[Mazhi]

This is a very quality analysis of 11 "controversies" regarding Yugoslavia's break-up: http://www.gradjanske.org/admin/downloa ... ach?id=264

I read this a while ago, and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. It was written by experts of different national/ethnic backgrounds, and each of the 11 groups had two group leaders. In each case, one of them was a Serb, for reasons which are stated inside.

It's quite a quality and objective analysis, I would say. I'm going to copy/paste the introduction:

Introduction

◆ Charles Ingrao ◆

It was the kind of scene most people would never forget. On 19 March 1988 a
car carrying two British army corporals inadvertently encountered a large funeral
procession that had gathered outside a Belfast cemetery to bury three slain IRA
gunmen. The crowd quickly converged on the men, who were dragged from the
vehicle, beaten, stripped, and then hoisted over a wall just out of sight of security
cameras, where they were summarily executed. Surely the horrific news footage
that flashed on the television screen that evening was not that unusual for British
or Irish viewers. But it left this American observer searching for answers.
Later that evening I wrote to a dear friend and colleague at the University of
Cambridge, who had just arranged for me to spend the following spring there as
a visiting fellow. In the letter I advised him that, upon my arrival in Cambridge,
I would ask him how the nightmare that had gripped Northern Ireland could be
resolved. That moment came ten months later, as we and our wives sat comfortably
around the fireplace in his living room. “Okay, Tim, what is the solution in
Northern Ireland?” Alas, my expectations were dashed by a response that was
quick, laconic, and anticlimactic: “That’s just it, Charlie. There is no solution!”
Perhaps my friend attributed my optimism to the naïveté that often springs
so readily from ignorance. After all, I was a central European historian whose
focus on sectarian conflict centers on the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires rather
than on a country that takes pride in its historic and cultural exceptionalism. He
may have even attributed my search for answers to the maddening syndrome that
afflicts so many Americans who believe that there is a solution to every problem
for those who are willing to invest the time, energy, and resources necessary to
achieve it. Indeed, native New Yorkers like me tend not only to demand answers
but also to ask plaintively why the problem hasn’t already been diagnosed, addressed,
and resolved.
Certainly these were considerations that came to mind during that Cambridge
spring and the rest of 1989 as the iron curtain came down, thereby freeing
the lands and peoples of central Europe to resurrect the very nationalistic agendas

that had earlier helped bring down the Habsburgs and Ottomans. Whereas the
ultimate dissolution of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia may have been inevitable,
it was at least possible to discern a cause for the divisions that have promoted
the creation of ethnically homogenous states—and the erection of divisions that
inure their people against future political or cultural reintegration. Simply put, the
peoples of former multinational polities like the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires
are divided by a common history. With independence, elites across central Europe
have legitimated newly created nation-states by crafting mutually exclusive, proprietary
historical accounts that justify their separate existence. Inevitably, each
narrative employs a different array of “truths,” many of which are either distorted
or blatantly untrue, while carefully excising “inconvenient facts” that promote
the utility of multiethnic coexistence and justify the dissonant narrative or political
agenda of other national groups. The resulting divergent recitations of history
not only unite each new republic’s constituent “state-forming” nationality but
also sow mistrust, resentment, and even hatred between them and other peoples
with whom they had previously coexisted. This has become true between Serbs
and their former wartime adversaries in Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Kosovo.
Yet whereas this volume focuses on competing narratives and memory of
the recent Yugoslav conflicts, it is important for us to appreciate the sheer geographic
breadth of the problem. Certainly it pervades Habsburg central Europe,
dividing Czechs from Germans, Poles from Ukrainians and Jews, and Hungarians
from virtually all of their neighbors; it is equally evident at the other end of
the multiethnic Ottoman world, pitting Turks against Armenians, Israelis against
Palestinians, and Cypriots against each other. But it is also a salient issue worldwide.
Seven decades of historical reflection have not bridged the chasm between
the Japanese and their Chinese and Korean neighbors’ memory of the rape of
Nanjing and thousands of “comfort women.” Nor has a half-century of independence
resolved historical disputes between Indians and Pakistanis over why and
how their subcontinent was partitioned.
In reality, these disputes have more in common than the immediate trauma
inflicted by warfare and crimes against humanity. Aside from the Chinese–Japanese
conflict, they also reflect the consequences of nation-state building in a multiethnic
world, including the construction of rival narratives designed to justify
the process and efficacy of separation. Moreover, all are exacerbated by the difficulty
of confronting myths and inconvenient truths in an age of mass politics—
particularly in democratic societies. Notwithstanding the many positive attributes
of democracy and the almost universal faith that it inspires as an instrument of
societal justice and stability, the greater accountability of popularly elected leaders
mortgages their ability to confront and reconcile competing narratives. This
is not to say that fascist and other authoritarian leaders have not also fastened on
divisive nationalist discourse to strengthen their hold on power, only that they

