Volume 10 Numbers 2/3

Spring/Summer 2001

Feature: The Future of the Former Yugoslavia

The Weight of False History
Ivo Banac

If the folk saying has it right and "love is heavier than force" (tezi hatar od sile), the weight of the past is heavier than the problems of today. But what sort of the past do we mean? It is a distorted and misconstructed past of nationalist ideology, with its stress on the continuity of victimhood and redemption, loyalty and treason. If the area of the former Yugoslavia is to have a future, it must come to a better understanding of its real past-an understanding that is not subject to trade, compromise, or wishful thinking, and that is ultimately acceptable to all. This coming to terms with the past means not only accepting responsibility but also overthrowing the caricature version of the past.

That would be a tall order in the most advantageous times. Today, although the times have improved somewhat, basic ideological fronts have not changed. Nobody is shooting at Sarajevo today, and it is not likely that anybody will be shooting at Podgorica tomorrow, but Milorad Ekmecic, the beneficiary of various learned exchanges, who has spent more time teaching and researching in the United States than is usually necessary to assimilate certain basic lessons of cultural and political pluralism, is at it again. This time, at a recent meeting in Podgorica, he developed a new conspiracy theory, namely, that the West favors Montenegrin independence because "it does not wish to risk leaving a significant portion of the Adriatic coast within the framework of a single Serb national state" (Srdan Jankovic, "Sa srpskim gudalom u Evropu," Monitor (Podgorica), December 1, 2000, pp. 18-19). This sort of thinking is not unique to any particular nationalist tradition. Yesterday, we had rather a scene on the floor of the Croatian Sabor (Diet or assembly). Vesna Pusic, the leader of a party within the post-Tudjman ruling coalition, who expressed the obvious truth that Croatia had participated in aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, was subjected to a cross fire not just from the Tudjmanite Croatian Democratic Union but from the parties of the ruling coalition-to the extent that Zlatko Tomcic, the president of the Sabor, actually reprimanded her. Mr. Tomcic evidently believes that the previously adopted Sabor declaration, which claims that Croatia took no part in the war against Bosnia, is sufficient to correct history. Hence, when we talk about the weight of history, we are dealing with the majority of recent developments that will continue to be controversial for years to come.

A bit of nonteleological history
One of the great problems is that our understanding of the common and individual histories of the South Slavs and the other peoples of southeastern Europe has not significantly benefited from critical historiography. This is because nationalist historiographies regularly have explained modern developments as an aspect of unilinear design. We have been taught to see connections that may be of our own making. For example, if we look at a current political map of the area and compare it to that from the era of settlements we will see that the present political divisions do not correspond to those from the early medieval period. Croatia is mainly a coastal area from the Rasa River in Istria to the Cetina River, a little bit to the east of the city of Split. Down the coast from the original Croatia, we have a row of unfamiliar Slavic territories that Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the tenth-century Byzantine emperor-historian, called Pagania (literally, land of the pagans), Zachlumia (most of present-day eastern Herzegovina, with the Croatian peninsula of Peljesac), Terbounia (the Trebinje area of eastern Herzegovina, with Dubrovnik and its eastern coastal environs), and Dioclea (the southern portions of contemporary Montenegro with the Bay of Kotor and the northwesternmost portions of present-day Albania around Lake Skadar/Shkoder). Serbia is located in the hinterland of Zachlumia, Terbounia, and Dioclea, its center around Ras, near today's Novi Pazar, in the Sandzak. Bosnia was apparently within this territory, but represented a negligible area around the source of the Bosna River, where we now find Sarajevo and its environs. And Dalmatia? In the tenth-century this was a necklace of Byzantine-ruled Roman coastal cities and island territories, from Krk in the north to Ulcinj in the south.

Moreover, modern territoriality required a tradition that was itself a product of modernity. Thus, unrelated traditions were merged to produce an idea of ethnic-as opposed to cultural-continuity. The Croat historical tradition goes back to the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea (a twelfth-century text from Bar in contemporary Montenegro) and its various translations (for example, Marko Marulic, 1510), which were in turn incorporated into the Early Modern "Slavic" and "Dalmatian" histories of Mavro Orbin (1601) and Ivan Lucic (Ioannes Lucius, 1666). These works then became material for the Croatianizing work of Pavao Ritter Vitezovic (Croatia rediviva, 1700), who was the most important influence on the revivalist generation of Ljudevit Gaj (1809-1872) and that of postrevival integral nationalists like Ante Starcevic (1823-1896). Curiously, the same histories (Orbin's) were Serbianized through the translations of Sava Vladislavic (1722), which then influenced the pioneering Serbian histories of Jovan Rajic (1794), and were Bulgarianized in the history of Paisij Hilandarski (1762). The Bosnian historical tradition was somewhat more self-contained. It combined the Franciscan memory of medieval Bosnian statehood with the experiences of Muslim ayan (notable) selfrule to argue for a uninational Bosnia (for example, Antun Knezevic, whose book was published between 1884 and 1887).

