Every time I read one of Andrej's nauseating attempts to portray his
countrymen as victims, I am reminded of this article. Ironic that despite
his vituperative denunciations of 'anti-Serb propaganda," the best anti-Serb
PR comes from his own mouth.

'Central to this mindset is the notion that the Serbs, and only the Serbs,
are the true victims in the Balkans.'

MILOSEVIC'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS
  
Milosevic's Willing Executioners
  
by Stacy Sullivan 

Maybe we do have a quarrel with the Serbian people.
  
In the spring of 1996, as eastern Bosnia's frozen ground was beginning to
thaw, a photographer and I drove to Kamenica, a village in Republika Srpska,
the Serb-run enclave that was carved out of Bosnia by Serbian ethnic
cleansing and later given juridical existence by the 1995 Dayton peace
accord. We had been told that Kamenica was the place where Bosnian Serb
forces had killed many of the 7,000 Bosnian Muslims who were missing after
the Serbs overran the U.N.-protected enclave of Srebrenica the previous
summer. 

We veered off the main road through the village onto a dirt path that led
into rolling green hills. A few minutes later, we found ourselves standing
on a grassy hillside littered with human bones. Nearly eight months had
passed since the men from Srebrenica were killed, and none of the Serbs of
Kamenica had thought to bury them. Tennis shoes and woolen socks still
hugged skeletal feet. A stretcher made of a blanket and two wooden sticks
lay on the ground; the wounded man who had lain on it was now an inta ct
skeleton, still dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. Skulls, vertebrae, arms,
legs, rib cages, rubber boots, bits of clothing, and ID cards were
everywhere. And, in a thorny bush at the bottom of the hill, we found an old
Polaroid of four men--all presumably victims--laughing and sharing a bottle
of beer. 

As we walked among the dead, two Serb farmers drove past us on a tractor,
the tires of their vehicle narrowly missing a corpse that still lay right in
the path. They seemed not to notice. A few minutes later, two more young
Serb men walked by. I asked them if they knew what had happened on the hill.
They shrugged their shoulders and told us that they had been on vacation in
Austria during the summer of 1995.

Ever since that encounter, I have been struggling to understand what these
men could have been thinking. Even before the current slaughter in Kosovo,
Serb forces had killed a massive number of civilians in the name of national
self-defense. Yet it has all gone on with barely a murmur of public dissent
or protest. Even when I approach Serbs individually, probing them for
remorse, I hardly find any. Why not?

Today, this could be the most important question facing the NATO allies as
they attempt to deal with the Serbian rampage through Kosovo. The
conventional thinking among many Western intellectuals and politicians is,
as President Clinton has put it, that we have no quarrel with the Serbian
people. It is their leader, Slobodan Milosevic, and his henchmen who
manipulated them into waging so many brutal wars. This is the thinking
behind Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's two broadcasts to Serbs in
their own language, which she learned during a brief childhood stay in the
Yugoslav capital. And, if it is true, then it suggests a strategy aimed at
breaking Milosevic's will or, at most, toppling him from power. To use the
parlance of military strategists, th e "center of gravity" in the war with
Yugoslavia consists of the government and its armed forces.

But what if it isn't true? What if the Serbs who wear targets on their
t-shirts and gather in morbid celebration for daily rock concerts or
marathon races actually support ethnic cleansing--actively or passively? In
that case, we do have a quarrel with th e Serbian people. In that case, the
"center of gravity" in Yugoslavia is something far more difficult to destroy
than an army or a regime. It is the very mentality of a nation.

I myself used to believe that ordinary Serbs had been deceived and bullied
into accepting the atrocities done in their name. But now, after five years
of covering events in the former Yugoslavia, and after trying in vain to
elicit expressions of remorse from the hundreds of Serbs I have met, I am
convinced that the latter assessment is the accurate one. Whatever else we
do in Kosovo, we must face the fact that, for all intents and purposes, many
ordinary Serbs are--to paraphrase Daniel Jonah Goldhagen--Milosevic's
willing executioners.

