BosNet ARTICLE: A Final Solution (The New Republic)
Vanja Filipovic
B o s N e t - May 6, 1999
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THE NEW REPUBLIC: MAY 10, 1999 : 29
A Final Solution
0n June 12, 1990, one of the most important Serbian intellectuals of the
twentieth century was laid to rest in Belgrade. His name was Vasa
Cubrilovic, and his funeral was attended by a who's who of Serbian academia
and politics. The dean of Belgrade University's College of Philosophy and a
member of the Serbian presidency, who spoke on behalf of Slobodan
Milosevic's government, gave eulogies. "The work that he left behind marks
him as one of the giants of our era" said one official. "He was a man of
understanding and negotiation. "The front-page obituary in the state-run
newspaper Borba said Cubrilovic's "name will be noted in his- tory as one
of the most important people of this country." President Slobodan Milosevic
couldn't attend the funeral, but he did send a telegram to Cubrilovic's
family.
Who was Vasa Cubrilovic to receive all these honors?
Born in 1897, Cubrilovic was a 17-year-old member of the Serbian
nationalist group that staged the 1914 assassination of Archduke Francis
Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Spared execution because of his age, Cubrilovic
spent World War I in prison and then returned to Belgrade to study and work
in the government of what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and
Slovenes. By the 1930s, he was a professor of history at Belgrade
University, where he taught for 40 years, eventually becoming the head of
his department and later the director of the prestigious Serbian Academy of
Arts and Sciences Institute for Balkan Stud-ies. In that time, he assembled
a body of historical research on Serbian political thought that has been
hailed even by American academics. And Cubrilovic was the author of vicious
plans to rid Yugoslavia of the Kosovar Albanians.
Cubrilovic first presented his ideas to the Serbian Cultural Club, an
organization of Belgrade intellectuals. On March 7,1937, he submitted "The
Expulsion of the Albanians" to the government as a secret memorandum. "From
1918 onwards it was the task of our present state to destroy the remainder
of the Albanian triangle [Kosovo]. It did not do this, Cubrilovic wrote.
"The only way and the only means to cope with them is the brute force of an
organized state." Cubrilovic suggested that Albania and Turkey would be the
best places to ship Kosovar Albanians. But, if Tirana objected to the
deportation, "the Albanian Government should be informed that we shall stop
at nothing to achieve our final solution to this question." Cubrilovic
explained that "to bring about the relocation of a whole population, the
first prerequisite is the creation of the suitable psychosis.' This, he
said, .can be created in many ways' "including bribing and threatening the
Albanian clergy, propaganda, and "coercion by the state apparatus," a
concept he explained at length:
The law must be enforced to the letter so as to make staying intolerable
for the Albanians: fines, and imprisonment, the ruthless application of all
police dispositions, such as the prohibition of smuggling, cutting forests,
damaging agriculture, leaving dogs unchained, compulsory labor and any
other measure that an experienced police force can contrive.
>From the Economic aspect: The refusal to recognize the old land deeds,...
requisitioning of all state and communal pastures,... the withdrawal of
permits to exercise a profession, dismissal from the state, private and
communal offices, etc., will hasten the process of their removal.... When
it comes to religion the Albanians are very touchy, therefore they must be
harassed on this score, too. This can be achieved through ill-treatment of
their clergy, the destruction of their clergy, the destruction of their
cemeteries, the prohibition of polygamy, and especially the inflexible
application of the law compelling girls to attend elementary schools,
wherever they are .... We should distribute weapons to our colonists, as
need be.... In particular, a tide of Montenegrins should be launched from
the mountain pastures in order to create a large-scale conflict with the
Albanians in [Kosovo]. This conflict should be prepared by means of our
trusted people. It should be encouraged and this can be done more easily
since, in fact, Albanians have revolted, while the whole affair should be
presented as a conflict between clans and, if need be, ascribed to economic
reasons. Finally, local riots can be incited. These will be bloodily
suppressed with the most effective means.... There remains one more means,
which Serbia employed with great practical effect after 1878, that is, by
secretly burning down villages and city quarters.
"My first thought when I read [Cubrilovic's 1937 memo]," says Charles
Jelavich, a professor emeritus of history at Indiana University and an
acquaintance of Cubrilovies since 1949, "was, my God, I think Milosevic
read this and said, "I'm going to implement this plan." Still, some Slavic
studies scholars and former acquaintances of Cubrilovic argue that, in
light of what was happening in Europe and Russia in the 30's, this ghastly
vision was not as extreme as it sounds today. "I think most of these things
should be put in the proper context," says Bosko Spasojevic of the Open
Society Institute in Budapest, who was once a teaching assistant at
Belgrade University, where he knew Cubrilovic. "At that time in Europe
things like this were solved in very radical, cruel ways" Indeed,
Cubrilovic wrote: "The world today has grown used to things much worse than
this, and it should not be a cause for concern. At a time when Germany can
expel tens of thousands of Jews and Russia can shift millions of people
from one part of the continent to another, the shifting of a few hundred
thousand Albanians will not lead to the outbreak of a world war."
