Are ethnic hatreds in Balkans so deep?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "There were 20 people underground, hiding in the cellar. There were only women and children," said the boy. "They first burnt a car on the road near the house and then they came inside, howling like wolves. They were local Serbs, they were not wearing ski masks."

The boy's name is Dren Caka; he is ten years old. "First, they shot a girl, she was about thirteen, with a machine-gun. They shot them one by one, in the head and in the back. I was near the door, and when they shot at me I threw myself down on the ground as if I was dead." Eventually the wounded boy escaped from the burning house, found an aunt, and fled with her to Albania -- but he left his mother and three sisters behind, dead in the deserted city of Djakovica in western Kosovo.

"Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred...acts of violence, pillage and brutality...such were the means employed by the Serbo-Montenegrin soldiery with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians," says the official report, and it certainly sums up the horrors of Kosovo. Except that the official report quoted is the Carnegie Report on the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, whereas Dren Caka's ordeal was last week..

Why are the ethnic hatreds in the Balkans so deep, so ancient, so uniquely fierce and strong that the passage of eighty years changes nothing? And very much to the point at the moment, when NATO countries are moving towards a decision to commit ground troops to drive the Serbs out of Kosovo and bring the refugees home, what's the use of intervening if they're all doomed to spend the rest of history at each others' throats anyway?

They aren't. The whole thing is lies. Inter-ethnic relations in the Balkans have not been dramatically worse than elsewhere in Europe during this century.

Except for the decade of the 1990s, indeed, the Balkans were not the part of Europe you thought about first when the subject of genocide came up. Germany was, followed (or even preceded, in terms of sheer numbers of people killed) by the Soviet Union. And even when it came to older, less bureaucratic forms of ethnic and religious hatred, places like Ireland and the Basque country came in well ahead of the Balkans.

So where did this notion of inevitable, irrepressible ethnic violence in the Balkans come from? History does have a bearing here, because this is the part of Europe where Islam and two bitterly hostile forms of Christianity meet. Catholic Croats loathe Orthodox Serbs, who duly despise them back -- and everybody hates the Muslims.

That is history's poisoned gift to the present, for most of the Balkans belonged to the Ottoman empire until eighty years ago. Through six centuries of Ottoman rule, the ruling Turks naturally favored local Muslim populations, and savagely punished Christian communities that dared to rebel. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and some Christians in the Balkans don't really believe that their Muslim neighbors have any right to be there.

Except that there weren't really that many people who thought like that. In the old, pre-Milosevic Yugoslavia, people got along pretty well, really. In Sarajevo, the country's most ethnically mixed city, most of the younger generation deliberately called themselves "Yugoslav" as a way of leaving the old ethnic and religious labels behind.

Throughout that old Yugoslavia, the different ethnic and religious groups worked and played together, they moved freely from one "republic" to another, they even intermarried in large numbers. What little tension you did see in a thoroughly secular society was mostly between Serbs and Croats, not Christians and Muslims.

To resurrect the old stereotypes in the laid-back Yugoslavia of the early 1980s, let alone persuade people to kill one another over them, would have taken a genius. It is the great tragedy of the Balkans that in Slobodan Milosevic, it found that genius.

The Serbian strongman bears a very large personal responsibility for the South Slav tragedy of the 1990s, for his main technique for gaining and keeping power is to stir up ethnic grievances and stimulate crises.

In the Serbs, whose style of nationalism has always cast them as the misunderstood victims of wicked foreign plots, Milosevic had fairly promising raw material, but paranoia among whole populations is not caused by a biochemical imbalance. It is a condition that needs to be roused, fed, and directed against plausible targets of resentment -- and in that, Milosevic is probably the leading European practitioner since Hitler.

Which leaves the question of why the West fell for Milosevic's self-serving lies and distortions, when even among the Serbs many were not fooled. (The saddest, most admirable people in the atrocious war of ethnic cleansing that Milosevic unleashed in Bosnia in 1992-1995 were the Bosnian Serbs who fought down to the end alongside their Muslim fellow-citizens to defend the ideal of a multi-national Bosnia.)

The main reason that the peoples of the West were persuaded to believe that all the "ethnics" of the Balkans were equally vicious and equally crazy is that their own governments lied to them about it. They encouraged that belief because they didn't want to risk the political costs of a military intervention.

They needed to head off popular demand to "do something" about the massacres that were devastating the Muslims of Bosnia (90 percent of the refugees in Bosnia were Muslims, as were 90 percent of those killed), so they spread lies about all sides being equally guilty.

The best documented case is "Kenneth Roberts", the pseudonym of an employee of MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, who wrote articles datelined "Sarajevo" for The Times and the weekly Spectator in 1994 claiming that atrocities were being carried out equally in Bosnia by all sides. But hundreds of other Western journalists wrote the same guff out of sheer ignorance and laziness, without even being paid to lie. They just went to the briefings, and passed on the spin they had been given.

So no, ethnic hatreds in the Balkans are not dramatically worse than elsewhere, or at least they were not before several hundred thousand people died and several million lost their homes in Milosevic's various wars. And even now, "ethnic hatred" is often a cover for less complex and completely non-historical motives -- like greed.

Many of the Kosovar refugees recently driven into Macedonia had phones in their houses, of course, and inevitably curiosity drives some of them to call their home numbers. Gjeraqina Tuhina, a journalist working for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting who fled from Pristina last week, knows seven or eight who have tried. The conversation, she says, is always the same.

Somebody answers the phone in Serbian. The expeller asks: "Is this the house of (whatever the family's name is)?" And the Serbian-speaker replies: "I don't know whose it was before, but it's mine now."