The regime's propaganda, though powerful, can account for only so much of
the Serbian behavior we have witnessed since Yugoslavia's disintegration in
1991. Consider a conversation I had on a sweltering afternoon in late July
1996, when I went to Kravica, another Serb village near Srebrenica. There,
forensic scientists from the U.S.-based group Physicians for Human Rights,
accompanied by NATO peacekeeping troops, were excavating a suspected mass
grave. The scientists gently probed the earth in search of human flesh and
began removing dirt, layer by layer. As they got closer to the corpses, the
stench of decomposing flesh became stronger. By the time they exposed the
dozens of bodies, the stench was unbearable. The bodies had their hands tied
behind their b acks with wire and had been executed at close range.

A family of Serb refugees from Sarajevo had been resettled in a farmhouse
right next to this mass grave. I found the head of the family, 68-year-old
Pavle (he wouldn't give me his last name), picking apples about 50 yards
away. When I asked him about the mass grave, his first reply was: "Those
bodies are probably Serbs. Six Serbs are missing from this area." When I
told Pavle that more than 7,000 Muslim men went missing after the fall of
Srebrenica, he told me, "The Muslims probably killed each other." Pavle went
on to explain that the Muslims had quarreled about what to do when the Serbs
attacked Srebrenica. Some had wanted to fight and some had wanted to
surrender. Eventually, these two groups started fighting and killed one
another off. 

Both of Pavle's stories--that the victims were really Serbs or that the
Muslims had massacred themselves--could have easily come from Belgrade
television, which had retailed similar exculpatory yarns throughout the wars
in Croatia and Bosnia. Yet it's hard to imagine he really believed either
tale. That became clear when I pressed him on the Muslim shootout version.
If the Muslims had killed one another in gun battles, I asked, how come the
corpses' arms were tied behind their backs with wire? "How should I know?"
he shot back. "And why should I care about recovering those who forced us to
leave our homes? The international workers would be more useful fixing our
house than digging up those bodies."

Obviously Pavle knew the truth. Just as obviously, his true sentiment about
the fact that so many Muslims had been slaughtered was: "They asked for it."
After all, the Muslim-led government had, he believed, forced him out of his
own house in Sarajevo. I have had many, many such conversations. Sooner or
later, ordinary Serbs stop denying and begin arguing that the massacres by
their forces were justified. Milosevic's propaganda is not really intended
to create a new belief system among its audience; its true purpose is to
arouse and reinforce a belief system that already exists, just below the
surface of the Serbian personality. And central to this mindset is the
notion that the Serbs, and only the Serbs, are the true victims in the
Balkans. 

This belief system, to be sure, is based partly in reality, both historical
and contemporary. Serbs suffered terribly at the hands of the Germans and
their allies during both world wars. And, in the conflicts since
Yugoslavia's breakup, it is true that both the Croats and Muslims committed
their share of atrocities against Serb civilians. In fact, the Srebrenica
enclave was the base for raids by Muslim guerrillas that killed hundreds of
Serb peasants. "In the twisted minds of us Serbs, knowing that what we are
trying to do is right is enough justification to close our eyes to
brutality," a Belgrade friend of mine once explained to me.

Yet even this doesn't quite wash, because no rational consideration of the
facts could produce the conclusion that the current abuses against the Serbs
(let alone those of the past) could constitute moral authorization for the
far larger slaughter the heavily armed Serb forces are now perpetrating.
This is where myth enters the picture. Serbian culture itself is built
around elaborate sagas of failure and betrayal, all beginning with the 1389
defeat of Prince Lazar by the Ottoman Turks on the battlefields of Kosovo--a
heroic last stand that sanctified Kosovo for all Serbs for all time. For
centuries, Serbs have been taught not only that they sacrificed more than
any other Christian European people to resist pagan aggression, but also
that their sacrifices have never been appreciated or recognized. Rather,
outside powers ungratefully denied them their independence.

It is this deep-rooted historical sense of frustration and grievance that
makes Serbs feel that they are, by definition, victims. And the Serbs' sense
of their own collective innocence is mirrored by an equally intense sense of
the collective guilt of the other Balkan ethnicities. In the grand sweep of
history, today's deaths of Muslims or Albanians (yesteryear's allies of the
Turks and Germans) are still nothing compared to the repeated "genocide"
against the Serbs in the past. Thus, if the Muslims of Srebrenica were
massacred, that is an appropriate form of retribution for what the Muslims
of Sarajevo did to Pavle and his family. Cosmic payback.