Clearly, something has happened in the span of ten centuries. Pagania, Zachlumia, and Terbounia have disappeared. The center of Croatia has migrated from the Adriatic to the north, into medieval Slavonia (literally, Slavic land), with Zagreb at its head. This happened in stages. During the High Middle Ages, the heart of Croatia was on the Una River, now in northwestern Bosnia. This territory (Turkish Croatia) was lost to the Ottomans in the sixteenth century and became a part of Bosnia. During the Habsburg reconquest and the concomitant Venetian operations in the seventeenth century, the framework of modern Croatia emerged in two extended shanks-one, to the north, to modern Slavonia; the other, in the south, in modern Dalmatia. At the same time, the Zagreb area, which was only dubiously Croatian in the early Middle Ages, became the heart of modern Croatia.

The story of Serbia is not much different. Serbia first migrated to the coast and assimilated Dioclea. Then it moved to the Ibar-Morava valleys; then toward the valleys of Struma and Vardar in Macedonia. It reached the Danube only as an Ottoman vassal in the fifteenth century. And its modern capital, Belgrade, became truly Serbian only in the course of Karadjordje's uprising in 1806. Bosnia, too, expanded under Ban (or prorex) Kulin (r. 1180-1204) into the Donji Kraji (literally, Lower Lands) around the Vrbas River and the Soli (literally, Salt Lands; for centuries, Ottoman, then modern Tuzla) and Usora, in its present northeastern corner. Later on, at the height of its power in fourteenth century, Bosnia expanded into Hum (Herzegovina) and the Drina River valley. The westernmost regions were incorporated into Bosnia during the Ottoman period. In fact, the only South Slavic land that demonstrated a modicum of territorial continuity, albeit under various overlords, was Dioclea, or medieval Zeta, that is, modern Montenegro. This history of the South Slavic domains is not a story of the movement of peoples. The dominant element, until the Ottoman conquest, is instead the movement of states. Modern nationalism has worked doubly hard to confound this history by equating peoples with states and territories.

All of this points to the differences between premodern societies and modernity. Premodern West European society was hierarchical, estate ordered, religiously intolerant (cujus regio ejus religio), and localistic. Although institutionalized inequality and localism obtained in the Ottoman Balkans, this society was open to complicated pluralistic arrangements that had disappeared in the West. The Ottoman millet system did not imply religious equality, but it effectively prohibited the type of religious homogenization that became the norm in Western Europe, going back to the unification of Spain that was accompanied by the expulsion of Moors and Jews. Christians and Jews were never expelled from the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The reverse expulsions, that of the Muslims from Europe, occurred as a direct consequence of the transition to modernity, that is, to democracy, secularism, and nationalism.

How and when did this occur? Southeastern Europe was lacking the Western "bourgeois" revolutions, which Marxism-one of the more influential interpretations of the transition to modernity- discovered in the Reformation, the English civil wars, and the French Revolution. The Balkan "revolution," that is, the forging of the independent nation-states of Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria, is a story of peasant uprisings in which the key component is ethnic cleansing. It involves the expulsion and, frequently, the extermination of Muslims. This did not occur in the western portions of the Balkan Peninsula because this area came under the Habsburg monarchy, itself a premodern and conservative empire, which prevented the course of "revolutionary" ethnic homogenization. For various reasons, the interwar Yugoslav state, too, failed to pursue the uninational project.

