The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracing the Break-up 1980-92
By Branka Magas
Verso, 1993. 359 pp.
Reviewed by Rob Graham
"The year 1992, scheduled to be a milestone on the road to European unity, saw Sarajevo and other European cities bombarded slowly to pieces and their inhabitants starved before the TV eyes of the world. It saw two million Bosnian Moslems threatened with Europe's first genocide since World War II."
This powerful opening immediately sets the scene for what is surely the greatest European tragedy since the second world war. In this volume, Branka Magas has assembled approximately two-thirds of her writings over the period, the earlier pieces originally published under the pseudonym Michelle Lee.
Rather than write a new book with the benefit of hindsight, she has chosen a "rawer" work, written at the time, with errors of judgment or prediction included. In particular, her early (though cautious) optimism regarding the chances of democratisation after the death of Tito proved unfounded.
Nevertheless, her mistakes are minor, for several reasons. In the first place, she was not a passive observer of events, but an active participant (the pseudonym was necessary to avoid trouble while visiting Yugoslavia). Secondly, Magas has a deep knowledge and understanding of the history and politics of the country.
The key, however, is her politics. As a revolutionary socialist, she is easily able to cut through the obscurantist racist and nationalist fog to lay bare the forces that tore apart the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Magas' main concern in her earlier writings is for the future of socialism in Yugoslavia. Born as it was of a genuine popular revolution (unlike the other eastern European states, which had their social revolutions imposed by the Red Army), Socialist Yugoslavia had a better chance of developing socialist democracy. As events unfold, this concern changes to a grave fear for the future of the country itself, as nationalism gains the upper hand.
The events in the province of Kosovo in April 1981 are identified as the watershed. Mass demonstrations by ethnic Albanians (some 80% of the population) demanding republican status for the province were met with the harshest repression since World War II, with martial law declared and up to 300 killed, as well as many receiving long jail terms.
Warning bells sounded at this time with the silence of the "left opposition" (especially amongst those around the banned Serbian journal Praxis, considered by Magas and others to be the conscience of Yugoslavia).
Magas saw civil war as a possibility in 1986, when several prominent intellectuals associated with Praxis signed a rabidly anti-Albanian petition. (Her trenchant criticism of this was met with an outraged rebuttal, which she comprehensively demolishes.)
From here, the rise of Slobodan Milosevic to the leadership of the Serbian League of Communists is traced, along with the incapacity of the leaders of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia to cope with the major economic and political crisis that gripped the country, and their capitulation to Serbian pressure, which ultimately led to their downfall. Milosevic's two options for his reactionary project are explained: either a Yugoslavia under Serb domination or an "ethnically pure" Greater Serbia.
Magas' analysis of Yugoslavia's undoing is firmly anchored in historical context. The experiment with "market socialism", which included the harsh medicine of the IMF, the party purges of the early 1970s and the legacy of Stalinism are all taken into account.
Magas makes it clear that the disintegration of Yugoslavia was not inevitable. The fact that the country came into existence twice is compelling evidence for the logic of some kind of political and economic union of the people of the region.
The response of the western governments, the UN and much of the western left comes in for harsh criticism — the UN for its inability to prevent "ethnic cleansing" and other horrors, and the left for basically lining up behind their own governments' fundamentally racist view that the people of the Balkans have a natural propensity to violence. Highly recommended.