fact of this pre-ordered study and its  time-frame  reveal   prima facie that the unstated but fundamental task of the ICTY is to  punish the Serbs, first and foremost by deforming them beyond any recognition and secondly by tarring them with collective guilt.  

     Among the jewels in this Bading piece is the assertion  that Serbia entered World War I with the pre-determined idea of creating Yugoslavia but that the driving force behind this idea was Greater Serbia lurking as it were sub-rosa underneath the Yugoslav mask. As proof of this version of 'history' Bading  claims that all research of the period in question revealed that neither of the three ethnicities entering into Yugoslavia knew much about the other two or was ready for participation in the new collective. Her first premise suffers from what real bread-and-butter professional historians call the backward projection. Since 'Greater Serbia' rings an  alarm  bell  against  the 'atavistic' and 'aggressive' Serb Nationalism (the kind  that "causes wars and ethnic cleansing"), stick it to "the Serbs" in 1914. Endow them with Balkan Imperialism in creating Yugoslavia. Pin the ethnic cleansing sins  of   the 1990s on some sort of Serb national trait. Hide the fact that the Serbs have been its most prominent  victims in the deep past, in World War II and most recently in the 1990s, at Western Slavonia, Krajina and a  Kosovo under a UN Trusteeship.

     There  is no doubt that some  of Serbia's  leaders wanted to extricate the Bosnian Serbs from Austrian rule and merge  their part of Bosnia with Serbia proper. But, this tendency can equally be seen as belonging to both anti-colonialism and liberation movements. It was, in fact, loudly proclaimed as such by the Hapsburg South Slav leaders. On the day of Austria's attack on Serbia  (24 July 1914), its government under Nikola Pashic called upon the Serb people to defend its homeland. It was only four months later that Bosnian Serbs came into view as a target  for liberation from Austria. In fact, the drive for  liberation and unity of all South Slavs was mainly one-sided until three years later when Pasic and a Dalmatian Croat, Ante Trumbic of the Yugoslav Committee, signed the Corfu Declaration (20 July 1917). It even began among the Hapsburg Slavs in the preceding century and became known as the "Illyrian  Movement."

     Nor can one sustain the claim that the Serb government wanted a war with Austria in order to obtain a Greater Serbia. As a matter of well-documented fact, Serbia accepted a humiliating Austrian ultimatum in order to avoid a war with Austria. It accepted 9 of its 10 demands in toto and left the tenth in an ambiguous state. It has been the general verdict of historians that the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo in 1914 was used as a  pretext to go to war on a wider scale. The preparations and advent of World War I cannot be pinned on the 'Serb nationalism.'

     As for the claim that none of the Yugoslavia's constituent peoples had intimate knowledge of one another, not being 'ready' for a collective state, it rests on little more than intellectual poverty. To this day, even in America, foreign  policy is not made by 'the people.' How much do the foreign-policy elites know even now about the populations affected by what such elites do or fail to do? Not much at all. It is an endemic feature of all foreign policy elites to think in terms of national interest without undue concern for  the impact of their acts at home and  abroad. Nor does it follow that had the three major ethnicities known one another intimately the Yugoslav Union would never have taken place. The Serbo-Croat or Croato-Serb  'problem' has been accurately defined long ago not as arising from 'Greater Serbia' but as one of  federalism vs. centralism.

     Former Imperial subjects, emerging from a feudal background, joined an ongoing state which had been forged out of a peasant  society  after four centuries  of  Ottoman rule. Two different political experiences and traditions, one generally contestatory and the other leader-oriented, could not easily mesh and the fact that the Croats and the Serbs did not share the same branch of Christianity became a Trojan Horse, awaiting World War II and the re-Balkanization of  Yugoslavia in the 1990s. There are two other major 'jewels' in the Bading text. One is the extension of the 'mask' argument to the second, communist Yugoslavia under the half-Croat, half-Slovene Josip Broz Tito. Accordingly, Belgrade 'hid' its dominance over all the other ethnicities by playing constantly the 'Yugoslav Card' but, in relality its heart was elsewhere.

     In reality Tito was an anti-Serb par excellence. He had requested in 1944 that the USAF bomb Belgrade to 'soften' the Serbs so they would accept Communist rule. The USAF obliged him by dropping its lethal ware on Belgrade eleven times, starting with the day of the Orthodox Easter in 1944. He deliberately allowed the majority  re-peopling  of  Kosovo by what had once been its Albanian minority. He effectively severed Vojvodina (major center of Serb culture) and Kosovo (birthplace of the Serbian state) from Serbia. The Constitutional Amendments of 1971 and  1974, presented as 'steps toward democracy' in ex-Yugoslavia by Bading and others of the same Serbophobic persuasion, actually transformed the hitherto Yugoslav citizens of Serb origin, living anywhere they liked, into unprotected and easily brutalized  minorities.

     If one goes by facts and not self-serving fiction, it is becoming increasingly  obvious that the Serbs are proving to be the only people of ex-Yugoslavia who still tolerate  and maintain multiethnicity. Throughout the civil wars, in which a Serb in Kosovo or Croiatia would be instantly killed, some 60,000 Croats and 80,000 ethnic Albanians lived unmolested in the Greater Belgrade area alone. In contrast, a University of California professor who went to Kosovo to work for the U.N. was assassinated by Albanian thugs merely because he spoke Serb ian in the street.

     It is not surprising that the presumed victors in Yugoslavia are busy rewriting history from their point of view. The New Imperialism is at once economic, political and cultural. It uses the sword to impose its will when all else fails and it employs the pen to solidify its self-gratifying version of 'history.'

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