Joe Geni

It was by no means inevitable that Yugoslavia would come apart. Secession is the most extreme demand an ethnic minority can make, and many other options—regional or cultural autonomy, affirmative action, or proportional representation—were perhaps on offer. But by the end of the Cold War, Yugoslavia was under great strain. Since the 1970s, the country had faced mounting debts and an inability to pay its creditors. The standard of living of its people was declining, and inequalities between the regions were increasing. Yugoslav leader Josef Broz Tito had been able to use “regime strategies” under the communist system to stem ethnic rivalries and prevent factionalism along ethnic lines, but these worked only as long as he lived to maintain them. The country’s 1974 constitution had a “collective presidency” among the separate regions, allowing the president of each an effective veto that could only be overridden by Tito, the President For Life. After his death in 1980, the state’s increasing federalism accelerated, moving toward outright separatism after Slobodan Milošević’s consolidation of the national leadership in 1987. It was arguably “the threat of recentralization in the late 1980s, that triggered the secessions.”

Scholars have debated whether the ethnonationalism on display was inherent or whether it was abused by calculating political leaders seeking to consolidate power. Many argue that the Croatia’s secession and the resulting wars over the the Krajina were the result of “purposeful policies on the part of elites,” pointing out that intermarriage rates between the Croats and Serbs in the 1980s were as high as one in three; that just before the 1990 election, only 37% of Croats identified Croatian independence as one of their top political priorities; and that the HDZ “in general portrayed itself as wanting democracy and peace and as a moderate nationalist party” in the run-up to the election. But this debate between “primordialists” and “constructivists” is often reductive and is almost beside the point. Both factors were at play and indeed are interrelated, because political leaders and “big men” in the Balkans have typically leveraged power through political and economic patronage networks that, even in pluralistic parts of Yugoslavia, were largely stovepiped along ethnic lines. Milošević and Tudjman were able to “advance their personal political agenda[s]” through nationalism because “most of those who followed them did so because they thought they were best served by militant nationalists.” The HDZ was the best financed party in Croatia, and in general nationalist parties were the best organized and able to mobilize.

Moreover, the circumstances on the ground were ripe for instability. Democratizing societies are often prone to conflict due to “weak central authority, unstable domestic coalitions, and high-energy mass politics” and often go to war “not because war is popular with the mass public, but because domestic pressures creative incentives for elites to drum up nationalist sentiment.” The Serbs were also numerically concentrated in specific regions of Croatia, something they shared, according to one study, with 88% of ethnic-based uprisings since 1945.

What could have happened will long be debated. What is clear, however, is what did happen. On election day 1990, nationalist parties swept to power across Yugoslavia, and once in office, quickly made their presence felt. In Croatia, the Tudjman government emphasized Croatia’s ethnic identity by “adopting a range of ethnic symbols such as the traditional coat of arms, flag and national anthem as the official insignia of the republic; making the Latin script the official alphabet; and making the civil services exclusively Croatian by firing Serbs and employing Croats instead.” In June of that year, the government drafted Constitutional amendments to define Croatia “as the sovereign state of the Croat people,” while defining all other groups as minorities.

All of this deeply worried the Croatian Serbs, who, despite only accounting for 12% of Croatia’s population, had been “disproportionately represented in the composition of Croatia’s communist leadership” and feared a loss of political privileges in a Croat-dominated Croatia. Compounding this were more existential fears: the Serbs remembered “the genocide against them that took place in the Axis-sponsored Independent State of Croatia” at the hands of the Croatian Ustashi during World War II, when Nazi-backed Croatian nationalists massacred Serbs with the stated goal of killing a third, expelling a third, and forcibly converting a third. Serb nationalists would use this history to mobilize Serb solidarity for the forthcoming war.

In the summer of 1990, the self-appointed Serbian National Council proclaimed a ‘Declaration of the Sovereignty and Autonomy of the Serbian People’,” and the situation sat on a knife’s edge for the rest of the year, with repeated clashes between protesters and police. All the while, Tudjman refused multiple entreaties to preemptively strike. Hardliners in the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), “under direction from Belgrade,” were pushing for “a full break.” In both the SDS and the HDZ, moderates were being undermined or removed by hardliners. The HDZ could legitimately fear Milošević’s designs and the SDS could legitimately fear the HDZ, but both parties were also strengthened by real or perceived threats posed by the other.

