Serbs, Jews and Israelis: A Plea for Understanding

(Author: Richard Burns, Vol. 67, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2012)

• Feature image: Flag of Jews in Serbia. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Jews_in_Serbia.png

The geo-historical zone of the Balkans is notoriously full of contradictions. Yet, a fuller understanding of current and recent attitudes and policies in each of the Balkan nations vis-à-vis both Jews and Israel is called for. In order to create an intelligible composite picture, it is necessary to develop a series of studies of each of the Balkan nations, including and most important the newly independent political entities that emerged during the 1990s on the ruins of Yugoslavia.

As if anyone needed reminding, the paradigmatic relevance of the Balkans to global politics is indelibly marked by the fact that the World War I was triggered in 1914 by the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip on a Sarajevo street corner. In what follows, however complex the issues, it is argued that the Balkans needs to remain a key region for Israel-watchers to watch, especially bearing in mind the expansion of strict Wahabi and extremist Islam in Bosnia-Hercegovina since the 1990s.

When it comes to the Balkans, there has never been much value in making sweeping generalisations. For example, truths that apply to the contemporary (Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia are evidently irrelevant to contemporary Bosnia. Details, even if not exactly possessors of proverbial devils, are vitally important both historically and in the contemporary context and should never be underestimated or dismissed as ‘merely local’ phenomena. The Balkans have always been a patchwork quilt, and therefore notoriously difficult to understand in terms of languages, religions, cultures and politics. And never more so than today, for the evident reason that, since the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the Balkans have been systematically re-balkanised, both by their indigenous political leaders and by the strenuous efforts of the determiners of NATO policies.

I believe that to build up such an understanding, state-by-state, is of crucial importance not only because of the geographical proximity of the Balkan Peninsula to Israel, but because each one of the various independent political entities and corresponding nationalisms that have emerged since the fall of Yugoslavia impinges in a slightly different way both on Israel and on Jews throughout the world. The situation is made all the more complex by the rapid and almost synchronous collapse, in the early 1990s, of all Communist regimes throughout the region, especially the fall of Nicolae  in Romania in December 1990. Hence the need to examine changes in attitude and policy in both Rumania and Bulgaria too.

Various current Western myths also need questioning and exploding, and complex situations that have been oversimplified in a facile manner, possibly for ephemeral political convenience, need to be accurately restated with proper recognition of their intricacies. Aside from the deliberate construction of myths for ideological purposes, even dialectical thinking that is honourably motivated by the search for truth all too easily gets distorted by simplification. What follows can be no more than a set of preliminary forays with these factors in mind.

Since the early 1990s, when several of the leading NATO powers were actively fostering the dissolution of Yugoslavia, notably the USA and Germany – culminating in the Rambouillet Agreement in 1999 – Serbia has tended to be misunderstood and maligned in the Western media; and an antipathetic, even evil stereotype has been fostered in the popular European and American imagination, with Slobodan figuring as the prime bogey, and the Bosnian Serb massacre of Bosnian Moslems at Srebrenica as the main emotive trigger. Since  ’s death in 2006, this bugbear-figure has been replaced by another, also a prisoner of the International Court in The Hague, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan. Atrocities committed by Serbs in Kosovo and Bosnia are undeniable. However, their opponents in the various conflicts of the 1990s have also been responsible for war crimes ranging from rapes, murders and beheadings (in Bosnia-Hercegovina), to desecration of religious sites (in Bosnia and Kosovo) and forced migration of entire communities (in the Krajina). However, for reasons that in retrospect appear no less irrational, prejudiced and hard to explain than the psycho-political nexus of antisemitism itself, negative prejudice against Serbs has become standard in the West. Consonant with this closed circuit of belief arousing suspicion, suspicion feeding accusation, and accusation creating more belief, far less attention has been paid in the West to atrocities committed by Croats, Bosnian Moslems and Albanian-speaking Kosovars against Serbs. Moreover, Serbs have been said by numerous influential Western political analysts and journalists to have a ‘persecution complex’, an accusation likely to be quite familiar to politically astute Israelis, and liable to raise sceptical eyebrows among such observers.¹

For these complex and circuitous reasons, in recent years many Serbs have grown increasingly sympathetic towards Jews and Israel, to the extent that they have tended actually to identify their own country’s ostracisation, vilification and even ‘demonisation’ – by Western politicians, media and political theorists – with traditional antisemitism. Non-coincidentally, during this entire period, to the best of my knowledge, Serbia has striven to foster a philosemitic and pro-Israel policy.

