Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution

241 Pages·2018·4.89 MB·English

by  Noam Chomsky

Yugoslavia
Peace, War, and Dissolution
Noam Chomsky
Edited by Davor Džalto
Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution
Noam Chomsky. Edited by Davor Džalto
© Valeria Chomsky 2018
Preface © Andrej Grubačić 2018
Introductory chapters © Davor Džalto 2018
This edition © 2018 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without
permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978–1–62963–442–5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942916
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Contents
Acknowledgments v
preface Remaining Yugoslav vii
Andrej Grubačić
IntroductIon 1
Davor Džalto
Glossary of Acronyms 4
PART I YUGOSLAVIA
Yugoslavia: Dreams and Realities 6
Davor Džalto
The Conscience of Yugoslavia 35
The Repression at Belgrade University 36
Letter to Tito 45
PART II YUGOSLAV WARS
Solutions and Dissolutions 50
Davor Džalto
USA, Germany, and the Faith of Yugoslavia 63
Most Guns, Most Atrocities 67
Open Letter to the Guardian 69
On the Srebrenica Massacre 74
PART III KOSOVO CRISIS
Kosovo: A Drama in Multiple Acts 78
Davor Džalto
Crisis in the Balkans 85
Wiping Out the Democratic Movement 102
The Truth about Kosovo 111
Kosovo Peace Accord 116
Lessons from Kosovo 126
A Review of NATO’s War over Kosovo 136
Humanitarian Imperialism: The New Doctrine of Imperial Right 157
Comments on Milošević Ouster 187
On the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia 191
Perspectives 201
about the authors 204
Index 205
Acknowledgments
This book would have never been completed without the enthusiasm,
energy, and support that my dear colleague and friend Marina Sovilj
invested in this project over a couple of years. I am deeply grateful for that.
I owe gratitude to my dear colleagues and friends Irene Caratelli, Borut
Zidar, Vladimir Veljković, and Emil Džudžević. They gave me many impor-
tant suggestions and comments that signifi cantly improved the manu-
script. My gratitude also extends to Milenko Srećković, who provided me
with important materials for documenting and understanding some of the
recent developments in the region.
I am grateful to my assistant Ella May Sumner; I cannot imagine the
completion of this project without all the time and eff ort she invested in
addressing many practical aspects of the process.
A big “thank you” also goes to Anthony Arnove, who continued to
support this project over many years.
Last but certainly not least, I want to thank Noam Chomsky, one of the
greatest intellectuals and humanists of our time, for his tireless engage-
ment in the world’s aff airs and for his struggle against injustice, oppres-
sion, and imperial ambitions everywhere, not least in the Balkans.
—Ed.
v

