Bloody War Threatens To Reignite, While Americans Remain Ignorant
Bias is insidious, it matters little whether it is passive or intentional.
A case in point is the horrific Bosnian war in the 1990s that threatens to erupt again. Few people can identify the combatants, let alone why and when the war was raged. It is a simple example of passive bias, based on western ignorance of one of history’s bloodiest attempts at ethnic cleansing.
A penultimate scene in the mesmerizing ESPN “30 for 30” documentary, “Once Brothers,” shows how the bonds between National Basketball Association stars Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic, both natives of the former Yugoslavia, exploded over a political display of a Bosnian flag at an NBA game.
Divac was raised in Serbia while Petrovic comes from Bosnia, the two regions involved in the deadly civil war in the 1990s. The 2010 documentary that is streaming on Hulu attempts to dramatize how politics and civil war destroyed a friendship and decimated two nations. It is a familiar theme.
Divac and Petrovic played together on the Yugoslavia national basketball team from 1986 to 1990 and were close friends until the Yugoslav Wars drove them apart as they came from opposing sides. Petrović died in an automobile accident in 1993 and, like brothers who never reconcile, much of film focuses on Divac’s regret that they were never able to resolve their differences.
When Yugoslavia won the gold in the 1990 FIBA World Championship, hostilities were reaching a boiling point between Serbs and Croats. Fans rushed onto the court one was holding a Croatian flag. Divac claimed he told the fan not to waive the flag, as the victory was a win for all of Yugoslavia. Divac said the man made a derogatory remark about the Yugoslav flag, at which point Divac took the flag. The taking of the flag made Divac a hero to Serbs, and a villain to Croatians, at a time when civil war was about to rip the region into violent shreds.
Divac’s action alienated him from many of his former Croatian friends, particularly Petrovic. FR Yugoslavia, the Serbia and Montenegro men’s national basketball team, won the gold medal at the EuroBasket 1995, and Croatia won bronze. Croatia, still at war with Serbs from Croatia, walked off the podium during the medal ceremony.
As it is said, the winners write the history. Fabijan Zuricv, a close childhood friend and former KK Šibenka teammate of Petrovic, claims that the incident over the flag never happened. It was invented to give credence to Divac’s Serbian heritage, Zuricv said.
It is as difficult to unravel the causes of the Bosnian-Serb hatred as it is to understand the jigsaw puzzle of alliances that led to World War I.
The film is being re-released at a time when the antagonisms between Serbs and Bosnians are flaring up and threatening to turn again to open violence. Understanding the Bosnia war is vital if it is to be avoided again. Leaders of the country’s Serb ethnic enclave have threatened to effectively secede from Bosnia-Herzegovina, potentially the region’s worst crisis in more than 25 years. While the world’s attention is focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina remains a cause for concern. The conflicting interests of various parties in the region could potentially escalate into a greater military conflict.
Understanding the conflict is about as confounding as untying the Gordian knot.
The show is a heartbreaking rendering of how the friendship between the Divac, a Serbian, and the Petrovic, a native Bosnian, could not survive. It opens a door on what has been described as one of Europe’s deadliest armed conflicts since World War II, marked by genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, massacres, and mass wartime rape.
Most Americans are likely unfamiliar with the causes and the extent of the Yugoslav wars, just like Americans know little about other 20th century genocides in Myanmar, Iraq, Syria, Darfur, Iraq, Iraq and Syria and elsewhere.
The Rohingya genocide has forced more than a million Rohinguya to flee their native homes in Myanmar. The Iraqi Turkmen genocide refers to a series of killings, rapes, executions, expulsions, and sexual slavery of Iraqi Turkmen by the Islamic State between 2014 and 2017. In Iraq and Syrian, the Islamic State committed genocide of the Yazidi between 2014 and 2017. Over a period of three years, Islamic State militants trafficked thousands of Yazidi women and girls and killed thousands of Yazidi men
Darfur has been the scene of the systematic killing of ethnic Darfuri occurred during the war in Darfur and the ongoing war in Sudan in Darfur. An estimated 200,000 people were killed between 2003 and 2005 in what has been called the first genocide of the 21st century.
