Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
burg Austrian and Ottoman Turkish armies: here Western Christianity ends and the world
of Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam begins; here Croatia jams up against Serbia.
The Krajina, which means “frontier” in Serbo-Croatian, was a military zone that the Aus-
trians in the late sixteenth century established against Turkish expansion, luring to their side
of the frontier both Croats and Serbs as refugees from the despotism of the Ottoman Sultan-
ate. Consequently, this became a mixed-ethnic region that, once the imperial embrace of
Austria vanished following World War I, experienced the further evolution of uniethnic
identities. Though Serbs and Croats were united in the interwar years under the Kingdom
of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, they were divided and at each other's throats during the
Nazi occupation, when a fascist Croatian puppet state of the Nazis murdered tens of thou-
sands of Serbs in death camps. United once more under the carapace of Tito's authoritarian
communist rule, Yugoslavia's collapse in 1991 saw Serb troops storm just over the Serbi-
an border into Slavonia and Krajina, ethnically cleansing the region of Croats. Later, when
the Croats retook the region, the ethnic Serbs here would take flight back to Serbia. From
Croatia's borderlands with Serbia, the war would next spread to Bosnia, where hundreds of
thousands would perish in grisly fashion.
There was history and geography aplenty here, but committed journalists and intellec-
tuals would have relatively little of it. And they certainly had a point, much more than a
point. First came the sheer horror and revulsion. Again, there was Garton Ash:
What have we learned from this terrible decade in former Yugoslavia? … We
have learned that human nature has not changed. That Europe at the end of the
twentieth century is quite as capable of barbarism as it was in the Holocaust of
mid-century.… Our Western political mantras at the end of the twentieth century
have been “integration,” “multiculturalism,” or, if we are a little more old-fash-
ioned, “the melting pot.” Former Yugoslavia has been the opposite. It has been
like a giant version of the machine called a “separator”: a sort of spinning tub
which separates out cream and butter.… Here it is peoples who were separated
out as the giant tub spun furiously round … while blood dripped steadily from a
filter at the bottom.
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Following from this revulsion came charges of “appeasement” by the West, appeasement
of Slobodan Milosevic: an evil communist politician who, in order for himself and his party
to survive politically following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and retain their villas and
and hunting lodges and other perks of office, rebranded himself as a rabid Serbian nation-
alist, igniting a second Holocaust of sorts. The appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938
quickly became the reigning analogy of the 1990s.
In fact, the fear of another Munich was not altogether new. It had been an underlying
element in the decision to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's aggression in 1991. If