enjoy much greater leeway in suppressing, modifying, or discrediting it altogether.
Thus the relative ease with which successive Soviet leaders unmasked the
cult of Stalin and the insufficiency of Marxist economics, much as their Chinese
counterparts could acknowledge the excesses of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and,
someday, the thousands of demonstrators killed in Tiananmen Square. Changing
six postwar decades of Japanese schoolbooks has proven far more difficult.1
Thus, we present this volume on the Yugoslav tragedy with the understanding
that the events of the 1990s fit within a much broader, two-century-long continuum
of mass politics and media. The proprietary national narratives that have
emerged have created or intensified tensions between nations and ethnic groups
through the insertion of myths and the exclusion of inconvenient facts. Scholars
have certainly played a significant role in this process, especially during the initial
stages of state creation, to be used by successive generations of elected politicians,
whether to ensure their electoral survival or expand their appeal and power.
Their contribution is clearly visible in the volume’s opening chapter, where proprietary
nationalist narratives provided politicians with the wedge they needed to
split Yugoslavia into pieces. The ensuing decade of conflict has erected further
obstacles through the creation of wartime narratives that have shifted blame to
other protagonists. The international community has been particularly critical of
the failure of Serbia’s newly democratic leaders and free media to acknowledge
the substantial record of war crimes perpetrated by its military, police, and paramilitary
forces. The assertion of some Serbian nationalist politicians that “all
sides sinned equally” has done little to mollify either Serbia’s critics in the West
or its former adversaries. Yet the same can be said of the Bosnian, Croatian,
and Kosovo-Albanian media, political leadership, and publics at large, who are
reluctant to concede even the smallest point of their narratives of victimization
to the Serbian enemy—including the admittedly far less extensive war crimes
committed by their own commanders. Nor has a lengthy string of indictments
for war crimes and even genocide significantly reduced the public adulation of
their wartime military and political leaders—including an unsavory assortment
of common criminals.2 So long as politicians retain a de facto monopoly over
public memory, perception, and interpretation, they will continue to discredit and
marginalize the few independent voices that challenge them. Indeed, there exist
many among the region’s political and media elite who privately concede the corruption
of their vocal majority’s historical accounts but who nonetheless lack the
courage to challenge them.
The Scholars’ Initiative represents an attempt by historians and social scientists
to challenge the tendentious nationalistic narratives that have succeeded so
well in dividing the peoples of central Europe by exposing and discrediting each
belligerent’s myths about the Yugoslav conflicts while simultaneously inserting
indisputable but inconvenient facts known to their former adversaries. Its work is

embodied in the research of eleven teams of historians and social scientists, each
of which was commissioned to focus on the most contentious issues that impede
mutual understanding between the Serbs and their wartime adversaries across the
new territorial and cultural frontiers of former Yugoslavia.
That said, this volume does not pretend to be all things to all people. Although
the research teams have benefited from the enormous amount of extant
documentary evidence and secondary sources, it is impossible to prepare a definitive
account only a decade after the end of the Yugoslav wars; at the very least,
that must await the release of additional memoirs, trial transcripts, and above
all, official state documents currently under seal. Nor does the book pretend to
resolve all of the major controversies that divide the former adversaries and their
advocates, especially in the continued absence of definitive evidence. Instead,
each team has indicated points of agreement, while highlighting the existence
of two or more contradictory explanations or interpretations that require further
research. Far from presenting the final word on the Yugoslav conflicts, we view
this contribution as a first step, an initial installment in a discovery process that
we hope will continue for decades as more evidence is uncovered.
Given limited financial resources and the need to minimize the volume’s
size and cost, we do not pretend to present a comprehensive narrative of all the
key events, personalities, or other developments that one would expect in a truly
comprehensive account. Rather our goal here is to focus on the targeted controversies,
presented in a positivist narrative that is readily accessible to scholars
and laypeople alike. Readers in search of more lengthy analysis may wish to consult
the project Web site,3 which contains rather fuller treatments drafted by the
research teams prior to their abridgement for inclusion in this volume. Limited
space, financial and human resources have also obliged us to bypass or minimize
coverage of some controversies. We have, for example, foregone any attempt
to focus on the Yugoslav conflicts’ pre-Miloševič origins, which surely go back
to World War II, and could be traced to 1389 or even to the medieval or ancient
pedigree of the region’s peoples. We have also given only brief coverage to the
Bosniak–Croat war, having judged—rightly or wrongly—that its legacy presents
less formidable obstacles to reconciliation between those two groups than their
respective conflicts with the Serbs. We have also wholly avoided interethnic tensions
within Macedonia, partly because international engagement and mediation
have limited their domestic impact but also because they are less vested in competing
historical narratives. Finally, the incremental emergence of evidence of
crimes committed against Kosovo’s residual Serb minority since 1999 (particularly
in March 2004), including such “late-breaking stories” as ICTY Prosecutor
Carla del Ponte’s allegations of KLA kidnappings and organ theft deserve to be
studied more thoroughly and judiciously than has proven possible under present
financial and time constraints.4 We do, however, hope to turn to these matters in

