Blueprint of Nations
Welcome to 'Double Helix: Blueprint of Nations,' the podcast where we analyze and look at the events, people and actions that have shaped the nations of our world . From revolutions to treaties, conflicts to triumphs, we explore the historical blueprints that continue to influence the way nations think and act today.
Blueprint of Nations
The Yugoslavian Breakup: The Nationalist Awakening (Part 3)
Yugoslavia's disintegration wasn't caused by ancient ethnic hatreds, but by political leaders who found nationalism the most effective tool for mobilizing support during uncertain times. The first multi-party elections in 1990 brought nationalist leaders to power across the republics, implementing programs that made conflict inevitable as citizens became increasingly sorted into hardening ethnic categories.
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We are in the capital cities of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1990. In Ljubljana, zagreb, belgrade, sarajevo, citizens line up at polling stations to participate in the first multi-party elections since before World War II. The mood is a complex mixture of excitement and apprehension. After decades of single-party rule, democracy has arrived, but it comes wrapped in nationalist banners rather than civic ones. In Croatia, an elderly woman carefully marks her ballot for Franja Tupman's Croatian Democratic Union. My father dreamed of a free Croatia, she tells her grandson. I never thought I would live to vote for it. Across town, in a predominantly Serbian neighborhood, families discuss whether to support Serbian parties forming in response to Croatian nationalism or vote for the reformed communists who still speak of Yugoslav unity. In Slovenia, a young couple votes for the Demos coalition, promising increased sovereignty or outright independence. Yugoslavia has become a burden, the husband explains to a foreign journalist. We look west to Europe, not east to Belgrade. On a wall nearby, fresh graffiti declares Europe now In Serbia, slobodan Milosevic's socialist party, communist in structure but nationalist in rhetoric, dominates the polls. He speaks for all Serbs, not just those in Serbia proper clear as a supporter from a town near the Croatian border. For the first time we have a leader who won't abandon Serbs living outside of Serbia. Finally, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the results map almost perfectly onto the Republic's ethnic composition. Muslims vote for Alija Izabegović's Party of Democratic Action, serbs for Radovan Karadžic's Serbian Democratic Party, croats for their own national party. The few who still vote for multi-ethnic options find themselves marginalized as nationalism becomes the new political orthodoxy. What few recognize in this moment of democratic euphoria is that they're not just electing new leaders, but endorsing fundamentally incompatible visions for Yugoslavia's future. The ballots they cast so proudly will help construct the political barricades behind which their communities will soon shelter or perish. This is part three of our series on the Yugoslavian breakup the nationalist awakening.
Speaker 1:You know how they say you can't understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. Well, I'd argue you can't understand a nation until you've walked through its history, not just the highlight reel or the sanitized version you find in textbooks. I mean really getting into its DNA, those defining moments that shaped everything that came after, those moments where paths were chosen, where decisions were made in palaces and backrooms and city streets that changed the course of millions of lives. I'm your host, paul, and this is Double Helix Blueprint of Nations, where we unravel the genetic code of countries through their most transformative moments. Think of it like ancestry testing, but for entire nations. We dig deep into the historical DNA, finding those crucial moments that made countries who they are today.
Speaker 1:In our previous episodes we traced Yugoslavia's creation as a deliberate attempt to transcend ethnic divisions and then examine how economic crisis and the leadership vacuum after Tito's death created conditions right for instability. Vacuum after Tito's death created conditions ripe for instability. We saw how nationalist rhetoric began its revival, particularly through Milosevic's pivotal embrace of Servian grievances. Today we'll explore how the nationalist revival transformed from rhetoric into political action, how newly elected leaders across Yugoslavia implemented programs that made conflict inevitable and how ordinary citizens found themselves sorted into hardening ethnic categories that would soon determine their fate. What's particularly striking about Yugoslavia's collapse, and what makes it resonate so powerfully today, is how a society with deep interconnections fragmented along ethnic lines that had seemed increasingly irrelevant to daily life. The parallels to our current moment of political polarization are impossible to miss the replacement of shared facts with partisan narratives, the transformation of political differences into moral divides, the erosion of common spaces where diverse viewpoints coexist. As we'll see, yugoslavia's disintegration offers a sobering case study in how quickly social cohesion can unravel when differentiating identity trumps shared experiences, a warning that feels increasingly relevant in our algorithmically sorted present.