By contrast, the first President of independent Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, who was never directly opposed by Western regimes, was an explicit antisemite and Holocaust denier and ran a government that was no more democratic than that of . His supporters included previous Ustaše members in exile in Canada, Australia, Argentina and other countries, and their families, some of whom returned to fight against Serbs during the collapse of Yugoslavia and have remained in Croatia since.

As for Bosnia-Hercegovina, an international Mujahedin regiment was assiduously assembled to fight in the Bosnian war, which lasted from 1992 to 1995. Their presence was welcomed by Bosnian president Alija Izetbegoviæ and there are plentiful records of his meetings with Mujahedin, including members of al-Qaeda. Those Mujahedin who rallied to Bosnia included radicalised Moslem students born and educated in various European countries and bearing passports of EU member states, including the UK. Al-Qaeda leaders were clear in their policy towards the Bosnian war: they treated it as a preparation ground for international Jihad. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden’s second-in-command, is reputed to have co-ordinated several Mujahedin operations in Bosnia-Hercegovina through the fronts of charity organisations, and to have visited Sarajevo. His brother Zaiman al-Zawahiri is thought to have worked for the CIA against the Serbs in Kosovo. The most superficial browsing of the Internet indicates accumulated evidence of this kind, even bearing in mind the necessity for caution about the reliability of such material. The financing for ’s overall war effort and in particular for Moslem extremists in Bosnia also needs further investigation and identification.

Fairly reliable western investigations point to banks and NGOs operating in Bosnia, with funding sources in Islamic countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt, Algeria, Iran and Sudan, and with links ranging from al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Egyptian terrorist group Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya and other Moslem organisations identified in the USA as ‘suspected of terrorism’, to the Saudi royal family and the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence & Security.²

Since the end of the Bosnian war, large investments have been made in Bosnia- Hercegovina by Saudi-Arabia, for example in the building of the large King Fahd Mosque in Sarajevo. The previously ‘European’, easy-going, urbane Bosnian version of Islam has been progressively radicalised by far stricter Wahabi educational programmes and conversion campaigns, sponsored primarily by investment from Saudi-Arabia and the Gulf States.³

Because the relevance of these indicators to Israel cannot be underestimated, especially those that reflect the rise of Islamic extremism, it would be salient in a series of studies such as those I propose, to explore the histories of the treatments of Jewish communities in each of the Balkan nations, with respect to patterns of both antisemitism and philosemitism.

In this context, the period of the occupation of Greece and former Yugoslavia during the Second World War by the Nazis and their Fascist Italian and Bulgarian allies needs special and careful reexamination and re-analysis. This applies likewise to the persecution of Jews, Serbs, Roma and Communists by the Ustaša regime in wartime Croatia, not to mention the enlistment and deployment of Bosnian, Albanian and volunteer Arab (Moslem) soldiers in Croatia in the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1943-44), and the key role in its formation by Hitler’s trusted ally, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin el-Hussein, who visited Bosnia on Hitler’s instructions in 1943. Properly contextualised analysis of all these historical facts and their underlying patterns should inform and underpin current Israeli policies.

Here follow some relevant notes on wartime persecution of Jews in Croatia and Serbia.

In the immediate wake of the Nazi invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ was established as a pro-Nazi government. Its ideology was concocted from a mixture of Nazism, Italian Fascism and an extremist local form of Roman Catholic fanaticism. The Ustaša dictatorship inaugurated its racial policies as soon as it came into power. Between August 1941 and April 1945, the systematic annihilation of all Serbs, Jews and Roma living within the Croatian borders, as well as of anti-Fascists of many ethnicities, took place at the death camp known as Jasenovac, a complex of five major and three smaller ‘special’ camps, spread out over 240km² in south-central Croatia. The word jasen means ‘ash tree’.