Surely, though, Pavle is just a peasant, an uneducated man susceptible to
sentimental stories and stirring folk music. Modern Serbs, those who live in
the big cities and have received an education, must be immune to such
appeals. Well, not exactly. Indeed , as Michael Dobbs reported in the April
19 Washington Post, many Belgraders have access to Western media accounts of
Serb atrocities against Albanians and dismiss them, reflexively, as
"propaganda." And it was a famous 1986 memorandum by leading members of the
Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the most distinguished institution in
Serbian intellectual life, that set off the Serbian nationalist movement in
post-Tito Yugoslavia. The document was a tendentious mishmash of demands for
recompense for the past sufferings of the Serbs at the hands of both Tito's
government and such rival nationalities as the Croats and Albanians (see "A
Final Solution," by Ryan Lizza, page 28).

As hostile as the Serbs may feel toward Croats or Muslims (and vice versa),
the deepest and most authentic intergroup hatred in the former Yugoslavia is
between Serbs and Albanians. Serbian anti-Albanian prejudice is perfectly
crude and yet perfectly respectable in Belgrade. And it extends through all
levels of society. 

In the summer of 1997, I attended a party in Belgrade at the home of a
beautiful artist, who had spent most of her life in Sweden but had recently
returned to Belgrade, and her boyfriend, a talented graphic designer working
for Saatchi & Saatchi. Most of the guests were like the hosts--handsome,
talented, university-educated, and well-traveled.

I had recently been to Kosovo, where I had been looking into what was then
an obscure group of rural militants who called themselves the Kosovo
Liberation Army. At the party, I met a Swedish diplomat who had also just
returned from Kosovo. We quickly realized that we had met some of the same
people and gone to the same bars in Pristina. As we recounted the good times
we had with the Albanians we knew in common, many of the well-bred Serbs in
the room started laughing. They thought we were joking. Surely, we hadn't
really gone out for a beer with Albanians. As it gradually dawned on them
that we were serious, the room fell silent, and, one by one, everyone left.
I assumed that they were bored with us or that they didn't speak English. I
learned later, from an appalled Serb who has since left the country, that
the other partygoers had gone into another room to express their dismay that
the two foreigners had been associating with Albanians.

There are, of course, "good Serbs," educated and considerate people who know
the truth and wish that they could act on it. Any number of Bosnian Muslims
owe their lives to such people, who risked all to spirit them out of Bosnia
just ahead of Milosevic's ethnic-cleansing machine. I asked one such
Belgrade Serb how it was possible that so many Serbs could walk past the
empty shells of houses, see piles of rubble that were once mosques, even
step over the skeletons of the dead without showing remorse or any emotion
at all. She was quiet for a moment, seemingly genuine in her anguish. "I
feel terrible when I see the images of Albanians being forced into Albania,"
she told me. "Believe me, there are many others who do, too. Not all the
good Serbs have left, as many believe. We are still here, desperate and
horrified. We are silent, but we are documenting this Serbian madness."
She asked that I not use her name or otherwise identify her for fear that
she would suffer reprisals. My friends in Belgrade tell me it is impossible
to protest the atrocities of the regime, especially in a state of war--and
Yugoslavia has been more or less permanently at war since 1991.

This view, too, has a rational basis. Back in 1992, as the war in Bosnia was
just getting under way, Serbian peace activists marched through Belgrade in
opposition but were brutally silenced. They made another effort in 1993,
but, again, a violent crackdo wn ended the protest quickly. Now, since NATO
started bombing Serbia, they say things are worse than ever before. "To show
remorse now would be suicide," explained my friend, pointing to the April 11
assassination of Slavko Curuvija, the Belgrade publishe r who had been
critical of Milosevic's policies. He was gunned down just days after the
official press had branded him a supporter of NATO's bombing.

Even so, fear of repression doesn't quite excuse or account for the
ineffectuality of the good Serbs. After all, Serbian military and police
began shelling Albanian villages and killing Albanian civilians more than a
year ago. How is it that the good Serbs could not find it within themselves
to protest the war on Kosovo's Albanians long before NATO got involved?
Furthermore, democratic-minded Serbs have, in other circumstances, showed
that they are not afraid to take on the regime. There was actually a brief
moment when I thought Milosevic's day of reckoning had finally come. It was
December 1996, a year after the war in Bosnia had ended. Tens of thousands
of Serbs took to the streets of Belgrade demanding that Milosevic resign. In
Belgrade's beautiful old town, I stood amid throngs of protesters in
Republic Square. They were students and workers, elderly men and women and
families. They carried whistles and placards, banged pots and pans. Their
mood was joyous and defiant--caught up in it, I, too, could hardly contain
my excitement at the prospect that Milosevic would soon be gone.

