As agreed in the Erdut Agreement , Eastern Slavonia, the last region controlled by Serb rebels, was reintegrated peacefully via transitional administration by the United Nations by Since then, Serbs have no longer been such a politically relevant factor as before. More than 20, people died in the war. The Serb community in Croatia dropped from , or The number of Serbs in may have been a bit larger, as there were , Yugoslavs. By , they practically disappeared with only declaring themselves as Yugoslavs.
Croatia is a signatory of a number of international minority rights mechanisms. The Act provides a set of cultural-autonomy and equal treatment guarantees including equal co-official usage of minority language in all municipalities and towns in which a minority constitute at least one third of the population, freedom of association, proportional representation in all public institutions and levels of government and cross-border cooperation rights.
As the Act is the result of international conditioning, its implementation often depends on external pressure and not on needs arising from the socio-economic position of Serbs. Demographically, economically and socially devastated, the Serb community cannot pose any threat to the state.
The failure to re-connect villages to the electric network is another example. It will primarily benefit Serb municipalities, as all ten least developed municipalities have a Serb majority. One day, the rebel Serbs hoped, the areas of Croatia they controlled would become part of a Greater Serbia. The Yugoslav wars cost tens of thousands of lives and made refugees of millions. And yet today, the region has been transformed and on 1 July Croatia will enter the European Union.
Symbolic of the change perhaps are two photos, which have been in the Balkan press and on social media recently. One shows a happy-looking pair travelling together on a coach.
They were both in London on their way to the funeral of Lady Thatcher. The second picture shows a young couple kissing. The boy is draped in a Serbian flag and his girlfriend in a Croatian one. The photo was taken in Mostar, in Bosnia-Hercegovina, during a school parade. The story is that the Croatian girl was allegedly berated by an old woman for having a Serbian boyfriend. This prompted her to turn and kiss him.
Both pictures say a lot about how far Croatia, Croats and their neighbours have come since the end of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia in Today, while no one has forgotten the enthusiastic participation of Montenegrin troops in the attack on Dubrovnik, relations with Croatia could not be better.
In , Milo Djukanovic, Montenegro's prime minister during the Dubrovnik campaign, apologised. In , compensation was paid for stolen cows. A dispute over a maritime boundary remains to be settled, but is not a major issue of discord. When it comes to Serbs and Bosnians, relations are more complicated. Mostar in southern Bosnia, is a town where Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks all lived before the war.
When the Bosnian war broke out in , Croats and Bosniaks first fought the Serbs here and then Croats fought Bosniaks, with the occasional help of the Serbs. The kiss picture has elicited mixed reactions. Some were enthusiastic, seeing it as symbolic of young people leaving the past behind. Others were more sceptical. Croatia's relationship with Serbs and Serbia has been long and tortuous. The two languages are very close. Croats are mostly Catholics though and Serbs are Orthodox.
They planned to do this by eliminating "disordering elements," namely the Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. The last two groups were to be completely eliminated, according to the doctrines of the Ustasas' Nazi patrons. The Serbs, however, were treated according to the Ustasas' own ideology, which as a rather inconsistent blend of racism and political hatred. As historian Aleksa Djilas puts it, the Ustasas viewed serbs as a political enemy but described them in racist terms, and treated them in the way the Nazis treated "racially inferior" peoples.
By July and August , the Ustasas began to implement their agenda for dealing with the Serbs: one-third would be killed, one-third driven from Croatia including Bosnia and Hercegovina , and one-third converted to Catholicism, a step that would remove their "national consciousness" and render them harmless politically. The techniques of the Ustasa campaign against the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia from will be familiar to all who have seen the details of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia since Some concentration camps were created, but most of the slaughter took place in towns and villages.
The techniques of the s were like those of the s: a group of armed men would descend upon a settlement of people who they defined as ethnonational enemies.
Murder, rape, and burning of the structures would follow. The numbers of dead in the s slaughter have been debated with increasing intensity, with some Serbs claiming that more than a million Serbs were slaughtered, and some Croats, including the President of Croatia, claiming that the numbers were closer to , A conservative estimate given by Aleska Djilas is that one in six of the approximately 1,, Serbs in the NDH in had been killed by , in Croatia, or Many more were expelled from their homes.