Speaker 1:The 1990 elections fundamentally transformed Yugoslavia's political landscape. In place of communist functionaries nominally committed to brotherhood and unity, came nationalist leaders explicitly elected to advance particular national interests, often at the expense of others. Let's examine what these electoral results meant in practice, beginning with Croatia, where the consequences would prove particularly fateful. We are in Zagreb on May 30th of 1990. The Croatian parliament, the Sabor, holds its first sessions following HDC's electoral victory. The marble halls once adorned with communist symbols and portraits of Tito have been hastily redecorated. Franjo Tudman, newly installed as president, enters the chamber to thunder his applause At 68, the former general and historian carries himself with military stiffness, his expressions stern beneath the white hair.
Speaker 1:Critics describe him as authoritarian and paranoid. Supporters see the dignity of Croatia personified. In his inaugural address, tudman invokes Croatia's thousand-year dream of independence and pledges to restore the nation's rightful place in Europe. We have waited centuries for this moment. He declares his voice carrying emotion rarely displayed in public. Today Croatia rises again, sovereign, democratic and proud.
Speaker 1:Within days, tudman's government implements immediate symbolic changes that signal Croatia's national revival. Their traditional Croatian checkerboard coat of arms, the Šahovnica, replaces Yugoslav symbols on government buildings. By mid-June, police uniforms changed from Yugoslav blue to Croatian blue with the distinctive checkerhov emblem. Most controversially, history textbooks are rewritten virtually overnight to emphasize Croatian national narratives, minimizing both Yugoslavia's socialist achievement and the fascist Ustashy regime of World War II atrocities. In Zagreb's central square, where this symbol is now prominently displayed, croatian crowds celebrate what feels like national resurrection. Rziana Kristic, a literature teacher, describes the atmosphere People sang in the streets, strangers embraced. It felt like a collective exhale, as if we could finally breathe as Croatians, without hiding or apologizing.
Speaker 1:The fear that defined my parents' generation seemed to evaporate overnight. But for Croatia's Serbian minority about 12% of the population concentrated in regions bordering Bosnia and Serbia the same symbols carried terrifying historical echoes of the World War II independent state of Croatia, under which hundreds of thousands of Serbs were killed in concentration camps like Jasinovac. The Sehovice flag to many Serbs wasn't merely a national symbol, but a warning sign of potential persecution. Wasn't merely a national symbol, but a warning sign of potential persecution. In the predominantly Servian town of Knin, jovan Miric, a railway worker, watches television coverage of Zagreb celebrations with growing horror. My grandfather showed me photographs of Ustashi wearing the same checkerboard. He tells neighbors gather in his living room Before they came to his village and murdered half the population. Now the symbols fly over police stations again.
Speaker 1:Are we supposed to trust that this time is going to be different, when Tudman compounds this symbolism by dismissing thousands of Serbs from government positions, police forces and state media, justifying the purge as removing communist loyalists rather than targeting Serbs specifically? Alarm transforms into organized resistance In Serb-majority areas of Croatia, particularly the Krajina region. Local leaders declare autonomous oblasts and begin arming themselves with weapons quietly supplied from Serbia. Milan Babic, a dentist turned nationalist politician who emerges as a Krajina Serb leader, expresses the sentiments driving this resistance at a rally in Canin, at a rally in Canin. We've seen this movie before 1941. First come the symbols, then the firings and then the killings. This time we'll defend ourselves from the start. If Croatia leaves Yugoslavia, we leave Croatia.