Legal norms became twisted for political ends. The Serbs rejected Croatia’s eventual declaration of independence as illegal under Yugoslavia’s 1974 constitution, while the Croats rejected Krajina Serb referenda on secession from Croatia in which only Serbs had been allowed to participate. When Croatia finally did secede in the summer of 1990, it, like Slovenia before it, invoked the principle of the “self-determination of peoples.” The Krajina Serbs counter-seceded under the same principle, laying bare the primary problem with the idea of self determination of peoples: namely, which peoples? The confusing nature of this right led to contorted legal opinions from the European Community, which accepted Croatia after an assurance of “special autonomous status” for the minority Serbs, but rejected the Krajina’s application “on the basis of the inter-related principles of the inviolability of Croatia’s borders and the absence of the right to external self-determination of its minority Serb population.” European states refused to interpose troops between the parties for lack of consent by the sovereign actors, and indeed Germany’s move to recognize Croatian independence was in part “designed to circumvent this obstacle.”

The mantra of the day was, “Why should I be a minority in your country when you can be a minority in mine?” All sides desired borders that confirmed their majority status, and hardliners in all camps were prepared to use violence if necessary to obtain them. With the HDZ’s election in Croatia, Serb conservatives and the JNA tried “to destroy the federation through force and then to consolidate power in a smaller, Serbia-dominated state” without Slovenia and Croatia. As the situation spiraled, all sides had increasing incentive to take the nationalist line and secure political control of an ethnically-defined national territory. Where minority populations existed across borders, the grim logic of ethnic cleansing followed.

Amid the competing declarations of independence and mutually exclusive referenda, open war broke out in August 1991. Quickly, the Serb separatists got the upper hand with the backing of the JNA, gaining control of the Krajina and eastern and western Slavonia. The war itself became “an instrument of ethnic cleansing.” The JNA was now thoroughly Serb-dominated (many non-Serbs had already left to join new national armies), and Croatia’s nascent national army could not repel them. In a prelude of what would become standard procedure in Bosnia, the Serbs expelled some 200,000 people, most of them Croats. As Serb nationalists tried to cement their dominance of the Krajina, even Serb moderates were harassed and sometimes killed at the hands of the radicals.

A ceasefire was finally agreed on 2 January 1992, and under the Vance plan the JNA formally withdrew, though in practice much of its equipment and personnel remained to secure the new Republic of Serbian Krajina. In February, the U.N. Security Council authorized a peacekeeping force (UNPROFOR) in the Krajina “with a mandate to protect Serb civilians from reprisals and facilitate the return of Croat refugees” and a civilian “transitional administration” for the disputed territories (UNTAES). From 1992 on, Croatia was left in an untenable situation: Zagreb had no control over a quarter of its territory, and “the majority of Croatia’s Serb population were refugees in ‘Krajina’ or in Serbia.” The Serbs, meanwhile, hunkered down into a garrison state with Knin as its capital, dependent on the encouragement and sometimes direct support of Milošević.

Throughout the war, the Krajina issue had “bedeviled Western diplomats,” who from 1993 on feared a new Serb-Croat war above all else. U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith said such a war would have all the savagery of Bosnia “with ten times the firepower.” U.S., European, and U.N. diplomats attempted to find an acceptable compromise, yet could make no headway beyond the Vance plan. Galbraith’s “Z-4” plan would have integrated the Serbs back into Croatia in return for autonomy, but years of negotiations yielded nothing. The Croats feared that a cementing of the status quo would lead to a “Cyprus-ification” of the situation and an eternally frozen conflict. The Serbs, meanwhile, were “willing enough to negotiate endlessly about the possibility of reintegration, while in reality doing everything they could to integrate their territory with the adjacent Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia.” Though the Vance plan had called on them to disarm, Knin recognized that there was no international will to enforce this. The fundamental issue of territorial status proved unresolvable, and unlike the U.N. and its peacekeepers, the parties on the ground did not want “peace at any price.”

Indeed, the fact that the Croats were no longer fighting did not mean they accepted the status quo. Zagreb was determined to regain full control of the Krajina “at any cost.” While Tudjman proved pliable on the issue of Croats in Bosnia, shifting his position several times, he never wavered on the Krajina being an integral part of the Croatian state. Instead, he waited until he had sufficient power, and the right political moment, to strike.

