Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0413/04130.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 31KB | 502 lines

$Unique_ID{COW04130}
$Pretitle{299}
$Title{Yugoslavia
Chapter 2B.   Ethinic Groups}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Patricia A. Kluck}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{serbs
serbian
croatian
percent
ethnic
albanians
population
1970s
war
government}
$Date{1982}
$Log{}
Country:     Yugoslavia
Book:        Yugoslavia, A Country Study
Author:      Patricia A. Kluck
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1982

Chapter 2B.   Ethinic Groups

Serbs

     Serbs, in the early 1980s, were the most dispersed of Yugoslavia's
nations. Although concentrated in Serbia proper, they accounted for a
substantial percentage of total population in Vojvodina, Kosovo, Bosnia, and
Croatia. Serbs' distribution reflected many of the vicissitudes of Balkan
history and played a pivotal role in the country's complex ethnic relations in
the 1970s. Vojvodina presented few problems; Serbs constituted a clear and
growing portion of that province's populace, while the Hungarian
minority-through the combined effects of emigration and a low
birthrate-declined.

     In Croatia and Bosnia the situation was more complex. Serbs were a
significant minority in Croatia; they were the single largest ethnic group in
Bosnia but were outnumbered by an increasing margin by the combined total of
Croats and ethnic Muslims. A concern for the fate of Serbs outside the
republic proper conditioned Serbian reactions to efforts at decentralization.
It was evident in Serbian nervousness at any possible Croat-ethnic Muslim
alliance in Bosnia. Part of Serbian alarm at the resurgence of Croatian
nationalist sentiment in the late 1960s-early 1970s was the memory of Serbian
suffering at Croatian hands during World War II (see The War: Occupation and
Resistance, ch. 1).

     Kosovo-at the center of the medieval Serbian kingdom and the core of much
of Serbian cultural heritage-was the Serbs' greatest concern in the early
1980s. Between 1961 and 1981 Serbs dropped from roughly 23 percent to slightly
more than 13 percent of the province's population; at the same time, Albanians
rose from two-thirds to over three-quarters of all inhabitants of Kosovo. In
part the Albanian high birthrate accounted for the province's changing ethnic
portrait; the exodus of Serbs from the province, however, was more worrisome
to Serbian officialdom. There had been a trickle of Serbs, mostly white-collar
workers, displaced by the growing Albanian presence in local industry and
government administration from the late 1960s onward. At the time of the
March-April 1981 Kosovo riots, the trickle became a stream, not just of former
civil servants and intelligentsia, but of farmers apprehensive of the growing
Albanian nationalist fervor (see Albanians, this ch.).

     A series of nineteenth-century peasant revolts formed the basis of modern
Serbian national consciousness. Serbs viewed themselves as a nation-at-arms;
World War I culminated centuries of armed resistance against foreign
overlords. They saw themselves as liberators of Croatia and Slovenia-nations
that had proved unwilling or unable to defend themselves against
Austria-Hungary and whose loyalty was suspect. Serbia's monumental losses in
World War I reinforced its tendency to see the Yugoslav government as its own
dearly won bailiwick. The per capita loss of fighting men was two-and-a-half
times that of France and three times that of Britain and Italy. The army
casualty rate was 40 percent of those under arms. Losses to battle and
epidemic disease amounted to one-fifth the total population.

     The kingdom's Serbian political elite were excessively centralist,
accustomed to rule and disinclined to share the spoils of power. There were,
on the eve of World War II, two Croatian and two Slovenian generals in the
army; the rest-161 generals in all-were Serbs or Montenegrins. In 1941, of
1,500 military cadets, 1,300 were Serbs. Serbs dominated the civil bureaucracy
as well; in 1939 they held 100 percent of the higher administrative posts in
the office of the premier, 89 percent of those in the Ministry of the
Interior, 82 percent of those in the foreign service, 96 percent in education,
and 85 percent in justice.

     Concern about the Serbian reaction to policies balancing participation in
government by the various ethnic groups dominated Serbian-regime relations in
the post-World War II era. Serbs were major participants in the Partisan
liberation movement; their sufferings at the hands of Croatian Fascists
appalled even the Nazis (see The War: Occupation and Resistance, ch. 1). Both
circumstances led the communist regime to react vehemently against any sign of
resurgent "greater Serbia hegemonism." Sentiments at all comparable to those
of Serbs in the interwar kingdom drew sharp criticism from the authorities-as
for example a 1980 offering by a Serbian poet in a Serbian Orthodox magazine
complaining at the Serbs' sufferings in World War II, and as the poem's
refrain noted, ". . . what has it all got us?" (see Religion, this ch.). By
the same token, authorities feared an anti-Albanian backlash to the 1981
Kosovo riots. Serbs had the sense of having sacrificed much and gained little
but increased demands by the intransigent Albanians; "greater Albanian
hegemonism" was the Serbian complaint.

Croats

     Despite substantial linguistic similarity and a common Slav background,
Croatia's cultural traditions and political heritage contrasted dramatically
with Serbia's. The Roman Catholic Church preserved Croatian national identity
during the centuries of Venetian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian rule. Despite
the church's ultramontane loyalties and Latin liturgy it gave Croatia a
literate clergy who both used Croatian as the language of pastoral work and
preserved it as a literary tongue from the Counter-Reformation to the
nineteenth century. Roman Catholicism imbued nineteenth-century Croatian
nationalism with the cultural ethos of Western Europe. As with many Balkan
peoples, language and religion acted as unifying forces linking educated and
uneducated Croats alike.

     Writers, scholars, commercial interests, well-to-do farmers, and timber
producers spearheaded the nineteenth-century Croatian nationalist movement.
Croatian nationalism, influenced by French revolutionary thought (through a
brief period of Napoleonic rule), gained impetus from Hungary's aggressive
Magyarization drive in the late nineteenth century (see The Croats, ch. 1).
Hungarian insistence on Magyar as the language of public life alienated the
growing intelligentsia. Transportation policy undermined Croatia's flourishing
trade with the Dalmatian Coast and antagonized traders and large landowners.
Agricultural policies and taxation impoverished the peasantry.

     Croatian political leaders devoted their political energies to opposing
whatever government was in power to counter the Magyarization drive. The same
tactics underlay their participation in the interwar kingdom. The Croatian
Peasant Party, the leading party, made occasional attempts to join whatever
Serbian cabal might be in power, but its efforts were erratic, unpredictable,
and, not surprisingly, unsuccessful (see The Yugoslav Kingdom, 1918-41, ch.
1). In the Croatian view the kingdom was no less "a prison of nations" than
the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been. Serbian rule merely exploited
Yugoslavia's advanced, European-oriented northern half for the "Balkan
primitives" of the south.

     Had there been any lingering doubt about Croatian disenchantment with
Serb domination-they regarded the kingdom as little else-World War II
dispelled it. Roughly half the population ruled by the Croatian puppet state
were Serbs. The ustase (see Glossary) were vehemently Catholic, anti-Semitic,
and anti-Serbian; their avowed policy was to convert one-third of the Serbs,
deport another third, and "eliminate" the rest. The regime closed all Serbian
Orthodox Primary Schools, outlawed the Cyrillic alphabet, and ordered Serbs to
wear colored arm bands.

     In the early 1980s Croats were Yugoslav