i sada opet jek lanca teškog dok mrak nadire a sunce pada hiljadu godina nastavlja priča kad dođu noći bez sna i mira
kod svake zore predahnem malo odmorim srce i uvijek tako vrijeme proteče primirje ode zar već je prošlo pitam se Bože
a dušman svoje nakane tjera blještave boje razloge svoje smrt ga vodi još jednom kreće u zlom naumu ime ti neće ni izgovorit
domovino zlatnoga cvijeća ne može zlotvor tebe ni pojmit
zvjezdano nebo opet se spušta kameni spavač svoj luk mi pruža nikad daleko ni s kraja svijeta rijeke ti hladne su krv moja vrela
i da se rodim stotinu puta branim te Bosno do sudnjeg dana ne dam te Bosno ne dam te draga vidam ti rane iz zadnjeg pakla brišem ti suze ljubim ti ruke sve do samog kraja vremena branim te mila do sudnjeg dana
Until the End of Time
and now again the echo of heavy chains as darkness descends and the sun sets for a thousand years the story goes on when the nights come without sleep or peace
at every dawn I catch my breath I rest my heart and always so time passes by the truce is gone has it passed already I ask, my God
and the enemy drives his old designs his shining colors his own reasons death leads him on once more he moves in his evil purpose he will not even speak your name
homeland of golden flowers no evildoer can even grasp you
the starry sky descends again the sleeper of stone offers me his bow never far away not from the edge of the world your cold rivers are my burning blood
and born again a hundred times I defend you, Bosnia until Judgment Day I will not give you up, Bosnia I will not give you up, my dear I tend your wounds from that last hell I wipe your tears I kiss your hands until the very end of time I defend you, beloved until Judgment Day
Author’s note: “Mein Abkommen“ is historical fiction, grounded in the historical and judicial record, including ICTY findings on joint criminal enterprises tied to the SDS-led Bosnian Serb project and the HDZ-led Croatian project in Bosnia and Herzegovina.1
– Well, it all boils down to this photo. This is me. I’m the one in the middle. Signing a deal. To my right (the left side of the photo) is a guy I have known for years: Slobo. What a guy. Hehe, yes, Slobodan Milošević, better known as the Butcher of the Balkans.2 To my left is Alija – finally, both of us – Slobo and I had to recognize him as the President of Bosnia – which he was. Don’t misunderstand me; he had been elected in 1990. But Slobo and I had some other plans.
She had been asking for that talk for a long time and, of course, knew that her grandpa was an important man. Everyone knew that. She was still very young, but today, by his standards at least, she was finally old enough to hear the whole story.
Her father had spoken to his old man, and today, to her surprise, Grandpa had invited her to his office.
After a warm greeting and a hug, followed by the usual questions about her dad and mum, he led her over to a seating area and offered her a seat. Her grandpa was such a gentleman, she thought, smiling as she looked into those happy brown eyes behind his glasses. She loved Grandpa’s cologne and the overall smell of his office. Everything here smelled like an old, well-kept library full of leather and wood.
He sat down across from her in a beautiful, massive leather chair, identical to the one she had taken a seat in only a moment before.
Grandpa opened a photo album bound in black leather, with luxurious decorative motifs woven in gold thread and a large red-and-white Croatian checkerboard emblem on the front cover, just as an attendant entered with their drinks: a gemišt for him and a cold Pepsi for her.
For a moment, she looked outside. Those great windows had probably been cleaned that very morning, as they were every day, and beyond them Zagreb lay beneath a vast summer sky, scattered with soft white clouds.
“Great times for Croatia, dear. A bright future ahead of us.”
He smiled and winked at her over his glass of gemišt, raising it in a toast with one hand while handing her the first photograph with the other.
Boy, was he excited.
– And look at those faces above us: all the crème de la crème of Europe’s great powers. And of course, the American – Bill Clinton – was the main architect of the agreement. They wouldn’t have brought us to the table in a hundred years if it weren’t for him and America’s military might. It is what it is – the emperor decides in the end.
I already had some agreements with Slobo – it’s not like we signed anything – oh no – that would have been stupid – but it’s not like it was exactly a secret either. Just before the war in Bosnia even started, we met near Karadjordjevo, at an old hunting resort in northern Serbia. .3
Wonderful times, I must say, even though at that very moment, he had me by the… ahem… beard, shall we say. His proxies were already in the process of tearing away what, a year later, would amount to almost a third of my newly independent Republic.
The United Nations would eventually force a truce at the right time to save the homeland, but right then, there we were – casually talking about splitting Bosnia. And hey, there were a lot of journalists waiting outside our closed doors – we were the authentic rock stars of the event, of course. I kept a napkin on which we drew the division of Alija’s state, you know, as a souvenir. Not the last napkin map I drew – I just love sketching.
– Oh, the maps – I just can’t help myself with maps, and apparently Slobo couldn’t either. Maybe it was the vast depth of cartographic knowledge we both acquired in our formative years at Yugoslav communist institutions. That was a damn good education, I must say, and we learned a lot of things.
Those old Tito’s communists – they weren’t joking – and well, they couldn’t afford to. Once, maybe you heard about it already, the Aparat sent tens of thousands of supposed Stalin collaborators to a desert island here in our Croatian sea. An island called Goli – Naked – and not because of some depraved nudists, my dear. No, no. There was nothing there. Just naked stone and a quarry.
Me, myself – an important communist at that time. Even, may I say, a former member of Tito’s Partisans and later of his apparatus, although I never fired a bullet. They condemned me in the seventies because of my “antirevolutionary activities” and stripped me of my military ranks. They let me out, a year later, just to put me in jail again in the eighties because of my “media dissidence”. They were implacable – and I understand them. People need discipline.
