History Lesson
Throughout the earlier part of my life, pre-doorman days, I did whatever was necessary to earn a living and support his family. As a boy, I stripped broken down or abandoned cars in his hometown and sold the parts to local mechanics to provide some extra money for my mother to go grocery shopping for my brothers and sisters.
As a teenager, I drove stolen cars from one part of the city to another for local gangsters. Don't worry... they rarely put me in actual danger because they knew I did not have the disposition for a life of hard crime. The local warlords like me, a pudgy teen, because I always smiled and never turned down a job, no matter what time of day or night. But when there was a chance that someone might get shot or the military was applying the heat, they sent me on the safe or tame missions, like going out to get food or gas or even to get supplies to fix up whatever shelled-out office or space they were using as a base .
That does not mean I was able to avoid the violence and turmoil going on around me. Growing up in war-torn Yugoslavia made that impossible.
The country formerly known as Yugoslavia no longer exists. My parents' friends would argue that it never existed and that the name means very little to anyone from that entire region. It’s more like a useless term that groups diverse people under one umbrella name. Like Africa. Before Yugoslavia officially became a nation, the Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Macedonians, and Albanians had virtually independent histories.
The Slovenes have been fighting to preserve their cultural identity for a millennium against a number of the rising and falling empires you learned about in your high school social studies classes. The Croats had their brief shot at independence before falling under Hungarian, Byzantine, Venetian, French, and Austrian rule as well. It seems like everyone had a dynasty in Eurpope but them.
The Serbs had their shot at glory back in the day and briefly rivaled the Byzantine Empire in medieval times. Then came 500 years of Turkish domination before the Serbs won independence in the nineteenth century. Their Montenegrin kinsmen lived in the mountains for centuries under a dynasty of bishop-priests and defended their homeland against foreign aggressors.
The Bosnians did not have geography on their side to protect themselves from external political and religious pressure. Many Bosnians converted to Islam after the Turks invaded and became a nuisance to Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth century.
A hodgepodge of ethnic groups have lived in Macedonia over the centuries. Just as the Ottoman Empire was declining, the region became a pawn among the major European powers.
The disputed Kosovo region, which had been in the news a lot in the last decade, has an Albanian majority and medieval Serbian tradition, yet remained an Ottoman backwater until after the Balkan Wars of the early twentieth century.
Bottom line: no one likes each other.
And with over twenty-five distinct nationalities, Yugoslavia had one of the most complex ethnic profiles in Europe. Over seventy years after Yugoslavia's creation, a peaceful coexistence of these groups within the integrated state was on the brink of collapse.
The Constitution of 1974 divided the country's ethnic groups into two legally classified categories, “nations,” which were defined as ethnic groups whose traditional territorial homelands lay within the country's modern boundaries, and "nationalities," ethnic groups whose traditional homelands lay outside those boundaries.
That meant that the Yugoslav "nations" were the Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Muslim Slavs, Serbs, and Slovenes. Yugoslavia's "nationalities" were the Albanians, Bulgars, Czechoslovak, Hungarians, Italians, Romanians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Turks, and Ukrainians. Other ethnic groups also present included the Austrians, Germans, Greeks, Gypsies, Jews, Poles, Russians and Romanian Vlachs.
All were entitled to the same rights and freedoms guaranteed all other Yugoslavs in the national Constitution. Yet that was far from the case.
The country had a brief period of light in an otherwise dark recent history when the 1984 Winter Olympics were hosted in Sarajevo, but most of the Olympic buildings have since been destroyed or converted to military installations. I remember those Olympics. Good times. Everyone was so happy, but it was all a facade. Now we look back at that time like a widow talking about her late husband.
Enter a bad, bad guy by the name of Slobodan Milosevic. Depending on who you ask, Milosevic was responsible for the murder if thousands. During his 13 years of power, the people of Yugoslavia saw their country torn apart, and hundreds of thousands of people die. Among those were two of my uncles and three of my cousins.
