Csaba Gy. Kiss
Sarajevo-A Tragic End to a Tragic Century
János Kõbányai: Szarajevói jelentés
(Report from Sarajevo).
Budapest, Pelikán Kiadó--Múlt és Jövõ
Kiadó, 1996. 247 pp.
[...]
Kõbányai insists, as do his Bosnian interlocutors, that
the country is an organic part of Europe, while Islam means centuries of
tradition. The reminiscences the locals entertain, whether of the Yugoslav
period or of earlier times, take on idyllic traits. They speak of common
weal, living together, a time when neighbours had respect for others and
had no idea of the ethnicity of the people next door, or whether they went
to worship and if they did, was it to a mosque, an Orthodox or Catholic
church or to a synagogue. Viewed from the war, the world of peace understandably
looks desirable, and the near or distant past more enticing than the present.
Yet the recurring questions--where does this unbridled hatred, where do
these horrendous acts of almost irrational cruelty spring from--remain
unanswered. János Kõbányai does try to provide explanations,
descending into another and yet another circle of Hell. One great merit
of his account is his avoidance of generalizations. The hatred and cruelty
that erupted with the force of a volcano cannot be attributed to a single
cause. While we deplore, as he does, intolerance, nationalism and the horror
of ethnic cleansing, an unreserved condemnation of these is simply not
enough. What has to be examined is the web of causes, from a mental heritage
right through the contradictions of the Yugo slav states--the three successive
Yugo slavias all showed differing values by any major indicator--to the
distorted images entertained by the outside world.
It is not at all certain that the state that came into being at the
end of 1918 was doomed from the start. It did fail to show a pattern for
how diverse peoples and civilisations could live together. The Serbian
and, in part, the Croatian and Slovene political elite were led by the
chimera of the pre-1918 experiment of the Hungarian nation-state. A "three-stemmed
nation" was the fiction. Macedonians were considered to be Southern
Serbs; the administrative division of the territory was so created as to
ignore traditions in the different pro vinces, such as the continuity of
Croatian law, and non-South Slavs were treated as second-rate citizens
both in the Kingdom of Serbs and Slovenes and, later, in the Yugoslavia
under a royal dictatorship. The great-power factor was an important element
that came into play for the country's cohesion. Yugoslavia was regarded
as the corner-stone for the stability of the Balkans, especially by French
diplomacy after the Great War. Yet mutual intolerance and hatred did not
abate in this period. And the inflammable material had been accumulating
in Bosnia-Herzegovina for centuries; the Balkan volcano was active in the
20th century too. (Ivo Andric''s works are evidence enough to this.)
The Yugoslavia that was reborn at the end of the Second World War came
into the world under the aegis of terror and atrocity. A complex civil
war saw more butchery between the South Slavs than at the hands of the
Germans. To the unprecedented savagery of the fascist Croatian state, Tito's
totalitarianism responded with equal brutality. The view that Tito's communism
was the more humane of the two, as voiced by one "Uncle Pista"
in Report (p. 177), is sadly among history's myths. Most definitely not
so in those first few years, when tens of thousands were massacred, including
those conscripted even into the Croatian state army were cynically handed
over by the Western powers, along side Slovenes and innocent Hun garians
in the Vojvodina. In 1945, this new Yugo slavia was responsible for a large-scale
ethnic cleansing, in the course of which hundreds of thousands, among them
most of the Italians of Istria and Dalmatia and the entire German population
of the Bac[Sinvcircumflex]ka and the Banat, were expelled. After the communist
schism of 1948, Tito was just as vicious in his elimination of his adversaries
as his Soviet comrades, by then his antagonists. The island of Goli, mentioned
in the book, and the other concentration camps in Yugo slavia, in no way
differed from those of the Gulag archipelago.
[...]
"The indigestible past has now taken control," Tvrtko Kulenovic,
president of the Bosnia-Herzegovian PEN Club, tells Kõbányai
(p. 248). An unclear past and the unburied dead always wreak their revenge.
Bosnia-Herzegovina's immediate past includes not only a unique cultural
atmosphere but also the fact that in communist times the republic was shot
through by an intricate network of political-economic clans and an intolerance
for totalitarianism more marked than that in the other Yugoslav constituent
republics. It would take a study in itself to show how, in such circumstances,
civilian society was being destroyed and the consequences of the introduction
of the category of Muslim nationality in the early 70s.
Csaba Gy. Kiss
is a Slavonic scholar teaching comparative literature of Eastern
Europe at Eötvös Loránd University and author of several
books on the region.