Their ostensible reason for marching was that Milosevic had overturned
election results in several cities, including Belgrade, where opposition
mayors and other city officials had been elected. But surely, I told myself,
the Serbs had finally found their soul and were also moved by their leader's
role in the siege of Sarajevo, the leveling of Vukovar, and the massacre at
Srebrenica. 

The Serbs carried on with their protests against Milosevic for 90 days
through sleet and snow and subzero temperatures, every day, without
exception. In so doing, they disproved the contention that the Serbian
people were mere putty in the hands of state television's propaganda.
Milosevic's TV tried to label the tens of thousands of demonstrators a small
group of terrorists and hooligans, but speakers at the rallies ridiculed
this as the primitive propaganda it was. Indeed, as the protests went on,
one of the movement's demands became that Milosevic give up his television
monopoly because the public was sick of the lies and propaganda.
As for the fear factor, scores of demonstrators were beaten and imprisoned
by police, but the movement continued undeterred. The three months of
protest ended peacefully, with a partial victory for the demonstrators:
Milosevic ceded some power and positions to his opponents.

These demonstrations constituted one of the most impressive displays of
civic resolve I've ever seen. I was wrong, though, to imagine that they had
anything to do with the regime's crimes in Bosnia. At no time did Belgrade's
democratic movement ever add the war crimes in Bosnia to its list of
complaints against Milosevic. To do so, in fact, would have divided the
opposition (which contained ultranationalist elements itself) and alienated
the public. 

Serbia is not Nazi Germany; Slobodan Milosevic is not Adolf Hitler; and the
Bosnian Muslims and Kosovar Albanians, whose own irregular forces have
killed Serbs hors de combat, are not exactly as helpless or as blameless as
the European Jews were. Still, the relative absence of effective Serbian
protest and, especially, the silence of intellectuals on the matter of war
crimes raise disturbing questions about the culpability of Serbs as a whole
in the actions of the authoritarian government that rules them.

The very notion of collective guilt is uncomfortable. The whole concept of
an international war crimes tribunal is appropriately based on the
assumption that individuals, not whole societies, are to be held accountable
when atrocities such as those we have witnessed in the Balkans this decade
occur. And yet what is striking about the ethnic cleansing by today's Serbs
is the same thing that struck Daniel Jonah Goldhagen as he reviewed the
conduct of ordinary Germans toward the Jews during the Holocaust. It 's not
only the utter lack of sustained or substantial protest against it; it's
also the gratuitous sadism--the "volunteerism, enthusiasm, and cruelty in
performing their assigned and self-appointed tasks" (to use Goldhagen's
phrase)--that the Serbs, like the Germans during World War II, have
exhibited. Albanians tell of being forced to chant "this is Serbia" as they
were driven from their Kosovo homes, or to hold up three fingers in the
Serbian salute. Kosovar Albanians have been systematically searched for
jewelry and money; their homes, looted. Such things went on in Bosnia, too.

Perhaps the most telling detail of the Belgrade protests was the nature of
the insults these Serbian pro-democracy marchers would hurl at Milosevic.
"Slobo is a Turk!" they would cry, a term that refers to Serbia's hated
historical enemy, the Ottomans--but is also a common, modern-day slur
usually aimed at Bosnian Muslims. "Slobo is an Ustasha!" they yelled,
referring to the Croat fascists who allied themselves with the Nazis in
World War II and killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs. And, when the
busloads of heavily equipped riot police dispatched by Milosevic arrived on
the scene, the protesters' response was to suggest that the cops were
focusing on the wrong target. "Go to Kosovo! Go to Kosovo!" they would
scream. 

Stacy Sullivan is a consultant at the John F. Kennedy School of Government's
Human Rights Initiative at Harvard University. She covered the Balkans for
Newsweek for two years and most recently wrote about Kosovo in The New York
Times M agazine.  
(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)