His speeches attracted huge public support and became rallying cries for Serbs in all parts of Yugoslavia. He went from an unknown Communist puppet to a firebrand of Serbian nationalism. By lifting the lid on the long-standing taboo of national and ethnic rivalries, he reinvented himself as a charismatic leader of the Serbs. He then took control of Serbia's Communist Party from a friend of his in 1989 and became President of Serbia.
If you remember what the Domino Theory is, that nations would fall like dominoes to Communism is the 1950’s and 1960’s if the United States did not act, I think it was just as accurate a -description of how Communism fell and ended in Europe 30 and 40 years later. The Yugoslav Communist Party collapsed in January 1990, around the same time as the many Soviet satellite nations fell to bloodless revolutions. The congress then voted for an end to the one-party system, but Milosevic refused to agree to other reforms. The Slovenian and Croatian delegations walked out, leading to the break-up of the party and splintering a nation.
As Croatia called elections, Milosevic warned that if the Yugoslav nation dissolved, it would be necessary to redraw Serbia's boundaries to include Serbs living in other republics. The prospect of civil war was looming as was a decade of social upheaval, devastation, Civil War.
I was around 20 years old at the time and had no idea what Communism meant. I did not care about politics and detested when my father tried to talk to me about it. My older brother had gone to the United States to study engineering in college a few years earlier, which meant that I bore the brunt of his father’s ideological rants.
My father, a reformed Tito loyalist and current airplane mechanic, chose to make the Croats the object of his scorn and rancor. After Croatia declared independence, the Serb minority in Croatia looked to Milosevic for support. By December 1991, the Yugoslav People's Army and Serbian separatists had taken nearly a third of Croatia's territory. But the cost of the war was high. Soldiers were deserting in their thousands, and suicide was common. Many of Mirko’s classmates and childhood friends were killed or injured. Up to 20,000 people were killed, and 400,000 people made homeless.
It was about this time that my father thought it would be wise to send his second son to America to live with the first. Both boys fought the idea, Brana by letter, me in person. Finally Brana stopped writing and calling home. After more than a year of not hearing from Brana, I won my freedom and got stay. I moved out of his parents’ home and into the home of one of the junior-level goons that worked for his employers in Belgrade.
When Bosnia declared independence in April 1992, following a referendum, violence broke out throughout the republic. Milosevic vowed to defend Serbs from what he called "Croatian genocide" and "Islamic fundamentalism." More than three years of war followed, the bloodiest in Europe since World War II. I saw the effects of the war firsthand. My boss’ son, just a year older than I was at the time, lost part of his right leg below the knee when an artillery shell blew up just a few feet from where he was standing.
I was assigned to drive the injured man around to visit doctors, do his shopping and keep him company. It was not a plum job, but I took it seriously. I spent a lot of time listening to the disgruntled man talk about what was going on in their country and vent his frustrations about the very mixed public sentiments.
Many people, particularly families who were affected by the draft, wanted to see an end to war. But others wanted to protect their Serb brethren in Bosnia, and rallied behind Milosevic. But as the extent of Serbia's war crimes was revealed, Serbia was further isolated as a pariah state by the international community.
I remained unswayed. In the fall of 1992, Brana wrote me a letter asking me to come visit in New York. He was getting married and wanted his little brother to be his best man, but I was not allowed to tell our parents anything about the marriage. I could not wait to see New York. It would be my first trip to the United States and I did not tell his family he was going. Instead I asked my boss, who gave me extra money to pay for my passport and travel papers.
By April 14, 1993, the date on the airplane ticket that my brother had sent him, I had decided that he would stay longer than the planned 10 days. I packed all of his belongings, which consisted of six t-shirts, three dress shirts, a suit, on pair of blue jeans, three pair of slacks, eight pairs of underwear, six pair of socks, one pair of shoes, a toothbrush, a comb and a razor, into a black duffel bag and drove myself to the airport.