the future, much as we invite other scholars to devote their attention to them by
applying some of the methodologies that we have employed here.
One controversy that does not lend itself to abridgement is the dissolution
of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia (SFRY), which has generated far more
scholarship over the past two decades than can be handled definitively in a standard
book chapter. Hence, at the suggestion of political scientist Lenard Cohen,
the project commissioned a special, freestanding volume dedicated exclusively
to the subject that could serve as a resource in the chapter’s preparation and to
which the team authors can refer readers for more detailed information and analysis.
5 In addition, the same team subsequently generated three articles by historian
and political scientist Sabrina Ramet that appeared in two special issues of the
journals Nationalities Papers6 and Südosteuropa,7 which bundled a dozen case
studies and reports by project participants from several teams.
Whereas we have been obliged to be selective in the choice and length of
coverage, other aspects of the project have demanded that we place a premium on
inclusivity. The number of controversies embraced by each research team reflects
a commitment to examining all of those controversies that, in our view, preempt
constructive discourse between the former belligerents. The commitment to inclusivity
has also extended to project participants. Throughout its course, the project
has routinely welcomed any academics, including graduate students, whose curricula
vitae presented the semblance of expertise. In the end not a single successor
state scholar who has sought to join the project has either been denied admission
or been removed. We have, however, felt obliged to make some exceptions to the
project’s “open enrollment” policy. As a scholars’ initiative, we have admitted
virtually none of the many accomplished Western investigative journalists who
have published significant accounts. Given the greater overlap between the two
professions within some of the successor states, we have permitted the participation
of some journalists from the region who hold advanced academic degrees
or university faculty positions. We have also welcomed the heads of research
institutes and repositories who, in some cases, do not have a doctorate in history,
law, or a social science. The need to avoid real or apparent conflicts of interest has
also prevented us from allowing the active participation of successor state scholars
who hold high-level government positions. During the course of our work, no
fewer than a dozen scholars either entered politics or were named to high-level
judicial, diplomatic or foreign policy-making positions, including three scholars
who had already contributed significantly to one of the team reports. Although
most stayed on board and continued to enjoy access to project correspondence,
all were recused from playing an active role in the preparation or criticism of the
team reports after they had been nominated for government positions.

Perhaps our single greatest concern throughout the project has been to sustain
a universal commitment to scholarly methodologies, most notably the impartial
weighing and representation of evidence with maximum transparency.
Toward this end, a detailed prospectus was drafted shortly after the project’s initial
organizational meeting in Morović, Serbia, in September 2001 that clearly
enumerated principles, policies, and procedures for posting on the project Web
site. Thereafter, key decisions were routinely disseminated to all project participants
via e-mail. The research teams first convened in Sarajevo in July 2002 to
draft a research agenda. The team leaders reconvened in Edmonton in September
2003 to present the first of what would become multiple drafts of the team
reports. Throughout this process individual contributions and successive drafts
of reports were routinely discussed at the team level before being passed on to
all project participants, each of whom had the right to make detailed comments
that ranged from fulsome praise to withering criticism. At the conclusion of each
round of criticism, all comments were bundled together and sent in a single email
to every project participant so that s/he could check succeeding drafts for
mandated revisions. Once a report had finally passed muster, it was immediately
distributed to the media and an assortment of regional NGOs, government supporters
in Washington, the EU, and the successor states to promote public awareness
and discussion.
The pursuit of inclusivity, impartiality and transparency necessitated the
aggressive recruitment of scholars from all eight Yugoslav entities, including a
large number of scholars from Serbia, which reflects both its higher population
and the existence of a distinctly Serbian narrative for all eleven controversies.
Moreover, from the beginning, every research team has been codirected by two
scholars, one of whom was invariably an ethnic Serb. This preponderance is evident
in the comprehensive list of scholars that appears in the appendix, which
has been organized by country to document the project’s multilateral posture.
We have done so, however, with the foreknowledge that our project participants
cannot be easily pigeonholed by nationality, particularly the large number who
are fervently antinationalist and highly critical of their regime’s actions during
the Yugoslav wars—including more than a few American and western European
scholars! Moreover, several participants hold dual nationality, whereas others are
natives of one country and citizens of another while living and working in a third.
Nonetheless, we hope that, by articulating project membership by nationality,
we can answer one of the most frequently asked questions that has been posed to
us by laypeople, journalists, government officials, and academics in each of the
successor states.
Nationality is hardly the only attribute that bears on the claim of impartiality.
Funding sources have already been held up to scrutiny and interpreted—or
at least represented—by some within the successor states as evidence of bias. Of