– Anyway, Slobo wasn’t a partisan – he was born too late for that in 1941. The Second World War ended when he was just a toddler. But the guy used his youth well to become something through that “Aparat” we built after the war. And he became a loyal apparatchik, my good Slobo. A great talent, a very capable young man making his way to the top of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia – even if it wasn’t easy or clean.
So if anyone asks you – by the way, what a stupid question- “How could I ever meet with him in 1991 to divide the territories?” – they really don’t understand who we were. The logical question would be: how could we not?
I remember his final steps to the top. Some dirty work aside with Stambolić and others, his rise was epic. I’ve seen hours of his speeches – I have all of them on VHS; I have to ask Miro to put them on that modern DVD stuff. You know, Slobo confessed to me that he watched my speeches as well. Well, I knew already. I really don’t want to get into Kontraobavještajna Služba stuff now – you’ve heard of KOS? – because we could talk for days and weeks.
– Slobo’s speech in Kosovo was the cherry on top of it all. He gave it “coincidentally” for the 600th anniversary of the “Battle of Kosovo”. And his ideas, oh my god, those were brilliant. Albanians in Kosovo wanted more freedom and to preserve their autonomy, while Serbian police were beating them daily during the protests.
You know what Slobo said in his famous Kosovo speeches? Wait, he said: “No one will dare to beat you”, but not to the Albanians – he said it to the Serbs. And finally, for the 600th anniversary of the “Kosovo Battle,” he presented the Serbs as victims of hundreds of years of struggle against foreign invaders.
He successfully linked the long-gone, mighty Ottoman Empire with present-day Albanians in Kosovo – an extremely poor and repressed region at the time. Brilliant! He stripped Kosovo of its autonomy and the Albanians of their freedoms – all under the banner of the “Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution”. Amazing! “Revolution” and “Anti” are the key words, my dear.
When the time came for Yugoslavia to break apart, I used subtler expressions like “tisućljetni san” (“the Thousand-Year Dream”) when speaking about our “desire for an Independent Croatia”. Words matter, as you’ll learn in life. Especially certain words like “Independent”.
That one stirred something marvelous in many of us Croats. And something quite different in the Serbs who lived among us.
And the final impulse for the fight? Both of us knew that no one was better suited to mindlessly wave the newly remade tribal flags than soccer fans. We knew it, we fed it, and raised it like you carefully raise a fungus in a basement.
This is Bosnia-Herzegovina on March 31, 1991.1 I mean, it’s just a graphic, a map of a census. Population classified by ethnicity. The fact that it was merely one-dimensional information on a two-dimensional graphic did not matter then, and would remain so far into the future – all the way to the present day.
The mountains and their relief, the rivers, the names of cities, valleys, villages, and towns, the everyday lives of millions of people who lived among them, and everything else that makes the country would all be made subordinate to that map – and the subsequent “fixing” of it.
Their names, tastes, friendships, illnesses, daily worries, the stress and rush of getting to work or class; the horns of old Ladas and brand-new Yugos; parks full of children playing and toddlers falling and scraping their knees; every person, every pet, every home, every favourite toy, every issue of Zagor, Stripoteka and Blek Stena comic book, every signed Bijelo Dugme album and poster, the greatest partisan film of them all, Valter Defends Sarajevo, every cherished crayon, the smell of those they loved – all of it pounded mercilessely by giant fists from above into a flat world of three colors.
As a republic of the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina was officially called the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Communist countries, it was something of a tradition to prefix everything with adjectives like “Socialist”, “People’s”, and so on – just in case anyone forgot what kind of system they lived under and were expected to praise 24/7.
And in Communist countries, recording nationality in a census was not in itself taboo. But the territorial depiction of those divisions, expressions such as “a city with such-and-such majority”, and the deliberate exaltation of differences over unifying facts could be – and often were – severely punished.
By 1990, communism was breaking apart in slow motion. The greatest communist empire ever, and the source of it all – the Soviet Union – was crumbling like an old Lenin monument, slowly but surely dragging down the remaining communist systems on the continent.
Even Yugoslavia, a country that had played its own “Non-Aligned” game outside the Eastern Bloc while still remaining a communist state, refused to keep the one-party system afloat and decided to hold democratic elections.
The people of Yugoslavia were fed up with all the communist repression of all kinds. Before 1990, almost any expression of identity was simply tagged as “wrong” or “anti-revolutionary”. During the 50 years of communist governance, an awful lot of people ended up in jail under the charge of “anti-revolutionary” or “anti-communist” deeds. Sometimes, the affected ones were nationalists for real, but that would probably be a small percentage compared to those who just “say something out of place” like a joke in a tavern.
And then, it all started. Several figures emerged seemingly from nowhere. They offered their “modern” solutions and “ancestral wisdom” with the charm and promises of snake-oil salesmen. And it really was something to watch, like a train wreck about to happen.
They found a niche: positioned themselves as the opposite of the system Yugoslavia had grown tired of. They exalted their ideas of “total freedom” and a “Western capitalist economy” and waved the old tribal flags. Declared the “Bratstvo i Jedinstvo” – the Titoist concept of “Brotherhood and Unity” – a diabolical construct designed for the mass oppression of – and here was the catch – their nation, while other, fabricated nations were benefiting at its expense.
The ethno-nationalists were back like it was 1941. Some of them, usually the leaders, were former inmates of the Yugoslav prison system, almost institutionalized, after years behind bars. Tuđman – the Croat, Izetbegović – the Bosniak, but not Milošević.
Slobodan Milošević was an interesting case – he was a well-known face on TV, still part of the system when nationalism began to rise. He was already president of the League of Communists of Serbia and, in 1990, became president of Serbia, but his speeches were no longer quite like the usual communist speeches.
As early as 1987, he found a much-needed enemy to keep himself in power – the Albanians of Kosovo – whom he presented as a vital threat to Serbia. And as a man already in power, he stripped Kosovo of its autonomy, dismissing the existing order as mere bureaucracy. He called it the “Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution”.
