I’ve been watching downloads of "The Death of Yugoslavia", the 6 part BBC documentary about the break-up of Yugoslavia. This was made in 1995 and if fascinating as a large number of key players on both sides of the war gave extensive interviews. It’s triggered memories of a trip through Yugoslavia in 1990 and my more recent visit to Croatia in June.
I’ve been watching downloads of "The Death of Yugoslavia", the 6 part BBC documentary about the break-up of Yugoslavia. This was made in 1995 and if fascinating as a large number of key players on both sides of the war gave extensive interviews. It’s triggered memories of a trip through Yugoslavia in 1990 and my more recent visit to Croatia in June.
Memory is a strange thing and was not the original subject of this blog. I intended to write about sectarianism and Ireland and as I started mentioned Yugoslavia briefly. But doing so opened a window into the past and suddenly I found hundreds of words on the screen about that story and not the one I had intended which will have to wait for another day.
It’s a great pity I didn’t see the BBC documentary before the holiday I went on in Croatia back in June, as it would have given me a great deal more context. I talked to veterans of the Croatian side of the war there, at least one of whom was still very clearly traumatised by the experience. I remember during the war a medical student friend of Yugoslav origin going there as a volunteer and coming back traumatised from having performed operations without aesthetic and other things he would only hint at. The cynical way the Croatian leadership had stoked ethnic tension (literally by a few of them driving to a Croatian Serb town and firing rockets into it) and then threw badly armed and barely trained men into the maelstrom of their creation is a good lesson in the way nationalism can be used in the modern world. They also murdered one of their own regional police chiefs because he dealt with Serbs erecting roadblocks by talking then into dismantling them. The Serb leadership were of course following just as cynical a strategy, which built up, to the large-scale massacre of civilians in Bosnia. The main goal of the ethnic and nationalist war that engulfed Yugoslavia seems to have been to keep the old guard in power.
In the early autumn of 1990 I took a train through Yugoslavia from Szeged in Hungary across the Yugoslav border to Subotica and then by train to Belgrade. This was the moment when the first conflict was breaking out in Kosovo, when Milosevic revoked the autonomy of Kosovo and there was widespread rioting in response. The train station in Belgrade was jammed with Yugoslav army conscripts being sent to Kosovo and enormous drunken flag waving crowds seeing them off. Every time a train packed with troops pulled out the crowds would smash glasses off it and sing what I’d guess to be patriotic songs. As we waited for the midnight train (it ran through northern Greece to Istanbul) it felt like we had wandered into some film set of times past.
We’d got chatting to a young man in a corner of the station who said he was Kosovian. He appeared to be carefully watching the trains being loaded and whistled as each departed, after a couple of times I noticed that his whistles were being repeated by someone out of sight in another part of the station. I suspect he was using us as useful cover when spying on the troops movements but he not only filled us in on what was going on (I don’t think I’d even heard of Kosovo at this point) he was able to tell us at five to midnight that they had switched the departure platform for the international train we wanted to catch to the opposite side of the station.
The memory above is curious, if it was obvious to me this guy was spying why not to others? Why did he talk to us about politics and the situation in Kosovo if that was what he was doing, obviously the conversation was in English but there must also have been Serbian English speakers in the station? I’m guessing he may have spent time in the western European squatter activists scene and we were dressed somewhat in the style of that scene which is why he’d started to talk to us. I thought maybe this was a false memory but on checking with Aileen who I travelled with she remembers enough of the same to be sure it was not.
In any case on hearing of the platform switch we had to say rapid goodbyes and run down and across the platforms to reach the train on the other side. We got there as they stated blowing the departure whistles and jumped onto the first carriage, which turned out to be full of 18-year-old men with shaven heads and military uniforms. So full that all the compartments were packed out and the passageway itself too packed to push through with our rucksacks. So we squeezed in among the soldiers on the floor of the passageway and fell asleep leaning on each other and the soldiers to either side.
Around three hours later we awoke to find the train was stopped. And then it rocked back and forth a little in the manner that we knew meant they were separating one segment from another. Some of the soldiers were indicating that we needed to get off the train. The penny dropped, we were on a trainload of Yugoslav army soldiers that was going somewhere other than Greece. There really was only one probably destination. We pushed our way out, jumped down onto the gravel and ran the length of the train with soldiers leaning out of the window laughing at us. At the far end, now separated from the rest of the train were a few carriages of civilians, we climbed onto that sections and even managed to find an empty compartment in which to sleep. I presume if we hadn’t awoken we’d have been arrested long before the train reached Kosovo.
Although I didn’t know anything about Kosovo at that point I did know that Yugoslavia was not the big happy family that it was presented as to the outside world. While working in London in the summer of 1987 I’d shared a house with two Yugoslavs and 23 other people, mostly Irish. It was expensive to rent in London and so up to 26 of us were squeezed into a three bedroom house in Walthamstow with an almost constant party in the back room as people came off shift work at all times of the day and night. One of the Yugoslavs was a Croatian women and the other a Serbian man and to say they didn’t get on would be to put it mildly. He was ex-military and in the light of what was to come had some odd habits including constantly wearing mirrored sunglass inside and doing one handed push up’s in the middle of the floor.
The experience of living 5 or 6 to a bedroom was enough that each summer after that we found accommodation in London with the aid of a crowbar. In the late 80’s the squatting movement had passed its climax and the laws were tightening but it was still quite possible to open a vacant, boarded up council flat in central London in the dead of night, and providing you could change the lock before the cops arrived hold it for months to come.
By 1989 when a group of us had began to organise in Dublin and travelled to London together we continued our activity out of one such squat on Old Street. It was the 20th anniversary of British troops being sent into northern Ireland and we took part in the Ireland solidarity marches of that summer that were surrounded by lines of hostile cops and on one occasion came under sustained attack by fascists and squaddies. That is another story of nationalism that will have to wait.
I had intended to write a blog around the sectarian massacres in Ireland before and under Cromwell and the claims of sectarian massacres in the south in the early 1920’s. Instead I’ve ended up with something a good deal more modern, that other blog will be for another day. As I finished this I remembered that I had written about the Yugoslav war for workers soon after it had begun in the article Yugoslavia: Whose bloody war? I just quickly re-read it now and if perhaps a little simplistic in parts it seems close enough to that I would write now when ‘humanitarian interventionism’ continues to be the acceptable face of imperialism.