I parked as far away from the airport as I could, left the keys on the frontseat and left Yugoslavia forever.
As a teenager, I drove stolen cars from one part of the city to another for local gangsters. Don't worry... they rarely put me in actual danger because they knew I did not have the disposition for a life of hard crime. The local warlords like me, a pudgy teen, because I always smiled and never turned down a job, no matter what time of day or night. But when there was a chance that someone might get shot or the military was applying the heat, they sent me on the safe or tame missions, like going out to get food or gas or even to get supplies to fix up whatever shelled-out office or space they were using as a base .
That does not mean I was able to avoid the violence and turmoil going on around me. Growing up in war-torn Yugoslavia made that impossible.
The country formerly known as Yugoslavia no longer exists. My parents' friends would argue that it never existed and that the name means very little to anyone from that entire region. It’s more like a useless term that groups diverse people under one umbrella name. Like Africa. Before Yugoslavia officially became a nation, the Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Macedonians, and Albanians had virtually independent histories.
The Slovenes have been fighting to preserve their cultural identity for a millennium against a number of the rising and falling empires you learned about in your high school social studies classes. The Croats had their brief shot at independence before falling under Hungarian, Byzantine, Venetian, French, and Austrian rule as well. It seems like everyone had a dynasty in Eurpope but them.
The Serbs had their shot at glory back in the day and briefly rivaled the Byzantine Empire in medieval times. Then came 500 years of Turkish domination before the Serbs won independence in the nineteenth century. Their Montenegrin kinsmen lived in the mountains for centuries under a dynasty of bishop-priests and defended their homeland against foreign aggressors.
The Bosnians did not have geography on their side to protect themselves from external political and religious pressure. Many Bosnians converted to Islam after the Turks invaded and became a nuisance to Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth century.
A hodgepodge of ethnic groups have lived in Macedonia over the centuries. Just as the Ottoman Empire was declining, the region became a pawn among the major European powers.
The disputed Kosovo region, which had been in the news a lot in the last decade, has an Albanian majority and medieval Serbian tradition, yet remained an Ottoman backwater until after the Balkan Wars of the early twentieth century.
Bottom line: no one likes each other.
And with over twenty-five distinct nationalities, Yugoslavia had one of the most complex ethnic profiles in Europe. Over seventy years after Yugoslavia's creation, a peaceful coexistence of these groups within the integrated state was on the brink of collapse.
The Constitution of 1974 divided the country's ethnic groups into two legally classified categories, “nations,” which were defined as ethnic groups whose traditional territorial homelands lay within the country's modern boundaries, and "nationalities," ethnic groups whose traditional homelands lay outside those boundaries.
That meant that the Yugoslav "nations" were the Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Muslim Slavs, Serbs, and Slovenes. Yugoslavia's "nationalities" were the Albanians, Bulgars, Czechoslovak, Hungarians, Italians, Romanians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Turks, and Ukrainians. Other ethnic groups also present included the Austrians, Germans, Greeks, Gypsies, Jews, Poles, Russians and Romanian Vlachs.
All were entitled to the same rights and freedoms guaranteed all other Yugoslavs in the national Constitution. Yet that was far from the case.
The country had a brief period of light in an otherwise dark recent history when the 1984 Winter Olympics were hosted in Sarajevo, but most of the Olympic buildings have since been destroyed or converted to military installations. I remember those Olympics. Good times. Everyone was so happy, but it was all a facade. Now we look back at that time like a widow talking about her late husband.
Enter a bad, bad guy by the name of Slobodan Milosevic. Depending on who you ask, Milosevic was responsible for the murder if thousands. During his 13 years of power, the people of Yugoslavia saw their country torn apart, and hundreds of thousands of people die. Among those were two of my uncles and three of my cousins.