Of course, even though Milošević was an apparatchik, in 1990 he could count on a whole cast of extreme Serb ethno-nationalists, many of them previously behind bars – Šešelj, Drašković, and others.
They played a strange role in the 1990 elections – a kind of motley crew, a weird case of “supporting opposition” that Milošević kept in check, conveniently making himself look like a moderate nationalist.
Milošević was a former Yugoslav banker: public sector, Communist, banker. Let that sink in for a moment. Think carefully about those words together, and then add: “turned political leader”.
Now you understand.
You can see three clearly differentiated colors on the 1991 census map of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The colored areas are the administrative units shown on the map, called opštine – municipalities. In Bosnia, an opština usually consists of a small city or town and the surrounding area, including nearby villages.
We are talking about a small country with relatively small cities. Even Sarajevo, the capital and by far the largest city, had only around 400,000 inhabitants. Other “cities” in Bosnia were usually towns of between 10,000 and 70,000 people.
Those three colors symbolize the country’s three main nationalities. You will probably try to guess, or ask, which color represents which nationality. I don’t think that is very important – at least, not for now.
Just keep in mind that none of those three colors represent the “Yugoslavs” as a nationality. Only about 7 percent of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared themselves Yugoslavs. They didn’t form a majority in any municipality in Bosnia, or in any other Yugoslav republic.
Instead of thinking about which color corresponds to which nationality, I would ask you to pay attention to the lack of continuity in the areas defined by each color. Every one of them – green, red, and blue – has multiple enclaves surrounded by the others. They cut stubbornly into one another at every opportunity.
And now let me show you a map with a little more, how should we put it – granularity:
Ethnic Structure by settlements 1991 census – en-academic.com2
Really, people don’t live exactly in municipalities. They live in towns, villages, neighborhoods, streets, and houses. If the lack of continuity was already deeply troubling when the territory was divided by municipality, you don’t even have to go house by house to see how much more complicated the picture becomes. And if you dare to go house by house in 1991 Bosnia-Herzegovina, you will find an awful lot of so-called “mixed” families.
I really don’t know if the Yugoslav prisons were such awful places as to make someone hate the whole world and want to see it burn down. Maybe that is the explanation. At least it could perhaps explain Šešelj and Tuđman to some degree.
I’ve read about how Slobodan Milošević had a terrible childhood, and that his father committed suicide, and several years later, his mother did the same. Maybe each and every case has its own psychological explanation. Who knows.
But then again, there are so many cases to explain.
It is October 1991, almost a year after Bosnia’s first democratic elections and some months after the map shown at the beginning of this article began appearing in newspapers across the country.
That census recorded the population as of March 31, 1991 – the same day as the first battle in the Croatian-Serb war at Plitvice, and less than a week after the Tuđman-Milošević meeting at Karađorđevo.
By October, however, the war in Croatia was in full swing. Serb paramilitaries organized by the SDS, alongside the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), were besieging and attacking Vukovar, a city in Croatia.
We see Radovan Karadžić speaking in the Parliament of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country in which he has lived for nearly thirty years, ever since he came from Montenegro to study in Sarajevo. The 1991 Radovan is the leader of the SDS – the Bosnian Serb nationalist party, which had won most of the Bosnian Serb vote in those first elections. The debate is over Bosnia’s sovereignty, but really, it’s the first step towards holding an independence referendum in the near future. That would mean following the path already taken by Slovenia and Croatia. Yugoslavia is crumbling.
Karadžić already has a documented and clearly defined “confidential SDS plan” dated February 23, 1991 – almost a full month before the Tuđman-Milošević meeting and war in Croatia. He has guarantees from the JNA. He is more sure of himself than ever before. 3
Here, Karadžić is pleading. He says that the “Muslims” and Croats from Bosnia cannot leave Yugoslavia because the Serbs, if the situation requires it, can stop them both. He does it with the energy and manner of an armed maniac who pleads while tying up your family and putting a gun to your head: “Don’t make me do this! You know you can’t escape.”
Well, to be fair, his literal words were, while referring to Bosniaks as Muslims:
– “This is the road that you want Bosnia and Herzegovina to take. The same highway of hell and suffering that Slovenia and Croatia went through. Don’t think you won’t take Bosnia-Herzegovina to hell and the Muslim people to possible extinction, because the Muslim people will not be able to defend themselves if it comes to war here.”3
I suppose by now you already know that, in 1992, they went house by house.
Sometimes I remember him vividly. It’s a strange sensation. I always wanted to be his friend. Some even say we shared a similar aesthetic sense. I considered him, you know, not exactly an idol…
Grandpa looked into his granddaughter’s eyes.
– We never should idolize anyone, my dear. Anyone! You have to learn this. It’s important.
Suddenly his eyes darkened for a moment.
I considered him someone who trully benefited Croatia and us Croats, someone who brought us Croats to the right side of history after all. Josip Broz Tito was, as Krleža said, the most successful Croatian politician of his time. That is for sure.
He directed his gaze back to the window again and sighed almost imperceptibly. – I don’t hold a grudge against Tito.
It wasn’t really him who sent me to prison, neither the first nor the second time. It was the “Aparat” we all built. And when he found out – he didn’t intervene directly. I can respect that as a leader. The first time, my sentence was reduced from two years to nine months. I believe it was him somehow. I didn’t ask. Didn’t beg. I think he respected that.
Later, I learned he said “Tuđmanu ne pakovati” – “Don’t frame Tuđman”. The second time, they reduced my sentence as well. He was already dead, but I think he left some kind of testament behind. I think he knew I was like him. Someone he recognized as a true Croatian leader.
Slobo – he still wasn’t that important in those days, you know. Heheh – little Slobo. He was doing some banking daredevilry to keep a Yugoslav bank, Beobanka, afloat. A smart cookie, I must say. He did some nasty things later to his mentor, Ivan Stambolić – but who didn’t play dirty in the world of politics.
