The Yugoslavia Counter-Narrative in 1993: Sean Gervasi, a neglected expert, spoke out in the early years of the catastrophe
Interview
with Professor Sean Gervasi, Institute of International and Economic
Problems, Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Recorded on February 24th, 1993
About the program: Starting in 1973, approximately
2,500 in-depth conversations were videotaped and aired in the “Conversations
with Harold Hudson Channer“ public access cable television series in
New York. Pre-internet videos and more recent videos can be found on Harold
Channer’s YouTube channel. This transcript was made in November,
2018.
Topics covered: the history of
Yugoslavia, Nazi occupation and resistance to Nazi occupation, Tito’s
relations with the USSR and NATO countries, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, the
multi-ethnic nature of the newly independent states, ultimate causes of the
wars of the 1990s, the re-emergence of the historical alliance between
Germany and Croatia, Western and especially German interests in balkanizing
the Balkans, government manipulation of the media, geo-strategic interests in
the Balkan region, misunderstandings of the present conflict (as of 1993) in
Western nations, misrepresentations of the present conflict (as of 1993) by
Western governments and media.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Harold
Channer (HC): Good evening and welcome very, very much to the conversation. We’re
pleased to welcome to the program Sean Gervasi. He is a professor and academic who
is concerned with economics and particularly with what is relevant to what we
want to talk about tonight. He has just returned from a long stay in in
Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and knows something of that situation. Sean Gervasi,
welcome very, very much to the conversation, and back to New York. Before we go
into some detail about what in the world is going on in terms of the Balkans,
from your experience there, maybe share a little bit of your own background. You
did some economics, you’re interested in economics.
Sean
Gervasi (SG): Well, I’m basically an economist. I studied in Europe, came back
to graduate school at Cornell, went into the federal government, resigned.
HC:
And the Balkans… you had some reason to be concerned with that area
particularly in some of your early life experience and so on?
SG:
Well, I’d lived a long time in the Mediterranean. My father had been a diplomat
posted in the Mediterranean and he covered a number of countries there for
quite a long time after the war, so I was living in the Med, and I know a fair
amount about Yugoslavia. I’m particularly interested in American foreign policy,
the economic aspects of that, and so when things started getting really out of
hand about a year ago, some old friends of mine whom I had known in the UN very
well and who are Yugoslavian, and diplomats, spoke to me and enticed me to come
over to the Institute for a week or ten days. Out of that I became a research
professor in Belgrade.
HC:
Yes, you’re research professor at the Institute for the Study of Economic and Political
Problems.
SG:
Right. It’s the Institute for International Politics, so it’s concerned
primarily with understanding the international aspects of Yugoslavia’s position
and it’s really been the premier research institute in Yugoslavia since 1948 or
so when it was founded. It was very large, with a very substantial staff which
has now been cut in about half. It’s still about 60 to 70 people, but it’s the
equivalent of a major think tank in the United States, obviously without the
connections and power that those have, although many members of the government,
the federal government primarily, have gone in and out of the institute and
government, and back and forth.
HC:
And that’s a long-standing institution.
SG:
It was founded in 1948, right after the war with Tito and so forth, and it’s
interesting that they tack on the end economic problems. Problems they have in the Balkans.
HC:
That is for certain and what a vantage point it has been for you. Now we’re
taping on February 24th, 1993, and you’ve been there…
SG:
Well, I went to the institute in all this. I was appointed in all this, and I’ve
been in and out… I’ve been back to the states three times, but I’ve spent a
good bit of time there over the last six, seven months.
HC:
And as you said, things began to come apart, as you put it, about a year ago. Maybe
you could set the stage for us here because the Balkans in modern history have
been a pivot point for world developments. After all the First World War
started there. There’s been a clash of cultures. Maybe you could give us a
little of that historical development, of the crucial nature, and the
geopolitical crucial nature of that that particular region. Fill in the general
audience.
SG:
Well, actually it’s the crucial geopolitical nature of the region which really
explains the founding of Yugoslavia in the beginning in 1918 as a state to unite
the South Slav nations, the republic of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the
kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes. Yugoslavia is in a very unique position
in some respects because it’s been a focus of struggle between, for a long time,
the Habsburg Empire on the one hand, and the Ottoman Empire on the other. And it’s
a focus therefore of European interest because it really represented the
demarcation line between the Eastern Empire and the West in some sense, and
that demarcation line moved up and down the Balkan Peninsula wildly according
to the various struggles which were going on between the 13th century and the
19th century, and it was really with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, in 1918, as a result of the
First World War, that a vacuum was created in a sense in that area and the
Western countries, the entente, really wanted to see a solid political entity
there in order to guard against—don’t forget this is shortly after the Soviet
revolution—in order to guard against a very traditional Russian Soviet
expansionism into the Mediterranean.
HC:
This is even following the First World War.
SG:
I think that Yugoslavia was envisioned by the Allies at that time as a kind of bulwark
against the expansion of the Russian Revolution, the Soviet revolution, into
the Balkans.
