Cutting Through The Balkans

The expulsion of the Serbs from Croatia was the largest act of ethnic cleansing in the whole of the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, and it is only right that someone has finally been convicted in relation to that act of a Holocaust-denying regime which restored to the borders of Italy and Austria the full panoply of 1930s Fascism.

We need to get over the idea that the Serbs were the spawn of Satan, the Croats were sort of all right, and the Muslims were whiter than white. It is a very, very, very long way from the truth. The Croats, in particular, need to be talked out of the threat to their witness as Antemurale Christianitatis in the form of EU membership as surely as they need to be talked out of the threat to that witness in the form of the Medjugorje cult.

And they need to brought, in all charity, to an appreciation of their error in siding with neoconservatives abroad, and with Islamists both at home and abroad, in destroying the latest in the series of multiethnic entities within and to which Providence had called and commissioned them to bear their witness. There can be no more rueful souls on earth than the Croats of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the land that Izetbegovic built, where, for example, even the more secular aspects of Christmas and Easter are now banned from the schools.

Still, at least Croats are not constitutionally barred from the Senate and the Presidency. That fate is reserved for the Jews and the Gypsies. But then, Franjo Tudjman opined that he would never allow a Serb, a Jew or a Gypsy to marry into his family. Such were the forces that we classified as the good guys in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. If there were any good guys, then they were certainly not the people whom we backed up to the hilt.