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:
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.
References:
- Bosnia-Herzegovina 1991 Census Map from © Statistika.ba ↩︎
- Ethnic structure by settlements – 1991 Census Map en-academic.com ↩︎
- ICTY, Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić, Trial Judgment, IT-95-5/18-T, 24 March 2016, paras. 2675-2676. ↩︎
- ICTY, Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić, Trial Judgment, IT-95-5/18-T, 24 March 2016, paras. 2675-2676. ↩︎