What about the communist revolution, whose impact is essential for the understanding of the recent conflicts? There is an enormous contradiction at work here, which must be noted in order to understand certain developments in the 1990s. Yugoslav communism, naturally, inherited the core of Leninist ideas. Revolutionary Russia maintained the idea of national pluralism, which was translated into an ornate federal and subfederal structure. In practical terms, however, the federal design of the Soviet state was quite limited in the period of Stalinism, and, indeed, under Khrushchev and Brezhnev as well. Nevertheless, the Leninist-Stalinist idea of federal statehood was entirely ethnic and excluded the recognition of historical lands. Lenin's concept of Lithuania was not the vast historical Lithuanian state, but the area in which ethnic Lithuanians were a majority. In his comments on the amendments to the Soviet Constitution (1936), Stalin explicitly said that the "nationality that gives its name to a given Soviet republic must constitute a more or less compact majority within that republic" (Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National Question: Selected Writings and Speeches [New York, 1942], p. 221).

The Yugoslav communists, as faithful as they were to the Soviet example, did not, in fact, follow the idea of ethnic republics. And that is why we have in the middle of the territory that was Yugoslavia a republic-Bosnia and Herzegovina-that is a multinational and historical entity. In other words, contrary to frequent claims, the Yugoslav communists generally did not change the borders of historical provinces that made up the Yugoslav federation. From the point of view of Soviet ethnic federalism, the Yugoslav revolution was conservative, even with regard to the nationalist "Balkan revolutionary" model. What this means is that the emergence of ethnic states was discouraged in the Yugoslav socialist model.

Misuse of the past
Let me provide a few examples of the misuse of history in the successor states of Yugoslavia today. One of the basic reasons we do not have a clear idea about the past in this area is that nationalist history and public discourse encourage the illusion of a separate and unique origin of each national group. Only a few days ago, there was a very interesting polemic in the pages of Slobodna Dalmacija (Split) regarding a report on the different genetic types in the territory of Croatia. The reporter concluded that Croatian regional varieties probably reflect genetic diversity. The article prompted vociferous protests from those who believe in the linear continuity of Croat ethnicity, going back to a protohomeland in ancient Persia. There are plentiful examples of this sort of thinking in political documents, for example, in the declaration of the Croat National Assembly (Novi Travnik, October 28, 2000) that includes a telling phrase reflecting the idea of a specific common origin: "the Croat people in the expanses of Bosnia and Herzegovina have behind them fourteen centuries of living that established their cultural and state-building identity." It is, of course, nonsense to talk about fourteen centuries of Croat, Serb, Bosniac, or any other national continuity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Modern Bosnian nationalities might have an undifferentiated common origin. As regards their separate modern identities, they can plausibly claim only a nineteenth-century common beginning. Instead of a common origin we should refer to a common beginning in modern times. That simply means that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century national integrations have a common starting point. One should never confound premodern national formations and the modern nations. There is an enormous difference between the two.

Let me say, by way of conclusion, that many of us, myself included, underestimated the importance of religion to the modern South Slavic national question. For a long time, we did not see the part played by religion in modern nationalism. We are not as sanguine after the experiences of the 1990s. Still, religion plays a role of a special kind. What we have at work is a secularized quasi religion, diverted from universalist concepts and transformed, sometimes in particularly macabre ways, into nothing more than a tribal cult. Bacon's regnum hominis did not succeed except in the secularization and tribalization of the great religious traditions. Under the circumstances, one of our tasks is to foster a return to at least some elements of premodern universalism and pluralism- but also to those localist traditions that have fallen to nationalist leveling.

It might seem eccentric that my discussion of the weight of the past omitted all references to the Ustasas and Chetniks and did not really discuss the communist terror. And if omissions are to be flagged, there are important lacunae regarding nearly every major problem of our recent past, including the nature of the war in the 1990s. Let me repeat, in my defense, a strong belief that the horrors of the twentieth century are directly connected to the living influence of false history. The weight of the past is not as heavy as the premises that foster its misuse. False history is heavier than history.

Ivan Zvonimir Cicak: Every conference on the former Yugoslavia that was held over the past ten years throughout the world always begins with a discussion of history. This is the reason why we sometimes- perhaps all too often-cannot see our future. We cannot escape the fact that we are living in what I call the intoxication of history. Moreover, we can easily find the reasons for the recent war in the conflicts over our interpretations of history. I do not mean among the people around this table, but among the many people in all the successor states of Yugoslavia. We have about 20 million historians who have 20 million interpretations of history, and each of us believes our interpretation is a fact. That is the reason why Banac today said to me that history cannot be resolved by the professors of history alone. Who can lift this burden? That is my question. I hope this table will try to find the answer to this question because it is very important. We had a huge demonstration in Split on February 11 [protests by the veteran and right-wing groups in Croatia against The Hague Tribunal and the prosecution of war criminals]. This event has completely changed the political reality of Croatia. So how do we deal with history? It enters into every territorial issue-the border between Croatia and Slovenia; the Prevlaka peninsula; what was Krajina. We must recognize that history has a strong impact on contemporary relations. We must find answers to questions that are not only on the table but also on our minds.