Speaker 1:This pattern symbolic changes triggering defensive mobilization by frightened minorities mirrors what we saw in our Rwanda series, where radio broadcasts and government rhetoric gradually transformed Tutsis from citizens into threats in the eyes of many Hutus, where political polarization gradually eliminated the middle ground until society fractured along lines that would determine who lived and who died during the coming civil war. What might have remained regional political tensions escalates dramatically when the Croatian government sends special police to Krajina to reassert control in August of 1990. The operation, meant to prevent a Serbian state within a state, backfired spectacularly. As dawn breaks over the Dalmatian hinterland on August 17, a convoy of Croatian Interior Ministry police speeds towards Kanin to remove illegal roadblocks and retake the police station from Servian local authorities, but they never arrive. Servian villagers, alerted by the emergency broadcast on Radio Knin claiming that Ustachian forces are coming to slaughter Serbs, fell trees across the roads the so-called Log Revolution effectively cutting off access to the region. Meanwhile, the JNA, the Yugoslav National Army, responds to calls from local Serb leaders by flying jets low over police convoys. In a show of force, the Croatian forces outgunned and blocked retreat to Zagreb. No shots are fired, but the psychological barrier against confrontation has been broken.
Speaker 1:For the first time since World War II, yugoslavs have mobilized against each other along ethnic lines. Ivo Goldstein, a Croatian historian who witnessed these events, would later write the Lag Revolution marked Yugoslavia's effective end, though few recognized it then. Once citizens organized militarily along ethnic lines, the federal state lost its monopoly on legitimate force, the basic prerequisite for any functioning state. Similar patterns unfold across Yugoslavia as newly elected nationalist governments implement programs reflecting their electoral mandates, mandates that prove fundamentally incompatible with maintaining the federation. In Slovenia, the Viktoros Demos coalition immediately begins preparations for independence, but far less drama, but with equal determination. Constitutional amendments assert Slovenia's right to secede. An independent monetary system is planned.
Speaker 1:Most fatally, slovenia reorganizes its territorial defense forces, effectively creating a Republican army outside of federal control. In a classified defense ministry meeting in Ljubljana, janis Janša, slovenia's newly appointed defense minister, at just 32 years old, outlines military preparations with clinical precision. We expect the JNA to intervene when we declare an independence, he tells senior staff gathered around maps showing federal army positions. We cannot win a conventional war against the fifth largest army in Europe, but we can make intervention too costly, too embarrassing for them to sustain. Slovenia's advantage, besides its northwestern location, bordering Austria and Italy, was its ethnic homogeneity. With over 90% Slovene population. It lacked the internal ethnic divisions that complicated Croatia's independence bid. This allowed its leadership to pursue independence with singular focus, without needing to balance competing internal constituencies.
Speaker 1:In Serbia, milosevic consolidates his control to a program as calculating as it is comprehensive. He restricts media freedom. Most consequentially, he continues his project of bringing all Serbs under Belgrade's protection, regardless of which republic they inhabit. Even more ominously, milosevic establishes direct control over the Yugoslav people's army by packing its officer corps with Serbian loyalists and removing non-Serbian generals. What had been the site as Yugoslavia's integrating institution, where young men from all republics served together, becomes increasingly an instrument of Serbian national policy.
Speaker 1:In October 1990, at a closed-door meeting in the Defense Ministry in Belgrade, serbian Defense Minister Veljko Karijevic addresses senior officers, many newly promoted, based on ethnic loyalty rather than merit. Our mission is no longer defending borders against external enemies, but preventing internal secession, he states bluntly. Yugoslavia must be preserved by force if necessary. The alternative is Balkanization that will destroy all we've built since 1945. Among the officers listening is a colonel who will later gain notoriety for his role in the siege of Bukobar. For the first time, he later recalled, we understood our enemy was not NATO or the Warsaw Pact, but internal separatists. It changed everything about how we viewed our role, a role the JNA's reorientation from external defense to internal control represents perhaps the most critical military development of this period. An army built to defend all Yugoslavs was being transformed into a force that would soon attack some of them in the name of preserving a state that had already ceased to exist in all but name.
Speaker 1:While these political transformations unfold at leadership levels. Equally profound changes occur in daily life as nationalist governments implement their programs. Ethnicity increasingly determines economic opportunity, personal safety and future prospects. Let me take you to another moment that captures this transformation in ordinary lives. We are in Vukovar in eastern Croatia. It is October of 1990.