Willful ignorance about genocide and other international crimes spreads because of racial, religious or ethnic bias, just like hatred of immigrants is being fueled around the world by the right wing and in the U.S. by trump and his supporters. The ignorance over the war between Bosnia and Serbia reflects a longstanding pattern of so-called “Slavophobia,” which demeans the people and denies their importance.
In the U.S., Slavophobia intensified during the “second wave” of European immigration in the early 1900s, when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were flooding the U.S. The new immigrants faced violent opposition from the “old” immigrants, who were mostly from Northern and Western Europe. It is a situation not unlike the common current hostilities toward immigrants coming to the U.S.
Slavic peoples were considered to be people of an “inferior race” who were incapable of assimilating into American society. They were originally not considered to be “fully white” or fully American. Slavic peoples’ “whiteness” continues to be a question of debate as explained in Jamil Khoury’s 2012 film, “Not Quite White: Arabs, Slaves, and the Contours of Contested Whiteness.”
Slavophobia in the U.S. increased during the Cold War, when Slavic peoples of all nationalities were lumped in with the Soviet Union as enemies. To many, wars in the Balkans were considered inevitable because of the Balkan peoples’ “propensity for extreme war violence,” according to a report in the Journal of Contemporary History.
Americans too often depict Slavic people, specifically Russians, as nefarious, violent and unintelligent. Slavophobia has had a resurgence in America as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where Russian-Americans and people of Russian descent have been collectively blamed for the Russian government’s actions.
To this day, people who are perceived as “Eastern” face discrimination and exclusion both in the U.S. and in Europe, where the term “Eurotrash” is a pejorative referring to people from Eastern European countries.
From the late 19th century until World War I, the country of Yugoslavia was annexed into the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. During World War II, Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. After World War II, it was granted full republic status in the newly formed Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In mid-1991, Yugoslavia was separated into six independent countries known as republics that had previously constituted Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Macedonia now called North Macedonia.
The Bosnian War began in 1992, lasting until late 1995 and the signing of the Dayton Agreement on Dec. 14, 1995. The warring parties agreed to peace and to a single sovereign state known as Bosnia and Herzegovina composed of two parts, the largely Serb-populated Republika Srpska and mainly Croat-Bosniak-populated Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The agreement has led to an uneasy peace.
The Bosnian war was a result of the break-up of the former country, inter-ethnic hatred and political warfare. They ranged from deep, historical cultural and religious divisions to the nightmarish memories of World War II atrocities committed by Nazi-supported Bosnian groups against Serbs.
From 1991 to 1992, violent political upheavals in Bosnia and Herzegovina displaced about 2.7 million people, including more than 700,000 who sought asylum in other European countries, making it the largest exodus in Europe since World War II. It is estimated between 1.0 million and 1.3 million people were uprooted in ethnic cleansing campaigns, and that tens of thousands were killed.
The Bosnian genocide was the first European wartime event to be formally classified as genocidal since the military campaigns of Nazi Germany, and many of the key perpetrators were subsequently charged with war crimes. Ethnic cleansing went on from 1992–95 as large numbers of Bosnian Muslims known as Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats were forced to flee their homes or were expelled by the Army of Republika Srpska and Serb paramilitaries. Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs had also been forced to flee or were expelled by Bosnian Croat forces.
The Bosnian ethnic cleansing campaigns include “killing of civilians, rape, torture, destruction of civilian, public, and cultural property, looting and pillaging, and the forcible relocation of civilian populations,” according to a U.N. report. Most of the perpetrators were Serb forces and most of the victims were Bosniaks.
The worst attack was the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica. The killings were perpetrated by units of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under Ratko Mladić. The Scorpions, a paramilitary unit from Serbia, who had been part of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991, participated in the massacre.
Anti-Serb sentiment has a long history. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg by Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip in 1914 eventually led to World War I. The assassination triggered the Anti-Serb pogrom in Sarajevo, directed at Serb shops, residences of prominent Serbs, the Serbian Orthodox Church, schools, banks, the Serb cultural society Prosvjeta, and the Srpska riječ newspaper offices.