In revenge, Serbs mounted terror campaigns against their enemies, especially against Muslims in Bosnia. It would be fair to characterize the s slaughter, however, as one in which the main victims were Serbs, at the hands of Croats and Muslims, in that order. The main non-nationalist force in Yugoslavia during the war years of was Tito's Communist-led army, the Partisans.
By the end of the international war, the Partisans had also won the civil wars within Yugoslavia, overthrowing the Ustasa regime and the Serbian royalists, the Cetniks. The regime set up by Tito was avowedly anti-nationalist, both for reasons of the ideology of communist internationalism and for the practical political reason that the major potential for opposition to communist rule lay in nationalist parties.
A basic principle of communist Yugoslavia was the "brotherhood and unity" bratstvo - jedinstvo of the Yugoslav peoples. Communist Yugoslavia was set up as a federation of republics, all but one of which bore the name of one of which bore the name of one of the constituent peoples of Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia. The exception was Bosnia and Hercegovina, the Muslims were the largest group, followed by Serbs, then Croats, and others.
Until the census, "Muslim" was not one of the categories listed for identification, and Serbs were the nominal majority in Bosnia and Hercegovina. In , however, Muslims could identify themselves as such on the census forms, and from then on, Muslims were the largest national group in Bosnia and Hercegovina.
The forty-five years of communist Yugoslavia did not produce "brotherhood and unity. Whatever central control existed depended on the communist party, and when that fragmented in January of , there was no central authority left in the country. In free elections in , the message that won in all of the republics was one of nationalism, of a distinctly illiberal bent.
In each instance, the winning party promised to turn the republic into the national state of the majority "nation," ethnically defined. In constitutional terms, the ethnic nation became sovereign: the Slovenes in Slovenia, the Croats in Croatia. Minorities were thereby excluded from among the primary bearers of sovereignty. Thus the post-communist transformation was from state socialism, in which the state was dedicated to the rule of that part of the population that formed the "working class," to state chauvinism, in which the state was dedicated to rule by that part of the population that formed the majority nation, ethnically defined.
Others were excluded politically, and soon, in many cases, physically. Empirically this was nonsense, since wherever Yugoslav peoples lived intermingled they intermarried in large numbers, particularly from the s until late into the s. However, the political rhetoric of enmity and partition rapidly overcame that of brotherhood and unity.
What succeeded politically within Yugoslavia was the message that joint state of Serbs, Croats and others was not in fact possible, and that the various nations had the right to "self-determination. One difference between the demise of Yugoslavia in and its creation in was a change in the dominant patterns of serbian nationalism.
Where the dominant Serb national ideology had been inclusive of all speakers of Serbo-Croatian in , by the Serbs had accepted a nationalist ideology that was an exclusive as that of the Croats. The single distinguishing criterium of Serbs, Croats and Muslims became religion, as an inherited characteristic rather than active belief.
Thus Serbs did not contest the identities of Croats and Muslims as separate peoples, nor did they contest the rights of the various Yugoslav peoples to "self-determination.
From their point of view, the Croats could have their Croatia, but it could not include areas with Serb majorities. Similarly, if the Muslims wanted an independent Bosnia and Hercegovina, that was fine, but it would not include regions with large numbers of Serbs. In the case of Croatia, the Serbs' suspicion was perhaps justified. It had then immediately taken steps to ensure that the Serbs would be rendered second-class citizens in a Croatia defined constitutionally as the national state of the ethnically Croat people.
The partition of Croatia began in August , when Krajina region Serbs, who formed a strong local majority there, resisted attempts by the new nationalist Croatian government to impose upon them purely Croat state symbols, including a flag very much like that of the fascist state that had slaughtered so many Serbs in When Croatia declared independence in June , the Serbs in this region and in some other parts of Croatia announced their own desire to remain in Yugoslavia.
The Yugoslav army, rapidly transforming into a Serbian army, supported the Serbs. In the course of the fighting, from August until January , the Serbs took control of about one-third of the territory of Croatia. Some of these regions had a Serbian majority before the war began, but others had not.
The pattern of the war in Croatia was the de facto partition of the regions of the republic that had been most mixed ethnically. In effect, in these six months of war, the mixed areas of Croatia were divided, and the populations forced to divide themselves, rather like the Hindu and Muslim populations of India and Pakistan in , though on a much smaller scale.
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