Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide

Introduction

1 Introduction An event from medieval Serbian history permeates present -day Serbian culture and politics. The 1389 battle with the Ottoman Turks on the Field of Kosovo still exerts a powerful influence on the Serbs, who see it as the pivotal moment of their plunge from a prosperous, sovereign medieval Balkan state to a stateless community within the Ottoman Empire, a condition that lasted until the nineteenth century. Even after Serbia became sovereign in 1878 and formed the core of the Yugoslav union in 1918, the memory of the 1389 battle remained vivid to the Serbs. Many observers have noticed the intensity of the memory of that distant battle; an anthropologist described its commemoration five and a half centuries later: In the hinterland of Dalmatia, especially in the Knin area, one can hear a kind of a moaning song, a primitive archaic intonation, consisting of the well-known doleful modulations of the sounds o-oy. . . . A few peasants, usually in a tavern, put their heads together and let their sorrowful modulations sound for hours, which constitutes a very grotesque sight for a European. And if they are asked why they sing like this, they give the answer: the lament for Kosovo!1 The Swiss sociologist Norbert Elias points out that significant loss of power is always a traumatic event: It is a proven fact that the members of states and other social units which have lost their claim to a position of highest rank in the elimination struggles of their day often require a long time, even centuries, to come to terms with this changed situation and the 2 | Introduction consequent lowering of their self-esteem. And perhaps they never manage it. Britain in the recent past is a moving example of the difficulties a great power of the first rank has had in adjusting to its sinking to being a second- or third-class power.2 The loss of power was particularly traumatic for the Serbs. Not only did Serbia lose the status of a regional power, it completely disappeared as a political entity. The Serbs became second-class subjects of the sultan. This condition lasted from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, during which time the Serbs assiduously cultivated myths of their great past and a great future. Like other countries that reemerged as sovereign nation-states in the nineteenth century after a long period of foreign domination or political fragmentation, Serbia displayed a strong expansionist trend. In the words of George Kennan, ‘‘it was hard for people who had recently achieved so much, and this so suddenly, to know where to stop. Dreams of new glories to flow from new territorial expansion bemused many minds. The air was clouded by visions of a greater this or that: a ‘greater Serbia,’ a ‘greater Bulgaria,’ and so on.’’3 Serbia’s expansionist drive was evident in the outbreak of the two Balkan Wars in 1912–13, and although Serbia did not cause the First World War, the 1914 murder in Sarajevo it sponsored in order to destabilize the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (which stood in the way of its northward and westward expansion) provoked the conflict. It would be an error to assume that the memory of the Serbian medieval empire necessarily led to the latest war for a Greater Serbia, but equally erroneous to deny a connection between the two. The myths and legends created soon after the Battle of Kosovo were reinvigorated by the Serbian intelligentsia to fan their compatriots ’ nationalist passions in the 1980s. The myths dealing with the loss of the medieval empire served to create a nationalist frenzy at the moment when the anticipated breakdown of the postwar order imposed by the communists and the Serbian domination of communist Yugoslavia’s armed forces (the fourth largest in Europe) seemed to provide a unique opportunity for the realization of the central promise of Serbian national mythology—the creation of the Second Serbian Empire. Introduction | 3 Myths have played an essential role in other twentieth-century genocidal campaigns as well. After the combination of fear, hatred, and imperialist ambitions fueled by myths and lies led to the Nazi and Fascist aggressions, a serious effort was made to understand the spread of these movements in terms of the type of persons who supported them. The best-known attempt of this kind yielded the F-scale (F stands for Fascist), which was supposed...