I think we both knew, I before him, that communism couldn’t survive much longer in Europe, and that Yugoslavia – that country Tito made – would and should necessarily be destroyed. You know, we Croats are a “državotvorni narod” – we are a state-building nation. Country makers. If you distract our people and make them forget that they are Croats first, they will create Yugoslavia. And then what? Me? If I wanted, I could have been the next Tito, but I wanted to be the Father of the Independent Croatian State.
And Slobo? As soon as he felt the real energy of the Serbian people and the strength of Serbia’s deep mythos, he knew that Serbia and Croatia had to be two different countries. Then his speeches changed. I could even find the exact moment.
Serbs have a strong mythical background and even their own Serbian Church – they call themselves “Nebeski Narod” – The Celestial Nation. That is strong. They lost the “Battle of Kosovo” against the Ottomans, but they mixed everything there – even their Prince Lazar, who died in the battle, became a kind of Christ-like martyr. He chose the Heavenly Kingdom instead of victory on Earth. And they say they didn’t lose – they were betrayed. So they are always invincible. All that is very strong. Slobo felt it.
We Croats have a motto: “Bog i Hrvati” – “God and the Croats”. As we don’t have our own religion, pardon, a Church of our own – we are Catholics, and the other Catholics could hardly approve of such a motto. Probably blasphemous to some, eh?
Again, he turned to his granddaughter, this time with a smile. He touched the little gold cross hanging from her necklace.
– It’s great that you can profess our Catholic faith in our own Croatian way, dear.
She nodded, smiling back, even though she wasn’t sure what he meant.
– Heheh. The Serbs have an advantage there. Their saints are former kings or princes, patriarchs and national heroes, Lazar, for example. Or, who knows, one day Slobo himself.
Slobo knew he had the keys to Yugoslavia, so to speak. It’s quite ironic that fate brought us together at that particular resort in Karađorđevo – a place Tito had been very fond of. Somehow, Slobo wanted to portray himself as a new Tito – but a better one for the Serbs, of course.
He had the support of the Yugoslav Army’s High Command. The “Aparat” we built had at its disposal this massive Yugoslav Army – the fourth largest in Europe at that time. Fifty long years of producing heavy weapons and ammunition, hundreds of thousands of professional officers, millions of reservists, and almost all the men in the country completed at least a year of compulsory military service. The Army was called “Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija” – the “Yugoslav People’s Army” – for a reason.
The real danger to an independent Croatia was Slobodan Milosevic deciding to preserve Yugoslavia within its existing borders by using the Yugoslav Army. As I told you before, we Croats build states, and fortunately for us, Slobo destroys them. We needed him to destroy Yugoslavia. Him to choose the “Greater Serbia” option, so we could build an Independent Croatia.
Well, in our common purpose of getting rid of Tito’s Yugoslav creation – we had a little problem: “Muslims”. And I don’t mean simply “Mohammedans” as a religion, although neither Slobo nor I were big fans of that stuff either. You know, our Croat ancestors fought the Ottomans for centuries under the Austrian and Hungarian crowns. The Serbs were conquered and oppressed by the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Even though that was almost two hundred years ago, we have an aversion to anything related to them.
Because of four centuries of Ottoman domination over Serbia and Bosnia, an awful lot of Christian people embraced the Islamic religion. And when the Austro-Hungarian Empire finally conquered Bosnia, those who had converted were still there. They stayed because they really weren’t from Turkey – the heart of the Ottoman Empire – but from Bosnia. And Bosnia-Herzegovina became a separate province under Austro-Hungarian rule. You get me?
As any serious historian, like myself, will tell you – in the period of the Middle Ages – the people of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and almost anywhere else in the world really didn’t understand what “nation” or “nationality” they belonged to in the way we do today.
Before the Ottoman Empire, the people of Bosnia called themselves Bosnians. Under the Ottomans and Austro-Hungarian Crown – Bosniaks. No matter what religion they professed. But here’s a catch, my friend! They named themselves after the land, not a nationality. They didn’t know, but they were!
Well, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated, the concept of “nation” became clear even in our lands. Serb and Croat emerged as modern national identities – no longer merely as demonyms – and were, I must say, correctly imposed on the people by the Serbian and Croatian intellectual elites. The main differences between us were language, religion, and a few clearly distinctive first and last names, although we share many of the same ones.
Sorry, as a historian, I may go into too much detail. Just stop me if you already know this. I suppose you know it, of course.
As you can already tell, there was an inconvenient anomaly in the formula. In Bosnia and some other territories, there were people whose religion was Islam; they spoke the same language as the Serbs and Croats – practically unifying it and demonstrating, de facto, that it was the same language – and their first names and last names were far more distinct than those separating the two emerging nations. Although, of course, they shared many surnames with both. You couldn’t even tell anymore whether their ancestors had been ancestral “Croats” or “Serbs”. A travesty!
Immediately after Austro-Hungarian rule ended, the Serb and Croat elites established the “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes”. Curiously, the Slovenes were indisputably Slovenes even then, heheh. Anyway, the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes happily organized the country into smaller chunks, but never, as you can see from the name of the new state, even recognized the existence of any other nation besides themselves.
The Bosniaks failed to emerge as a nation when the nations were emerging. They weren’t a nation. Never! The Serbs considered them Islamized Serbs, while the Croats considered them Islamized Croats. And the same happened when the country was reorganized into the “Kingdom of Yugoslavia” some years later.
The Serbs tried to apply the same equation to the Croats – saying we indeed were just Catholicized Serbs – and, naturally, as we weren’t – we were an emerging nation, not a mere regional identity – a great deal of conflict followed. They even killed some of our politicians who stood in the way of their interests.