Remaining Yugoslav
Andrej Grubačić
Sixty years ago, the concrete pier that butts against the Adriatic in the
village of Trpanj was strewn with drying fi shing nets. Local fi shers came
into the cannery to empty their bursting nets, and in the summer tourists
from the USSR mingled among them. Twenty years ago, it was empty, aban-
doned because of the Yugoslav civil war. Stone buildings that had housed
gathering places and families were transformed into hospitals, the fi shing
boats long abandoned. I look upon the same pier today, busy with young
families and tourists, mostly from the former Soviet republics. A short walk
from the harbor, I come upon a magazine stall. The papers report on the
most recent attempt to change the name of Marshal Tito Square, fi ve hours
north in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Despite the passing of decades, the
battle for the soul of Croatia, now a member of the European Union, and
all of former Yugoslavia rages on. Was Comrade Tito a good Croatian or a
pro-Serb dictator? Who inherits modern-day Croatia, antifascists or the
heirs of the Ustaše,infamous Nazi-collaborators?
Few in the U.S. have tackled the complexity of the former Yugoslavia
the way that Noam Chomsky has. When asked to write this preface, I started
reworking my way through Noam’s writing. His analysis is ruthless, clini-
cal. His debates with the Guardian’s George Monbiot and the new intellectu-
als of the Bosnian Institute of England are the stuff of legend. Noam’s infl u-
ence on public discourse in the countries of former Yugoslavia remains
unparalleled. As I read through his writings, I was struck by what I con-
sider an “Alexievich moment,” an absence of what Russian oral historian
Svetlana Alexievich called the “interior life of socialism,” or “socialism of
the soul.” (Only a Russian could come up with such a delightful phrase!)
Alexievich was referring to everyday life under socialism, a challenge
to an oft-repeated falsehood of capitalist historians: that all the world’s
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preface
socialisms were alike. Of course those of us who grew up in the formerly
socialist world—ineptly referred to as Eastern Europe, or where the boo-
geyman lives, as a friend from Ohio once told me, only half joking—have
certain things in common. But the Soviet man and the Yugoslav woman,
for example, were quite different. And they had little in common with a
Bulgarian or Romanian socialist citizen.
This preface aspires to be one glimpse of the interior life of former
Yugoslavia from the perspective of a Yugoslav, of a Yugoslav exile. And
even after multiple exiles—first from Yugoslavia at the end of socialism
and later from what was left of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the
1999 NATO bombings—I remain a Yugoslav. My family has lived at the same
Belgrade address, first in Socialist Yugoslavia, then the Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro, and today, Serbia. My story and
that of my family are at the same time idiosyncratic and representative of
Yugoslav history.
I never met Comrade Tito. But I remember the day he died in May 1980.
His funeral procession in Belgrade brought seven hundred thousand to
the streets, millions of people wept and mourned throughout Yugoslavia.
Many of them were Tito loyalists, pledging their allegiance to our endan-
gered socialist homeland. Many others, like myself, were proud to call
themselves Yugoslavs, proud to be from a communist country. A country
that hosted the Living Theatre, a country that was home to the music of
Laibach and the Black Wave cinema of Dušan Makavejev.
Even as a child, I knew our Yugoslavia was an anomaly. We played
Partisans and Germans, not Cowboys and Indians. In the U.S., children
cross their hearts and hope to die when they make a promise or swear they’re
telling the truth. As school children in Yugoslavia, we would say Tita mi!—I
swear on Comrade Tito! For us, there was nothing more sacred. The adults
were equally serious. When I was seven, my teacher asked whom I loved
more, my mother or Comrade Tito. When I chose my mother—after all, I
reasoned, I had never met Tito, while I’d gotten to know my mother quite
well—I was called a reactionary and sent home in tears. My mother was
fuming; she marched straight to the school, and I was allowed to return
the next day.
But my mother could afford to do things like that: her father Rato was
one of the most celebrated communists in Yugoslavia. His first family, he
once told my mother, was the Communist Party: he was the last secretary
of the legendary Communist Youth; a minister in the first post–World
viii
preface
War II Yugoslav state; a member of the Central Committee of the League
of Yugoslav Communists; an ambassador to the Non-Aligned Movement;
the president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Bosnia; later becoming a
member of the rotating Yugoslav presidency after Tito’s death. Even before
World War II, my grandfather was well known: a professional football
player (real football, not that odd thing people do in the U.S.). He used trips
to away games to distribute party material. It is even said that he and his
cousin Miljenko Cvitković, a fighter in the Spanish Revolution, attempted
to assassinate the anti-communist Minister of the Interior of the Kingdom
of Yugoslavia. Luckily for the minister (and for my grandfather), they did
not find him.
A communist illegalist, Rato also spent time in a Sarajevo prison, then
considered a red university where young militants were educated. The party,
which actively recruited students before the war, later sent him to study law
and forestry in Belgrade. After he finished university in 1939 war broke out:
my grandfather fought against the fascists, both as a Partisan commander
and a political commissar. He helped organize the Sarajevo uprising and
took part in the political assemblies of the incipient Yugoslav state, held in
the so-called free territories of Užice and Bihać. As Yugoslavs struggled for
their liberation, Rato met my grandmother Tatjana, a member of the youth
antifascist movement. They were an odd couple. Tatjana, named after the
famous Puškin poem, was a well-educated Montenegrin royal exiled after
the establishment of the Union of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes after World
War I. Class differences aside, they fell in love. (Tatjana’s mother, a royal-
ist taught from an early age that communists were “devils,” even came to
love my grandfather as one of her own.) Tatjana always held onto a bit of
her old elitism, though: she couldn’t stand the future communist dissi-
dent Milovan Đilas, then a family friend. “The man has never read a single
novel in his life,” she used to say. One can only assume his penchant for
brutally assassinating his wartime comrades was related to this lack of
poetic imagination.
After World War II, my grandfather Rato met his counterpart in the
Cuban government, the Minister of Light Industry Che Guevara, who was
in Yugoslavia seeking arms. My grandfather, who considered Che a bandit
incapable of understanding the process of socialist construction, was livid.
(According to my anarchist mentor Trivo, who traveled with Che to Latin
America, the Argentine was similarly disappointed in the reality of real
socialism.) Later, as secretary of the Communist Youth, Rato initiated the
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