Estimates of the total numbers of men, women and children killed at Jasenovac range from 70 000 to 700 000. It will never be possible to establish accurate figures. The Jasenovac regime so far exceeded that of the Nazi camps in its barbarism and savagery that even German officials claimed to be shocked. Whereas an almost predictable, factory-like, organised monotony prevailed in the camps run by Germans, the Jasenovac authorities specialised in vengeful unpredictability and ‘artistic’ variation and inventiveness in the application of torture and murder. It might even be argued that in their concentration camps across Europe, the Nazis perfected a perversion of Taylorism in their precise and impersonal organization of their ‘production lines’ – the principal ‘end-product’ being the ‘commodity’: death. In contrast, the Ustaše officers and guards who ran Jasenovac vied to refine their methods of barbaric torture and infliction of horrendous deaths with an enthusiasm tantamount to relish. One might even go so far as to suggest that they perfected a refinement of ‘cruelty for cruelty’s sake’: that is to say, a kind of extreme sadistic perversion of ‘art for art’s sake’. Thus General von Horstenau, Hitler’s representative in Zagreb, wrote in his personal diary for 1942 that the Ustaša camps in Croatia were “the epitome of horror” and Arthur Hefner, a German transport officer for work forces in the Reich, wrote on November 11, 1942: “The concept of the Jasenovac camp should actually be understood as several camps which are several kilometres apart, grouped around Jasenovac. Regardless of the propaganda, this is one of the most horrible of camps, which can only be compared to Dante’s Inferno.”⁴

The Ustaše worked in active collaboration with Catholic priests and deployed Bosnian Moslem guards as well as Croat Catholics Those systematically exterminated were Jews, Roma, Communists and Orthodox Christian Serbs.⁵ The full story of the crimes committed at the Ustaša concentration camp of Jasenovac is unlikely ever to be told because of the razing of the site immediately after the war by Tito’s Partisans, a questionable act whose spurious and hidden political motivation has been debated ever since. Nor has the scale of Jasenovac ever been fully admitted by successive government authorities, let alone systematically investigated, either during the post-war Tito era (1945-1980) or during the post-Tito period when Croatia was still part of Yugoslavia (1980-1991). After the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation, obfuscation continued under the presidency of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman (1991-2000), who was notorious for his antisemitism, statements of Holocaust denial and revisionism. Thus, deliberate and systematic attempts to shroud or whitewash truth, destroy evidence and make the site unreadable have been made by successive authorities and regimes.

However since 2000, thanks in large part to pressure on Croatia from the European Union, under the presidency of Stipe  (2000-2009), a former Communist and the final president of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia, some progress has been made in the direction of admitting that the crimes did take place.

While, during World War II in Croatia, the persecutors of Jews were Catholic Croats and Bosnian and Albanian Moslems, in Serbia the situation was entirely different. The persecutors, terrorisers and murderers were the Nazi occupiers, and in the south Bulgarian forces. There were many Nazi mass executions of Serbs, Jews, Roma and Communists, for example nearly 3000 men, women and boys in and around the town of Kragujevac in central Serbia between 19-21 October, 1941.⁶⁶ A brilliantly informative and sympathetic monograph on the way of life of the Jews of Kragujevac.

The extermination of prisoners by gassing, which was later applied in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe, was first tried out experimentally in Serbia. Serbian Jews, many of them, women and children, were murdered by Nazi military drivers on Serbian roads in specially designed transportation lorries. The detailed histories of the two concentration camps run in Serbia by the Nazis, Sajmište and Banjica, still need to be fully researched and documented, that is, if it is not by now too late to do so.⁷

The majority of Serbs, of widely varied and even opposed political persuasions, ranging from royalist  to Communists, detested the Nazi occupation and opposed it whether actively or passively. Resistance by patriotic  groups began in July 1941, very soon after the Nazi invasion in April 1941 and before any Communist actions. The situation was extremely complicated, however and a relatively small sector of the Serbian population was involved in active collaboration with the Nazis, including the rightwing nationalist followers of Dimitrije , the Srpski dobrovoljaki odred [‘Serbian Volunteer Detachment’].