Speaker 1:This ethnically mixed city near the Serbian border had been a showcase of successful integration. Serbs and Croats worked in the same factories, drank in the same cafes, intermarried frequently. The Baroque architecture of the old town center testified of Austro-Hungarian influence, while the Danube flowing nearby connected the city to Belgrade downstream, while acts and differences matter far less than the shared economic interests and decades of coexistence, the Borobo Shoe Factory, the city's economic heart, employs thousands across ethnic lines. Its workers' cafeteria has always been a place where Serbs and Croats sit intermingled, sharing complaints about management and swapping weekend plans. But in this autumn morning something has changed. Tables have suddenly sorted themselves along ethnic lines. Conversations happen within groups rather than across them. The cafeteria has become a microcosm of Yugoslavia's fragmentation. Stefan Stefanovic, a floor manager, stands in the doorway surveying what he calls the great rearrangement. In 15 years at the factory, he's never seen anything like it. Last month we were arranging carpools based on who lived closest to each other, he observes. Now people are driving further just to ride with their own kind, as if an invisible hand has pushed everyone into separate corners.
Speaker 1:Across Vukovar, neighborhoods that had been mixed for generations begin subtle sorting of families, where families move to areas where their ethnicity predominates. Properties are quietly sold or exchanged, children transfer. Schools, churches and cultural organizations that once competed for members now fill with those seeking ethnic sanctuary, for members now filled with those seeking ethnic sanctuary. Marko Samarsic, a Serbian factory manager married to a Croatian woman named Anna, describes this transformation in his diary. We've lived here 30 years. Suddenly, neighbors who've joined us for holiday meals for decades cross the street rather than greet us. My children come home crying because classmates call them Chetniks. Anna is labeled a traitor by Croatian colleagues. We're the same people we were last year, but the world around us has changed.
Speaker 1:The entries grow more distressed over autumn weeks. In November he writes Anna's brother called from Zagreb to say we should send the children to stay with him. It is safer there. He says Zagreb is too big, too visible for ethnic cleansing. They say that he used such words about Vukovar. Our peaceful Vukovar terrifies me more than any specific threat by December.
Speaker 1:The diary records Someone painted Servian Pig in our garage door. Last night Anna cried for hours. We've decided she'll take the children to her parents in Zagreb after Christmas. I'll stay to protect the house and keep my job. We tell each other it's temporary. Neither of us believes it.
Speaker 1:What the Zemarcik family doesn't know, cannot know, is that within months Vukovar will become the focal point of the Croatian war's worst violence. The city will be besieged for 87 days by the JNA and Serbian paramilitaries. Over 90% of its buildings will be damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of civilians will be executed. After the city falls, the Barak Center will be reduced to rubble and the Barabo factory, that microcosm of Yugoslavia's integration and disintegration, will never produce another shoe.
Speaker 1:This experience, repeated across thousands of mixed communities throughout Yugoslavia, reveals nationalism's insidious power. Even those who rejected nationalist politics found themselves classified by ethnicity rather than personal choice. The middle ground of mixed identity once Yugoslavia's main strength became increasingly untenable as systems demanded clear categorization. By early 1991, many Yugoslavs inhabited separate information ecosystems that presented incompatible versions of reality. A Serbian villager watching Belgrade television and a Croatian neighbor watching Zagreb television could witness the same incident, yet receive entirely different accounts of who perpetrated it, who suffered and what it signified. Consider a single incident in April of 1991, a confrontation between Croatian police and local Serbs at Plivice National Park that resulted in several deaths. Serbian television presented the event as Ustashe forces attacking peaceful Serbian villagers, with extensive footage of weeping Serbian mothers and armed Croatian police. Croatian television depicted the same event as Croatian authorities defending territorial integrity against armed Serbian terrorists, highlighting Serbian weapon storage and interviews with frightened Croatian civilians.
Speaker 1:The two narratives share the same geographical location, but otherwise described entirely different events. Croatian journalist Slavenka Draculic described this media environment. When the same event can be completely reversed depending on which television channel you watch, truth itself dissolves. Without shared reality, compromise becomes impossible. Each side lives not just in different political worlds, but in different factual ones. But in different factual ones, the media war extended beyond news to entertainment and culture.