HC:
And the Yugo of Yugoslavia, does that mean unity,
or does it have a literal translation?
SG:
It was the union of the Slavs.
HC:
That was literally what the word means, and it brought together, prior to that,
those ethnic identities, which in various ways are being asserted so obviously now,
go way back.
SG:
Bosnian, that’s a rather artificial conception. It’s not an ethnic concept at
all. The ethnic groups in the area are historically the three South Slavic
ethnicities, if you like, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, the second and the third
being traditionally under the influence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and
Catholic, the former [Serbs] being much closer to Russia and Orthodox, but
there are a very large number of significant minorities mixed in there,
significant numbers of them too: Hungarians, Albanians, Macedonians,
Montenegrins, and then there are even other peoples there.*
HC:
The Montenegrins, and so forth, these would be subcategories of these three
main groups?
SG:
No. Well, the Montenegrins really are very closely related to the Serbs, but
the Albanians are not at all, neither are the Hungarians, and the Macedonians
are more complicated. They are Slavs, but they’ve also, being in the southern
part of that area, lived for centuries under a strong Turkish influence.
HC:
Yes, indeed.
SG:
And there is a significant Muslim population in Macedonia, as there is, of
course, in Serbia and the province of Kosovo where the Muslims are Albanian.
HC:
Yeah, and then you have Skopje to the south.
SG:
It’s the capital of Macedonia.
HC:
That’s Macedonia there, and that’s not been in the news until now, and let’s
hope that it does not become news, but in any event, there’s this clash of
these entities there after the First World War, and then there’s also been a
considerable German interest.
SG:
Well, there’s been a historic German interest in the area. The Germans have
always, particularly the South Germans, the Bavarians, have always looked with
some possible cupidity on Croatia and on Slovenia. The Austrians have very
close relations with Slovenia. Of course Germany, for a time, absorbed Austria.
They’re very close culturally, ethnically etc. And Germany, of course, has
always been interested in, particularly, the domination of Central Europe. This
is an issue that goes way back to the Bismarck Empire and possibly one might
also say that Germany has been interested in having access to the Mediterranean
through gaining entry into the Adriatic via Croatia. That’s not insignificant.
HC:
Yeah, and the Baghdad railway.
SG:
The Berlin to Baghdad railway. I forget actually where exactly that passed through.
It must have passed through…
HC:
But that is interesting. We want to talk some about Mr. Kohl’s [German
chancellor 1982-1998] role in the more modern experience with… But maybe we
could pursue this historical development a little bit here. There was then, of
course, the growth of Nazi Germany and there was the expansion, and they moved in.
The First World War obviously started at Sarajevo with the assassination of the
Archduke. But bringing it up into the more modern experience, the Balkans was
an area where the Nazi forces actually experienced considerable difficulty with
guerrillas. It held out and fought them and they never were really able to
assert themselves, as powerful as they were, on the ground against some of
those guerrilla forces. Or am I off-base on that?
SG:
No, that’s absolutely right. The Second World War was a very important
experience in the Balkans, especially in Yugoslavia. The Germans created a
puppet state in Croatia which was called the Independent Croatian State. This
was very large. It included all of Dalmatia, almost all of what is presently
Croatia and Bosnia as well, so it was a very large area. That was the area
which they occupied. The Italians were given a piece of Montenegro, and had
some activities in other parts.
HC:
When would they have done that?
SG:
1941, when the Germans invaded in 1941. They created this independent Croatian
state, and this is extremely important in understanding the present because the
Independent Croatian State included large numbers of Serbs, firstly, and as
Croatia and Bosnia today do, they include probably in excess of two million
Serbs living in Bosnia, what is now Bosnia, and what is now Croatia. They were
also in those areas at that time. In fact, there were probably proportionately
more of them, but the important thing to remember about the Independent
Croatian State, which is remembered very sharply and bitterly today, is that it
was a clerical fascist state, and as a clerical fascist state, it pursued quite
savage policies toward the minorities, towards Jews, Gypsies and Serbs. And in
fact I think there’s a lot of historical evidence, and certainly it’s taken for
granted in the Balkans, that under the Nazis the Germans in fact gave the
responsibility to Pavelić, the head of the Independent Croatian State, for
carrying out a part of the Holocaust which included the elimination of a large
part of the Serb population. It was a very deliberate racist, genocidal policy.
HC:
Directed at the Serbs.
SG:
Directed at the Serbs, the Jews and the Gypsies, and it’s been recognized after
the war by the United Nations as a policy of genocide. Now in that situation at
that time, in a number of camps, primarily a camp called Jasenovac
concentration camp in Croatia, very large numbers of Serbs perished and very large
numbers of Serbs perished when the Ustashe, the fascist military cadre,
attacked Serb villages and pretty horrible atrocities were carried out. Now
there’s a lot of controversy, obviously, over precisely how many people were
killed, but the range of estimates I can give you, which is generally accepted—except,
of course, by the present Croatian president—is between 300,000 and a million
Serbs were exterminated at that time.