Zdravko Grebo: I would like to address two issues that Ivo Banac mentioned; one is how the past is really a burden for us in the ex-Yugoslav area (whatever that means). Ten years ago, we faced the worst possible situation. Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Yugoslavia entered into war. It turned out that, in the process, historical arguments were held in higher stock than pluralist politics among the new political elites. This was no longer the problem of professional historians; rather it became an existential problem for all of us.

Ivo Banac mentioned another problem. I, too, must admit that ten years ago we did not think about the role of religion, or religious communities. I am from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and when Ivo [Banac] mentions religion, the problem is (keeping in mind the topic of this session) precisely the weight of the past. What is my identity if I am a Muslim by origin? How do you organize democratic life in Bosnia and Herzegovina with three peoples (Serbs, Croats, and Muslims), when religion tells me I am a Muslim in a political sense? There are Bosnian Muslims who say that the people of Pakistan, Malaysia, not to mention Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are closer to them than the Serbs and Croats. If we are to share values, prosecute war criminals, and so on, we must promote truth and reconciliation. And because Ivo Banac is a historian, and I really appreciated all that he said, may I suggest that we move on to recent history. The fact is that in Bosnia and Herzegovina the indicted war criminals are war heroes for their respective ethnic groups.

Jovan Donev: The process of nation building in the Balkans was actually a struggle through religion. The struggle for an independent church under Ottoman rule was a struggle for some kind of political independence or political privilege. So religion is part of our national system. We have the same problem in Montenegro and in Macedonia, as the autocephalous churches negotiate for recognition with the Greek Church. Why were graves and Muslim mosques attacked during the war in the Balkans? Because religious objects are a part of national identity. There is, too, a linguistic problem-the problem with the translation of the word "nation." Because we are thinking on a different level. To us, the word "nation" means something different than it does in the rest of the world. We had no national revolutionary movements. We had peasant movements. The logic of the peasant was the logic of ethnic cleansing-the struggle for land-and this logic survives. The peasants were dominant in numbers. They could go ahead with ethnic cleansing and take the land. There is also the problem of memory. The manipulation of the Serbs in Croatia was possible because there was a very strong memory of the Second World War and ethnic cleansing. The same was true in Bosnia and Herzegovina; memories frightened people.

If we consider the situation during the 1990s, Macedonia supported independence, and its citizens supported independence. But now our people speak very openly about regional cooperation. In the period of the Yugoslav kingdom and the Yugoslav federation, there were no ethnic communities. They could not express themselves culturally under the pressure of the dominant ethnic group. So they wanted to separate. But these small ethnic groups, these small states, cannot survive in the era of competition and globalization. So, now, they are initiating a different process-a process of regional cooperation. Possibly this is the right moment to put aside parts of our history and to develop a common civic culture forgotten during the period of nation building. That could perhaps push aside the influence of bad memories.

Nenad Canak: I have a completely different concept. Mr. Cicak mentioned the intoxication of history. This probably can be explained by the inability of individuals to influence their future. And also with the absence of a collective future. Mr. Grebo mentioned three parallel histories at work in Bosnia. In Vojvodina we have at least thirty histories, none of which refer to the present political situation. This is because opinions differ radically about the meaning of the same events. It is completely impossible to fashion a single history, acceptable to all. For example, I have a problem with the term "ex-Yugoslavia." When we say "Yugoslavia," it makes sense. But when we say "ex-Yugoslavia"- what is that? Did it exist? Calling different things by the same name can lead into quite a mess. Yugoslavia used to be a state, once. But it was not the same thing for all the people of Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, or in Belgrade. It meant different things. This became very clear in 1999, during the NATO intervention. The supporters of the Milosevic regime were standing on the bridges with their target signs, feigning a willingness to sacrifice their lives if NATO attacked the bridges. The important thing was their slogans. They hailed Serbia and Yugoslavia, but simultaneously attacked Montenegro. Now that was pretty weird. You have two federal units in a federation, and you are supporting one federal unit against the other. What does that mean? It means that Yugoslavia is not a state but a model. For example, you now have customs control inside Serbia on the border with Kosovo, on the border with Montenegro. And the customs stations were established by order of the federal customs administration. This is the first time in history that Yugoslavia is smaller than Serbia itself. And that is, I think, a very important point. Yugoslavia was a false idea of Greater Serbia. And that is what is important to understand. It helps to explain the antagonistic movement in Montenegro, and the reasons why Kosovo cannot remain in that kind of so-called Yugoslavia, and why in Vojvodina, which is changing its substance every few years because of very turbulent events in the neighborhood, you have now more and more people who favor independence-a republic, or whatever. This did not use to be true. New positions emerged because old ideas are no longer functional.

