Alex Massie points me to this little piece in the Guardian. It’s about how Croatians in Zagreb have overcome their government’s ban on smoking in bars and cafes by simply continuing smoking. The piece’s author, Euan Ferguson, is commendably enthusiastic about this development, but his traditional British contempt for the region shines through nonetheless:

What have the Balkans ever done for us? Until I saw this picture, I would have said pretty bloody little. Anger, wars, vampires, evil food, poisoned rivers, dictators, distrust, revenge and fear and it still features the only part of the world – mad northern Albania – where I’ve been offered a handgun for protection in a hotel because they’d lost the bedroom key.

Right back atcha, pal—what have you ever done for us? British policy in the Balkans has always been wrong-headed, hatched by the dimmest bulbs in the foreign office, whose understanding of the region seems to have come from a reading of Rebecca West’s disastrous Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and not much else. Stuff your sanctimony, pal, and ponder your own country’s turd-filled legacy to the world (Pakistan, Afghanistan, the modern Middle East come to mind) as you drift into cultural senescence and irrelevance, the distended state teat lolling about your wrinkled lips.

Fascinating story unraveling in the pages of the Wall Street Journal about one Eduardo Rózsa Flores, a Hungarian national who was killed last week by police in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. According to the Bolivian authorities, he was plotting to overthrow Evo Morales’ government and assassinate Morales himself. According to an interview Flores gave to a Hungarian TV show a few months ago, he was going to go organize a legal militia within Santa Cruz in order to defend the province against Morales’ attempts to found a communist state.

Flores seems to have been a colorful character. An author, an actor, and a professional revolutionary, he starred in a semi-fictionalized movie of his own life (now added to my Netflix queue). From watching the first few minutes of the film on Google Video, it seems like he grew up with impeccable leftist revolutionary credentials, with an idealist Jewish playwright father who got kicked out of the Bolivian Communist Party for his clandestine work with Che Guevara in the jungles.

What changed him from a fiery revolutionary to a establishmentarian counter-revolutionary, one wonders. Could it be that totalitarian communists are taking the place of fascists in those fevered minds looking to pick up arms and fight for a cause? More to come as I find it.

As Croatia’s genocide case against Serbia comes up for a hearing, the Serbs are trying to have the case thrown out of court.

Crimes were committed by both sides, [Tibor Varady, chief representative for Serbia] noted. “What happened cannot be reduced to a one dimensional picture,” he said. “The misdeeds of one side were matched by the misdeeds of the other.”

Quite wrong. It was a war of aggression masterminded by a genocidal maniac who held the Serbian nation in his thrall. Indeed, the Serbian defense is acknowledging as much by arguing that Belgrade is “not responsible for the government’s behavior during the Milošević years.”

The Germans were not allowed to make such specious arguments after World War II because the world powers understood that collective guilt was the only way to bring about the necessary catharsis for the modern German state of today to emerge. The mere fact that Belgrade feels comfortable airing such poison goes a long way to prove that the Serbian body politic has not adequately grappled with its recent history.

While I certainly don’t trust the International Court of Justice to come to a competent, honest judgment in this case, arguments such as the ones made by Serbia have to be answered consistently and methodically lest they succeed in muddying the historical record.

President Bush arrives in Croatia on Friday. Croatia’s leadership’s all a-titter, having finally received some of the positive international attention it so cravenly craves. But keep your pants on, lads:

An EU diplomat with extensive knowledge of the region, said the visit had more important undertones. “The NATO invite and the Bush visit are coordinated. This is not because the West really cares so much about Croatia, but because they are protectively creating a safety cordon around Serbia and potential instability there,” the diplomat said.

That’s not the whole picture either. Admission into NATO makes a country’s borders virtually inviolable which ought to deter Serbia from lashing out at its neighbors. But almost more importantly, it discourages any of the new member countries from unilateral military adventurism outside their own borders—like Croatia intervening on behalf of its ethnic minority in Bosnia if that country begins to fray badly. I fully expect President Bush to sternly warn the PM and President against that sort of thing.

Croatia, Bulgaria and Hungary recognized Kosovo today, joining Canada and Japan who recognized the country earlier this week.

Croatia’s governing coalition, which includes the SDSS, the party of Croatia’s Serbian minority, may pay the price. The SDSS minister, Slobodan Uzelac, tendered his resignation from the government, which was rejected by PM Ivo Sanader. The SDSS will now vote whether to remain in the governing coalition, or whether to try to bring the government down in protest.

For some Croats, recognizing Kosovo is a moral imperative—memories are fresh of Croatia eagerly awaiting international recognition when it declared independence in 1991. For others, especially those with business interests in Serbia, recognition unnecessarily complicates things. The decision to finally recognize Kosovo, however, was probably a precondition set by Washington in exchange for smoothing Croatia’s entry into NATO.

Earlier this year, noises were being made in official circles that Croatia was not yet ready to be admitted within NATO’s ranks. Then, about a week or so ago, it was announced that George W. Bush would visit Croatia immediately following the Bucharest NATO summit where a decision on the country’s NATO accession would be made. Some quid pro quo was probably arrived at.

So is recognizing Kosovo a smart move for Croatia? It’s hard to say. Geostrategically, it’s important that Croatia has decided to firmly place itself in the U.S.-centered NATO camp, thereby rejecting any dalliances with a resurgent Russia, a rising power with clear designs on the Balkans. SDSS’s position—to delay recognition until after Serbian parliamentary elections—was not without merits, however, especially if a more moderate, pro-EU government was to arise in Serbia.

Marko Hoare wrote another excellent essay over at Greater Surbiton. It’s both a succinct summary of the history of the late part of the Balkan wars, as well as an admirable attempt at apportioning blame where blame is due.