HC:
Good Lord! And this was done in the name of… was there a racist component at
the time as there would have been against the Jews?
SG:
Absolutely. It was exactly what was directed against the Jews.
HC:
And yet the Croats were Slavs, so the direction against the Serbians was
something other than geopolitical demonizing. It was an ethnic or racist
argumentation, and yet the Croats themselves were Salvs. Why was the Aryan
appeal able to find fertile ground among the Croatians?
SG:
It was the clerical element which generated the difference between the two. The
difference between people who had lived under the Catholic Church for a very
long time and people who remained in the Serbian Orthodox Church.
HC:
And the underpinning of Bosnian or Muslim was there all along? What was the
attitude of the Croats toward those Muslims who were…
SG:
That’s an important point.
HC:
The Ottoman influence.
SG:
It’s important to understand that these Muslims are ethnically Slavs. The
Muslims in Bosnia and in other parts of Yugoslavia are people who are the
descendants of those Slavs forcibly converted when the areas in which they
lived were under Ottoman occupation. Under the Ottomans, the Slavs were, of
course, seen as lesser folk, and they were persecuted, discriminated against,
and, in fact, very often in danger of their lives. They were very heavily taxed,
and there was a lot of resistance to the Ottoman occupation. So ferocious was—and
it’s very famous in literature—the Ottoman occupation that large numbers of
Slavs did, in fact, convert to Islam, but, as it were, in a more formalistic
sense. So today, for instance, in Bosnia and other parts of Yugoslavia you have
Muslims who are ethnically Slavs, blond-haired, blue-eyed, very tall etcetera,
but who are in a cultural sense still formally Muslims—by the way many of them
are not at all very religious—they’re very modern for Muslims—but they regard
themselves as Muslims in some sense. And, of course, as Yugoslavia began to
break up, and even before that, there was a great deal of pressure put on
Muslims in places like that to become more Islamic. Now one important point, I
think, to remember about the experience of the independent Croatian state
during the Second World War was that as it included a significant number of Bosnian
Muslims at that time, Muslims of Slavic origin but descendants of converted
Slavs, again, those people were enlisted in, frankly, the genocidal war which
was waged against other populations there. And, in fact, the Muslims formed the
primary elements of two SS divisions in Bosnia, and that is one of the bitter
memories which Bosnian Serbs have of that epoch: that that the Muslim
population actively participated with the Croatian Ustashe in the genocidal
attacks which took place against gypsies, Jews and Serbs.
HC:
Who at that time was, in a certain sense, if that’s the right term, backing them?
SG:
Well, the Nazis. As you know, Serbia was totally occupied by the Nazis. There
were at that time, essentially, two quite different groups of Serbs resisting
that situation.
HC:
Tito being one.
SG:
There were first of all Tito’s partisans who were made up of all the Slavic
nationalities and including some Muslims, I believe—Serbs Croats and Slovenes. The
partisans were primarily a multi-ethnic group and obviously ideologically
unique and not at all ideologically diverse, but ideologically coherent around
the idea of a future struggle for communism in the future Yugoslavia.
HC:
You would tie it to the Soviet Union?
SG:
Oh, they were. They had political relationships with the Soviet Union, but the
primary military backers I would say at that time, perhaps not the primary
military backers of the partisans, were the Allies.
HC:
I was thinking in terms of ideology.
SG:
Oh, not ideologically. We supported Tito. But there was another Serbian group
at the time that needs to be remembered because today it’s a bit on the rise
and that is the royalist Serbians calling themselves Chetniks which refers
to the old resistance fighters against the Turks. The Chetniks and the
partisans both fought the Nazis, but they also fought each other, so the Second
World War is a pretty hellish scene in Yugoslavia in the sense that there was
triangular warfare going on.
HC:
And the resistance that the Nazis and the Croat patriots experienced was
persistent and consistent and well-remembered in the minds of many of the
Western Europeans who had experience in that Second World War. There was a real
major force that was launched against these invasions.
SG:
The partisans, particularly the partisans in Bosnia, really pinned down a large
number of German divisions and fought them to a standstill. There is no doubt
about that. That was probably the most significant military opposition against
the Nazi occupation.
HC:
You would think that might be well remembered by military advisers even as we
sit and talk now.
SG:
Oh, absolutely. There are many British intelligence officers, one of whom died
recently, a man named Lise [correct spelling uknown], a man who wrote about
British relations with Tito. He was very much against them. He and a number of
people like Fitzroy MacLean and _____ Davidson who was an MI-6 officer in
Yugoslavia during the wars, who is now a very famous writer. All of these
people are fully familiar with the intensity of that conflict and it’s
triangular character.
HC:
And then there’s building up among the people who inhabit that area these
historical and even contemporary, relatively contemporary, experiences of deep
animosity and hatred among the people who make it up, which might help account
for the incredible chaos that seems to be emerging.
