Read Online Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Michael Ignatieff
Tags: General, Social Science, History, Political Science, Ethnic Studies, Political Ideologies, Nationalism
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if my new boss is a Serb or a Muslim? The answer to these questions was no, because no state remained to enforce the old inter-ethnic bargain. As a result, every individual rushed, pell-mell, to the next available source of protection: the warlord.
For the warlord not only offers protection. He offers a solution. He tells his people: If we cannot trust our neighbors, we must rid ourselves of them. If we cannot live together in a single state, we must create clean states of our own. The logic of ethnic cleansing is not just motivated by nationalist hatred. Cleansing is the warlordâs coldly rational solution to the war of all against all. Rid yourself of your neighbors, the warlord says, and you no longer have to fear them. Live among your own, and you can live in peace. With me and my boys to protect you.
VUKOVAR
After dark in Vukovar, your car headlights range over pock-marked walls, roofless ruins, and piles of rubble on both sides of the road. You do not stop at the bullet-shredded STOP signs because there are no cars at the crossroads. People must be living here, because you occasionally see a solitary lightgleaming from behind a shutter in one of the bombed-out tower blocks. But you see no one because no one ventures out after dark. Rats scuttle to and fro across the road to forage in the garbage. In the distance, you hear an occasional burst of small-arms fire.
This ghost town was once a Habsburg episcopal seat on the Danube. In 1991, it became the Croatian Stalingrad. Throughout the autumn, the Croatian national guard defended it to the last street against the heaviest artillery bombardment seen in Europe since 1945. When the Serbian paramilitaries and the Yugoslav National Army finally âliberatedâ the town in November 1991, at a cost of something like nine thousand lives, there was nothing left to liberate but a devastated ruin.
The self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina has its eastern headquarters in Vukovar. âKrajinaâ means the military frontier. Serbian settlement in Croatia was established in the seventeenth century by the Austro-Hungarians as a buffer zone between them and the Ottomans. As the appointed defenders of European civilization against the Turks in the Balkans, the Serbs have always gone armed. The gun culture here is ancestral.
In the town square, a banner has been stretched over the road from one pulverized house to another. It reads: âWelcome to Vukovar, Year One.â But, eighteen months after entering the town, the Serbs have done nothing to rebuild it. It should probably be left as it is. UNESCO could fence it off and declare it a European heritage site. What could be more European, after all, than our tradition of senseless nationalist warfare?
The Serbs have taken down the Croatian street signs and replaced them with Serbian ones in Cyrillic, but the Croatian signs are still stacked in the attic of the pulverized townmuseum, as if somewhere in their minds the Serbs expect that the Croatian signs will one day go back up again.
In the museum attic, too, is a still more extraordinary sight: three bronze bustsâMarx, Engels, and Leninâsitting on the main roof beam, dispatched there in the 1980s at the official death of Communist ideology, and now revealed by the bombardment that blew away all the roof tiles and the false ceiling concealing the roof beams. These three bronze busts were the only exhibit in the museum to have survived the siege intact.
While the responsibility for the destruction of Vukovar lies squarely with the tanks and artillery of the Yugoslav National Army which lobbed 150,000 shells into the place, the Croatians also appear to have dynamited parts of it as they withdrew, so that the Serbs would gain nothing but rubble for their pains. The pulverization of Vukovar made no military sense. When I asked a Serbian tank commander why they had done it, he shrugged his shoulders. âWar has many such tragedies ⦠Leningrad
For the warlord not only offers protection. He offers a solution. He tells his people: If we cannot trust our neighbors, we must rid ourselves of them. If we cannot live together in a single state, we must create clean states of our own. The logic of ethnic cleansing is not just motivated by nationalist hatred. Cleansing is the warlordâs coldly rational solution to the war of all against all. Rid yourself of your neighbors, the warlord says, and you no longer have to fear them. Live among your own, and you can live in peace. With me and my boys to protect you.
VUKOVAR
After dark in Vukovar, your car headlights range over pock-marked walls, roofless ruins, and piles of rubble on both sides of the road. You do not stop at the bullet-shredded STOP signs because there are no cars at the crossroads. People must be living here, because you occasionally see a solitary lightgleaming from behind a shutter in one of the bombed-out tower blocks. But you see no one because no one ventures out after dark. Rats scuttle to and fro across the road to forage in the garbage. In the distance, you hear an occasional burst of small-arms fire.
This ghost town was once a Habsburg episcopal seat on the Danube. In 1991, it became the Croatian Stalingrad. Throughout the autumn, the Croatian national guard defended it to the last street against the heaviest artillery bombardment seen in Europe since 1945. When the Serbian paramilitaries and the Yugoslav National Army finally âliberatedâ the town in November 1991, at a cost of something like nine thousand lives, there was nothing left to liberate but a devastated ruin.
The self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina has its eastern headquarters in Vukovar. âKrajinaâ means the military frontier. Serbian settlement in Croatia was established in the seventeenth century by the Austro-Hungarians as a buffer zone between them and the Ottomans. As the appointed defenders of European civilization against the Turks in the Balkans, the Serbs have always gone armed. The gun culture here is ancestral.
In the town square, a banner has been stretched over the road from one pulverized house to another. It reads: âWelcome to Vukovar, Year One.â But, eighteen months after entering the town, the Serbs have done nothing to rebuild it. It should probably be left as it is. UNESCO could fence it off and declare it a European heritage site. What could be more European, after all, than our tradition of senseless nationalist warfare?
The Serbs have taken down the Croatian street signs and replaced them with Serbian ones in Cyrillic, but the Croatian signs are still stacked in the attic of the pulverized townmuseum, as if somewhere in their minds the Serbs expect that the Croatian signs will one day go back up again.
In the museum attic, too, is a still more extraordinary sight: three bronze bustsâMarx, Engels, and Leninâsitting on the main roof beam, dispatched there in the 1980s at the official death of Communist ideology, and now revealed by the bombardment that blew away all the roof tiles and the false ceiling concealing the roof beams. These three bronze busts were the only exhibit in the museum to have survived the siege intact.
While the responsibility for the destruction of Vukovar lies squarely with the tanks and artillery of the Yugoslav National Army which lobbed 150,000 shells into the place, the Croatians also appear to have dynamited parts of it as they withdrew, so that the Serbs would gain nothing but rubble for their pains. The pulverization of Vukovar made no military sense. When I asked a Serbian tank commander why they had done it, he shrugged his shoulders. âWar has many such tragedies ⦠Leningrad
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