After the NATO bombing, can the Serbs change their minds?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "In 1945 Germany was still under Hitler," British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the Rumanian parliament in early May, a month before the Kosovo war ended with Serbian withdrawal. "Within ten years it had reestablished its democracy, rebuilt its cities, joined North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and was in at the birth of what is now the European Union."

"Serbia can rejoin the world community too," Blair continued, "but that prospect will only be a reality when corrupt dictatorship is cast out and real democracy returns to the former Republic of Yugoslavia." In other words, it was one evil man, Slobodan Milosevic, and not the Serbs as a whole who bear responsibility for the wars of ethnic cleansing that have devastated almost every part of former Yugoslavia (except Serbia itself) during the 1990s.

Get rid of Milosevic, read Blair's message, and you will be rehabilitated both economically and politically as fast as Germany was after the World War II. But there are some problems with this simple analogy that make Blair's prediction a little shaky.

The first is that Milosevic is not just a dictator, though his opponents sometimes come to sticky ends. Like Hitler, he has ruled with broad support from his own people, especially during the wars he has caused. Then there is the problem of false consciousness, just as there was in Germany.

Serbs are so habituated to the thought processes of the big lie that it caused no comment when, in his speech announcing the capitulation to NATO, Milosevic claimed that "We have defended the only multi-ethnic society left over as a remnant of the former Yugoslavia." Serbs feel sorry for themselves, not for the millions whose lives they have blighted or destroyed, and they have an elaborate system of rationalizations to protect this view.

The first line of defense in most Serbs' minds is simply to deny the atrocities committed in their name. Another, contradictory defense is to claim that Serbia was forced into it by foreign plots. A third is to assert that the victims of the killing and expulsions were sub-humans, Muslim fanatics, people whose inexplicable hatred for Serbs made them a mortal danger to the Serbian nation. It's quite common for Serbs to run right through this gamut of rationalizations in ten minutes' conversation.

There are Serbs who openly admit the truth and condemn it, of course, as well as some who genuinely do not know it. But from the massacres in Vukovar during the attack on Croatia, through all the slaughters in Bosnia from the Drina valley to Srebrenica, and right down to the horrors of Kosovo in recent months, the actions of Serbian soldiers, police, and paramilitary killers are well known to most Serbian citizens -- and simultaneously unacknowledged.

Thus far, the analogy with the state of mind of most Germans in 1945 is quite close. Look in Daniel Goldhagen's remarkable book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, published three years ago, and you will find a fairly complete description of the Serbian state of mind in 1999. The sheer scale of the killing was much less this time than in the Nazi Holocaust, but the complicity, the denials, and the rationalizations are the same.

Yet Germany really had recovered by ten or fifteen years later, not only economically but morally. The guilt was acknowledged, the guilty were punished, and a close study of the psychology and politics that made the Holocaust possible became an obligatory part of every young German's education. So why can't Serbia do the same?

It can, but it probably won't, because there is one crucial difference between Germany in 1945 and Serbia in 1999. Germany was forced to sign an unconditional surrender in 1945: the whole country was occupied by foreign troops, and for a time the German state actually disappeared.

It was during that period, when the Nazi ideology was uprooted from the political and educational systems and democratic values transplanted in its stead, that Germans were given the tools to change their own mentality. Today Germany is one of the freest, fairest, and least nationalistic countries in Europe. But Serbia has not been occupied, and none of that process is likely to happen there.

Even if Milosevic falls, there is no obvious way that an equivalent process of political and moral regeneration will occur in Serbia. Despite fewer than 5,000 dead and some bridges and factories smashed as the result of an air campaign that was obsessively careful about minimizing civilian casualties, Serbs still feel vastly more pity for themselves than for the 200,000 who died and the two million who lost their homes in Bosnia as a result of Serbian policy there, let alone for the million Albanians whom they recently drove out of Kosovo.

None of Milosevic's likely successors will try to change their minds about that, and there are no foreign occupiers to do the job. This means that while there may be democratization and even economic recovery, Serbia will long remain trapped in a vast historical sulk which, by denying the truth about its past, blights its future as well.

And the only thing the outside world can do to help, if and when the Serbs dump Milosevic, is to shower them with economic aid in the hope that the next generation will feel themselves enough a part of Europe to break the chains of guilt and denial that bind their parents.