Jovanka Broz, the last Yugoslav Icon

The death this week in Belgrade of Jovanka Broz, the widow of Yugoslavia’s former communist ruler, Josip Broz Tito, stirred surprising emotions in me, as in many others. Jovanka, a teenaged partisan during the Second World War before becoming Yugoslavia’s First Lady, had been abominably treated after the death of her husband, expelled from her home without most of her belongings, and placed under house arrest in a shabby dwelling. She had been left in poverty on a miserable pension. She had often been the butt of jokes, denigrated by many as a simple peasant girl. Elizabeth Taylor had reportedly felt peeved when, visiting Tito on the island of Brioni with Richard Burton, who had played the dictator in a World War II partisan movie, she was left in the company of Jovanka, while Burton enjoyed the company of the famously charming Tito. But for others, Jovanka was glamorous. A Kosovo Albanian lady told me how women going to the hairdressers had asked for the Jovanka style.

Jovanka Broz in her prime, with Tito

For years, Jovanka had been largely forgotten. Journalists occasionally wrote of how poorly she had been treated. Some in Croatia argued that she should be brought home to her Croatian motherland (she was in origin a Croatian Serb), given a decent pension and treated with the respect she was due.

But in death she was granted a state funeral, and her passing was reported in international media. Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dačić spoke movingly of her: ‘She was an important part of history, a history we gave up on, a history we forgot… This is the departure of Yugoslavia’s last icon.’ Thousands attended her funeral, many travelling to Belgrade from other parts of former Yugoslavia.

For many who can remember what Yugoslavia was, a serious, if ultimately failed attempt to build a multi-national community with a common identity transcending its peoples’ diversity, Jovanka was perhaps the last link with a past for which some still feel nostalgia. For all its obvious faults and contradictions, Yugoslavia had something. In its cultural diversity there was a richness, a vibrancy that at times produced brilliance. While the successor states may feel unburdened in their independence, and while they are certainly freer, it is hard to argue that the sum of the parts adds up to what Yugoslavia once was. Above all, Yugoslavia represented a dream of a common life for peoples who had once been at each others’ throats. It was surely better than the squalid nationalism and reversion to mutual destruction that followed the state’s demise. For those that mourned her, the death of Jovanka perhaps rekindled a memory of that dream, of hopes for something better.

A visit to Imotski

From Sinj, I continued my journey southwards through the Dalmatian hinterland to Imotski, close to the border with Bosnia, tracing the footsteps of the 19th century British Egyptologist, J. Gardner Wilkinson. There being no direct bus route, I had to change buses at Split. Imotski is a small town, perched on a hill overlooking a large fertile plain, surrounded by the Dinaric mountains. The views are splendid, and the old town centre is attractive, built of the usual white limestone blocks.

Unlike Sinj, Imotski is rather isolated, with no highway linking it with the coast. It is rather a peripheral place. While the surrounding villages engage in agriculture, the town offers few opportunities. Young people sit around outside cafés. Many, no doubt, have left for more promising corners of the country. Imotski has had some famous sons, among them the poet Tin Ujević. But they didn’t stay there. I bought some locally-produced pršut (cured ham) from a shop in the town. The owner told me hopefully that a tunnel would be built through the mountains, linking Imotski to the coast, giving it a boost. For now, there was only one restaurant in the town, in the hotel where I stayed.

The Blue Lake, seen from the castle walls, Imotski

Imotski is famous for its two dramatic sink holes, the Blue Lake, and the Red Lake. These are typical features of limestone, karst regions. They were formed by the collapse of underground caves millions of years ago. The Blue Lake is in a wide, deep hole directly below the town castle. From one side of the castle, built atop a hill on the edge of the town, you look straight down into the lake, a considerable distance below. A zig-zag path leads down to the water’s edge. The lake is fed by several small streams, and the level of the water is said to vary considerably, sometimes disappearing altogether.

A short distance from the town, the Red Lake is named for the red colour of the cliffs that form the walls of the hole. It is one of the deepest sink holes in the world, a total of more than 500 metres. The nearly sheer cliffs make it impossible to descend to the water’s edge, but it is a spectacular sight. The lake is fed by an underground river whose origin and destination are unknown. It contains a unique type of fish which is also found in the rivers and streams in the plain below Imotski, hinting at the underground connections that link them.

The Red Lake, Imotski

Imotski was under Ottoman rule from the late 15th century until 1717, when it was captured by the Venetians. Gardner Wilkinson saw a stone in one of the walls recording that the castle had been restored by one Lubomir, said to have been a Bosnian prince before the Ottoman conquest. According to the local tradition, as related to Gardner Wilkinson, the castle had been captured by some 80 men, who had tricked the Ottoman garrison into believing they faced a much larger force by lighting numerous fires in the forests, prompting them to abandon the fort. Nothing remains of the town’s Muslim past.

Gardner Wilkinson was told how the Venetians, as a cruel form of sport, had offered condemned criminals the option of hurling themselves off the castle walls on to a ledge more than ten metres below. In the unlikely event that they succeeded, they would receive a pardon. Otherwise they plunged down the cliff into the Blue Lake.