SG:
Well, I would emphasize the very precise words you use: “help account” because
that’s only part of it. In fact, I would say that one of the remarkable things
about the period from 1945 until quite recently in 1990, until 1989 perhaps, is
that these ancient antagonisms were very much attenuated, I would say. Some people
like to say repressed. There’s no doubt that Tito was an enormously successful
leader in this sense. Under the slogan of brotherhood and unity he succeeded
really in composing… I would not say eliminating… but he succeeded in composing
the accumulated historical antagonisms between the various groups in Yugoslavia,
and he and the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist League built what is surely
one of the most successful federated states in the history of the 20th century,
far more successful in some respects than the Soviet Union was. I would have
said it was a model of federalism in many respects…
HC:
Of federalism, not confederalism?
SG:
Of federalism. I’m not correcting you. I want to make the distinction because
from the time of Tito’s death, actually before, from the time of the 1974
Constitution when there were clearly tendencies, possibly fostered already from
outside, towards a much looser federation, from the time of that constitution
when, by the way, all of the republics of Yugoslavia were already declared
sovereign. That’s the sense in which you can already say that there’s a
tendency to confederalism in Yugoslavia from the adoption of the 1974
Constitution. The 1974 constitution was already loosening up. There’s just no
doubt about it.
HC:
Following the Second World War Tito emerged and you had Mr. Churchill with his
Iron Curtain, but Yugoslavia which was a nominally socialist, communist aligned
country but was unique to the rule that Mr. Tito was able to have a window, in
a certain sense, on the West.
SG:
More than a window I’d like to say. I think something needs to be said about
that.
HC:
But he also had a link to the communists.
SG:
Ideologically, Tito of course had very close links historically with the Soviet
Communist Party and the Soviet Union, and in 1945 the Yugoslavs established a
communist state, but I think Stalin did not regard Tito as a very good
communist.
HC:
I would think he had reason not to. He had an independent streak.
SG:
Tito was a very strong person, and very independent, and the Yugoslavs are very,
very independent. The Yugoslavs are very, very independent people. Under the
pressure of the Soviet Union they began to wind down joint enterprises with the
Soviet Union in the late 40s. They brought about the withdrawal of Russian
military advisers, which, by the way, had been with the partisans as well as
British officers and some Americans, I think. And then there was an interesting
event in 1949. Mr. John Foster Dulles secretly flew to the island of Brioni in
the Adriatic and met with Marshal Tito and offered him not just a window but a
very large foot in the door. Foster Dulles offered Tito a kind of tacit
alliance with the United States to stand against possible Soviet expansionism
in the Balkans. And as a matter of fact, there was a tacit and a secret
alliance between Yugoslavia after, say, the early 1950s, from the early 1950s,
and the United States, in particular in the framework of NATO. There are very
large bases which were to be activated in the event of a conflagration between
the major powers in Yugoslavia—secret bases like…
HC:
In….[INDISTINCT]
SG:
Oh, no. Much more serious stuff than that: a major underground military air base
in Croatia. There were other bases…
HC:
This is in the 1970s?
SG:
No, this is from the 1950s. Yugoslavia undertook actual military obligations
within the context of a NATO confrontation with the Soviet Union. For instance,
the Yugoslav forces undertook the obligation to block the movement of Soviet
forces into southern Italy from Hungary. There were very specific engagements
which were undertaken. Now, in return the Yugoslavs received enormous military
assistance from the United States, from NATO, but really 90 percent of that
military assistance was from the US. Yugolsav officers were trained in the
United States. Yugoslavia received enormous technical assistance in its
aircraft industry, in its military industry. That assistance enabled the
creation of a very powerful, very modern military force in Yugoslavia, and of
course that was a NATO asset.
HC:
And those forces were under the command of the Yugoslavs and of Mr. Tito?
SG:
But in the event of a confrontation between East and West, they were to
participate in military actions aimed at the Soviet Union.
HC:
Now what was the role of the Soviet Union in terms of the support, say
militarily, or the logistics, or the internal logistics to the East in terms of
military support. How do we begin to understand whence came the weapons that
are being utilized in the Balkans now?
SG:
Today?
HC:
It seems, from our perception, to be overwhelmingly in the hands of the Serbian
forces, that they seemed to be very, very well-armed. What were the realities
of that, and what has been historically the tie to the Soviet Union in terms of
arms and the arms that do appear and are there in the Balkans?
SG:
Well, let me start by saying that Yugoslavia saw between 1945 and 1981-82 a
quite a remarkable transformation really. It became an industrial state, an
industrialized country, not fully industrialized, still with a minority of its
population working the land, but nonetheless as a semi-modern industrialized
state. There is a widespread view that the exclusive area of industrialization
was Croatia and Slovenia, but it’s not true. Let me just give you an example. One
of the most modern industries in Yugoslavia is the arms industry. It’s very
large, by the way. I think it probably was in the beginning of the 1980s or the
mid-80s perhaps the fifth largest arms industry in the world—exporter, sorry, I
should correct myself a very, very significant exporter of military equipment
and arms.