When World War II began, some Croatian politicians chose to join Hitler’s cause – forming an armed pro-Nazi militia, the Ustaše (“Insurgents”). In exchange, he would help them build the result of our thousand-year dream – the Independent State of Croatia. The Ustaše claimed Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina as ancestral Croatian lands and cleared the territories of Serbs who refused to accept their Croatian ancestry, using some violent methods. Of course, everything has been wildly exaggerated by the Serbs. They talk about a million deaths. Don’t misunderstand me – I publicly despise such methods myself, but the Independent Croatian State was really the dream of our nation.
The Serbs had their own collaborationist regime under German occupation. Their main armed nationalist movement was the Četniks (“Combatants”). They were frequently helped by the Italian fascist occupiers and, as the war progressed, spent far more time fighting Tito’s Partisans than the Axis. The Italians and Germans found them useful against their common enemy – the communists.
The Četniks carried out ethnic cleansing and committed terrible atrocities against the “Mohammedans” in Bosnia-Herzegovina, especially along the border with Serbia – the Drina River. The “Muslims” weren’t eager to join either side at first. But when the Četniks massacred their villages, the Nazis mobilized thousands of them and formed a special “Division”. As early as 1941, the “Muslim” elite and religious leaders from across Bosnia condemned the Ustaše atrocities and demanded security and equal treatment for all citizens of Bosnia, regardless of their faith, in the face of the anarchy imposed by the occupying forces. An awful lot of “Muslims” eventually deserted and joined Tito’s Partisans. They even formed the 16th “Muslim Partisan Brigade”.
I was a very young member of Tito’s resistance – the Partisans. The Ustaše even captured me once, but I outsmarted them and escaped. As you can tell, it was a hell of a war – a civil war inside a world war.
And we won the war. Despite everything. And built a new Yugoslavia: the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Tito even defied Stalin. The guy was something. But then he made a big mistake. He eventually made the “Muslims” a nationality as they allegedly were neither Serbs nor Croats. And Bosnia-Herzegovina returned in its “original” form. Well, almost – Tito gave some of its territories to one of the new republics – Montenegro.
I don’t know if “Muslims” were too happy about their new name. We couldn’t call them Islamized Croats or Islamized Serbs anymore, but as at least a few generations had passed since the last time they had called themselves “Bosniaks”, the vast majority of them didn’t even remember the term. But well, there is always someone, ain’t there, dear? At first, it was some poet, then another intellectual, whatever – slowly but surely, they remembered this invented Bosniak nation. And finally, when Yugoslavia fell apart, it was as if a time machine had brought them back, skipping the last hundred years and throwing all our efforts into the garbage.
– So we had this guy, Stjepan – Stjepan Kljuić in Bosnia. I really was never entirely convinced by the image he cultivated. Imagine – a guy with a bow tie and a beard. Huh. Smoking a pipe. He looked more like a poet, like a bohemian, than a politician – but the guy was serious. So we accepted him as the main candidate for my political party in Bosnia. You know my party, right – the HDZ? My dear “Croatian Democratic Union”. This guy, Stjepan, was from Sarajevo – the main city of Bosnia, a city where there aren’t too many Croats, so he was a good choice for our future plans, since we’d connected with some people there. Stjepan won the Croat vote in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the first democratic elections in 1990. The good thing: he was a democrat; the bad thing: he was too much of one.
The Serbian vote in Bosnia-Herzegovina was won by the SDS – “Serb Democratic Party” – led by Dr. Radovan Karadžić, a psychiatrist and poet. Karadžić was a Serb from Montenegro who came to Sarajevo in 1960 as a student. At first, he was a proud Montenegrin, but later, after some legal problems and some interrogation by the Yugoslav Secret Services, he came to the realization that Montenegrins are Serbs. Well, everyone can change their views, right? Oh, if Stjepan seemed to me like a bohemian, this guy Radovan was something: the guy had disheveled hair and dreamy, tired eyes of a drunkard who hadn’t slept for years, listening to gusle music in some smelly tavern. He was perfect for the job.1
– As you can see, the Serbian and our Croatian parties clearly identified themselves by putting their “nations” in their party names. What about the “Muslims” you may ask? At first, when I learned about their party, I thought, “Clever motherf… Mother of God! What a strategy. They want our votes too.”
They didn’t put something like the “Muslim Party” in their name. They were called “Stranka Demokratske Akcije” (“Party of Democratic Action”). They didn’t base the name on it being the “Muslim” party – as I already told you, in communist Yugoslavia, “Muslim” was a made-up nationality for the Islamized Croats. Later, I realized it was even worse – they probably omitted “Muslim” so they could use this invented “Bosniak” nationality, rescued from the Middle Ages.
Their leader was this guy – Alija Izetbegović. A “Mohammedan” politician, he was a member of the “Young Muslims” movement in his youth and avoided joining any organized military force during World War II. He was imprisoned for three years, as early as 1946, on charges of “anti-communist” activity.
Alija Izetbegović, prison photograph, 1946.
Some years later, he studied law in Sarajevo, but for his “anti-communist” deeds, the “Aparat” eventually sent him back to prison. In the seventies, he wrote a pamphlet called “The Islamic Declaration – A Program for the Islamization of the Muslims and the Muslim Peoples.” Wasn’t a great writer, I can tell you that; the stuff was boring as hell, but the pamphlet helped land him in a Yugoslav prison, and later to get elected by widening his electoral base, and gave the SDS and us in the HDZ a document we could later point to and say: “hey this guy wants an Islamic Republic in Bosnia” – even though, by 1990, he really was all for a multiethnic, secular Bosnia-Herzegovina, despite his activist years. “Multi-ethnic”, eh honey? “Mul-ti-eth”… It already sounds clumsy, doesn’t it? Probably sounds worse than “Islamic”. Heheh. And it is.
Grandpa took a sip of his gemišt, cleared his throat, and continued with renewed enthusiasm.
