A Politics of Sorrow: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

When Tito died in 1980, a tourist could have a Middle Eastern experience
in Sarajevo, without going to the Middle East. Although it was Ramadan,
women put their veils into their purses as they left the mosques and
blended into the crowds. Throughout Yugoslavia, food was plentiful, and
police were rare. Tourists could fraternize with Yugoslavs. Customs and
immigration officials were friendly. Yugoslavia appeared to have more in
common with France than with neighbouring Romania.

Barely a decade later, Yugoslavia collapsed, and Ljubisic—now a
resident of Montreal—understandably laments its passage. Neighbours
killed each other and destroyed each other’s property. People of one
ethnicity found themselves unwelcome in territory dominated by another,
although their families had lived there for generations. A series of
hostile nation-states, each dominated largely by people of one religion
and one language, replaced multicultural Yugoslavia. Ljubisic wonders
why this happened.

Ljubisic is well qualified to answer. His bibliography includes
French-language, Serbo-Croat, and Slovenian sources. He interviewed
Bosnians who had moved to Montreal. He argues that animosity among the
various groups was largely a 20th-century phenomenon. (Otherwise, could
authorities have created a united Yugoslavia after World War I?) He
correctly says that no ethnic group was pure or without fault. He blames
Yugoslavia’s disintegration on Germany and the United States.

What he says is largely valid. When Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in 1941,
Croatian Ustashi sided with the Nazis and created a kingdom of their
own. After the Cold War, weapons purchased in Florida and Texas gun
shops, plus advice from retired U.S. Army officers, again helped to
detach Croatia from Yugoslavia. Helmut Kohl’s government was the first
to recognize the independence of Croatia and Slovenia. However,
Croatians in Canada and Australia provided money for those weapons, and
both Commonwealth countries served as staging areas for anti-Yugoslav
Croats. The assassinations of Croat leader Stipe Radic and then King
Alexander (by a Croat-inspired conspiracy) in the interwar period
indicate that much of the hatred was home-grown.

Ljubisic has the right values and makes many good points, but there is
more to say.