In 1989, a major exhibition entitled Jews in Yugoslavia, toured the state capitals of Zagreb, Sarajevo and Belgrade. According to its catalogue, before the 1941 Nazi invasion 75 000 Jews lived in Yugoslavia. Of these, only 15000 survived, over half of whom later immigrated to Israel. But 5000 Jews either fought as partisans or were members of resistance organisations, that is, 67% of the pre-war population, a marginally higher proportion than for the country as a whole. These figures help not only to explain the high regard accorded to Yugoslavia’s Jewish community from 1945 until the collapse of the Yugoslav Federation (1989-1992), but also to give the lie to the myth that Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe simply went like lambs to the slaughter. Some Yugoslav Jews later rose to high positions of power under Tito, for example Moše Pijade from Serbia and the Slovenian Edvard Kardelj. Conversely, I have never come across evidence to suggest that Jews suffered more repression or violation of human rights under Communism than anyone else, especially in Tito’s early years before the break with Stalin in 1948 and Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform.

Facts that are not known, however, and remain to be researched, are the precise fates and numbers of non-Communists of all ethnic and religious groups who, though in no way collaborators or supporters of either Fascism or Nazism, perished at the end of the war during the period of ‘liberation’ by Russians and Titoist partisans (1945). It is suspected that many thousands were eliminated in this way. In Serbia, to my direct personal knowledge, it has only recently become acceptable even to talk with any degree of openness about this insidious and largely invisible purge of all possible and potential opponents to Communism.

I believe that a proper understanding of the relations between Jews and speakers of Slavonic languages is unlikely to be achieved without detailed deconstruction of the etymology and concepts underlying the complex nexus of ideas embraced in the pan-Slavic word narod.⁸ This word is interpreted as ‘people’, ‘race’ and ‘nation’. Such an analysis would need to include the enormously complex ways that Serbo-Croatian (i.e. Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian) words such as narod and narodnost (meaning not simply ‘nationality’ but also something approximating to ‘ethnicity’, ‘ethno-religious group’ and ‘ethnoreligious affiliation’) have been socialized and institutionalised in individual consciousness before, during, and after Communism.⁹ In the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the terms narod and narodnost appeared in various legal decrees, in attempts to delineate citizens’ rights for what we might now call ‘ethnic minorities’. Exploration of terms like these would present insights into the conceptual and linguistic underpinning of attitudes about race in general and anti- and philosemitism in particular

In post-Titoist Yugoslavia, where I lived from 1987 to 1990, I never once experienced the slightest hint of antisemitism from anybody I came in contact with. In that time, I lived mainly in Belgrade, but visited all the Republics and the two autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo. At that time, Jews were fully integrated into all aspects of civic, cultural and political life.

Leading Serbian-Jewish intellectuals like the poet Oskar  (1909-1989), the scholar and actor Eugen Verber (1923-1996), and novelists Danilo Kiš (1935-1989) and Filip David (b. 1940) were (and still are) honoured and admired.¹⁰ This kind of information is of more than incidental relevance.

However, attitudes to Yugoslavia’s own Jews were not necessarily consonant with those towards Israel. Along with other leaders like Sukarno (Indonesia), Nehru (India), and Nasser (Egypt), Tito had been a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, whose first meeting took place in Belgrade in 1961. This movement was by-andlarge sympathetic to the PLO. However, in the 1980s, I believe that subtle and gradual shifts occurred in Yugoslav foreign policy. The first time I visited Yugoslavia in 1981, as a lecturer on a British Council summer course for teachers of English, I witnessed a large and noisy pro-PLO demonstration in Marx and Engels Square in the centre of Belgrade, following Israel’s response to rocket attacks on northern Israeli settlements by bombing PLO positions in southern Lebanon. In the following years, as a British poet, I became a regular guest at the International October Writers’ Meeting in Belgrade. In 1987, for the first time since the foundation of that event in 1964, an Israeli writer, Jakov Orland, was on the guest-list. In the following October, I met two more Israeli writers, Abraham Hus and Aviv Ekroni. When it comes to international relations, cultural friendship-visits often precede political rapprochements. I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on Israel’s accords with other Balkan countries, but believe that Israel would do well to continue fostering cordial relations with Serbia, as with other Balkan nations.

