Croats And Serbsthe Final Lap

If we overlook the agreements reached by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 1991, and we really can't take them into consideration because we still don't know their contents and their outcome, CroatianSerbian negotiations have lasted, with some interruptions, for a whole year. They started publicly and spectacularly in Geneva with a meeting and agreement between Tudjman and former Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic. Both sides set up negotiating committees, and the heads of the future diplomatic bureaus in Zagreb and Belgrade were named. The negotiating committees held several meetings. After that Croatian Prime Minister Franjo Greguric and Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic met.

The increasingly savage war in Bosnia and Cosic's and Panic's dismissal stopped the negotiations. Not long after this Tudjman and Milosevic met in Athens. This meeting opened a series of meetings, mostly in Geneva. They slowly helped establish the idea that CroatianSerbian talks were possible. And the Croats and Serbs, after a series of unsuccessful international proposals on the organization of Bosnia Herzegovina, have accepted it as the key issue of a future agreement. Since then, the number of CroatianSerbian meetings has increased greatly, both at the official and unofficial levels, and between political and nonpolitical representatives.

At the same time, but always a step behind the ``big'' CroatianSerbian meetings, those between Zagreb and Belgrade, ``small'' CroatianSerbian meetings followed, i.e. meetings between Zagreb and Knin. Topusko, Geneva, Vienna, Oslo, the vicinity of Belgrade followed one another and paved the way to negotiations, sometimes even bringing results whose effects could not be applied immediately, but more often results which would be visible in the long run.

All these negotiations were followed with hopes, fears and expectations and suspicion. After all the human suffering and hardships it was normal that it should be so. It is also normal that people should fear a new war as well as an unfair agreement. It is also normal that during these times of great mistrust, people should forget earlier successful attempts by Croats and Serbs at resolving their inter ethnic and interstate relations. So it was that the 1939 agreement reached by the leader of the Croatian Peasants' Party Macek and then Prime Minister Cvetkovic has been unjustly forgotten. This agreement was aimed primarily at finding a solution to the territorial disputes and subsequently the legalpolitical differences between Croats and Serbs. Because of WW2 this agreement was never negotiated to the end, and could serve today as a signpost in the final lap of the CroatSerb negotiations. But perhaps it could best be the foundation for a belief that after WW2 and this war, Croats and Serbs can find a road to reaching an interstate and interethnic agreement. All the more so, as the abandoning of such an agreement would halt the Croats and Serbs in their national emancipation and in their state aspirations.

No matter how unrealistic, even unacceptable it may be, what was the first circle in the disintegration of Yugoslavia, could be the last one in the resolving of a hundredyearslong misunderstanding. When the question of BosniaHerzegovina is put on the agenda, we will soon see how far we are from closing this final circle, since the negotiations will have to reach an agreement on the interethnic relations between Croats and Serbs. It must be hoped that this time the international community will definitely abandon its policy of creating states for whose existence it doesn't have any real interest, and that the international community, whatever this might mean, will realize that help in reaching a compromise between the carriers of national rights is not just the basis for peace, but also for states which have been created after the disintegration of Yugoslavia. If this does not come about, the international community, will, as it did a few years ago, turn over another page of war. The Croats, Serbs and others who live with them, in their own interests, have to write out the contents of the pages which have to be turned over. The inspiration for these contents must be found and strengthened in the philosophy of a national agreement.

(This text was written at the request VREME's editorial board, on the occasion of an initiative for the founding of a new party rallying Serbs in Croatia).