I think it is important to mention another matter. Mr. Donev said it was easy to manipulate the Serbs in Croatia because of historical frustrations, this being a nasty effect of the past, and so forth. If so, why did the communists for fifty long years keep whipping up these memories? Why did they keep them alive? Why did they not die out with memories of the Second World War, say, twenty years ago? If the war could not end in 1945, why could it not end in 1955 or 1965? The explanation is obvious. For as long as the war was alive, they were victors and liberators. The latter had an enduring permission to do whatever they wanted, because they saved some of the peoples from genocide. The nucleus of destruction in the Second Yugoslavia [the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] lay in internal relations, where the communists always played the role of liberators and protectors. This afforded them a chance to hide their incompetence in ruling the country, and their incapacity to solve the outstanding questions that beset the Balkans. And we had a lot of them.

Ivan Lovrenovic: It is important to deal with the past because we still live in this past. In fact, the worst violence in these recent conflicts came from literature. That we still do not understand this is frightening. In the premodern period, the discourse encouraging violence was nourished by religious literature. Bosnia is an excellent example, but for some reason no one wants to study the matter. When you look at the religious literature of the premodern period you will find reciprocal demonization. There are plenty of examples. The real explosion of this type of communication occurs in the nineteenth century. Some of our greatest literature is of this kind. This need not be illustrated, for it is well known. And now I come to a theme that has always fascinated me-the discourse of ideological disqualification that draws its origin from a religious ambience. It was contested by twentieth-century Communist discourse, but in a way that reproduced it. When you compare the revolutionary patriotic themes of the Partisan period with the great polemical works of the first half of the nineteenth century, you will find the same themes, the same tone, and so on. The theme of Skender Kulenovic's Stojanka, the Mother of Knezpolje is remarkably similar to that of Ivan Mazuranic's The Death of Smail-aga Cengic. And it is an irony that Kulenovic is the author of a magnificent, beautiful essay on Mazuranic. This narrative of anathema displays astonishing resilience. And it survives through all possible historical and political discontinuities. It is clear that we are dealing with something fundamental. Let me remind you that I started by saying that you can discover all of the bloody slogans used to promote the recent ethnic cleansing in our best literature. If we have some serious business it is surely the business of disclosing and examining these facts. One can conclude, without going into the usual exaggerations and exaltations, that this sort of discourse is common to all national communities throughout the Balkans. It is vital to promote some sort of independent studies that would systematically detect these aspects and systematically research them.

Drago Jancar [interrupting]: I would not blame literature so much for the enemies and heroes and so forth. I mean, this is in the nature of nineteenthcentury literature everywhere. You have Polish literature about Germans, Russian literature about Germans. Maybe it is a problem here, in such an overcrowded area. But I would not blame literature as such.

Andrew Wachtel [from the audience]: I will start by saying that I wrote precisely on the topic you were talking about; well, not precisely, but very close. My book is called Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. But in terms of the question of history, in this kind of discussion, I think that it has highly negative importance, and little positive importance. That is how I would interpret it. It is very important to understand the past and have some kind of idea of what the past was, whether or not it will be capable of being misused, or whether people want to make arguments that are really negative or unpleasant, using historical material. On the other hand, I am not at all convinced that the barriers, varieties, and rival interpretations of the past pose insurmountable obstacles to forging some kind of future life in the region. It is important that they not be misused, of course. But I cannot go along with the idea that you are behaving so badly now because Croats were oppressive in the past, or Albanians, or whoever. That is not true. But it is not very helpful to ask "How will we now go forward?"-what Jovan [Donev] said in the context of new aspirations for integration. These aspirations can become more important than the historical issues that are not answerable, as there are indeed many plausible interpretations of the past. Germany is not that useful as an analogy because, after the Second World War, we came in and imposed a specific version of history on the Germans that did not allow them to have many different interpretations of the past. The victors suppressed the natural diversity of historical perspectives. Please note that this was not the case in the former Yugoslavia. That is, no one there [is going] to impose a single interpretation of history. Thus, you will continue to have contesting interpretations. Even so, it is not likely that a single shared history is necessary for forging future ties. I think there is more promise in recognizing that you need to go beyond these things. I am an historian, but I believe that we should leave the past behind so far as we can.