Richard Burns is a UK-based writer, editor, poet and lecturer, who has lived and worked for a significant period in the Balkans. His first book of poetry, The Easter Rising, was published in 1967. He was educated at University College – London and lectured at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University).

Notes

1. As a typical example, see the BBC report (consulted 26/ 8/2001): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/ from_our_ own_correspondent/117628.stm2010.
2. http://www.sina.ba/index.php?option=com_content& view=article&id=115:daily-reports-on-role-of-b-hbanks-in-terrorist-financing-&catid=39:archive&Itemid=57, consulted August 26, 2010.
3. Gradual Islamisation, with funds being poured in from the Middle East, is not of course confined to Bosnia. It has been happening for years all over Europe, not least in the UK.
4. See the website of the Jasenovac Research Institute, accessed August 2007.
5. The testament of Braco Danon (2000), a prisoner who escaped in 1941 at the age of eighteen, and then joined the partisans, is among the most sickening (and moving) accounts of the Holocaust I have come across (The Smell of Human Flesh, a Witness of the Holocaust – Memories of Jasenovac, tr. Vidisava Jankovi, published in both English and Serbian versions, Belgrade, 2000). Danon, the last known Jewish survivor of Jasenovac in Serbia, died in 2009. I was privileged to meet him in Belgrade in 2007
6. A brilliantly informative and sympathetic monograph on the way of life of the Jews of Kragujevac, which also deals with that community’s destruction in 1941, has been written by Staniša and Millomir  (Jevreji u Kragujevacu [The Jews of Kragujevac], 2011). See also Richard Berengarten, The Blue Butterfly, Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2008, especially pp. 114f
7. A book entitled The Crimes of the Fascist Occupants and Their Collaborators against Jews in Yugoslavia was published in 1957 by the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Belgrade. This volume, the so-called ‘Black Book’, documents Second World War atrocities throughout former Yugoslavia, and includes many graphic photographs. This book, which is a monument to patient and difficult research and a great achievement for its time, is presented from within the perspectives of Titoism. Since the demise of the Titoist regime, with all its paraphernalia of ideology and mythology, some aspects of it clearly need to be deconstructed and reexamined.
8. While I propose the value of such an analysis primarily vis-à-vis the development of an accurate historical understanding of ‘psycho-politics’ within the territories of former Yugoslavia, that is to say, within the linguistic zones of Serbo-Croat, Macedonian and Slovenian, discussion of this kind would certainly be equally relevant to all other Slavonic languages, from Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian to Polish, Slovakian, and Czech. Apart from the Baltic countries (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), and Hungary and Romania, the mere naming of these languages itself delineates more or less all the zones of East Europe in which Jews lived before the Shoah.
9. Since the demise of Yugoslavia, the expression ‘SerboCroat’ is no longer ‘politically correct’ in any sense of that term. I use it here non-controversially in strict historical context. Its usage has been systematically suspended and necessarily superseded by the separate linguistic designations ‘ Serbian’, ‘Bosnian’ and ‘Croatian’, each of which claims and has its own identity, despite more points in common than differences from a strictly linguistic point of view.
10. See Richard Burns, ‘Belgrade Jewish writers flourish’, Jewish Chronicle, London, 25 Nov 1988. For a comprehensive and detailed critical study of the contribution of Jewish writers to Serbian life, see Predrag Palavestra, Jewish Writers in Serbian Literature, tr. George Nikolic, Association of Serbian Writers Abroad (ASWA) & PEN, London, 2003.

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