When we were in Slovenia recently, we met with a lawyer in Ljubljana. Among the things we talked about was the split up of Yugoslavia and how and why it occurred.
He said he was scheduled to fly to Belgrade the day the fighting started. When he woke up that morning, he heard on the radio there tanks at the airport. He could not believe it, but he turned on the TV and there they were.
As to why the war in Slovenia was only ten days (as opposed to what happened in Croatia and Bosnia), he said two things. First, there were not a lot of Serbians in Slovenia.
Second, in anticipation of independence, the leaders of Slovenia had created a secret army. When Slovenia declared its independence, there was a race between the Slovenians and the Yugoslav army to gain control of the border crossings with Italy and Austria. The Slovenians got there first. At that point Italy and Austria intervened diplomatically. They did not want the Slovenians and the Yugoslavs fighting on their borders. They put diplomatic pressure on Belgrade to give in, and because there was nothing the Yugoslavs really wanted in Slovenia, they did so.
But why did it happen at all? Why did Yugoslavia split up?
By the 1980s, he said, communism was no longer working, so the politicians had to come up with something else. In fact, the politicians no longer believed in communism themselves. They just wanted to stay in power. Their substitute for communism was to appeal to nationalism. What happened after that, we know.
However, the lawyer said that Yugoslavia did not have to split up. In his mind, better politicians could have held Yugoslavia together.
This raises an interesting point. If Yugoslavia’s split up was not inevitable, if better politicians could have held Yugoslavia together (by not appealing to the darker side of human nature, by not turning people against each other with their nationalistic appeals, etc.), then what we were told in 1990s was wrong. What was happening in Yugoslavia and Croatia and Bosnia and Serbia was not inevitable. It was not the inescapable result of hundreds of years of ethnic hatred that nobody could go anything about. It was, instead, the result of the actions, and non-actions, of people at that time. Things could have been different.
After all, for years and years, under other leaders and other governments, these people lived next to each other and intermarried and things were peaceful. With different people and different politicians doing different things, what happened in Yugoslavia did not have to happen.
Killing is not inevitable. Genocides can be stopped. Good people trying hard can make a difference. It may not be easy. We may not succeed all the time. But to not try because "they’ve hated each other for centuries; there’s nothing we can do about it" is a cop-out.
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