PRISONERS OF AN INVENTED PAST
(A Peruvian's journey through the Southern Balkans)
[Ciberayllu]

José Luis Rénique
 

Introduction
  Twice in this century, South Slav peoples have attempted political unification into one single nation. In doing so, they found strengths as well as weaknesses. The First World War gave birth to one Yugoslavia that the Second World War destroyed. A monarchy the first one, a communist regime founded by Tito the second one, in both cases, political failure was not as hard to digest as the violent explosion that came with it. A level of violence that to Western eyes grew out of the inability of the different ethnoreligious groups of the South Slavs to live together in one nation. "Violence was indeed all I knew of the South Slavs" Rebeca West wrote in 1934 about her views on the region just before she set out to her famous journey through Yugoslavia. West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. A Journey through Yugoslavia is still an influential book among Western readers.

Then, as in the 1990s, the prevailing view was that the violent failure of South Slavs unification sprang, ultimately, from history. From the fact that Yugoslavia sprawled across the central fault line in European history, the one that divided the western and eastern Roman empires and still runs between the Catholic and Orthodox religions and the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. The Croats had long lived on the western side of this line, the Catholic Austro-Hungarian side. Most Serbs had lived on the eastern side, Orthodox Christians of the Byzantine and then the Ottoman worlds. Bosnia had straddled this division and so been coveted by both sides, existing successively within the Ottoman and then Austro-Hungarian empires and developing a uniquely intermingled population of Catholics, Orthodox Christians and the Muslims who converted to Islam under Turkish rule.

A complex history of divisions and confrontations recurrently spurred by foreign powers made the survival of a unified Yugoslavia problematic if not impossible; that seems to be the thesis. Unwilling to accept what I see as a somewhat deterministic argumentation I consider other more proximate events as I prepared my trip to the field. Facts as Tito's inability to create a workable succession mechanism; the traumatic legacy of the conflicts occurred during the Second World War; the economic imbalances between the Yugoslav republics; the new wave of aggressive nationalism led by former Communists like Slobodan Milosevic and Franco Tudjman; the fall of communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe and the end security problems aroused by the end Cold War. As I traveled the territories of former Yugoslavia, however, I was constantly thrown into the not always immediate past which appeared with strange familiarity in conversations with locals about the present and the immediate past.

In writing this report I have tried to maintain that tension in the following sense -This is first of all a travel chronicle in the traditional sense. In organizing a narrative based on the always elusive "actual and concrete" I have attempted to relate my observations to that history measurable in decades (economic cycles, political eras and processes of social transformation) but also to the historical periods of long duration that Ferdinand Braudel identified as measured in centuries. This is the time required for deep changes at the level of mentalities, which Braudel compared at the coral reefs in the ocean's bottom. Following these views, this report is organized in the following manner: An introductory section deals with Sarajevo and some general aspects of the Muslim-Serb confrontation. A second section describes my visit to the Muslim-dominated region of Bihac. A third section is based on my visit to the Serb-dominated region of Banja Luka. In the fourth section I include my reflections on Serbian nationalism as I travel from northern Bosnia to Belgrade, and in the fifth section I consider Zagreb and Croatian nationalism. An ending section presents some brief conclusions.