Milosevic Read Online Free Page B

‘Serboslavia’ – would fuel the nationalist aspirations of the other republics. But a Yugoslavia with a weakened Serbia would increase Serbian resentment and fuel Serbian nationalism.
    The Slovenian president Milan Kucan, like Milosevic, was born in 1941. He argues that the first Yugoslavia collapsed because nobody believed in it. ‘Yugoslavia fell apart in seven days in 1941. Nobody defended it because nobody felt it was their homeland. That was the consequence of a dictatorship established under Yugoslavia as Serboslavia. It was not understood as a homeland by Croatians, Slovenes or Macedonians. The raison d’être for the country ceased to exist. In the second Yugoslavia Serbs also often believed that Yugoslavia should also predominantly serve Serbian interests.’ 8
    Even so, after the war, for the young and the believers, these were daysof hope. In many ways, Tito’s Yugoslavia was a remarkable creation. It was a multi–national federation, whose borders stretched from Austria, Italy and Hungary in the north to Romania, Bulgaria and Greece in the south. The rich ethnic mosaic also included substantial minorities such as Albanians, Italians, Hungarians, Turks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Slovaks, along with Gypsies and the remnants of the country’s Jewish community, each with their own language.
    Yugoslavia’s diverse cultures spanned European history, boasting a complex heritage of long–vanished empires. Here were the coastal towns of the Roman and Venetian empires, seaside cities such as Trogir and Split, and Dubrovnik, the medieval walled city that was the jewel of the Adriatic. Roman legions had marched through here; as had their successors the janissaries of Suleyman the Magnificent, and Napoleon’s rowdy armies. The Romans had built Diocletian’s palace at Split, the Ottomans the beautiful mosques of Sarajevo and Travnik with their needle–sharp minarets pointing skyward to Allah.
    The French soldiers had bequeathed a love of wine and liberty. Like many foreign visitors they, too, were entranced by the fiery temperaments and almost oriental cheekbones of the country’s women, whom they christened ‘petit–chat’, now shortened to the slang word
picka
, an altogether less gallant term. Rome, Istanbul, and Paris all left their legacy, and Vienna too, which once ruled Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia. The Habsburg spirit of civic pride lived on in the spacious squares and ornate apartment buildings of cities such as Zagreb and Novi Sad, in the former Habsburg territory of Voivodina, and stolid municipal buildings painted the characteristic Habsburg ochre stood as far south as Bosnia.
    Tito had created eastern Europe’s own mini–Soviet Union, a diverse ethnic mix held together under the Marxist mantra of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’. The idea behind Brotherhood and Unity was admirable, if optimistic. The memories of the ghastly atrocities committed by the Chetniks, Ustasha and partisans were to be buried, and a new Yugoslav identity formed. Tito believed, probably correctly, that any genuine examination of wartime activity would pull his nascent country apart in bloody recriminations. But fifty years later, the price of his failure to come to terms with Yugoslavia’s past would be high indeed. Wartime memories, and victims, of massacre and murder did not fade away. Instead, like ice–age mammoths, they were perfectly preserved under Communism’s permafrost, ready to be dug up – sometimes literally – anddisplayed as proud symbols of victimhood when Yugoslavia began to collapse.
    Tito’s six federal republics enjoyed considerable autonomy, and were run by their own Communist parties. But this autonomy existed only within the overarching state framework of the Federal Republic, which was responsible for national matters such as defence and national economic and foreign policy, conducted – in theory at