We loved his “magnum opus” and frequently threw in some, you know, not entirely accurate quotes here and there when talking about it. Just to spice it up a bit. Sometimes even adding a single word to a phrase changes a lot. Who would ever read the damn boring thing to check it anyway?
His granddaughter looked into his eyes, her head tilted slightly to one side.
– Yes, of course. It’s very wrong to tell lies… – he said, taking another sip of his drink – … to your family, and your grandpa. But sometimes – you will learn this as you go through life – you can tell little white lies to protect someone. Like Grandpa did in this case, to protect Croatia.
Some Serb propagandist even spread the claim that Alija was the leader of the “Young Muslims” in Bosnia during the Second World War. According to them, he had organized the movement, collaborated with the Nazis, and as its leader, even received a guy called Amin Al-Husayni in Sarajevo in 1943 – Hitler’s main ally in the Middle East.
When I first heard that one, I loved it. But come on. Who would believe that about Alija? They were turning him into some tremendously important figure inside the SS and the Independent State of Croatia.
The problem, just for starters, was that he was fifteen when the war began. So they were turning Alija – by the way, have you seen this guy? – into some badass teenage SS leader, some sort of commando who had, God knows how, taken control of an organization like that inside the Independent State of Croatia and, by seventeen, was receiving Hitler’s top envoys in Sarajevo? As if the State was some kind of joke.
I thought people would laugh at it. And once they started laughing at one thing, they might start questioning many others.
The amazing part is that people believed it without even checking how old he had been at the time. Serbs, foreigners, even people who really should have known better.
I mean, Alija even had to do his compulsory military service in the Yugoslav Army once the war was over, so think about that for a moment. Do you know how many former SS men and Ustaše went on to do compulsory military service in postwar Yugoslavia? I’d bet my life the answer was zero.
But hey, what can I say? Alija was perfect for all our purposes, or at least it seemed that way then.
In 1990, he was the oldest of the three national leaders of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The most serious one, the least energetic speaker. He spent almost a decade in Yugoslav communist prisons. I considered him a “Mohammedan” washed-up grandpa who would be very useful when the time came. Slobo thought the same.
You already know that the war in Croatia started in 1991, when we declared independence, soon after my meeting with Slobo in Karadjordjevo. You know, where we drew some new maps on napkins. I know for a fact that Milosević tried to win Izetbegovic over to his side even before the war in Croatia started. He offered him the position of the next President of the new Yugoslavia – formed by Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and parts of Croatia – which the Serbs would rename the Republic of Krajina. In exchange, Izetbegovic would have to give him the conscripts for the common army to help break Croatia – they were already part of the Yugoslav Army anyway.
You know what Izetbegovic said? He said something perfect for the Serbs and for us. He said: “This is not our war. We don’t want to be part of it,” and refused any position in the rump Yugoslavia. Even that public declaration he made – “This is not our war” – was a fantastic weapon against him by both sides. For the Serbs, he didn’t want to be part of their “new Yugoslavia” – more like a “Srboslavia”, heheh – and for us Croats it was even better – he didn’t give the Yugoslav Army another 200,000 soldiers for their war in Croatia, but we could use his words to say “he really didn’t support us Croats either”.
As a historian, I again have to say that Slobo was a masterful chess player. It was amazing to watch him play like a grandmaster, pushing his opponent’s pieces into the abyss, where it didn’t matter what move they made, as it would always leave ’em in a worse position.
That was the talent and knowledge of that apparatchik Milosević – zugzwang – Alija was just an “anti-communist” dissident – an ex-prison dweller, a pariah. Alija was a small fish trying to swim away with his head held high, but he was in a pool full of real sharks. He was an easy opponent for Slobo. And for me, of course, I have to say. I know that Slobo knew that I could anticipate his moves – although, to his misfortune, maybe he didn’t understand exactly how far ahead I could see.
I know, I know, now you’ll ask: How then did I not see Kljuić coming? As I said before – I wasn’t keen at all on his candidacy for my HDZ in Bosnia. Oh, that f… friggin’ moron.
The first time I explained the deal with Slobo to Stjepan was in 1991, shortly after the Karadjordjevo meeting and just before the war in Croatia. Stjepan looked at me, visibly surprised.
I mentioned how Milošević had personally given us Cazin Krajina – quite a large and nice area, with several towns, including the city of Bihać, right on the border of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.1
He continued: “Well, Cazin Krajina belongs to Milošević no more than Sardinia belongs to me”.
I understood immediately that he definitely wasn’t the man for the job and avoided any further conversation with him. Motherf… ahem. Mother of God.
He was ruining everything. Mesić was there too. Another snake in the grass, Mesić, as I would learn much later.
Those stupid morons. They couldn’t understand that we had to protect our national interests, our national space, our Independent Croatia. Yes – Cazin Krajina – “the Turks’ Croatia” as Slobo called it – had a Bosniak… damn it, ugh! For Christ’s sake – a… an Islamized Croat majority. So what? That didn’t make it any less Croat anyway.
My dear. Some people are like that. You’ll learn that in life. They are simply “zločesti” men – very bad people. And they make Grandpa curse, as you can hear. Very “zločesti” guys. He took a breath as he adjusted his tie.
– Hey, you know that we Croats invented the tie, yeah? Hehe. Smart girl.
Grandpa had already emptied his second gemišt and continued while the butler was replacing his empty glass with another full one.
– Hvala lijepa – he said. Well, where were we?
Mesić asked me: So, what about the “Muslims”?
I told him – like our Croat representative Maček did when he made his deal to split Bosnia with the Serbs in 1939 – let’s pretend that they simply do not exist. It’s easier that way.
He looked at me; I should have known then that he was not really on my side either, that “zločesti” Mesić.
– Those are three million people, Mr President. We cannot pretend they are not there.
“We cannot pretend, mimi mimi mimi mi.” Whatever. I started preparing to replace Kljuić.
