It’s not hard to see why. If you look around the Balkan battlefields, you can see a common result everywhere: total ethnic segregation. Slovenia–the most prosperous and peaceful of the former Yugoslav republics–is the only one that has always been ethnically “clean.” Croats cleansed their rebellious Serb minority in 1995 and turned Croatia into a one-nation state. Three years after the Dayton peace accords ended the war in Bosnia, the country’s multiethnic past is no more then a fading memory. Instead, Bosnia today is a set of three ethnically clean reservations in which some 30,000 NATO soldiers are still necessary to prevent Muslims, Serbs and Croats from tearing at each other’s throats.
But Bosnia’s ethnic ghettos seem like paradise compared with Kosovo. On March 24 NATO decided to bomb Serbia, my ill-fated homeland, believing that airstrikes were the only way to save a multiethnic society and defeat the evil Milosevic. Ironically Milosevic has used the strikes as an alibi to order a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing that will make multiethnic life in Kosovo impossible. Six weeks of bombing later, I know of no Kosovar capable of imagining Serbs and Albanians ever living together in Kosovo again.
It’s not only in Kosovo that the prospects for the survival of multiethnic society are gone. Ethnic Macedonians are moving out of Tetovo–a bustling town with an Albanian majority in western Macedonia. As Albanian refugees settle there, many Macedonians are relocating to what they describe as a “safer” area–the Macedonian-dominated east of the country. The criterion for safety is not the crime rate but the degree of ethnic homogeneity. Or consider Vojvodina, Serbia’s prosperous northern province, which used to be the most diverse and ethnically mixed part of the former Yugoslavia. Now Hungarians, the largest minority group in the province, are leaving. Hungary joined NATO only two weeks before the airstrikes started and Serbs now view it as an aggressor state. Muslims of Sandzak, an isolated, mountainous region just north of Kosovo, are leaving for Sarajevo and other Muslim-controlled parts of Bosnia.
It is in Sarajevo’s suburbs, swollen with refugees, where the tragedy of Balkan ethnic segregation is at its most absurd. In April I visited houses that had been emptied in 1996, when their fleeing Bosnian Serb owners decided to leave before the Serb-controlled suburbs were reintegrated into the overwhelmingly Muslim Bosnian capital. Rather than living under Muslim authority, the Serb owners opted for refugee life in Serbia. Their abandoned homes are now occupied by Muslims from eastern Bosnia, squeezed together with newly arrived “self-cleansed” Muslims from Sandzak. Although up to 40 people may now live in single-family homes, residents told me that–“alive and safe among their own”–they felt lucky. (The unlucky, of course, are in graves, having stayed on the wrong side of a new ethnic boundary for too long.)
Deepening ethnic fault lines are not the only signs of this ultimate “Balkanization” of the Balkans. For the first time since 1991 even the ties linking tiny, tolerant, pro-Western elites in the republics of the former Yugoslavia have been broken. In Belgrade, outspoken critics of Milosevic’s regime view NATO’s action as an unselective, misconceived attack that–just like Milosevic–hurts the innocent. To liberals in Sarajevo and Pristina, Belgrade’s Vreme magazine, for years a gutsy symbol of resistance to the regime, now seems no different from Milosevic’s mouthpieces. An article in Dani, the leading liberal magazine in Sarajevo, recently argued that “the war against Milosevic’s regime should be transformed into the war against all of Serbia… Let intellectual Belgrade burn.” (Dani, it might be noted, recently won an international award for promoting tolerance.)
There is, sadly, an awful logic to the Balkans. Over the last decade, most leaders have aspired to head one-nation states–and repeatedly, such men won elections divided neatly along ethnic lines. No other politician shared Milosevic’s ruthlessness, but many of them used the bloody cover of his unspeakable crimes to turn their own visions into reality. You needed a Milosevic in Belgrade for Croatia to become a one-nation state, or for Kosovo to win independence. Serbian voters were not the only ones who wanted to see Milosevic rule in Belgrade. Many nationalist (and openly anti-Serb) politicians in Pristina, Sarajevo and Zagreb rejoiced in his victories.
Still, NATO’s leaders evidently believe that their bombs will resurrect the multiethnic society in which I grew up, and which Milosevic killed repeatedly at the ballot box and on the battlefield. Perhaps. People do say that miracles sometimes happen.