Ivan Zvonimir Cicak: As most of you, here, know Natasa Kandic and I are mostly involved in the detection of war crimes on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. When we deal with war crimes, we write letters about the facts and not books. So now I will talk from my experience. When you see how these crimes were committed, you see the reflections of the books that we read in school. For example, the stories of the old women that were raped, etc. Do you know what book went through the largest number of editions in Croatia? It is Andrija Kacic-Miosic's eighteenth- century crusading compendium The Pleasant Discourse of the Slavic People. That book, and the tales of Prince Marko, exercised the greatest influence in the forming of the people in the Dinaric area, where most of the crimes took place.

Drago Jancar [interrupting]: It's education, not literature. Otherwise, Poles would be criminals on account of their heroic poems; the French and the English would be criminals. These ideas . . .

Andrew Wachtel [interrupting]: They did their best to suppress those things. When you were in school you did not read the most violent passages. You read the most benign selections. So it was underground. People got . . .

Zdravko Grebo [interrupting]: The problem is not, and I agree with [Drago] Jancar, it is not the official educational system but something within the
family.

Andrew Wachtel [interrupting]: Right, that's what I'm saying . . .

Ivan Zvonimir Cicak [interrupting]: That's how we got our education. Do you know the words of General [Ratko] Mladic to his soldiers in Srebrenica? "Now go and take revenge on the Turks."

Ivan Lovrenovic [interrupting]: This is simply a refrain of Milorad Ekmecic in 1990, at the beginning of the war. He said, "This is merely the completion of
the Serbian uprising of 1804. . . ."

Teuta Arifi: Among the problems that we should discuss are the patriarchal values that are promoted in history. When we look at the literature on the history of our countries, we find a lot of values, but mainly patriarchal values. These are the values that are identified with heroism, with men who fight against other men of other nations. I would like to say something about the Albanian question. In southeastern Europe today there are two big questions-Serbian and Albanian. These are the so-called problematic questions of the region, the questions that provoke wars and instability.

I would like to retell the first history lesson that I had when I was in primary school. We were taught that our South Slavic forefathers came in the seventh century from beyond the Carpathians. The text was translated into Albanian directly from Macedonian, but we were not the intended audience. Situations like this explain why the Albanians of Yugoslavia were the country's most homogenized community. But they were also territorially divided. During the Yugoslav period, Pristina was a center for all the Albanians in Yugoslavia. The University of Pristina is where the Albanians went to study. But the division remained a problem, preventing the Albanians of Yugoslavia from building a single countermyth to that propagated by the Serbian Academy of Sciences. Half of the Albanian nation was in Albania and the other half outside Albania. But Albania-no more today than during the communist regime-was not and could not be the Piedmont of the Albanians. The Albanians, even those of Albania, would like to use history to turn Kosovo into our Piedmont. The Drenica district in central Kosovo, where the Kosovo Liberation Army was formed, was very important in the wars against the Turks. It gave important heroes to Albanian history. In his new book Ismail Kadare wrote not about contemporary Kosovo, but about the Kosovo battle of 1389. I wondered why Kadare went so deeply into the fourteenth century. Finally, I reached the conclusion that he was trying to present the Albanian part of the battle, which Serbs never stopped using as an historical argument.

Srdja Popovic: What is meant by the past? If it means the last ten years, then I do not agree with most of the participants here, that it is impossible to establish what has really happened; that all interpretations are going to compete on an equal footing with all the rest. What happened in the last ten years is very simple. What happened is crime, and the valid interpretation is being formulated in The Hague. The Hague is presently writing the history of the last ten years. Not much else happened, there was no battle between different ideas, between different concepts, between different ideologies. It was simply a huge crime, basically committed by the Serb side. That's the history, that's the whole history of the region of the last ten years. It is a history of crime. And it should be examined in a criminal court. And an independent criminal court, an international court, should deal it with. And that's all there is to it. I don't think that any serious debates about what happened are possible when there is so much denial. But that history will be quickly established, documented, and accepted by everybody except those who committed it.