HC:
And manufacturer?
SG:
And manufacturer. Absolutely.
HC:
Manufacturer of small arms?
SG:
No, no. Really, the Yugoslavs manufacture everything from tanks to
sophisticated electronics for and avionics.
HC:
Let me ask you a naïve question that I should have had right at the beginning.
What population are we talking about?
SG:
In Yugoslavia? 25 million.
HC:
And they had built up industry, one of which was an arms industry.
SG:
Right now it’s important to remember that after the building tensions, if you
like, with the Soviet Union, the Yugoslavs removed their arms industry and
concentrated it where? In Bosnia. Seventy percent of this very modern arms
industry is in Bosnia today and was in Bosnia when Mr. Izetbegović declared the
independence of his republic in April 1992, April of last year. Now, most of
the areas which are occupied by the Muslims are areas which have large portions
of that 70% of the Yugoslav arms industry.
HC:
What percentage would you say? You’ve brought this point up. It’s new to me. What
percentage of the arms that are there, in terms of the fighting on the ground,
or in the air, had been sourced domestically?
SG:
The vast majority was produced domestically, some of the stuff under license. For
instance, the Yugoslavs produced Soviet T52s etc., but they produced their own
versions of the 72 called M84. They produced that themselves. My recollection
is that it was the 5th largest arms exporter at a certain stage, maybe the mid-80s.
I could be wrong, maybe sixth. It’s a significant producer of modern arms and
equipment.
HC:
Apart from that then if we were to look at that, and you said we had armed the
partisans in the Second World War, and there had been this ideological tie to
Soviet Union, communism. There was this quasi-tie to NATO. There were ties back
to Moscow and so forth, and I’m just in a certain sense curious as to those
that were not domestically produced and what has been the reality of supply
lines and externally generated materials that would support a war?
SG:
In the present conflict?
HC:
Leading up to and within the present conflict.
SG:
There are two principal external sources of arms in the Yugoslav conflicts
today. There are two conflicts, essentially, one between Croatia and the
Serbian populations of Croatia and Bosnia, and one between, on the one hand,
Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, and a part of the Croat army in place in
Bosnia, and the army of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia, which includes 35,000
regulars, perhaps 40,000, and 35,000 irregular troops. And they’re roughly
matched in size. The Croatian army has between 45,000 and 50,000 men and
weapons inside Bosnia today. That’s something that’s not much talked about.
HC:
These are regulars?
SG:
Oh, those are regular members. Those are are brigades of the regular Croatian army.
HC:
And they would have been part of an overall Yugoslav force that would have been
there previously.
SG:
Right. No, they weren’t there previously. These troops are…
HC:
Because there had been a Yugoslav military presence and established order…
SG:
That withdrew from Bosnia in the spring of 1992.
HC:
To where?
SG:
To Yugoslavia. Some of the people who might have been stationed in Bosnia in
the Yugoslav army before that might have withdrawn to Croatia. Many Croatian
officers, for instance, left the Yugoslav Army with the outbreak of the wars in
Croatia in the spring of 1991 a year previously. They were then integrated into
the Croatian army. Now it’s that army which actually invaded Bosnia last year.
HC:
You had said earlier there were two sources.
SG:
Two sources, primary external sources of arms today. One is Germany. Germany,
for instance, is perhaps this week completing the delivery of two squadrons of MIG-21s
to Croatia. It has provided military advisors and weapons of many kinds, more
light weapons, I think. There are rumors about German leopard tanks being used
in Bosnia. They haven’t been confirmed so far as I know, but there’s no doubt
that the Germans had a very large hand in equipping and preparing the Croatian
army in the end of 1990 in the beginning of 1991.
HC:
And those links would have gone back through time?
SG:
The political relationship. I would say that Mr. Kohl’s recognition of the
seceding republics is without any doubt what precipitated the wars in
Yugoslavia. It didn’t start them, but it turned them into major international
conflicts. The other source of arms going into Bosnia today is a pipeline from
the major Islamic countries, Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, who are obviously
competing against each other for influence in the Bosnian Muslim region.
HC:
Is that reaching significant dimensions?
SG:
It’s not insignificant. The number of volunteers, I don’t think, is really very
large—maybe four or five hundred in Bosnia now—but it’s not insignificant and
the arms are becoming significant and the military advisers—by the way, I
forgot to mention that the Turks are very, very important in this great power
game that’s going on.
HC:
And there’s great feeling among a good deal of the Muslim world as they see, as
we have seen, a great deal of…
SG:
What seems to be the persecution of the Muslims?
HC:
… what seems to be the persecution of the Muslims by an overwhelmingly powerful
Serbian force that has been able to exert itself. Well, you’re aware of the Western
press and perhaps you see things differently.