By 1995, the military balance had begun to shift. Throughout the Krajina’s autonomous existence, Croatia built up its army in violation of an international arms embargo, “especially through covert aid from private military organizations in the United States,” while Belgrade’s support for the Krajina had “dwindled in the wake of the economic sanctions which had been imposed against Serbia, Montenegro, and the Serbs of Croatia” by the U.N. Security Council in May 1992. In the summer of 1995, Tudjman allied himself with Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegović, to Washington’s delight, and launched a joint attack on the Bosnian Serb forces, shifting the military balance and putting Milošević further on the defensive.

Tudjman’s excuse to launch the final offensive on the Krajina was the re-closing of a the main Zagreb-Belgrade Highway, which had been reopened as part of painstaking negotiations championed by the United States. It was the right moment. The Krajina Serbs depended on the coast for commerce and had no economic viability on their own. For four years, they “had by necessity been a garrison society, in which every adult male was, in effect, either a policeman or a soldier.” Economically and militarily, they were exhausted.

Operation Flash saw the Croatian army seize Western Slavonia with shocking speed. Serbs fled by the thousands with little resistance. Serb TV scarcely mentioned the event in the nightly news, suggesting that Milošević had decided to stay “on the sidelines.” To this day, speculation continues as to whether Tudjman and Milošević struck a secret accord to ensure Belgrade’s non-interference, but either way, the Krajina Serbs had clearly lost their primary patron.

After the success of Operation Flash, the Knin leadership “was now split into several different political camps with the government, police and military all in complete disarray.” While its leaders Milan Babić, Milan Martić, and Borislav Mikelić fell to infighting, at least 10,000 and possibly as many as 18,000 Serbs who had been evicted from Sector West searched for shelter, first in the remaining Serb-held territories, then in Bosnia and beyond. By the time Babić became Prime Minister again on 28 July, he understood his breakaway state would not survive without Milošević’s support, and promptly flew to Belgrade to try to get it.

As the Croats massed their forces for a final taking of the Krajina, the American position had shifted as well. The Croatian hard right had benefited as Washington “moved to support Croatia as a regional counterweight to Serbia in order to end what it perceived to be a military stalemate in Bosnia.” Tudjman understood from his communications with Galbraith that the United States would not interfere, and American officials merely expressed “concern” at the buildup. Meanwhile, events in Bosnia gave Washington another reason to go along. July brought the massacre at Srebrenica and the massing of Serb forces around other safe zones, especially at Bihac, which international peacekeepers seemed powerless to protect. On 17 July, President Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake unveiled his “endgame strategy,” that would involve threats—ultimately carried out—to bomb Bosnian Serb positions and lift the already heavily violated arms embargo. The embargo was indeed lifted by Congress nine days later. Operation Flash had exposed Milošević’s unwillingness or inability to defend the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs. The Clinton Administration, long reluctant to enter the fray militarily, took heart that it could attack the Bosnian Serbs without facing the united JNA.

On the morning of 4 August, Operation Storm commenced. Croat forces advanced on Knin, outnumbering Serb defenders five to one and featuring superior training as a result of an “increasingly congenial relationship with the United States.” Advancing on the breakaway republic’s capital, the Croats came “burning and looting all before them,” and ill-treating the U.N. peacekeepers that had monitored the status quo. In one instance, they marched Danish troops ahead of the infantry as human shields.

During the attack, Tudjman “broadcast assurances that the rights of Serbs would be fully assured, asking them to remain,” but the army’s tactics perhaps betrayed its true intentions. “The Croats had left escape routes” and through these the Serb leadership and much of the population fled. By mid-morning on 5 August, the Croatian army arrived on the outskirts of Knin and found the city “deserted.” The next day, the Serbs asked for a ceasefire “so that they could arrange a safe evacuation,” but the Croats insisted on an “unconditional surrender.” Perhaps Tudjman was already looking ahead, imagining two alternate scenarios; one, a firmly Croat Krajina populated by grateful Croat returnees who would reliably vote HDZ for years to come; the other, an conquered, embittered Serb minority who would vote instead for anyone else. The Croatian President would later say, “I thought 60 to 70 percent of the Serbs would stay, that they would understand that democratic Croatia will guarantee their ethnic rights. So the Serbs themselves are to blame for their destiny.”

By the end of Operation Storm, Croatia had secured all of its territory. The Erdut Agreement, formalizing the new facts on the ground, would follow closely on the heels of Dayton. But the Croat conquest caused a massive population upheaval, and left the Krajina “virtually cleansed of its Serb inhabitants, who retreated with the Serbian army.” In all, 300,000 Serbs were evicted from their homes, and by 1998, Brendan O’Shea could write that “Croatia has become the most ethnically cleansed of all Balkan states.”