His speeches attracted huge public support and became rallying cries for Serbs in all parts of Yugoslavia. He went from an unknown Communist puppet to a firebrand of Serbian nationalism. By lifting the lid on the long-standing taboo of national and ethnic rivalries, he reinvented himself as a charismatic leader of the Serbs. He then took control of Serbia's Communist Party from a friend of his in 1989 and became President of Serbia.
If you remember what the Domino Theory is, that nations would fall like dominoes to Communism is the 1950’s and 1960’s if the United States did not act, I think it was just as accurate a -description of how Communism fell and ended in Europe 30 and 40 years later. The Yugoslav Communist Party collapsed in January 1990, around the same time as the many Soviet satellite nations fell to bloodless revolutions. The congress then voted for an end to the one-party system, but Milosevic refused to agree to other reforms. The Slovenian and Croatian delegations walked out, leading to the break-up of the party and splintering a nation.
As Croatia called elections, Milosevic warned that if the Yugoslav nation dissolved, it would be necessary to redraw Serbia's boundaries to include Serbs living in other republics. The prospect of civil war was looming as was a decade of social upheaval, devastation, Civil War.
I was around 20 years old at the time and had no idea what Communism meant. I did not care about politics and detested when my father tried to talk to me about it. My older brother had gone to the United States to study engineering in college a few years earlier, which meant that I bore the brunt of his father’s ideological rants.
My father, a reformed Tito loyalist and current airplane mechanic, chose to make the Croats the object of his scorn and rancor. After Croatia declared independence, the Serb minority in Croatia looked to Milosevic for support. By December 1991, the Yugoslav People's Army and Serbian separatists had taken nearly a third of Croatia's territory. But the cost of the war was high. Soldiers were deserting in their thousands, and suicide was common. Many of Mirko’s classmates and childhood friends were killed or injured. Up to 20,000 people were killed, and 400,000 people made homeless.
It was about this time that my father thought it would be wise to send his second son to America to live with the first. Both boys fought the idea, Brana by letter, me in person. Finally Brana stopped writing and calling home. After more than a year of not hearing from Brana, I won my freedom and got stay. I moved out of his parents’ home and into the home of one of the junior-level goons that worked for his employers in Belgrade.
When Bosnia declared independence in April 1992, following a referendum, violence broke out throughout the republic. Milosevic vowed to defend Serbs from what he called "Croatian genocide" and "Islamic fundamentalism." More than three years of war followed, the bloodiest in Europe since World War II. I saw the effects of the war firsthand. My boss’ son, just a year older than I was at the time, lost part of his right leg below the knee when an artillery shell blew up just a few feet from where he was standing.
I was assigned to drive the injured man around to visit doctors, do his shopping and keep him company. It was not a plum job, but I took it seriously. I spent a lot of time listening to the disgruntled man talk about what was going on in their country and vent his frustrations about the very mixed public sentiments.
Many people, particularly families who were affected by the draft, wanted to see an end to war. But others wanted to protect their Serb brethren in Bosnia, and rallied behind Milosevic. But as the extent of Serbia's war crimes was revealed, Serbia was further isolated as a pariah state by the international community.
I remained unswayed. In the fall of 1992, Brana wrote me a letter asking me to come visit in New York. He was getting married and wanted his little brother to be his best man, but I was not allowed to tell our parents anything about the marriage. I could not wait to see New York. It would be my first trip to the United States and I did not tell his family he was going. Instead I asked my boss, who gave me extra money to pay for my passport and travel papers.
By April 14, 1993, the date on the airplane ticket that my brother had sent him, I had decided that he would stay longer than the planned 10 days. I packed all of his belongings, which consisted of six t-shirts, three dress shirts, a suit, on pair of blue jeans, three pair of slacks, eight pairs of underwear, six pair of socks, one pair of shoes, a toothbrush, a comb and a razor, into a black duffel bag and drove myself to the airport.
I parked as far away from the airport as I could, left the keys on the frontseat and left Yugoslavia forever.
posted by Mirko Milutovic @ 9:11 AM
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