SG:
Well it’s very difficult to be on the spot, and you have to look at all of this
stuff very carefully. Let me remind you about the incubator incident in Kuwait.
Let me remind you about the fact that there’s a vast official propaganda
mechanism at work in every major Western country which emanates from the
government, which organizes mass propaganda campaigns. Look, there’s a part of
the directorate of operations of the Central Intelligence Agency that deals
with these things and hundreds of people are employed. Similarly, in the United
States Information Agency, similarly, in parts of the British Foreign and
Commonwealth Office. So let’s start from the fact that official propaganda is a
fact and that there are massive mechanisms for organizing that. The question at
issue here is when we look at what we have seen in the media in the West during
the last year and a half as far as you Yugoslavia, or whatever you wish to call
the various parts of it, is concerned, are we dealing with honest, objective
reporting, or are we dealing with, to very large extent officially inspired and
indeed fabricated propaganda?
HC:
All right. Officially inspired propaganda on the part of whom?
SG:
Primarily on the part of Germany I would say. The Germans have a very great
interest in this situation. Let me just sketch that very briefly. At the end of
the 1980s, as you know, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe were really
disintegrating, under various kinds of pressure.
HC:
And in the centrifugal forces that are exerting themselves in Yugoslavia there
is a relationship between that fact and the fact that there is difficulty
emerging in Yugoslavia.
SG:
Well, yes and no. Let’s just start with the fact that this was a fact at the
end of the eighties, all right? Now, in 1989 Germany was reunified. That made
Germany far and away the most powerful country in continental Europe. Now we
also have to remember that Germany at the time—and this was particularly
accentuated by the process of unification—had already experienced, as the
United States and France and Britain and Italy and other Western countries have,
long years of economic dislocation, slowing of economic growth, rising of
unemployment. Germany today has more than ten and a half percent unemployment.
HC:
They’re absorbing East Germans.
SG:
Well, they had a high unemployment before they absorbed East Germany. Eastern
Germany has created an absolute economic cataclysm for Western Europe because
of the manner in which it sought to be absorbed.
HC:
You don’t think they’ll get their act together?
SG:
Absolutely out of the question. Well, it depends on what you mean. Economically
there’s no way in which they can make it viable, but that’s an economic
question we can look at. That’s another hour’s discussion. So, we have the
disintegration of the Eastern European regimes. By the way, the death of Tito was
in 1980, which is a not insignificant date and an important factor contributing
to this situation. We have long years of economic stagnation and dislocation in
the West. By the way, that was transmitted to Yugoslavia through the reductions
in trade, reductions in investment, reductions in immigrant remittances etc.,
so that Yugoslavia through the 1970s was affected by the economic crisis in the
West which deepened and deepened, you know, from 1972 to 1973. When West Germany
absorbed Eastern Germany, that economic difficulty was really greatly enhanced.
We then saw… actually it had begun well before that… a rise of a new kind of
nationalism in Germany which hasn’t been seen there in a long time. And if you
look at the German debates which have been going on for some time now, they are
fairly hair-raising. German academics, historians etc. are really debating anew
how bad Hitler was. That’s the tenor of the debate. There’s a very large
revisionist debate going on in Germany which has been accompanied by and, I
think, has facilitated the rise of nationalism. And we have also the rise of
the right-wing extremist groups. By the way, I have to remind you…
HC:
Skinheads and whatnot?
SG:
Like Deutsche Alternativa—these groups which are essentially street combat
groups, but they’re financed through the electoral system because when you
create a political party in Germany, you get subsidies from the electoral
system in order to field your candidates.
HC:
You think these street ruffians and people doing fire bombings of immigrants
and shouting “auslander aus” and so
forth are supported by the government officially?
SG:
That’s a complicated question.
HC:
Is it disaffected individuals who are lashing out?
SG:
No, it’s much more systematic than that. They’re supported by important figures
in industry, and they are supported by people in the government in very
discreet ways, obviously, but just to give you an example: There are two deputy
directors of the Federal Ministry of Defense in the Federal Ministry of the
Interior in Germany, an enormously important department in Germany, who are
actually members of revanchist eastern parties, particularly Sudeten Deutsche parties, which… In any
case, these connections exist, but most important of all of these things is
that Germany began consciously rebuilding its cultural and economic links into
Central and Eastern Europe systematically, and South Eastern Europe. Yugoslavia
has always been one of the areas which has been in, historically, German imperial
sights. And with the reunification of Germany, and the rise of nationalism, and
all that that’s been accompanied by, we have seen a definite clearly defined,
traceable German effort to resume its dominance in Central Europe, particularly
East Central Europe. That is, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the
Czechs for instance maintain that the Germans played a critical role in
precipitating the schism in Czechoslovakia, the separation of Slovakia. And
there’s very good reason for believing that. I mean the Germans, don’t forget,
had historic ties to the Slovaks. They did, in Slovakia during the Second World
War, very much what they did in the independent Croatian state. It wasn’t quite
as horrible, but there were Slovak fascists. The Germans supported them. There
was a Nazi puppet state in Slovakia etc. What I’m saying is that a lot of the
of the ugliness that we saw in the 1930s and the 1920s in Western Europe and in
Germany, in particular, really is resuming.
