Looking Back Facing Forward One Reporter's View of the Balkans by Dave Marash At the end of the Cold War, ethnic conflicts raised troubling questions about borders in central Europe as cities like Belgrade and Sarajevo became war zones instead of destinations. Ten years later, ABC News' Dave Marash, who covered the wars in the Balkans, returns to see what the world faces after the fighting ends.

Here’s what makes the Balkans the Balkans: stubbornness. Since 1991, virtually every collective of political or economic power on this planet has tried to impose its will on the little-known leaders of ever-smaller fractions of the former Yugoslavia. And, by and large, they have failed. Some cases in point:

Franjo Tudjman, leader of Croatia for most of the 1990s, won admission to Europe’s markets, travel freedoms and an expanded, equipped and trained military—courtesy of the U.S.—while at the same time defying European and American objections to his ethnic cleansing campaigns against Serbs in his country and his murderous interventions across the border in Bosnia.

Slobodan Milosevic, who ruled Serbia and Yugoslavia from 1989 until last December, used international sanctions to get a vampire’s throat-hold on the national treasury, draining an economy dominated by its black markets, which were controlled by Milosevic, his family, supporters and friends. While all this was taking place, Milosevic was treated as America’s “key man” in the region. Even after American warplanes ended Milosevic’s dream of Greater Serbia (enlarged at the expense of Croatia and Bosnia), the man himself was treated with deference.

In a peace agreement signed in 1995 in Dayton, Ohio, Milosevic’s sometime surrogates and allies in Bosnia, the indicted war criminals Dr. Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, were awarded half a loaf of territory they were, in the weeks before, losing slice by slice on the battlefield. This gift was a sign of respect for Milosevic, as was the omission of any prescriptions in the Dayton Agreement about the Serbian province of Kosovo. Milosevic repaid these rewards by toughening up his police state in Kosovo and supporting separatist extremists in the Republika Srpska, which comprises 49 percent of Bosnia.

Diplomatic demands and exclusions, economic sanctions, threats of force, even weeks of NATO bombing barely dislodged Milosevic from his position. Only an electoral revolt finally removed him from office.

So, now, Tudjman is dead, and Milosevic seems permanently overthrown. New leaders in Croatia and Serbia have shown a propensity for grudging cooperation with the international community. On creating new structures for economic and political liberalization, both the Croats and the Serbs seem largely in agreement with “the internationals.” When it comes to cooperating with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is based at The Hague, the Croats have come pretty far, the Serbs have not.* Will the new Croat and Serb governments heed the wishes of the world and treat their citizens and neighbors with civility and respect? And will they clear their names by apologizing to their neighbors and prosecuting those responsible for killing and displacing hundreds of thousands? And if they won’t, what can or should the world do to compel cooperation?

In Bosnia and Kosovo, where NATO has forcefully intervened, and where its troops remain, far less forcefully, on the ground, the results of international efforts fall far short
of the proclaimed goal of inter-community civility and cooperation. In Kosovo, where the Serb minority is still viciously besieged by the Kosovar Albanian majority, all the Albanian political parties remain focused on independence, the one thing the international community is not prepared to give them. In Bosnia, political power remains in the hands of the same corrupt and extremist nationalist parties that tore the country apart in 1992. Economic recovery in Bosnia has been as feeble as civil enlightenment. More than five years after the Dayton Agreement, it is clear that contract sentenced Bosnia-Herzegovina to be a dysfunctional, divided, pseudo-state, dependent on outsiders for financial assistance and the bare rudiments of the rule of law.

What follows is a progress report on efforts to normalize life in Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Belgrade

Simultaneously, both of the cab driver’s hands fall to the steering wheel. His head follows a similar downward arc, stopping just short of a lobotomizing collision with the wheel. We stop just short of the car ahead.

The gesture and the frustration are familiar to any urban dweller. The cause is familiar, too: a traffic jam, perfectly normal for most capital cities of over a million inhabitants. For Belgrade, the bomb-damaged capital of the ever-diminishing Yugoslavia, the recent routine of heavy traffic at noon and midnight, as well as at the standard commuter drive times, is super-normal.

Next page: The director of the Belgrade Center for Human Rights says he awakens every morning now aware of “the absence of fear,” a sign, he says, “of how normal we have become.”

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