Having spent part of 1994 working for a Mercy Corps International in Kosovo, Serbia, and Croatia, I’ve maintainted more than a passing interest in affairs in the Balkans. Ten years later, the shooting may have stopped, but the anger, the hatred, the mistrust, and the sharp divisions along ethnic lines continue unabated. Of course, in the Balkans, ten years is, historically speaking, a very short period. It’s certainly not enough time to overcome generations of hatred, bloody violence, and brutal repression. Hatred is learned early in the Balkans, and it dies hard- if it dies at all.
Here in this country we have sharp and sometimes bitter differences of opinions between Democrats and Republicans. We may have serious and very real differences with each other, but we manage to (more or less) get along without killing those who think differently or burning their villages. Somehow we coexist through our differences. You won’t find that taking place in the Balkans. Of course, Republicans and Democrats don’t have a history of violent and bloody conflict with one another.
LJIPJAN, Serbia and Montenegro — Naser Bytyci and Branko Smilic are dentists who pulled teeth from fighters on opposite sides of Kosovo’s ethnic war. Five years into a tenuous peace between ethnic Albanians and Serbs, the dentists live in the same town and practice the same profession. But Bytyci, an ethnic Albanian, pulls only Albanian teeth, and Smilic, a Serb, pulls only the teeth of Serbs.
Bytyci says he would not mind fixing Serb teeth, but that all the Serbs in town refuse to visit him or Albanian doctors of any sort. Smilic professes to be uninterested in giving Albanians root canals.
“It is better for each side to take care of its own,” said Smilic, a stout man with a round face. “Suppose a patient got angry and began blaming the doctor because he was Serb or Albanian?”
It is safer, too, he argues, because recent violence against Serbs demonstrated that the foreign peacekeeping troops here cannot protect the Serbs.
The truly fascinating thing here is that, even though Serbs were the minority for many years and actively discriminated against Albanians, they persist in seeing themselves as victims. Perhaps this is symptomatic of the problem as a whole. Hatred has been passed from generation to generation for so long now that it has become an accepted part of the fabric of life. Religious faith in the Balkans is less a spiritual practice than the dividing line that separates “Us” from “Them”. Though the overt militarized violence has been quashed for the time being, that hardly means that peace and love will reign unabated.
The divided dentistry represents a persistent problem for Kosovo half a decade after NATO-led forces pushed the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army from the province and freed the ethnic Albanians from rule by then-president and current war crimes defendant Slobodan Milosevic.
Not only are the majority Albanians and minority Serbs living in segregated, mutually hostile communities, but they have been unable to integrate even ostensibly neutral public services such as health care. The “parallel structures” mock the stated aims of U.N. overseers in Kosovo to create a multiethnic society in advance of talks designed to resolve the political status of the province, which remains officially part of Serbia.
Kosovo’s problems have a cousin in Macedonia to the south. There, a seemingly innocuous plan to reduce the number of municipalities nationwide by consolidating several areas has riled the majority Slavic population, which identifies itself simply as Macedonian.
The Macedonians assert that the plan, part of a U.S.-supported program of ethnic reconciliation, will make worse what they call efforts by the Albanian minority to split the country in two. Albanians say they just want to redress gerrymandering that has kept them at a political disadvantage….
All over the Balkans region, the violence that burned in the 1990s has been doused, but the basic conflicts are unresolved. General trends are often negative.
In Bosnia, efforts to bring Serbs, Croats and Muslims into a workable government partnership have stalled. Few refugees who were driven from their homes during Serb campaigns of ethnic cleansing have returned permanently. Nor have Serbs returned after fleeing such places as the Bosnian capital Sarajevo at war’s end. Croats remain segregated from Muslims in the western city of Mostar, touted as a symbol of peace when its graceful Ottoman-era bridge was recently restored. The town is almost totally devoid of Serbs.
The end of the 1999 war in Kosovo raised hopes in the West that perhaps the generations of hatred and mistrust could finally be left behind. This rather naive hope failed to recognize the realities on the ground. What diplomats and aid workers failed to take into account is that memories in the Balkans are long and unforgiving. Given the atrocities that many Albanian Kosovars suffered at the hands of Serbs, we should try to at least understand the degree and depth of hatred and mistrust that exists. No, I’m not trying to justify it, but if all that Democrats and Republicans had between them was a legacy of hatred and brutal, deadly violence and repression, life in this country would be much more contentious…and the body count would be much higher. Politics really would be a blood sport.
I suppose the fact that the shooting has stopped can be taken as progress- or what passes for it in the Balkans. The truly sad thing, though, is even this “progress” has not had a tangible effect on day-to-day life. In the former Yugoslavia, where ethnic groups lived, mingled, and intermarried under Tito, life will never be what it once may have appeared to be.
Even under Tito, ethnic tensions existed, though any manifestations were quickly and brutally suppressed by the central Yugoslav regime. With Tito’s death, the lid came off the pressure cooker, and the results will quite likely reverberate throughout the Balkans for generation. The sad truth is that the separation of ethnic groups may well be the best option at this point in time. Given the hatred and mistrust, keeping among your own is certainly one way to ensure your safety. No, it’s not an ideal or even a positive solution, but if it keeps the body count down, that has to be taken as a positive sign.