HC:
That’s very, very worrying.
SG:
But it is an important element here in understanding what’s happened in
Yugoslavia because the Germans really helped to precipitate that. They helped
to precipitate the war between Croatia and Yugoslavia, the secession of Croatia,
and they have armed, assisted, advised etc., guided the new version of the independent
Croatian state under Mr. Tudjman.
HC:
And do you think that the hand of Germany… I wonder if you could put this in
perspective for us. This last year or so, the Serbian activity was a reaction
to that?
SG:
OK. Serbia. Let’s go over…
HC:
We’ve had people like George Shultz and ex-president Reagan—all sorts of people
at the very highest authority in this country condemn what we see on television.
People are talking now about the Bosnians who have suffered. Today as you and I
talk on February 24, they’re airlifting and air dropping supplies into Bosnia,
for the suffering Bosnian people. And in the minds of the American people, the
Serbian forces have been a ruthless and aggressive force that ought to be
confronted. They are even talking about the use of air power against Belgrade.
SG:
There’s no doubt that we are…
HC:
And what is the reality, as far as you see, of all of these which you obviously
can see, which is the perception that is felt by many of the leadership and
much of the general society in this country. And we feel frustrated that we’re
not able to go in because our military advisors tell us we’ll get ourselves
into another Vietnam quagmire and we mustn’t enter militarily. And do you think
we might? And what do you think about some of these questions that are so much
in the in the thinking of the American people now?
SG:
I think it’s important…
HC:
Put some of that in perspective for us.
SG:
I think it’s important to come to the situation today, to the Vance Owen plan (Mach
II), the version generated by the Clinton administration, the new proposals to
go into Bosnia, the position of the United States military. But the background…
let’s just say something about that. There is a conflict in Bosnia, a major
conflict in Bosnia, just as there is in Croatia between Serbs and Croatians. Both
of those conflicts were precipitated by a very simple fact: the secession of
these states from Yugoslavia without attention to regulating the status of
Serbs in Croatia and in Bosnia. This is a very serious question because of the
historical background which I mentioned—the independent Croatian state and the
genocide conducted against various populations, the Serbs in particular between
1941 and 1945. At the time that Croatia declared its independence in June of
1991, there were 750,000 Serbs living in parts of the Krajina, as they’re
called, which by the way is the geopolitical heart of Croatia. There were 1,300,000
or 1,400,000 Serbs living in Bosnia at the time that Bosnian independence was
declared in April of last year. These secessions took place in a manner which
raised the historic fears, historically justified fears, of the Serbian
populations of these areas that they would be the target of genocidal
persecutions again. Why? When Mr. Tudjman became the president of Croatia and
declared its independence, he passed legislation which purged Serbs from
government service, changed property rights of Serbs living in Croatia, mandated
the purge of Serbs from the universities, the media etc. in the name of
democratization, but nonetheless. And he began this, and in addition right-wing
extremists in Croatia carried out military attacks on Serbian communities. And
the Serbs resisted. That’s how the war in Croatia began. That’s why the
Yugoslav army intervened in Croatia. Now again, remember that the Muslims in
Bosnia sought to create, stated so, still do—it’s a very important issue which
is denied in this country—a fundamentalist Islamic state in the middle of
Europe, and that also ignored the historic rights of Serbs to be considered an
equivalent nationality as they had been before Croatian secession in Croatia,
with equal rights to other members of the population, and as they saw it, this exposed
them once again to the threat of genocidal persecution.
HC:
Where would this Muslim oriented entity be?
SG:
In Bosnia.
HC:
In the whole of Bosnia?
SG:
Yes, the secession of Bosnia took place when the Muslim population of Bosnia
was 44% of the total and a minority. By the way, that’s against the
constitution of the Bosnian Republic itself—secession without the consensus of
the three principal nationality groups is against the Bosnian Republic’s own constitution
in 1992. So all of these things that were done were totally illegal. The illegalities
in themselves frightened the Serbs. The determination of the Croatians to
discriminate against and to leave the Serb populations out of equivalent
consideration constitutionally, as happened in Bosnia, really began to raise
all these old fears. And the Serbs reacted. The Serbs reacted by saying, “OK,
we will ourselves choose to secede as a Serbian nationality in Bosnia, in
Croatia, from these independent republics and become members of Yugoslavia and accede
to membership of Yugoslavia.” That’s really what they would like to see. This whole
thing, by the way, could be settled very simply.
HC:
How?
SG:
By according to the Serbian populations of these republics the same rights and
privileges, the same property rights etc. as belong, according to their
constitutions, to all other citizens. What has happened with the Croatian and
the Bosnian secessions is that mono-ethnicity has been declared as the only
right and proper basis for self-determination, but this is complete balderdash.
