Towards Serboslavia?
YUGOSLAVIA
The major difference between the two is that the Serbs have been the dominant nation within the first Yugoslavia and have maintained to a significant extent a domineering attitude, with the material means to exert such a domination if the army chooses to put itself at the service of
WITH the blockade of several Adriatic coast ports and the movement of troops towards Zagreb, the appearance of an internal interethnic struggle on Croatian territory has melted away; the Serbian regime, the Serb paramilitary groups and the Serb minoritles in Croatia are points of support for a federal army, one of the last vestiges of a Yugoslav state in a Yugoslav or Great Serb oppressor project.
The blocking of the accords which envisaged Yugoslavia as a free union of sovereign states was the combined feat of the Serbian authorities, the army and the federal government of Markovic, at the time supported by the western powers.
decomposition. CATHERINE VERLA — September 20, 1991 because no such authority now exists. Like the putschists in Moscow, it is primarily defending its privileges, indeed its very existence, which is organically linked to the maintenance of a Yugoslavia, even
From the time that Slovenia and Croatia decided on separation, its strategy added up, through evoking the so-called "self-determination" of the Serbs of Croatia, to redefining the contours of a "little" Yugoslavia with frontiers redesigned to the benefit of a greater Serbia appropriating for itself a maximum of territory. The logic of Greater Serbia does not stop at those zones which have Serbian majorities.
This is not the case in any one of the "liberated" zones in Croatia; everywhere else, in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Serbs are in the minority, closely intermingled with other nationalities. A massive exodus is the "solution" proposed to those who do not wish to be part of Serbian territory, or who do not have the means of preserving "autonomous territories".
Moreover, the very identity of the Bosnian Muslims, the Montenegrins and the Macedonians risks being put in jeopardy by the establishment of a murderous "Serboslavia", which could only be maintained through permanent civil war. This Serboslavia will be in the image of the current Serbia, which has recentralized its territory to the detriment of the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina (with a large Hungarian minority) and Kosovo (with an Albanian majority), which have been brought to heel by force, purges, political and henceforth cultural repression.
Officially, the Serbian state of Milosevic is not at war and the Serbian parliament has not recognized those territories which have proclaimed themselves autonomous in Croatia or in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Officially again, the federal army is still "Yugoslav" and supposedly playing a buffer role between Croat and Serb ethnic groups which are fighting each other. Officially, finally, the right of self-determination (therefore of separation) is recognized for the different Yugoslav nations.
### Sovereignty violated
But the sovereignty of the Croat state (or that of Bosnia-Herzegovina) is being violated in the name of the sovereignty of the dispersed Serb nation. The internal frontiers are treated by the Serbs as "artireproach Tudjman, the Croat leader, for rejecting all of Titoist Communism apart from the frontiers of Croatia). But it is entirely the force of the army which allows this redefinition of frontiers, and not a negotiation between sovereign guaranteeing determination of their peoples.
The propaganda of the Serbian media, brought back into line by new dismissals and the nomination from above of journalists, tries to equate in the Serb consciousness an independent Croat state with the fascist wartime state Ustashe, and to link Croat national sentiment with
This association has been strengthened by the genuine nationalism of the new regime elected in Croatia, and the shattering declarations of Tudjman, congratulating himself for having neither a Jew nor a Serb as a wife. The Croatian leader of the Croat Peasant Party, Zvonimir Cicak (former leader of the Croatian struggles of 1971), at first opposed Tudjman, in a logic of association with the Serb intellectuals of Croatia like Milorad Poupovats who fight for the respecting of a double sovereignty; that of the citizens within the frontiers of the Croat state, and that of the national communities wishing to preserve their identity. But Tudjman has preferred to negotiate (in vain) with Milosevic than with the Serbian representatives of his state, and the Croatian parliament has only recognized too late the rights of minorities.
The intervention of the army, whatever has been its past logic, goes today in the sense of a real political coup d'état combined to a Great Serb logic. It expresses an alliance between what remains of neo-Stalinist "communism" in Serbia, and a section of Great Serb nationalism reclaiming the traditions of the Chetniks (the other section having chosen to place itself in opposition to Milosevic).
It is not yet possible to know how far the army will go, nor if its high command is really capable of controlling it. Some divisions have appeared in the recent past, but there have been widespread purges. The pursuit of the current army intervention can only lead to the spreading of the conflict throughout Yugoslavia, at the price of the lives of all its peoples. Such a dynamic cannot be halted through the intervention of foreign armies, which will only serve to unify the Serbian ranks; on the contrary it can only be stopped through a break with Great Serb logic, through its challenging from within.
### Youth provide hope
The mass movement of Serbian youth last March represented a first hope that this might happen. Would nationalism push the logic of war to its limit, or would this logic be broken by a mass movement of Serbian youth, linking up with others in a refusal to participate in this dirty war? Some Serbian voices, a minority who had difficulty in making themselves heard, have already been raised in Croatia and Serbia to denounce the utopian and reactionary myth of the Serb nation/state as a form of realization of national rights.
Some Croat and Muslim figures have done the same in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in favour of the protection of multinational sovereign states. Only the free union of such effectively democratic states, respecting fully the rights of their nations and nationalities, can lead to the necessary withering away of frontiers, to the respect of individual and collective identities.
But for that to happen, it is necessary to finish also with the remnants of a bureaucratic regime which has also committed crimes in the name of Communism and which has sought to maintain to the end the power reduced to its army. Party/state, even if 2 of the
International Viewpoint #213 • September 30, 1991
USSR