Tragic tale of the Balkans

THE undeclared war waged against Croatia since its declaration of independence from 4`Yugos1avia on June 25 has so far been a low-key, low-tech affair, not a patch on the war against Iraq, for example.
It is easy to see why. The forces waging that war are winning against the outnumbered and outgunned Croat police and national guard units. The Serb irregulars, who have been in an open state of insurrection against Croatia ever since August last year, are not particularly numerous. They are only a small section of the Serb minority in Croatia which makes up about 12 per cent of the republic's total population of 4.5 million. But these Serbs are armed, supplied and fully supported by the (largely Serb-officered) Yugoslav federal army and by the government of Serbia, Yugoslavia's largest republic.
It is an unequal struggle. So much so that the army needs to deploy tanks, artillery and aircraft only on very specific occasions when its suits its commanders to do so.
This happens, for example, when Serb insurgents try to occupy a town or a group of villages and the Croat forces try to stop them. Then the army moves in with tanks and armoured vehicles, ostensibly to separate the warring faction and re-establish peace but actually to help the attackers consolidate their hold over the territory they have just occupied. This tactic usually works very well.
The other variant of intervention is when the army shells villages and towns with artillery and mortar fire prior to their being attacked by Serb insurgents. Under such fire, and occasional strafing by Yugoslav airforce aircraft, most of the civilian population is forced to flee, leaving the beleaguered Croat police and guardsmen a relatively easy target for final "liquidation". These tactics have led to more than 100,000 Croats, leaving their homes and seeking refuge in Zagreb, the capitalsat Croatia, and other bigger cities. Nearly 500 people have been killed since June 25.
The strategy behind the attack of Croatia has as its aim the creation of Greater Serbia, to include, as well as large chunks of
Croatia, the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia with Serbia proper and the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina (previously autonomous but since 1989 forcibly re-integrated into Serbia) at its centre. This is an old Serb dream and the official aim of the Cetnik movement led by Vojislav Seselj whose members arc fighting in Croatia along the local Croat Serbs.
Serbia's ruling Socialist (renamed Communist) party, which VMS re-elected in December 1990, supports the drive for Greater Serbia as a means of staying in power. Serbia's hardline Communist boss, Slobodan Milosevic, has succeeded in presenting himself as champion of Serbs who live outside Serbia and the man who will fulfill the dream
of Greater Serbia. Milosevic had originally wanted to be the ruler of the whole of Yugoslavia, another Tito, but has now settled for Greater Serbia.
So has, it appears, the leadership of the Yugoslav army which until recently hoped to keep Cie whole of Yugoslavia "safe for socialism" against the CIA and other Western imperialist predators allegedly trying to break it up. The army tried to keep Slovenia within Yugoslavia by force when that republic, like Croatia, declared its independence on June 25.
In their onslaught on Croatia, which is now in full spate, the attackers have been able to mobilise the powerful weapon of hatred just as they had done previously against the Albanians in Kosovo before 1989.
In Croatia, the central objection to Croat Serbs remaining under Croat sovereignty is not historical (no part of today's Croatia has ever been under Serbia) or ethnic (Serbs form a majority in only a small number of districts in Croatia) but moral. It is that Serbs outside Serbia cannot abandon their fellow Serbs in Croatia to the prospect of another genocide like that during the Second World War when Croatia (including Bosnia) was under the puppet regime of And Pavelic.
The Croats do not dispute that the Serbs, many thousands of them, were killed by the Pavelic regime during the war in a most brutal manner. Indeed the memory of those wartime killings is a course of distress to all Croats, just as that of Nazi crimes causes anguish even to today's generation of Germans. But all Croats resent systemic attempts by the government-controlled media in Serbia to brand the Croats as a "genocidal nation", not least by exaggerating the figures of Serbs killed in Croatia.
The Croats resent, too, the fact that no mention is ever made in Serbia of the many thousands of victims (Croat and Moslem) of atrocities committed bithe wartime Serb Cetniks in various parts of Yugoslavia. And there is deep resentment that the wartime support for the Pavelic regime by a pail of the Croat Catholic clergy is frequently mentioned and exaggerated including blatant lies picked up by easily persuaded foreign reporters that the Franciscans ran the largest death camps for Serbs and Jews in wartime Croatia. There is never any mention of the fact that a number of Serb Orthodox priests actually led Cetnik units which committed atrocities against innocent Croat and Moslem
civilians.
There is by now a widespread suspicion indeed it is conviction among the Croats that harping on the past and alleging that today's Croats are planning another Serb genocide against their republic's Serb minority is designed to make the present Serb onslaught out to be defensive. Being depicted as an aggressor, a genocidal one at that, when you are actually a victim, as Croatia is today, is a truly maddening position to be in.
Perhaps the saddest thing about it all is that the success of this propaganda in implanting real and deep hatred of all Croats among so many Serbs means that the removal of that evil from human minds may take years to accomplish. The only antidote will be complete truth.