There was this talented guy – Boban. Mate Boban – a guy from Grude, a small town, almost a village, in Herzegovina. That guy! He understood everything and knew exactly how to organize our thing. Croatia would return to Herzegovina once again. I named him vice-president of my party in Bosnia. So he could start warming up the engines.
And then – after that meeting – the Serbs attacked us in Croatia. They had already been in rebellion since your Grandpa won the first democratic elections the previous year. Of course, they declared a so-called “autonomous region” then. Serbs always do that – as though we don’t know that they want to tear our beloved homeland apart. “Lijepa naša domovino” – Our Beautiful Homeland.
Grandpa stands up with tears in his eyes, gazing far into the sky through the window, and sings loudly with his right hand over his heart:
Lijepa naša domovino,
Oj! Hrvaaaatska zemljo miiiiila…
His granddaughter joins him, timidly at first, but soon they are both singing the Croatian anthem at the top of their lungs. They finish smiling, and finally embrace.
Oh, this wonderful Grandpa.
Another gemišt is already waiting for him.
– So. Grandpa continues the story after they sit back down.
– We won the first battle of the war at Plitvice. I sent the special police forces there because some Serb bandits were trying to put the area under the control of their “autonomous region”.
One of our guys died. One of theirs. We kicked their asses and arrested a lot of them, but there was still this Yugoslav Army and the Yugoslav Government – so we had to withdraw our forces from there as soon as they demanded it.
The Yugoslav Army made it look like they were separating the local forces and preventing a war, but they really were taking our territory. And that was part of Slobo Milošević’s game at the time.
Yes, that was the first day of the war in Croatia – March 31, 1991. Not even a week after my meeting with Slobo in Karađorđevo. Hehehe. What are you gonna do, heh?
The Serbs in Croatia, of course, knew that we were holding a referendum on independence on May 19. They knew that we would be victorious. Croatians didn’t want to live in the same country as the Serbs. Not anymore. That old communist movie was over, my dear.
But, as I told you, the Serbs in Croatia – heh – had been playing this SAO – Srpska Autonomna Oblast, “Serb Autonomous Region” – game for almost an entire year. At first, they blocked some of our roads with barricades – literally logs – to cut off access by our state authorities and police to some Serb-majority areas.
They called it the “Balvan Revolucija” – the Log Revolution. It wasn’t spontaneous, though they wanted it to look that way. With every tactical piece moved on the board, I could recognize Slobo’s hand and almost see his smirking face.
Very soon, his SDS proxies controlled almost a third of Croatia through their illegal police force. And of course, they refused to vote in our referendum.
Instead, they organized their own illegal referendum on seceding from Croatia and joining Serbia. They would hold it on May 12, just a week before our referendum. Slobo was good at this game.
In the Serb’s illegal mock referendum, 99% decided to join Serbia, but in the real referendum, 93% of the votes were cast in favor of an Independent Croatia. They couldn’t stop us. Just a month later – you already know this, from school, of course – on June 25, 1991, we proclaimed Croatia’s independence.
At the same time as us. Slovenia, our little neighbor to the north, decided the same. They didn’t want to stay in Yugoslavia either. Their good fortune was that they had hardly any Serb population.
Now, the Yugoslav Army at that time was already controlled by Slobo. It seemed as they fought a “war” against the Slovenian forces for about ten days. But really, all they wanted was to withdraw their weapons and equipment from their barracks in Slovenia and transfer it to the Serbs in Croatia.
That withdrawal from Slovenia was crucial – it confirmed what I had already learned from the man himself at Karađorđevo: Milošević had decided to create a “Greater Serbia” instead of using the military to keep Yugoslavia together. Of course, he still wanted to call it Yugoslavia – but that was only in name.
The transfer of more weapons to the Serbs in Croatia was obviously dangerous for us. I still didn’t have a proper army, and his mock referendum in SAO Krajina made it crystal clear that they wanted one third of Croatia.
We couldn’t fight the fourth-largest armed force in Europe with only the police. At that moment, though, organizing a military force and calling it the Croatian Army would have been a death wish. So I called it the “Zbor Narodne Garde” – National Guard Assembly. By the end of May, I had already proclaimed it the “seed of our future armed forces”.3
I gave the speech. It was wonderful, but the strength we displayed was merely a projection of our wishes. The project was ambitious. In time, we would have several brigades of professional soldiers in the ZNG, but at that point, we had no modern weapons, equipment, or even enough manpower to defend Croatia against the by-then almost entirely Serb Yugoslav Army.
But still, remember Karađorđevo – Slobo had promised me parts of Bosnia. That was an offer I couldn’t refuse, no matter how much that clown Kljuić talked nonsense about offering me Sardinia. Slobo had the military might to deliver on his promise at the time.
00:00:00 No one is officially forcing us to leave.
00:00:02 No, we are not staying with them.
00:00:05 We are digging them up and taking them with us.
00:00:08 I’m leaving.
00:00:08 We’re leaving.
00:00:09 I don’t want to live with Alija,
00:00:12 But we’ll find somewhere. Republika Srpska is large.
00:00:19 We are crying, but we are leaving.
00:00:22 Who would stay with the Muslims?
00:00:34 Thanks to them for their guarantees of safety and for their promises,
00:00:37 but I wouldn’t live under their rule even if I were dead.
00:00:41 I’m leaving because there is no life with the “Muslims”.
It’s 1996.
The Serbian nationalist party, the SDS, had lost the war. After four years of the merciless siege of Sarajevo, its forces were required to withdraw from the ring around the Bosnian capital.1
It is a long and painful story, but a lot had already happened by then. When the war began in 1992, Bosniaks and Croats in the areas surrounding the city were rounded up, expelled, and imprisoned in concentration camps. By the end of the war, thousands of them had been killed through massacres and systematic persecution in those territories.
