Jewish Affairs - South African Jewish Board of Deputies

JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012OBSERVATIONS ON SERBS, JEWS ANDISRAELIS: A PLEA FOR UNDERSTANDING*Richard BurnsThe geo-historical zone of the Balkans isnotoriously full of contradictions. Yet, a fullerunderstanding of current and recent attitudes andpolicies in each of the Balkan nations vis-à-visboth Jews and Israel is called for. In order tocreate an intelligible composite picture, it isnecessary to develop a series of studies of each ofthe Balkan nations, including and most importantthe newly independent political entities thatemerged during the 1990s on the ruins ofYugoslavia.As if anyone needed reminding, theparadigmatic relevance of the Balkans to globalpolitics is indelibly marked by the fact that theWorld War I was triggered in 1914 by theassassination of the Austrian Archduke FranzFerdinand by the Yugoslav nationalist GavriloPrincip on a Sarajevo street corner. In whatfollows, however complex the issues, it is arguedthat the Balkans needs to remain a key region forIsrael-watchers to watch, especially bearing inmind the expansion of strict Wahabi and extremistIslam in Bosnia-Hercegovina since the 1990s.When it comes to the Balkans, there has neverbeen much value in making sweepinggeneralisations. For example, truths that apply tothe contemporary (Former Yugoslav Republicof) Macedonia are evidently irrelevant tocontemporary Bosnia. Details, even if not exactlypossessors of proverbial devils, are vitallyimportant both historically and in thecontemporary context and should never beunderestimated or dismissed as ‘merely local’phenomena. The Balkans have always been apatchwork quilt, and therefore notoriouslydifficult to understand in terms of languages,religions, cultures and politics. And never moreso than today, for the evident reason that, sincethe collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, theBalkans have been systematically re-balkanised,both by their indigenous political leaders and bythe strenuous efforts of the determiners of NATOpolicies.I believe that to build up such an understanding,Richard Burns is a UK-based writer, editor, poetand lecturer, who has lived and worked for asignificant period in the Balkans. His first book ofpoetry, The Easter Rising, was published in 1967.He was educated at University College – Londonand lectured at Cambridgeshire College of Artsand Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University).state-by-state, is of crucial importance not onlybecause of the geographical proximity of theBalkan Peninsula to Israel, but because each oneof the various independent political entities andcorresponding nationalisms that have emergedsince the fall of Yugoslavia impinges in a slightlydifferent way both on Israel and on Jewsthroughout the world. The situation is made allthe more complex by the rapid and almostsynchronous collapse, in the early 1990s, of allCommunist regimes throughout the region,especially the fall of NicolaeinRomania in December 1990. Hence the need toexamine changes in attitude and policy in bothRumania and Bulgaria too.Various current Western myths also needquestioning and exploding, and complex situationsthat have been oversimplified in a facile manner,possibly for ephemeral political convenience, needto be accurately restated with proper recognitionof their intricacies. Aside from the deliberateconstruction of myths for ideological purposes,even dialectical thinking that is honourablymotivated by the search for truth all too easilygets distorted by simplification. What followscan be no more than a set of preliminary forayswith these factors in mind.Since the early 1990s, when several of theleading NATO powers were actively fosteringthe dissolution of Yugoslavia, notably the USAand Germany – culminating in the RambouilletAgreement in 1999 – Serbia has tended to bemisunderstood and maligned in the Westernmedia; and an antipathetic, even evil stereotypehas been fostered in the popular European andAmerican imagination, with Slobodanfiguring as the prime bogey, and the Bosnian Serbmassacre of Bosnian Moslems at Srebrenica asthe main emotive trigger. Since ’s deathin 2006, this bugbear-figure has been replaced byanother, also a prisoner of the International Courtin The Hague, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan. Atrocities committed by Serbs inKosovo and Bosnia are undeniable. However,their opponents in the various conflicts of the1990s have also been responsible for war crimesranging from rapes, murders and beheadings (inBosnia-Hercegovina), to desecration of religioussites (in Bosnia and Kosovo) and forced migrationof entire communities (in the Krajina). However,for reasons that in retrospect appear no lessirrational, prejudiced and hard to explain than the26