As for the past taken more generally, I have a problem with bringing this question up at all, because in my opinion it helps obscure what happened in the last ten years. When we start the discussion on history, in a way, we create an impression that what happened recently is a result of that history, that it is somehow an organic part of our people's history. And that's not what happened. This so-called war was a matter of conspiracy-criminal conspiracy. It was engineered by a couple of dozen people. The crimes were committed by professionals, mostly the Yugoslav army, Serbian police, and criminals organized by the Serbian police. It was not really something that grew out of our common history. Everybody in Yugoslavia was amazed that it happened, people were amazed. Nobody believed that it happened, because it was engineered. It was organized by professional soldiers, the secret police. They were the ones who were engaged in the killings. Of course, later on, everybody started believing that they engaged in self-defense. But that's secondary, that's not what the real event was about. The real event was an assault by Serbian and Yugoslav professionals against countless civilians. That's it. And that's a crime. As for those different interpretations of history-many of you will not agree, especially Professor Banac who is a historian-but, in my opinion, there is no connection between history and this conflict.

What I want to say is that Croatian history and Serbian history cannot be understood except in the context of the remnants of the two great empires-the Ottoman and Habsburg. Likewise, Croatian and Serbian history cannot be understood apart from the changes in the Soviet Union. The demise of the Soviet Union is another chapter in Croatian and Serbian history. Finally, NATO controls a big part of the country and, in many ways, dictates what happens at present. We cannot understand our own histories without seeing them in the light of much bigger pictures. Especially since we live at the border between Eastern and Western Europe-a border that is an outpost of Islam, of Orthodoxy, of Catholicism. Whatever happens in such a place is just an echo of something bigger, and that "something bigger" is the most important. So I know you don't agree, but I would be very happy to hear what you have to say.

Ivo Banac: I am very grateful for this, and, in fact, I do agree with much of it, because I think that it is literally impossible to abstract specific stories out of the general context, which is precisely what you were saying.

Srdja Popovic: And as Mr. Lovrenovic was saying, writers did not start the war, but they helped sell the war to the people.

Ivan Lovrenovic: Of course, I agree with Mr. Jancar and Mr. Popovic. I do not speak about writers as the originators of war. I am talking about ideological topoi that have been created and nurtured within the framework of literature and religion for at least the last three hundred years. And these topoi could be read very clearly in the slogans that our warriors took into battle. And, needless to say, the writers are entirely innocent. . . .

Miodrag Perovic: I agree with Mr. Popovic that the history of the last decade in the former Yugoslavia is being written in The Hague. However, the problem for me is that, after the experience we had with German nationalism, how was it possible that elites in the Balkans, especially the Serbian elite, were ready to accept the repetition of that sort of nationalism and to commit such crimes. So we come to the problem of axiology, that is, a value system that is predominant in a culture, which allows people to commit the same sort of crime that was committed by Germans in the Second World War. And I find that all the nationalisms in the Balkans are similar in several ways. First, all the nationalisms are ethnic nationalisms; they are not modern nationalisms. They did not go through the historical events that shaped modern Europe, for example, the separation of church and state, making it possible to have a nation with several confessions. In the Slavic part of the Balkans, people could speak the same language and have many elements in common, in culture, and history, and so on. You can identify their nationalisms-Serbs and Croats-according to confession. Serbs never were ready to accept Catholics as Serbs. Croats were also not ready to accept the Orthodox as Croats. When I was a child and studied my native language, reading a Serbian primer, everybody had to know the following lines by heart: "Today they say to us, the children of this century, they don't deserve our history, because we are kept by the western river and our souls are in a fearful fever." So, everything would be simple and just the way Mr. Popovic said, if we were completely western and if we accepted the values of West European civilization. But that is not the fact. For example, Vojislav Kostunica behaves as if he does not know the words of the two leading ideologues-the leading personalities of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the twentieth century. For example, Justin Popovic said: "Europe is a cemetery. The absence of culture is a clear advantage because it indicates the presence of God. The Orthodoxy of Saint Sava is the divine-human culture, but it is not humanistic."

Ivo Banac: In conclusion, let me say just one thing. I think that my friend Srdja Popovic misinterpreted one aspect of what I was saying. I am not connecting the past with the last ten years. I am simply trying to point to the obstacles that prevent a proper understanding of our history.

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