Throughout the nearly four-year siege, Serb forces shelled and destroyed thousands of homes, along with infrastructure worth millions of dollars. From the surrounding hills, they subjected the streets of Sarajevo to shelling and sniper fire, day after day, for years.23
BiH Ethnic Population by municipality – Census 1991 – zoom of Sarajevo and surroundings – Wikipedia
As you can see from the map above, Bosniacs were the majority in Sarajevo and its suburbs, except in Ilijaš municipality, which had a slight Serb plurality.4
In the video, Serb residents accept that the period in which their military held the upper hand is over, but categorically refuse to remain. Their nationalist party, the SDS, had called on them, even had intimidated many into leaving.
Even though the Government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina had guaranteed their safety, under the supervision of NATO-led forces in Bosnia, they chose to obey the SDS.5
They even exhumed their own dead to take them elsewhere. 6 The answers they give the reporter are astounding. They do not want to live with the “Muslims”, and they do not want to live under “Alija” – Alija Izetbegović, the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
They knew, of course, that their newly established parastate and its military had attempted to remove their Bosniak and Croat neighbors through murder, imprisonment, and forced expulsion. Now that the surviving inhabitants were returning to their homes, they chose to leave them behind forever.
In many places in Bosnia, during the war, local Serbs dug up entire Bosniak cemeteries with bulldozers, 7 simply to erase any trace of Bosniak existence and culture. To see these people now persuaded to exhume their own dead is both ironic and terrifying.8
The scenes are eerily reminiscent of Germany in 1945: a defeated nationalist apparatus urging civilians to retreat with it rather than remain among the people it had taught them to fear, as the territory under its control collapsed.
Many of the Serb residents left for Bratunac and Srebrenica, the very area where Serb forces had committed genocide in 1995, setting in motion a chain of events that accelerated their military and political defeat.
It’s June 27, 1991. Two days after Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia.
To the surprise of the rest of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav Army (JNA), despite being the fourth-largest army in Europe at the time, is not really trying to prevent Slovenia’s secession. Something strange is happening.
The Slovenian Territorial Defense – a structure inherited from Yugoslavia’s doctrine of “Opštenarodne Odbrane” – Total People’s Defense – is surrounding JNA barracks and attacking the conscripts. The conscripts have been trying to withdraw into Croatian territory with their equipment.
They are just kids. In this ten-day war in Slovenia, many of them are Bosniaks. They especially feel and look like abandoned cannon fodder – no help is coming for them. The JNA officers who “lead” them have traditionally been Serbs, but during the war in Slovenia, they are suddenly nowhere to be seen.
In the video, we see a JNA conscript in a desperate situation. His unit crossed from Croatia into Slovenia, and now they are trying to withdraw. He is being interviewed by a reporter for Yutel, a Yugoslav television news program broadcast by TV Sarajevo:1
Reporter: So tell me, do you know what’s going on – who you’re fighting and all that?
Soldier: How would I know? All I know is that they’re shooting at us, nothing more.
Reporter: You don’t know who’s shooting?
Soldier: The Territorial Defense members. Who else?
Reporter: And do you know what this war – this battle – is being fought over?
Soldier: How would I know… From what I understand, they supposedly want to break away, and we supposedly won’t let them. The truth is, we just want to get back to the barracks, nothing more.
Reporter: What do you think happens next? What now? Do you keep fighting, or…
Soldier: What’s there to think about? I just want to stay alive. Goddammit… Look, mate, you’ve been in the army. You know how it is. You do what you’re told. And not one officer has died – it’s my friends who keep getting killed…
Reporter: How many of your friends have died today – do you know?
Soldier: Three today.
Reporter: Not a single officer?
Soldier: Not a single officer…
Reporter: …at a firing position?
Soldier: Man, I don’t even know where my head is. I’ve got no idea where I am, what day it is, how many… I don’t know anything. It’s a total madhouse.
Never in my life did I imagine that I would shoot at someone, or that someone would shoot at me. How can that be? It just can’t be. I really don’t understand any of this. I just pray to God that I stay alive, nothing more. Just to stay alive, I swear on my mother.
Reporter: How old are you?
Soldier: Nineteen…
Reporter: What’s your name?
Soldier: Bahrudin.
Reporter: How many soldiers have died?
Soldier Bahrudin: Four altogether, so far.
Reporter: Here, in this area?
Soldier Bahrudin: No – three here. Three died this morning. Two this morning, two. And then the third one, the one who was wounded – he died. He died! He did.
Reporter: What’s the situation like in the unit?
Soldier Bahrudin: What do I know… What can I tell you? We’re all praying to God for this to end so we can go back home. I don’t know… my mum, what she must be going through now. Just to tell my mum that I’m alive and well and that, God willing, I’ll come back. Nothing more. That’s it. Just that.
Reporter: We wish you the best of luck.
Soldier Bahrudin: Thank you! As I said, appeal through all the media – television, newspapers, radio, everything… Get this to calm down. Get them to pull us out. They say we don’t want to withdraw but we are literally dying here trying to get back to the barracks – for them to take us back, to let us go.
Reporter: And where are your barracks?
Soldier Bahrudin: In Karlovac ( Croatia ).
Soldier Bahrudin Kaletović was captured a few days later by the Slovenian Territorial Defence. He was eventually released and returned to Tuzla – his hometown in Bosnia – only to be mobilized again by the Yugoslav Army (JNA) for the war in Croatia.
During the war in Croatia, he served as a musician in a military band – one of his passions was playing the guitar. The entire unit was captured in Đakovo, Croatia, and released several months later.
When the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina began, Bahrudin volunteered for the Bosnian police and later joined the newly formed Bosnian Army – the Armija Republike Bosne i Hercegovine – and served as a radio operator until the end of the war.2
After the war, he kept playing the guitar, even doing some gigs in the capital of Croatia – Zagreb. He died in a car crash in 1998 on his way to Tuzla to meet a newborn son.3