In the aftermath of the assassination of the archduke, anti-Serb sentiment ran high throughout the Habsburg Empire. Austria-Hungary imprisoned and extradited around 5,500 prominent Serbs, sentenced 460 to death, and established the predominantly Muslim special militia Schutzkorps which carried on the persecution of Serbs.
After the assassination, Austria-Hungary sought to defeat Serbia, to demonstrate its own strength and to dampen Serbian support for Yugoslav nationalism. Vienna, wary of the reaction of Russia, a major supporter of Serbia, sought a guarantee from its ally, Germany, that Berlin would support Austria in any conflict. Germany guaranteed its support but urged Austria-Hungary to attack quickly to localize the war and avoid drawing in Russia.
During World War II, the Axis Powers occupied Yugoslavia and established the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi satellite state, ruled by the fascist militia known as the Ustaše that began its reign of terror in 1941. German troops occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as part of Serbia and Slovenia, while other parts of the country were occupied by Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy. From 1941 to 1945, the Ustaše regime persecuted and murdered around 300,000 Serbs, along with at least 30,000 Jews and Roma; hundreds of thousands of Serbs were also expelled and another 200,000–300,000 were forced to convert to Catholicism.
The Serbs are Orthodox Christians with a history shaped by almost four centuries of Ottoman Turkish occupation. They were the only nation in Yugoslavia to have liberated themselves from foreign rule and established an independent state in the 19th century.
The Croats spent centuries under the Austro-Hungarian empire, and their Catholicism and Central European outlook significantly influenced their identity. They resented the fact that the first Yugoslav state (1918–1941) was essentially Serbia-dominated.
The Bosniaks are Slavs who converted to Islam under Turkish rule. They became a distinct nationality which shifted the demographic balance in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats are the three main ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina, constituting over 96 percent of the population.
Bosnian-Croats are native to Bosnia and Herzegovina. They form the third most populous ethnic group in the country, after Bosniaks and Serbs. As one of the constitutive nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, they have played a significant role in its history.
“Once Brothers” tells the story about the Bosnian war as seen through two once great friends who were divided forever by ethnic rivalries.
EuroBasket 1991, the European championships, held in Italy, was the last tournament in which Yugoslavia participated, as the country disintegrated in the following months. The upheaval in their home country caused disruption in the national team. Already in 1990, there had been problems between Petrović and Divac.
One of the first players on the EuroBasket team affected by the war was Jure Zdovc. Zdovc was a FIBA EuroStar selection in 1996. He also represented both the senior Yugoslav national team, and the senior Slovenian national team. Zdovc was inducted into the Slovenian Athletes Hall of Fame in 2015 and was inducted into the FIBA Hall of Fame in 2020. On the day before the semifinals, Zdovc was forced to leave the national team, while the airport of his hometown was bombed and Slovenia declared independence.
Center Divac and forward Žarko Paspalj were the first Serbian players to play in the NBA, in the 1989–90 season. Divac was most recently the vice president of basketball operations and general manager of the Sacramento Kings of the NBA. He was among the first group of European basketball players to transfer to the NBA in the late 1980s and was named one of the 50 Greatest EuroLeague Contributors. Divac was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2019.
Petrovic, a shooting guard, was first successful playing professional basketball in Europe in the 1980s with Cibona and Real Madrid before joining the NBA in 1989. Petrović earned two silver medals (1988, 1992) and one bronze (1984) at the Summer Olympic Games, a gold (1990) and a bronze (1986) at the FIBA World Cup, and a gold (1989) and a bronze (1987) at the FIBA EuroBasket. He was the FIBA World Championship MVP in 1986 and the FIBA EuroBasket MVP in 1989.
Petrović joined the NBA in 1989, as a member of the Portland Trail Blazers. In 1990, Petrović was traded to the New Jersey Nets where he blossomed into one of the league’s premier guards.
In 2002, he was posthumously enshrined into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In 2013, he was voted the best European Basketball player in history, by players at the 2013 FIBA EuroBasket.