Although parts of Cubrilovic's plan were put into effect during the 30's,
World War II temporarily interrupted any mass deportation. But, after
Soviet troops liberated Belgrade in late 1944, Cubrilovic, who spent part
of the war in a German prison camp, submitted another plan to Yugoslavia's
new Communist leader, Josip Broz Tito. This second document, "The Minority
Problem in the New Yugoslavia," advocated the expulsion of not just Kosovar
Albanians but all of Yugoslavia's minorities. "Yugoslavia can achieve peace
and ensure development only if it becomes ethnically pure" he wrote. The
army should "systematically and without mercy cleanse the minorities of
these regions, which we want to settle with our own national element." He
advocated taking advantage of the war chaos to help "ethnically conquer"
Kosovo: "That which in peaceful times takes decades and centuries in time
of war will be accomplished in a matter of months and years." He also
called for concentration camps, the development of a complicated government
bureaucracy to conduct ethnic cleansing, and stressed that "[t]he hatred
and irresistible wish of our masses to do away with minorities must be
utilized in a constructive way," for "[i]t may be that we might never again
have such an opportunity in order to make our state ethnically pure."
It tells you something about the sincerity of Tito's "brotherhood and
unity" slogan that he invited Cubrilovic to serve as a federal minister
from 1945 to 1951. During this period, the Tito government did send tens of
thousands of Albanians to Turkey and, according to some estimates, executed
tens of thousands more.
Yet some say that, by the time of his death in 1990, Cubrilovic had
mellowed and no longer believed in the brutal solutions he had once
advocated. "I think he was afraid of what [post-Tito nationalism] would
unleash, " says Norman Cigar, who is completing a study of the infamous
1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
intellectuals' manifesto that became the inspiration for Milosevic-era
Serbian nationalism. "He was dead against the memo' "says Cigar. "He said
it was going to lead to bloodshed " However, at the same time Cubrilovic
was predicting that the memorandum would break up Yugoslavia, he also
threatened that blood would be spilled if Kosovar Albanians sought
independence.
Whatever intellectual shifts he may have gone through at the end of his
life, Cubrilovic had created an ideological monster he could no longer
control. Shortly after his death, The Collected Historical Studies by Vasa
Cubrilovic was trotted out by nationalist Serbs to bolster the case for the
wars that Milosevic later launched.
Confronted today with more than half a million deportees and reports of
unspeakable violence, many in the West wonder at the lack of dissent among
Serbian intellectuals. But, as Cubrilovic's work shows, the historical
rationale for ethnic cleansing has been provided by some of the most
respected academics in Serbia. The present generation of Belgrade scholars
is hardly different. As Miranda Vickers, the author of Between Serb and
Albanian, puts it, "The more educated the Serbs are, the more nationalist
they become."
During the Milosevic era, Dusan Batakovic, a Belgrade University historian,
has emerged as the leading advocate for the minority Serb population in
Kosovo. Like many nationalist writers, though, his scholarship seems
clouded by a wildly chauvinistic reading of Serbian history. He notes that
the Kosovar Albanian intelligentsia consists of "semi-intellectuals capable
of taking in only a limited number of ideas. " He writes that during World
War II some 100,000 Albanians immigrated to Kosovo under a secret Italian
resettlement policy. (The Axis powers occupied Albania during the war.) In
Kosovo: A Short History, however, Noel Malcolm exposes this assertion as
"pure fantasy." He writes, "No evidence of any such mass migration during
the war can be found in any of the documents of the occupying powers'
Writing about the deportation of Kosovars to Turkey in theories, Batakovic
insists that mainly ethnic Mirks were sent and that the number of Albanians
was "negligible. " He fails to mention that, before the deportation,
Albanians were coerced into declaring themselves as Turks (the number of
"Turks" in Kosovo increased by 2,500 percent in six years). Today, this
spurious "researcher" is a widely respected historian, and it is said he
will likely follow in Cubrilovic's footsteps and be named director of the
Institute for Balkan Studies.
Yet Cubrilovic's true legacy may be what is now happening in Kosovo the
enactment of his decades-old blueprint for ethnic cleansing through
Milosevic's meticulously planned Operation Horseshoe. "NATO didn't realize
that this 'Cubrilovic syndrome of the 1930s was still active in the 1990s,
says Vickers. "But the Serbs have always said, "We don't want Albanians
living with us". There's no hypocrisy on their part."
RYAN LIZZA
THE NEW REPUBLIC: MAY 10, 1999 : 29
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