He makes a very important point which I failed to make yesterday:

Operation Storm resulted in the exodus of at least 150,000 Serb civilians. This was not a case of Croatia rounding up the Serb civilians and transporting them out of the territory; it was a **planned evacuation carried out by the Krajina Serb leadership itself**. *[emphasis mine -dm]*

It’s crucial to keep this kind of stuff in mind when you read about these ongoing trials. The narrative of the prosecution implies that Croatia’s war of liberation was qualitatively equivalent to Serbian aggression, and that Operation Storm was “the single largest event of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the 1991-1995 wars”. This is patently false and historically inaccurate. Yet it’s a narrative that keeps coming up again and again.

Along those lines, a seemingly unrelated passage in Dr. Hoare’s piece stands out:

In its ruling last year, the International Court of Justice ruled that the Srebrenica massacre, alone of all Serb massacres in the war, was an act of genocide. Had it not been for the Croatian Army and the US oppostion in 1995, Serb forces might last year have been found guilty of two genocidal massacres, not just one. This is one reason why Serbia, almost as much as Croatia and Bosnia, should be thankful for Operation Storm.

The problem, of course, is that Serbia proper wasn’t found guilty of anything in Srebrenica. Resultantly, there hasn’t been the kind of soul-searching within the Serbian body politic which would lead to a solid repudiation of their recent past. Instead, Serbia’s political elite is dominated by thugs like Koštunica and Nikolić who repudiated Milošević not because his wars were criminal and reprehensible, but rather because he lost them.

Tudjman was no saint, and he shares great responsibility for what transpired in the early 1990s. His litany of sins, as clearly enumerated by Dr. Hoare at the end of his piece, are damning indeed, especially when taken in as a whole. And having the Croatian public confront the individual acts of brutality which occurred during Operation Storm can only be good for the future health of the country. But the politics behind the ICJ and ICTY are not merely failing to bring reconciliation to the Balkans; they are in fact dangerous to long-term stability there.

The war crimes trial of Croatian general Ante Gotovina got under way yesterday. For a backgrounder on the unseemly politics of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, take a gander at my article in The American Interest from a few months back:

After Dayton, the international community turned its attention to prosecuting war crimes as a further means of forcing reconciliation. Again, the underlying assumption was that all sides were guilty; Serbia was perhaps quantitatively, but not qualitatively, more guilty than the other parties, but this was not important for practical purposes. For example, the fact that Serb civilians, fearing retribution, were fleeing in front of advancing Croatian and Bosnian armies was also viewed as “ethnic cleansing”, even though the Croats and Bosnians were not engaged in the methodical slaughter of innocents and forced deportations perfected by their Serbian adversaries over the years.

Doubtlessly atrocities did occur during Croatia’s “Operation Storm”, and Tudjman and his generals certainly weren’t terribly concerned that thousands of Serbs were fleeing their homesteads. This was not, however, “the single largest event of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the 1991-1995 wars” as the NY Times would have it.

The Croatian Serbs had massacred hundreds and expelled thousands of Croats from their homes in the intervening years, and they very rightly feared that their returning neighbors wouldn’t take too kindly to them. Tudjman’s cavalier attitude and his failure and unwillingness to provide security for these people stands as a black mark on the history of the founding of modern state of Croatia. But it doesn’t even begin to measure up to the systematic barbarities and deportations practiced by the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia during the Balkan wars. Equating the two sides, as the Times does above, is either dishonest, or more likely just plain historically ignorant and lazy.

“Tribunalations” is not my favorite pseudo-pun of all time, but it does the job. My afore-mentioned article in The American Interest is up, free to the loyal readers of this blog.

Click here to enjoy.

My article on the ICTY, the Vukovar Three, and the Balkans is up at The American Interest. Here’s the crux of the article’s relevance to things going on today:

Whatever the reasons, the Court’s policy is ill-conceived. It has cost the West credibility in the region. Serbia has already interpreted the West’s lack of resolve as a fundamental weakness and will likely attempt to extract maximum advantage over Kosovo. After all, Serbia rejected the Rambouillet agreement in 1999 and commenced cleansing Albanians from Kosovo in large part because a similar strategy in Bosnia was ultimately vindicated at Dayton. Furthermore, the question of Republika Srpska within the framework of Bosnia still remains an open sore. Serbia’s determination to eventually annex the territory is not likely to wane. It has already thumbed its nose at the West by threatening to call for a referendum on national self-determination within Bosnia.

I’ll try to get a link up to the whole article within the next few days. Bear with me.

Via Alex, I came across this story explaining one facet of England’s defeat at the hands of Croatia two days ago:

Tony Henry belted out a version of the Croat anthem before the 80,000 crowd, but made a blunder at the end.

He should have sung ‘Mila kuda si planina’ (which roughly means ‘You know my dear how we love your mountains’).

But he instead sang ‘Mila kura si planina’ which can be interpreted as ‘My dear, my penis is a mountain’.[^1]

That really made me laugh. Turns out, the Croatian team loved it too. It apparently helped to relax them before the match, which in turn supposedly lifted them to victory in the second half.

The article goes on to explain how the English opera singer was mortified and tried to apologize.

“It was the last thing that I would intentionally do, and all I can say is if I have offended any Croatians, then they have my deepest apologies.”

On the contrary, Henry is becoming a cult hero in Croatia… “The Croatians think it’s great, and they’ve invited him to come over and sing at Euro 2008…”

Such stories convince me of the validity of national stereotypes. There’s something in the soul of a Balkan slav that reliably lights up at unexpected ribaldry. It’s true of all the peoples of former Yugoslavia (with the possible exception of the Slovenes, who have a more Teutonic attitude towards humor). It certainly helps explain my own predilection for the filthy and lewd.