Robert Service on Yugoslav Wars

“The barbarous violence was brought to an end in 1995 by an agreement signed in Dayton, Ohio; and Milošević was momentarily hailed around the world as a peacemaker. But he had suspended action in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina only because he currently lacked the necessary military power. Kosovo, morever, was another matter and in 1998 he carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing which forced Albanians to flee for their lives over the border into Albania. President Clinton convinced the UN to sanction armed intervention. In March 1999, after Milošević refused to give way, Belgrade suffered relentless NATO bombing from the air. By June he had no alternative but to pull out of Kosovo. Political demonstrations began against him in Belgrade. In the following year he went down to defeat in Serbia’s elections and was ousted from office. In 2001 the Serbian authorities surrendered him for trial as a war criminal at the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague; he died in March 2006 before any verdict was reached. Yugoslavia had long since been dismembered and its communism consigned to the dustbin of history. Nationalism, casting off the light disguise of constitutional federalism, had triumphed – and only to a partial degree did it lead to liberal democracy. The system of political patronage and financial corruption outlived the communist order in the states carved out of Yugoslavia.”

“Although there was peaceful abandonment of communism in most states of the former Soviet Union, some terrible exceptions occurred. Russian and Moldovan elites fought for supremacy in Moldova (which had dropped its Soviet name of Moldavia). Tribal and religious rivalries produced a vicious civil war in Tajikistan on the Afghan border. Chechnya rose in revolt against the Russian Federation. A bloody war sputtered on between Armenia and Azerbaijan about the Armenian-inhabited enclave in Karabagh. But it could have been so much worse and most of the countries of the former USSR at least achieved independence without bloodshed. The same was true across the Kremlin’s ‘outer empire’. Eastern Europe’s peoples coped calmly with life after communism without ‘Russian’ interference. There was a political emergency in Czechoslovakia when the Slovaks, after years of resenting the Czechs, demanded the right to secede. But the dispute was resolved. Not a shot was fired as the Czech Republic and Slovakia went their separate ways in January 1993. The great exception was Yugoslavia (which had anyway never submitted to Soviet Imperial control). Conflicts broke out across the borders of many republics after Milošević’s rise to power in Serbia. Ethnic strife convulsed the internal affairs of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Suddenly in mid-1991 Yugoslavia broke apart when Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally declared their independence. Macedonia followed in September 1991, Bosnia-Herzegovina in March 1992. Inflamed by Milošević's speeches, Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina demanded broad self-rule. This was reasonably interpreted by resident Moslems and Croats as the first steps towards annexation by Serbia. The Croatian government under Franjo Tudjman poured finance and arms into Bosnia-Herzegovina in support of its conationals. The whole federal state collapsed in concurrent processes of secessions, civil wars, inter-republican invasions and ethnic expulsions.”