Read Online Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff - Free Book Online

worked their way to the heart of power in the authoritarian single-party states of Croatia and Serbia alike.
    War criminals are celebrities in the Balkans. They have seats in the Serbian Parliament. One of them, VojislavÅ eÅ¡elj, the self-styled Duke of the Serbian Chetniks, runs his own party as well as a full-time paramilitary unit. Another,Željko Raznjatović, a.k.a. Arkan, controls an eight-hundred-strong paramilitary unit called the Tigers, who raped and tortured their way through eastern Slavonia in the Croatian war of 1991. This odious thug, on the run from an Interpol warrant for an attempted murder in Sweden, is a parliamentary deputy and operates a number of immensely profitable sanctions-busting businesses, including selling smuggled petrol for hard currency at petrol stations around Belgrade. Ever the postmodern Prince of Darkness, Arkan has launched himself into celebrity franchising. In Serbian farmhouses in eastern Slavonia, the icon you are most likely to see beside an image of Saint Sava is a large colored calendar with a different picture of Arkan for every month of the year.
    At anti-MiloÅ¡ević demonstrations in Belgrade, which I attended at the end of my journey, who should appear, cruising through the middle of the crowd in his Cherokee Chief, but this smiling killer in a smart sheepskin jacket, waving suavely to left and right, obviously reveling in his provocation of Belgrade’s impotent peace party.
    Croatians will tell you that the fact that Arkan is allowed to serve as a deputy in the Serbian Parliament is proof thatSerbia is a fascist regime. It is not. There are functioning opposition parties and newspapers, and, indeed, just as much democracy in Belgrade as there is in Zagreb. It is Djilas’s characterization of Serbian politics—“democracy with a tinge of banditism”—that best describes the way warlords have worked their way into the heart of the system.
    There are warlords on the Croatian side, too—if not in Zagreb, then in the front-line towns like Osijek, run by town council president and local party boss Branimir GlavaÅ¡. When you tour the town in Glavaš’s jeep, it is like being with a spectacularly popular local politician in a small American town. He comes across a local wedding and the band serenades him. The bridegroom asks him to kiss the bride; the revelers hand him bottles to sample. It is hard to remember that this man is leader of the GlavaÅ¡ Unit, a paramilitary group held responsible not merely for the defense of Osijek but for the cleansing of Serbian villages and for the murder of Croatian policemen who sought to maintain good relations with Serbs.
    GlavaÅ¡ flashes a policeman’s badge at the police checkpoints, as well as a military pass at the front line. The limits of his power are as imprecise as they are pervasive. He has translated the nefarious glamour of the warlord into peacetime power, yet he assures you with a snap of his fingers that he could remobilize his paramilitaries overnight. Thirty kilometers away, across the front line in Serb-held Vukovar, there is Mr. Kojić, the Serbian equivalent of Mr. GlavaÅ¡. Same jeep, same courteous manner. Same guns.
    The warlords are nationalists, but their convictions are uninteresting. They are technicians of violence, rather than ideologues. Earlier than everybody else, they understoodthat ethnic nationalism had delivered the ordinary people of the Balkans straight back to the pre-political state of nature, where, as Hobbes predicted, life is nasty, brutish, and short. In the state of nature, the man with a Zastava machine pistol and a Cherokee Chief is king. For he can provide the two commodities everybody here craves: security and vengeance.
    Once the Yugoslav Communist state began to spin apart into its constituent national particles, the key questions soon became: Will the local Croat policemen protect me if I am a Serb? Will I keep my job in the soap factory