So Much Further Yet to March Baron Frankal

so much further yet to march © Baron Frankal

It’s not often that too many people feel the EU has handled something rather well, but that is surely the case in delaying Croatia’s progression towards membership, a decision to resonate loudly around a neighbourhoodjust 100 miles from the EU,where Srebrenica hasa meaning just a decade old. Croatians too have their own demons to excise. New europe was present at a moment that without too much exaggeration could be termed historical, at the Winter 1996 demonstrations in Belgradethat began the overthrow of Milosevic.

You knew you were near by the clamour of the carnival: not a crowd but a streaming procession, thirty bodies wide, balloons and banners flowing, ‘slobo out’. An even thicker crowd watched them pass, stood on the pavement, leaning out of windows, staring from shops. With a brass band in its midst, the whole crowd was anarchic noise: chanting, whistles, hooters, horns and rattles made from Heineken cans. At a bridge across the Sava, people lined the entrance, smiling and applauding: as the demonstration was over a mile long they must have been clapping a long time. ‘Easily manipulated’ the rally was branded; ‘manipulated professor’ read a badge. The procession came to a halt around the state TV and radio stations later bombed by NATO, and then under the control of Milosevic’s eldest daughter. Much of the country didn’t even know about the demonstrations, but apparently when everyone bellowed loud enough it disturbed the transmissions.

Not so long before the Serbs started their long march, Milosevic had reacted Bosnians’ free and fair votefor independence by sending in 80,000 troops to pound all in their path. Before fire, murder, rape and massacre became norms of policy, Sarajevowas for hundreds of years the epicentre of tolerance in the Balkans, boasting the most mixed marriages in the whole of Jugoslavia. Joined by Bosnian Serbs however, financed by Belgrade and aided by the infamous Serb irregulars whose commander has admitted to taking orders from Milosevic, these throwbacks to the dark ages destroyed more people than would fill every stadium in Budapest. Villages were systematically emptied of their male populations, who were gunned down in their hundreds, their corpses piled high in vans driven to mass graves. Systematic rape and the bayoneting of pregnant women was used to destroy Muslim women in body and soul. Sarajevo was shelled to destruction. Bomb the Presidency and the Parliament, Mladic told his commander; shell the Muslim neighbourhoods until the people are driven mad. The hospitals destroyed, the children sniped, the victims of the central market place - these were no accidents.

Then,Europe and the rest of the world looked, saw nothing and did less, the modern-day equivalent of Elie Wiesel’s onlooker, who watched the courtyard of Budapest’s great synagogue fill and empty for days, “The Hungarian policewere very cruel but I don’t remember their faces… the one face I completely remember was his…he stared out of the window expressionlessly. There was neither compassion nor joy, neither shock nor rage. He wasn’t even interested in what was going on… He was neither murderer nor victim; he was only a bystander. He wanted to live in peace and quiet”. It is of course far too little far too late, however keeping making Croatia work harder is neither guilt or punishment. The biggest lesson of the long war for its participants was that it took force and violence to win the day. That was true even at its end, when, in NATO’s bombs, the Serbs found an enemy able to effectively attack them. After just weeks, a four-year war was over. In standing up now to those who want Croatia’s application to proceed regardless, the EU is making an important statement about unlearning that lesson.

First published in the budapest sun, 19 may 2005,