War in the Balkans - 13
Myths and Distortions of Yugoslav History
Tony Benn insists that people should study the history of the Balkans in order to understand the current conflict. Unfortunately his own references to Yugoslav history show a remarkable lack of even the most basic knowledge, let alone understanding. If we have singled out Tony Benn it is because he most clearly articulates a number of myths and distortions that are prevalent on the British left.
1) On a number of occasions Benn has claimed that Kosova has been part of Yugoslavia ‘for centuries’. Since the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was first formed in 1918 (and only became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929) such a claim is clearly absurd. The South Slav population of the Istrian peninsular and some parts of Dalmatia were not even included in the Yugoslav state until after 1945.
It is true that Kosova was part of the medieval Serb empire — but so was Macedonia and part of northern Greece. To argue that Serbia has a right to Kosova on the basis of medieval history is a totally useless political method. After all in 1389, the date of the battle of Kosovo Polje, large parts of France belonged to the Kingdom of England. No-one would seriously claim that Britain has, therefore, some claim on Calais, Bordeaux, Normandy etc.
There is another problem with such methods: the capital of the Serb empire was initially Skopje and then Ohrid — both of which are in Macedonia. Belgrade, the capital of modern day Serbia, was only briefly a part of the Serb empire. Perhaps Tony Benn would support Milosevic seizing control of Macedonia and northern Greece while handing Belgrade over to Hungary?
2) According to Benn ‘the Serbs’ fought on ‘our side’ and were ‘against fascism’. ‘The Croats’ are dismissed as pro-Nazi, responsible for massacres of Serbs and Jews. Such a view is totally at odds with that of Tito and the Partisans.
For the Partisans the Second World War was certainly a war against the Nazi and Fascist occupiers. Serbs and Montenegrins provided the majority of Partisans but all the nations of Yugoslavia (including non-Slavs such as Albanians and Italians) participated in the Partisan struggle. The Partisan struggle was never presented as a purely Serb affair — even by the main Partisan historian, Vladimir Dedijer, who was not immune to some Serb nationalist views.
In any case the Partisans also conducted a civil war against all the pro-Nazi collaborationist regimes. They did not distinguish between the Ustasa regime in the so-called Independent State of Croatia and the regime of General Milan Nedic in Serbia.
In his desire to emphasise the ‘Serb’ nature of the Partisan war Benn never even mentions the Nedic regime. The existence of this Serbian regime, which included Dmitrije Ljotic, leader of an openly Nazi party in Serbia, contradicts Benn’s thesis that all Serbs opposed Hitler. Benn is forced to suppress the fact that Nedic’s Serbia was the first state in the world to be declared judenrein — ‘clean’ of Jews.
The Partisans didn’t only fight the openly collaborationist regime in Serbia: they also fought the Serb nationalist Cetnik movement of Draza Mihailovic. For the Partisans Mihailovic’s Cetniks were as much the enemy as the occupiers. Indeed, once the Nazis were clearly going to be defeated the Partisans concentrated their efforts on defeating the Serb nationalists. Mihailovic was put on trial after the war and executed as a war criminal.
Thus, far from the Second World War in Yugoslavia being a war of ‘the Serbs’ against the Nazis it was a war of Communist Partisans of all nationalities (of whom the majority were Serbs) against the fascist occupying forces, collaborators of all nationalities and the advocates of Great Serbian nationalism. That, at least, is how Tito and the Partisans always presented it. Benn’s views are not those of Tito but of the Cetniks.
3) Benn repeats the claim — widely believed on the British left — that the break-up of Yugoslavia was caused by Germany’s recognition of Croatian independence. This is clearly belied by the facts. Germany did not recognise Croatia until 23 December 1991 — by which time Vukovar had been destroyed and Milosevic had requested the sending of UN troops to Croatia, where they would guarantee the military gains made by the Serbian army. It was only in August 1991, after war had already been raging in Croatia for two months, that the German government even announced that it might have to reconsider its position on maintaining a unitary Yugoslav state. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and a few other states all recognised Croatia before Germany.
Benn never claims that German recognition of Slovenia led to the break-up of Yugoslavia although, as we argue elsewhere, the Slovene leadership bears far more responsibility than the Croatian. Nor does he point out that Milosevic’s supporters in Croatia declared the secession of the Serbian Republic of Krajina before Croatia had even declared independence. His position reflects a deep seated hostility among the British left to Germans and Croats, based on a completely false interpretation of the Second World War which, among many other errors, forgets that before 1933 ‘the Germans’ had built the largest Communist Party in the world outside the USSR.
4) Benn’s ‘history’ is certainly false, but there is an even more worrying element to his approach. Benn suggests we should support ‘the Serbs’ because they were on ‘our side’. We have already shown that ‘the Serbs’ were not a homogenous bloc: Serbs fought both for and against the Nazis. We have to ask what does Benn mean by ‘our side’. For Socialists the Second World War encompassed a number of different wars: one of them was a war of British and US capitalism against German Nazi capitalism for imperialist domination.
Socialists certainly did not see that war as ‘our war’. The Partisans were prepared to accept weapons from British and US imperialism but they also, correctly, never placed any political trust in imperialism. They feared a British landing in Yugoslavia which would have as its aim the restoration of the Serbian monarchy and the creation of a client state. ‘Our side’ was that of the Partisans, not British imperialism.
In any case the argument that ‘the Serbs’ fought on ‘our side’ fifty years ago is irrelevant to what attitude we take now. Benn would never have argued that because ‘the Italians’ and ‘the Japanese’ fought on ‘our side’ in the First World War therefore ‘we’ should not have opposed the Italian invasion of Ethiopia or Japanese invasion of China during the 1930s. He would be able to understand that the political situation had changed. Nor would Benn be so blinded by the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust that he would support the oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state. Yet he seems totally incapable of this in relation to former Yugoslavia. He is stuck in a time-warp which sees heroic Serbs fighting Nazi imperialism and fascist Croats.
In the case of the Croats he is incapable of distinguishing between the nature of the Ustasa regime and the Croatian people while he appears totally oblivious to the existence of a pro-Nazi regime in Serbia and the Great Serbian chauvinists of Mihailovic. But even if every single Serb had fought against Nazism and every single Croat was an Ustasa butcher what has this got to do with the situation in Kosova today? Does Benn seriously believe that because ‘the Serbs’ fought Nazism in 1941-45 they will always be anti-fascist? Will ‘the Croats’ therefore always be pro-fascist? Are Albanians, many of whom collaborated with Fascist and Nazi forces, condemned to always being pro-fascist? And, what actually lies behind such ‘analyses’ among sections of the British left, will Germans always be Nazis?
Such a view of history has nothing to do with Socialism. Indeed, the notion that certain nations are prone to adopting particular political characteristics and that they bear collective responsibility for the actions of their governments is considerably closer to the ideology of Nazism than Socialism. We do not doubt for a second Tony Benn’s unremitting hostility to Nazism. He would never lump together the British government and the British people yet he appears incapable of making such distinctions in former Yugoslavia. His current flirtation with Serb nationalists — who are utterly hostile to Tito and everything the Partisans stood for — is leading him to very dangerous political conclusions.