Gardner Wilkinson found evidence of the former Muslim presence in the country around Imotski. In the village of Župa, he saw tombs with the crescent and star carved on them. At another village he saw tombs ‘apparently with the crescent and the cross rudely sculptured upon them…’. I had myself seen such a tomb with both cross and crescent in 1998, in a medieval graveyard near Stolac, across the border in Bosnia. The apparent confusion of Christian and Muslim symbols presumably dated from a period when people had publicly converted from one faith to the other, but were still hedging their bets. Several other tombs in the graveyard I visited near Stolac bore the typical markings of the Church of Bosnia, the heretical sect that took root in Bosnia in the Middle Ages, with their carved figures with outstretched, out-sized hands. Perhaps the ambiguity of the tomb with the cross and the crescent reflected the fact that this was a land of confused religious identities, where heresy had only briefly been supplanted by Catholic Orthodoxy before Islam appeared on the scene.

At Vrgorac, further south from Imotski, Gardner Wilkinson wrote of the ruined castle in terms that expressively reflected the attitude of his time to the drawn out conflict between Christianity and Islam in the region: ‘It was built in the days of terror, when the conquering Turks were spreading conquest and desolation over many Christian countries, and Dalmatia was trembling for its liberty and its faith…. It stands as a satisfactory memorial to the triumph of Christian over Moslem power; a still more singular proof of which is seen in the conversion of a minaret into the belfry of the church below.’ Yet under Ottoman rule Christianity had been tolerated, and although Christians were undoubtedly second-class subjects of the Sultan, they co-existed with Muslims. There were churches as well as mosques in Ottoman lands. As the Ottomans were rolled back in the 17th and 18th and most of the 19th centuries, Islam was simply effaced from the reconquered territories. Only in the last quarter of the 19th century, when Austria occupied Bosnia, did Christian Europe permit Muslims to remain in its midst.

Gardner Wilkinson was much interested in the Morlachs. He described at some length the manifold superstitions and folk beliefs of the Morlachs, including the measures they took to ward off vampires and witches. In Imotski, he witnessed a group of them, ‘simple-minded boors, with the usual long pigtails, loose brown jackets and blue tights’, claiming their rewards for killing wolves at the town hall, where they were ‘quizzed by the hat-wearing townsmen.’ At Župa, he was not altogether happy with the interest they showed in him: ‘Had it not been for the odious habit they have of making spitting part of their conversation, I might have been as much pleased with their visit as they seemed to be with mine… and their custom of abstaining from ablutions renders their near approach by no means desirable.’

The EU failing in Bosnia

Here is a comment I wrote in response to an article by Daniel Korski for the European Council on Foreign Relations on the EU and Bosnia. Below is a link to Daniel's article and the comments it prompted. Below that is my comment.

http://ecfr.eu/content/entry/commentary_korskibosniathirdoption/

The EU should be the international actor best placed to help Bosnia out of its by now habitual crisis. It has the most important and worthwhile carrots to offer. Beyond visa-free travel, an immediate reward of great relevance to most Bosnians, the benefits of EU integration, economic, political and social, are well-tested throughout Mediterranean and Central Europe. Most Bosnian leaders, of all ethnic stripes, as well as ordinary Bosnians, appreciate that. Also, the reality is that there is no one other than the EU that can help Bosnia. For the past decade American administrations have, understandably, been keen to shift responsibility for the Balkans on to their European allies. This is unlikely to change. The EU cannot pass the buck. No one else wants it.

But the dysfunctional mess of Bosnia’s constitutional set-up, its inability to meet the requirements of EU integration, means that Bosnia is indeed not at a point where it can be treated as a normal pre-accession country. The EU needs to adopt a more muscular approach to Bosnia if it is to have any chance of tackling the country’s chronic problems.

And that is where the EU has been failing. For years now the intention has been for the OHR to hand over to a beefed up EU Special Representative’s office. Yet after all this time they are still not ready. Where is the beef? What mechanisms will the EUSR need? This has been much discussed, but the question of how the EU would take over responsibility has just been allowed to drift.

One issue had been the relationship between the EUSR and the European Commission, which holds the crucial purse strings. This should have been resolved now that the newly established EU High Representative for foreign affairs also sits in the Commission. It might have been encouraging that Lady Ashton chose to visit Bosnia and the Balkans so early in her tenure, as a signal of the importance that the EU attaches to the region.

Yet the lesson is probably rather less encouraging. Ashton’s visit to the Balkans probably signals that, like Solana before her, she has realised that the Balkans is the only part of the world sufficiently uninteresting to the larger member states that she will be able to take the lead for the EU there. Her visit was also distressingly reminiscent of Solana in the string of meaningless platitudes she mouthed about the road to the EU etc. etc. All from the same dull lexicon of Brussels spokesperson’s drivel. Don’t expect Paris, London and Berlin to let her take the lead in the Middle East, for example. In foreign policy terms, Bosnia and the Balkans represent the crumbs that have been left to the Brussels foreign policy establishment.

And that, unfortunately, is why the EU is so ineffectual in Bosnia. Because it just does not care enough to devote the attention and energy that is needed. Let’s hope Ashton may emerge from her current difficulties in Brussels strengthened and with the determination to give Bosnia the attention it needs.