course, most scholars are aware that public foundations generally give money
to proposals they like but never interfere with the compilation of research or the
conclusions derived from it. This was certainly the case with our donors. Nonetheless,
the long list of acknowledgements includes the names of institutions that
will raise eyebrows within the successor states, most notably the Serbian Ministry
of Science, the provincial government of Vojvodina, the U.S. Institute of Peace
(USIP), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).8 If certain donors
have subjected the project to guilt by association, the lack of adequate funding
has posed a problem by limiting the array of languages available for publication
and for posting on the project Web site. Although translations are offered online
in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), its evolution into a trinity of three distinct
languages has made it impossible to obscure the nationality of the individual
translator, in most instances a Serb whose antinationalist credentials have been
insufficient to prevent a priori accusations of bias by some Bosnian, Croatian,
and Albanian readers. Finally, in representing place names in the text, the editors
have taken refuge in the prevailing practice of employing prewar nomenclature
(Kosovo rather than Kosova or Kosovo-Metohija; Priština, not Prishtinë; Foča,
not Srbinje or other postwar innovations employed in Republika Srpska).
The commitment to transparency extends to the presentation of the team
reports, which appear here in chapter format and are prefaced by a roster of all
team members who enjoyed access to every step of the research and writing process.
Because there was a wide variation in levels of participation, the names of
those who actively contributed to the process of shaping the chapter are listed in
boldface; additionally, the chapter masthead is accompanied by a brief team history
that identifies personnel developments, satellite meetings, the apportionment
of research stipends, and specific contributions by individual team members. The
plenary roster of all project participants posted in the appendix likewise distinguishes
between access and activity, while listing the years during which each
scholar joined and, in some cases, left the project.
Finally, we should define the meaning of membership because it does not
necessarily represent active contributions by each individual listed on the plenary
roster or unanimous agreement by all project participants. Rather, it represents
the names of all those scholars who enjoyed open access to the process, with the
right to see and comment on every draft once it left the team and was posted to
the project at large for additional comment and criticism. In reality, many of the
scholars listed on the plenary roster were content to observe (and, in some cases,
ignore) the intensive discussion of team drafts, even though they did not necessarily
agree with everything within them. For sake of greater clarity, we have endeavored
to identify as best we can those scholars who did contribute materially,
whether by commenting, participating in a team or plenary meeting, conducting

