Yugoslav parallels

I am just back from Serbia and lots of parallels spring to mind thinking about Yugoslav history.

King Alexander instituted a royal dictatorship in Yugoslavia in 1929 that enjoyed the full support of Yugoslavia's ally France as did the Polish dictatorship (three joint dictators after Pilsudski died) and King Carol II's royal dictatorship in Romania. 

The Anglo-Americans similarly support autocratic regimes in the Persian Gulf today. The stuff about democracies versus autocracies is all my eye.

Slobodan Milosevic, I was told by a historian friend while in Serbia, planned in 1999 on pushing the Albanians out of Kosovo and replacing them with Serbs forced out of Croatia as the result of the war in Croatia that he had initiated. This is different from the story we were told at the time, that he intended to slaughter Albanians, but he would have killed them had they stayed.

This put me in mind of the behaviour of Netanyahu in Gaza and the West Bank today.

How differently the Americans and Nato responded to Milosevic and to Netanyahu.

Srebrenica was thirty years ago last month. Germany sponsored the UN General Assembly resolution designating July 11 the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.

I remember my horror listening to the BBC and realising thousands of Bosnian Muslim men were about to be murdered by the Bosnian Serbs on General Mladic's orders.

I was in Tuzla in Bosnia shortly after the war ended and was in tears hearing an account by a young woman of the Srebrenica massacre. 

I note that Germany is the ardent supporter of Netanyahu's actions in Gaza today. 

I also note that terrible though Srebrenica was it followed Bosnian Muslim massacres of Serbs. 

I cannot call the Srebrenica massacre genocide though. Mladic provided buses to remove women, children and old men. But the Germans and Americans do, while denying that genocide is what the IDF are committing at this moment.

All the killing was a result of Milosevic using national feeling in place of Communism to consolidate his power. 

Netanyahu did something somewhat comparable. He deftly built up Hamas as a guarantee that there would never be a Palestinian state, a project of the Labor Party establishment that he wanted to defeat. 

Hamas is his Frankenstein's monster as Osama bin Laden was the Americans' in the Afghan war before last.

The Communist partisans killed eight (?) thousand ethnic Hungarians in the Vojvodina when they took the region, simply for the crime of being Hungarian, which reminds me of the killing of maybe a hundred thousand Poles and many Jews in Ukraine by the supporters of Stepan Bandera. 

By the way, Bandera himself was in comfortable quarters in a German camp until shortly before the end of the German occupation of the Ukraine. He wanted to be a war criminal, I don't doubt, but wasn't given the chance.

This isnt a parallel but, dipping into John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War (a book I recommend), I was reminded how in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev and Malenkov had a terrible journey in a 2 propeller plane through a thunderstorm and then a worse boat trip, in which they feared the boat would capsize, before reaching Tito on his holiday island to get his agreement to the invasion of Hungary.

It was otherwise in 1968. Tito and Ceausescu strongly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 by Soviet Russia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and East Germany. Brezhnev considered invading Romania after Czechoslovakia. 

Zhivkov of Bulgaria told the plenum of the Bulgarian Communist Party on March 29 1968 "There is no need for us to use the Stalinist methods of the past but we are obligated to take measures to introduce order in Czechoslovakia as well as in Romania. Afterwards we will introduce order in Yugoslavia, too."