Mahmudagic and the others are victims of “ethnic cleansing.” The phrase is a euphemism for the mass expulsion of civilians of targeted ethnic groups, carried out by paramilitary units with the tacit approval of the government in Belgrade. The practice has created the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the end of World War III. Almost 2 million people have been forced from their homes since the civil war began last year. In the past four months alone, Serbian forces loyal to Belgrade have conquered two thirds of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the most ethnically diverse republic; along the way they have expelled almost 1 million Muslims. “This ‘cleansing’ is despicable,” Yugoslavia’s new Prime Minister Milan Panic told NEWSWEEK last week. “It portrays the Yugoslavs as the barbarians of the 20th century, reminiscent of the Germans and their super race.”
Panic’s analogy is fitting. In scenes disturbingly evocative of the Nazis’ deportation of European Jews, thousands of Muslim refugees from northwestern Bosnia have been packed into railroad boxcars over the past month and sent to a Muslim region in central Bosnia. While Serbian authorities haggled over one train’s passage last week, more than 4,000 people were trapped for hours in the blistering cars without food or water or toilets, many so weak from the journey that they collapsed. Panic, a naturalized American who returned to Belgrade two weeks ago to become prime minister, pledges to stop the “uglies” responsible for the expulsions “at any cost.” To do that, he will have to defy Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Although Milosevic has not publicly called for ethnic cleansing, establishing Serbian majorities in newly conquered territories is a key step toward creating a “Greater Serbia” encompassing all Serbs living outside the republic’s current borders. “You conquer as much territory as possible. Then you drive out the non-Serb residents,” explains Milos Vasic, an editor for the Belgrade weekly Vreme. “Then eventually you hold a referendum, and of course the majority vote to join Mother Serbia.”
The brutal efforts of warring Serbian, Croatian and Muslim factions to create their own ethnically “pure” territories by terrorizing civilians defy centuries of cultural development, during which different nationalities settled in neighboring villages and cities, and often intermarried. “Ethnic cleansing” is, in effect, a crude attempt to reverse history. In some cases, towns are “cleansed” when the invaders herd local ethnic rivals onto buses or trains, issue passports on the spot and drive them to the nearest border. In other cases, murder is used to frighten the survivors into fleeing. Serbian forces who attacked the Bosnian city of Bijeljina in April shot 27 residents, then stood smoking cigarettes and kicking the corpses of several middleaged women for all to see. Today Bijeljina is a Serb city.
Croats and Bosnian Muslims have retaliated on a smaller woe, expelling about 300,000 Serbs from their homes and farms outside Serbia. Jelena Jovic, a Serb, lived in the Croatian capital of Zagreb for 35 years, but fled to Belgrade in April, after she and her son were threatened by neighbors and abandoned by longtime friends. “We had anonymous phone calls at all hours. People would spit on our door,” she says. “I heard the butcher say one day how he was keeping one of his sharpest knives to slit Serb throats.” She now lives in a refugee camp in Belgrade’s Pioneer Park.
“Ethnic cleansing” has bred its own peculiar vocabulary. Serbian authorities in Bosnia arrange “safe transportation” for deportees. Those who flee or are driven away are referred to as “departed residents.” And all sides are scrambling to pass legislation that would enable their own ethnic refugees to claim the property of those who have been “cleansed.” A Law on Special Conditions for Real Estate Transactions was enacted in Belgrade recently, forbidding the sale of homes owned privately by Serbs to Kosovo Albanians, even though both are citizens of the new Yugoslavia. The Croatian government announced it will soon pass legislation classifying Serbs who live in Croatia as “foreigners” whose property could devolve to the state.
In Hrtkovci, a small farming town in western Serbia that used to have a Croat majority, the windows of the town hall have become a poignant bulletin board for the about-to-be displaced. Here, Serbs who live across the Croatian border in Slavonia offer to exchange their homes with Croats eager to get out of Hrtkovci. One notice offers “house with six hectares, a tractor and all other properties for exchange.” There’s an ad from the Croatian village of kula, offering the entire village of 50 houses for a “similar property” in Serbia. The ad touts “telephones, paved roads, running water, a village hall, sports stadium, shops and a big forest.”
But transplanting entire communities will only create deeper wounds. Homes, factories and schools can someday be rebuilt. But the refugees’ ruptured friendships and torn families are irreplaceable. The United Nations has so far been unable to protect ethnic minorities who try to remain in their own homes, facing threatening phone calls and visits from armed men in ski masks. Unless the new Yugoslavian government succeeds in stopping the “uglies,” the destruction of the old Yugoslavia’s diverse culture has only begun.