Its historical nonsense. It’s legal nonsense, and frankly it’s only because it
serves the strategic interests of outside powers, powers not part of that
region, that this has been tolerated, and that around this a whole series of
myths have been created which create the impression which you were describing a
few minutes ago.
HC:
And which is a very widespread one here. It makes one think a little bit of
Cyprus where the Turks and the Greeks had fought so vociferously and then they
divided the island into two groups.
SG:
It doesn’t make any sense economically.
HC:
It doesn’t make any sense economically, but it [division of Cyprus] did make
sense because they were killing each other and fighting over these ancient
animosities, and there are some attempts now to try and divide the people in
the area of Yugoslavia into groups because there’s a sense that these groups
simply cannot get along together…
SG:
Well, let me raise the further irony.
HC:
… unless there’s this overpowering force of unity, a Tito or something to hold
them together.
SG:
Well, I think that’s a false perception. There has been a very great effort to
work at the stimulation of nationalist tendencies in order to fragment Yugoslav…
HC:
Nationalist tendencies in this case being Yugoslav?
SG:
No. Croatian, Slovenian secessionism, Bosnian secessionism, Muslim
fundamentalism. All of these, including Albanian secessionism, all of these
nationalities have been appealed to, to some extent—financed, cosseted,
assisted, directed by outside powers—in order to bring about the dismemberment
of Yugoslavia.
HC:
Well, we have it not only in Yugoslavia. We have it in all kinds of places in
the world. You mentioned Czechoslovakia. We have Tajikistan. We have it in Kurdistan
and all sorts of entities, and ethnic entities on the subcontinent of India. We
have it in Africa. We have it all over the place—these ethnic groups which are
asserting themselves as nations which had previously been part of a nation. There
was unity, but there seems to be ethnicity, and I’m not sure exactly what we
mean by that, this is a whole other program, and this is becoming the basis of
political sovereignty in the minds of many.
SG:
Well, you see the problem is…
HC:
We see this centrifugal force, which is exerting itself on a worldwide scale,
and one wonders how many nation states—we don’t say ethnic states—but the
ethnicity seems to become the basis of political sovereignty in the modern
world.
SG:
This is impossible.
HC:
It becomes economically unworkable, but I just wonder if…
SG:
Apart from the economics…
HC:
… it’s not just in Yugoslavia that it’s exerting itself.
SG:
I understand that, but let’s look at the example of Yugoslavia. Apart from the
economics, obviously the secessions have shattered Yugoslavian infrastructure
totally, destroyed the linkages between industries across markets etc. It’s an
economic catastrophe for the secessionists. But then there is a further paradox,
a very, very bitter irony, actually, which, I would say, for simple
geostrategic convenience, various powers, including the United States and
Germany in particular… by the way resisted for a very long time by the
Netherlands and France and Great Britain behind the scenes. They fought
bitterly to prevent Germany from doing what it did inside the European
community. While these powers decry the impossibility of holding a nation of
many ethnicities like Yugoslavia together, what they are doing is creating mini-republics
with the same ethnic contradictions and puzzles. Bosnia is not a state with an 80
percent or 85 or 90 percent Muslim population. There is only 44 percent.
HC:
This is going to compound the problem.
SG:
Right. So the problem here is… and the same is true of Croatia. It has an
enormous Serbian population. There is no way in the world that you can draw a
map of Yugoslavia which will contain a really large majority of any individual
ethnic group. It’s just not possible.
HC:
We only have about two minutes left. What about the Vance Owen plan? Could you
just sum it up now? What’s going to happen there?
SG:
Well, it’s clear that there’s a strong desire on the part of some US
politicians to involve the United States in this war, or at the very least to
prolong it. Prolonging this war serves a very important strategic American
purpose which is it’s totally disrupting the European continent at a critical
moment when it’s trying to move towards political integration. That’s a very
important consequence. Germany, Italy and other European countries have
suffered tremendously from sanctions [against what remains of Yugoslavia], but
there’s a very great danger here that the so-called minor military assistance
to these so-called humanitarian efforts can explode into a major conflict, and
the Yugoslavs are now telling the United States behind the scenes that they
really are risking a major conflagration which could place them in the same
situation that the Germans found themselves in when they tried to occupy the
country in the Second World War.
HC:
Yes, that’s why there’s so much concern. We could talk for hours. Thank you. Sean
Gervasi has filled us in very, very admirably.
*
The transcript has been altered here to
reflect what must have been the intended meaning. In the interview, Professor
Gervasi said, “… Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, the first and the third being
traditionally under the influence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Catholic,
the latter being much closer to Russia and Orthodox.” It is the Serbs who have
Orthodox heritage, and the Croats and Slovenes who have Catholic heritage.
Professor Gervasi probably meant to say, “… Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, the second
and the third being traditionally under the influence of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire and Catholic, the former being much closer to Russia and Orthodox.”
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