Speaker 1:Films, music and literature increasingly emphasized national distinctiveness rather than shared heritage. Cultural figures were pressured to declare national allegiance or face marginalization. Emir Kusturica, the internationally acclaimed Yugoslav filmmaker who had won the Pondio at Cannes in 1985 for when Father Was Away on Business, found himself in this impossible position. Suddenly, the question was whether I was a Serbian director or a Bosnian director, never just a director. Your work was judged first, by which nation could claim you? Only secondarily by its actual content. Kusturica, born to a Bosniak family in Sarajevo but working in Belgrade, would later be denounced by Bosniak intellectuals as a traitor for his perceived Serbian sympathies, despite his films exploring Yugoslav identity in all its complexity, his experience exemplifies how cultural space for nuance and ambiguity collapsed as nationalism demanded clear, singular allegiance.
Speaker 1:As 1990 ended and 1991 began, yugoslavia's disintegration accelerated as newly elected leaders implemented their incompatible mandates. Slovenia and Croatia formally declare they will seek independence unless Yugoslavia was fundamentally restructured as a loose confederation. Serbia rejected any arrangement that didn't maintain a strong central state or, failing, that redraw borders to include Serb populations in Croatia and Bosnia. The federal institutions designed to mediate such conflicts have been rendered impotent. Milosevic controlled four of the eight votes in the collective presidency through allied republics. In March of 1991, this control became explicit when Serbia refused to accept Croatian's stupid message as the next rotating president, breaking the constitutional order that had governed federal transitions since 1974. Sarajevo, march of 1991.
Speaker 1:The Hacic family gathers for what will be their last peaceful meal together. Three generations sit around a table in their apartment overlooking the city Grandparents who rebuilt Yugoslavia after World War II. Parents who grew up in its relative prosperity, and young adults now facing its dissolution. Political arguments that once ended in reconciliation now produce genuine rupture. Emir, an engineering student, desperately defends Yugoslavia as the only protection for Bosnia's multi-ethnic character. His cousin, adnan, argues for Bosniak nationalism as the only response to Serbian and Croatian national movements. Their grandfather, who fought with Tito's partisans, sits silently watching his family divide along lines he spent his whole life trying to erase. When dinner ends, they exit into Isarievo still functioning normally Cafes full, trams running, people of all backgrounds mingling in the city's historic center, non-suspect that within 14 months the same streets will be under siege. Sniper fire will prevent even the most basic movements, and the diverse social fabric they take for granted will be shredded by violence.
Speaker 1:This normality on the surface while foundations crumbled underneath, characterized Yugoslavia's final intact period. The institutions still functioned on paper, the currency still circulated, though devastated by inflation. Yugoslav sports teams still competed internationally, citizens still carried Yugoslav passports. But the invisible bonds that had held the federation together shared vision, mutual trust, belief in common future had been severed by nationalist politics that transformed neighbors into potential enemies and shared spaces into contested territory.
Speaker 1:By June of 1991, the stage was set for Yugoslavia's violent dissolution. Slovenia and Croatia had announced that they would declare independence on June 25. Serbia had made it clear it would not allow unilateral secession. The Yugoslav People's Army had positioned forces near the borders. International diplomacy had failed to broker a compromise. What would follow was not the inevitable result of ancient hatreds, as many Western observers would later frame it. It was the predictable consequence of political choices made by leaders who found nationalism the most effective tool for mobilizing support in a time of uncertainty and who proved willing to sacrifice peace for power, and who proved willing to sacrifice peace for power. The tragedy is that millions of ordinary citizens who had lived interconnected lives, who had intermarried, worked together, shared daily experiences across ethnic lines, would pay the price for these political calculations. Their complex, multifaceted identities would be reduced to simplify ethnic categories that determined whether they could stay in their homes or were forced to flee, whether they lived or died in the conflict about to erupt.
Speaker 1:On Double Helix. We'll examine how Yugoslavia's most prosperous republic became the first to declare independence, how the ten-day conflict that followed established patterns that would influence far bloodier wars to come, and how international responses, or lack thereof, set dangerous precedents for conflicts that would soon engulf Croatia, bosnia and eventually Kosovo, conflicts that would soon engulf Croatia, bosnia and, eventually, kosovo. We'll meet the politicians, military leaders and ordinary citizens caught in this pivotal moment, the opening act in a tragedy that would ultimately claim over 130,000 lives and displace millions across what had once been a shared homeland. Until then, thank you for listening. We will see you soon.
