Artificial State

As soon as the Serbian Foreign Minister, Vladislav Jovanovic, informed the Persians from Teheran that he considered Bosnia and Herzegovina an artificial state, he opened one more road towards the justification of foreign isolation of Serbia. And Serbia is no less artificial than Bosnia. The almost insoluble relations between the Kosovo Albanians and Belgrade, the growing middle-class antipathy of Vojvodina towards the Belgrade mountain nationalists, the growing distrust of Central Serbia towards Milosevic's plundering Montenegrin clan and the sending of Serbs to fight on the other side of the Drina, all make Serbia less stable than Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and maybe even Bosnia. Serbia awaits a greater dissolution than that in Sarajevo if it doesn't give up Serbian nationalism and neo-socialism as an integral constriction of the state.

Following the European and American recognition of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Belgrade policy of a Greater Serbia has become irredentist. Irredentists in Belgrade! What a turnaround! Now Belgrade and Tirana accuse each other using the same and mutually accurate arguments. It is true that both want another state's territory for their own. The difference between them is first of all that our Kosovo Albanians - and not Tirana -receive the support of the international public, because Belgrade denies them certain rights, while Karadzic's Serbs will receive the condemnation of this same public because of the destruction of their own state. Any Serb, even Karadzic himself, when he says he was nationally oppressed in Sarajevo is not speaking the truth. Karadzic became insecure only when he gave way to terrorism, and not because he was a Serb. The truth is that he is misleading the public that the people of Sarajevo are a manipulated crowd and that the defenseless people who die on the streets of Sarajevo are terrorizing his and Koljevic's men armed with snipers in the room of a luxurious hotel. Instead of the people's assassins being brought before justice, they are let go by Karadzic's Serbs from Pale, to destroy Sarajevo with the rocket launchers got from the neutral Yugoslav army. Not one general has been brought to court for the illegal and fratricidal hand out of arms to civilians.

Even though Tudjman won a political point with his recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, he lost it with the hypocritical occupation of western Herzegovina. Even though Milosevic, with his acceptance of international governing bodies in Croatia, shook the European conviction that he was not to be trusted, he has now, with Karadzic's terrorism in Sarajevo, confirmed that Belgrade is a sycophant. Both regimes know that after the American recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina this country will not be left to irredentist circles in Serbia and Croatia. They are aware that an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina can only exist in as much as the population is mixed in the way it is today, without relocation to surrounding territories in Serbia and Croatia. Zagreb and Belgrade would like, if they cannot immediately dismember Bosnia and Herzegovina, to do so in future by the creation of outside Serbo-Croatian territory. And the unhappy Serbs and Croats in Bosnia serve them as an advance-guard, as a first line of resistance against the fictional outside aggression, as a sacrificial wave bound for glorious defeat.

The agreement between Zagreb and Belgrade has come into force. It began with the relocation of people. When western Herzegovina is cleared of non-Croats and eastern of non-Serbs, the crime of relocation by genocide will cease. Both sides will be satisfied with the horror and move on to the tactic of the long wait. They will say: "O.K., Bosnia and Herzegovina is independent, but one day we will come for what's ours". The Moslems will be squeezed into central Bosnia, surrounded from all sides - to the south by Montenegro - Sarajevo will be divided into Moslem and Christian sections and the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina transformed into their own ping-pong ball.

Belgrade is losing the diplomatic game in Bosnia for three reasons: first, because it is using the JNA, which is seen as an extremely unfair balance of privileges to one side; second, because Karadzic crowned his open separatism with the proclamation of the puppet Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and third, because Serbia, in avoiding the declaration of its independence and borders, takes on less responsibility for its policy in Bosnia than Croatia.

Belgrade awaits humiliation with the threat of economic and traffic sanctions insofar as it does not give up, amongst other things, its illegal guerrilla and irredentist troops, and bring the criminals to justice.

The Bosnian Moslems are a national entity and not only a religious one. If Otto Bauer, one of the great authorities of the 19th Century on the question of nationality, were alive today, he would present his opinion that religious belief can be the root of nationhood. The Jews are a well-known example of this root. He would point out that the territorialized culture of life is a framework for economic and political integration. The denigration of the Moslems, particularly on the part of Montenegrin mythomaniacs, arises from the fact that the Montenegrins had no slavery, nor feudalism, but unlike the Norwegians who like the Montenegrins fled to remote mountains, thus missing out on stages of European history, neither did they have any experience of Christianity. Even though after the Westphalian Peace Treaty Europe drew up a religious truce, modern Serb and Montenegrin nationalists, by avoiding economic, technological and political integration with it, regress three centuries to the scenes of outdated religious wars, in order to justify their belated territorial ambitions. And the Serbs, like the Montenegrins, cannot wage a religious war because they never accepted the militant aspects of religion and therefore fight without ideology. And they will be punished.