interviews or other research, or making a written contribution to any of the successive
drafts or collateral SI publications.
By contrast, team membership represented a closer affiliation with the chapters
that appear in this volume, if only because members had the right to insist
on the inclusion of relevant publications, documentation, or arguments as they
inspected every draft. With one exception, the team leaders and principal authors
worked hard to accommodate team members’ requests, whether by integrating
their contributions or by mentioning the lack of unanimity on some issues and
listing alternative views. In one instance, a principal author who had successfully
pressed for changes in several of the other team drafts withdrew from the project
rather than address criticisms and incorporate contributions by fellow team members.
As a rule, however, the numerous face-to-face meetings between scholars
have been attended by a high degree of mutual respect and collegiality, during
which participants have generally achieved a consensus on the evidence that
governs most major controversies. This is not to say that individual participants
have not sometimes felt uncomfortable about the resolution of one controversy
or another that reflected poorly on their country or national group. Although team
members had the right to insist that the final report address their concerns by representing
their position, perhaps a half dozen chose instead to resign from their
team (and, on occasion, from the project) in order to express either their dissatisfaction
with an interim draft or their apprehension over the consequences that its
eventual publication might have on their career prospects.
The selection of team leaders also requires some explanation. From the very
beginning we have recognized and appreciated the role that Western scholars
could play in this project, whether in facilitating the interactions between their
colleagues from the successor states or in codirecting some of the research teams.
On the surface at least, their greater distance from the horrors of the Yugoslav
wars suggested that it might be easier for them to withstand both the pull of
national loyalties and the pressure of institutional politics. Yet the project has
always been committed to maximizing interaction between successor state scholars
and to securing public acceptance of the SI’s findings within their countries,
which would be best served by promoting a greater sense of ownership in the
process. Hence, our hope to enlist as many successor state scholars as possible to
the point of affording them right of first refusal.
This was not that easy. At the time there were few successor state scholars
with established reputations about a war that had just ended; many who had were
already invested in nationalist discourse that would be hard to revise or repudiate
and, in several cases, committed to careers in government and politics that wholly
foreclosed their participation. We were, however, pleased to discover that there
were many Serbian scholars eager to strike out on a fresh path in conjunction with
their colleagues across the successor states, western Europe, and the Atlantic.

Nor was it particularly difficult finding Croatian and Slovenian scholars, whose
countries had emerged triumphant from the wars and had somewhat greater access
to institutional financial support. Actively engaging Bosnian and Kosovo
Albanian scholars proved much more difficult. One reason was that foreign governments,
international organizations, and NGOs had established literally hundreds
of missions in the postwar Bosnian Federation and Kosovo that offered
alternative income sources for well-educated professionals who were conversant
in English and other western European languages. The SI could not compete with
them with the modest sums at its disposal, with the result that several scholars
in the Federation and Kosovo politely declined our invitations to become team
leaders or research stipendiaries. Another problem was the devastating human
toll that ethnic cleansing had exacted there. From the beginning there was somewhat
less enthusiasm for engaging with Serbian scholars, a reluctance among
Kosovo Albanians that was abetted by the desire to achieve independence from
Belgrade. Hence, whereas we were ultimately able to engage ethnic Serb scholars
to codirect each research team, the final roster of team leaders included prominent
scholars from Albania, Croatia, and Slovenia, together with eight from the U.S.,
Germany, Great Britain, and New Zealand—but none from the Federation or Kosovo.
It is difficult to overstate the effort that they have expended and the contribution
that they have made in producing this volume. The process of revising and
expanding the initial drafts at the Edmonton meeting lasted four years until the
approval of the last of the team reports in the fall of 2007, after which some teams
undertook additional changes in response to comments by four outside referees.
Most reports went through eight to ten drafts before successfully passing through
the highly public and sometimes humbling projectwide review that came to be
known as the Gauntlet. Four reports needed to be totally rewritten, including one
that went through three wholly new drafts, each written by a different team member
until it finally passed muster. A fifth needed to be replaced after the principal
author declined to incorporate contributions by some team members or carry out
changes mandated by the outside referees.
This is not to say that we are as yet wholly satisfied with the product published
here. As stated earlier, we present this volume as a first installment in a process
that will surely benefit from further research, pending access to additional
funding and the appearance of new sources. At this point we invite the reader to
examine what the teams have concluded based on evidence that we have judged
valid. Although we seek a consensus, we also expect criticism, which we regard
as an integral part of this process. We only ask that the criticism be backed by
evidence and logic, not by “patriotic” appeals or special pleading that has no
place in scholarly discourse. We also invite criticism of the project’s design and
implementation, which was actually the most challenging task we faced in bringing
so many scholars together to work toward a common goal.

Nor should other scholars who have not heretofore participated feel that
their only recourse is to criticize either the project or its results from a distance.
Rather, they should feel free to join the process, not only through constructive
criticism but through active participation in the project’s subsequent public outreach—
whether by engaging in future public presentations or by joining in the
research and writing of later updates, whether on the Web or in later published
editions. In return we ask only that their engagement adhere to the same level
of collegiality that has characterized our activities to date. This invitation applies
especially to scholars from the successor states—and, above all, to those
from Bosnia and Kosovo—who we hope will ultimately assume full ownership
of every phase of this enterprise. Admittedly, few Western societies have suffered
so severely from the tyranny of mythmaking and selective memory that cultural
elites have imposed on the public and their elected representatives. Yet we should
all feel an obligation to confront it.