Bosnian Inferno

The man from the Foreign Office was still struggling to fix his unwieldy pile of maps to the Kremlin’s antique easel. Chris gave him a hand.

‘Good morning,’ Castle said finally, in a voice that was mercifully dissimilar to Malcolm Rifkind’s. ‘Despite your CO’s testimonial to your reading habits, I’m going to assume you know nothing.’

‘Good assumption,’ Razor agreed.

Castle grinned. ‘Right. Well, Yugoslavia, roughly translated, means Land of the Southern Slavs, and these Slavs originally came south to populate the area more than a thousand years ago. The peoples we now call the Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Bosnian Muslims are all descendants of these Slavs. They are not separate races, any more than Yorkshiremen are a separate race from Brummies, no matter what Geoff Boycott might tell you. If you visited an imaginary nudist colony in Bosnia you wouldn’t be able to tell a Bosnian Muslim from a Slovene, or a Serb from a Croat.’

He paused for breath, and smiled at them. ‘What these peoples don’t have in common is history. I’m simplifying a lot, but for most of the last five hundred years, up to the beginning of this century, the area has been divided into three, with each third dominated by a different culture. The Austrians and sometimes the Italians were dominant in Slovenia, Croatia and along the coast, imposing a West European, Catholic culture. In the mountains of Bosnia and Hercegovina – here,’ he said, pointing at the map, ‘there was a continuous Turkish occupation for several centuries, and many of the Slavs were converted to Islam. In the east, in Serbia and to a lesser extent in Montenegro, the Eastern Orthodox Church, with its mostly Russian cultural outlook, managed to survive the more sporadic periods of Turkish domination. In fact, fighting the Turks was probably what gave the Serbs their exaggerated sense of identity.

‘So, by the time we reach the twentieth century we have a reasonably homogenous racial group divided into three cultural camps. Rather like what Northern Ireland might be like if a large group of Arabs had been settled there in the seventeenth century, at the same time as the Protestants.’

‘Christ almighty,’ Razor muttered.

‘A fair comment,’ Castle agreed. He seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘The problem with people who only have cultures to identify themselves is that the cultures tend to get rabid. Since much of the last millennium in the Balkans has been a matter of Muslim versus Christian there’s plenty of fertile ground for raking up old Muslim–Croat and Muslim–Serb quarrels. And in both world wars the Russians fought the Austrians, which meant Serbs against Croats. In World War Two this relationship reached a real nadir – the Croats were allowed their own little state by the Nazis, managed to find home-grown Nazis to run it – Ustashi they were called – and took the chance to butcher a large number of Serbs. No one knows how many, but hundreds of thousands.

‘But I’m getting a bit ahead of the story. Yugoslavia was formed after World War One, partly as a recognition that these peoples did have a lot in common, and partly as a way of containing their differences for everyone else’s sake. After all, the war had been triggered by a Bosnian Serb assassinating an Austrian archduke in the mainly Muslim city of Sarajevo.’

Castle checked to see if they were awake, found no one had glazed eyes yet, and turned back to the map. ‘There are a few other minor divisions I should mention. The Albanians – who are a different racial group – have large minorities in the Serbian region of Kosovo and in Macedonia. Macedonians are not a separate ethnic group, and their territory has been variously claimed by Bulgaria – which claims that Macedonians are just confused Bulgars – and Greece, which claims etc., etc.’ He grinned owlishly at them.

‘It’s a right fucking mess, then,’ Razor observed.

‘But all their own,’ Chris murmured.

‘At the end of the last war a temporary solution appeared – communism. It was the communists, under Tito, who led the guerrilla war against the Germans, and after the war they took over the government. The ethnic tensions were basically put on ice. Each major group was given its own state in what was nominally a federal system, but Tito and the Party took all the important decisions. The hope was that the new secular religion of communism would see the withering away of the old national-religious identities – everyone would have a house and a car and a TV and be like every other consumer.

‘But when Tito died in 1980 there was no one of the same stature to hold it all together. The system just about stumbled along through the eighties, with the Party bosses holding it all together between them, but when communism collapsed everywhere else in eastern Europe, the rug got pulled out from under their feet.

‘What was left was an economy not doing that badly, at least by other communist standards, but a country with nothing to bind it together, and of course all the accumulated grievances came pouring out. Under Tito the richer areas like Slovenia and Croatia had been forced to subsidize the poorer ones, but they hadn’t been given much of anything in return. The Serbs, who dominated the Party and the federal institutions – and particularly the national army – had no interest in changing things, and the power to stop those who had. Not surprisingly the Slovenes and Croats decided to opt out.

‘Slovenia presented no great problems, except that it set a precedent – if Slovenia could go, then why not Croatia? The trouble was that Croatia had a large Serb minority, and the Croat leaders made no effort whatsoever to reassure it.

‘By this time everyone was acting very badly, like a bunch of mad prima donnas. The Croats decided to secede from Yugoslavia, and their Serb minority areas decided to secede from Croatia. That was a year and a half ago, the summer of 1991, and both secessions have stuck, so to speak. Croatia has been recognized as an independent state, but since the cease-fire at the beginning of this year the Serb areas are nominally “UN-protected” – in other words under Serb military control. There’s no foreseeable hope of Croatia taking them back.

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