Bloodconnected
A small book with potential, it should be obligatory to read this for everybody interested in the Balkans and for those who live/work there. It is a historical report which points itself very often at the hostility between the two biggest south Slav people, the Serbs and the Croats.
a quote;
At the end of the book:
The book Bloodconnected is published in Dutch by publishing house C.A. van Oorschot in 1994. ISBN 90 282 0839 9.
'The so called ‘pure race’ is an idealized point of view of anthropologists. European people are not pure races. He who says to be racial and ethno-biological pure, in fact pleads for it own biological degeneration.
Along with that Serbs and Croats are maybe not even Slavs, according to some ethnologists. During the ethnical waves that whipped across the Balkans between the 5th and 7th century, they arrived on the Balkans as two quite unimportant en not very crowded tribes, from their homecountries White Croatia and White Serbia (that also in that time bounded towards each other) somewhere between Caucasus and Carpats. The Croats and the Serbs came on the 6th century on the Balkans (and quarreled since than about who came first) after they were expelled by the Mongols, and they came as foot-soldiers of the Avarian people.
The oldest source about the Serbs and the Croats is written by the Byzantium emperor and historiographer Constatin Porphyrogentius. He made no difference between the two. Also in the 12 century history writers from Byzantium speak about ‘the Croat tribe which some people call Serb or the Serb tribe which some people call Croat”.
According to some scientists the word ‘Serb’ and the word ‘Croat’ even come from the Avaric language, which could be so because they can not be related to Slavic words.
‘Which leftovers are purely Croat, and which purely Serb?’ the Croatian historiographer from the 19th century Natko Nodilo wonders himself. I do not know the answer like an Englishman doesn’t know the difference between the old Angelic and Saxon heathens.’
We should not forget that the ‘Serbship’ and ‘Croatship’ are identified only in the 19th century by the Roman Catholics and Orthodox, after which Serbs and Croats, as they pleased, pushed their ‘own’ nationality.
The far from artificial creation of Yugoslavia was an historical answer to a historical demand, therefor it grew organically on an ethnical and cultural ground which was the common property of all south Slavs. The Yugoslav idea needed a political frame, the liberal democracy and maybe even more; new, non-nationalistic constitutional startingpoints. As we know it was this subject that lack in every unification of Yugoslavia until now. Yugoslavia was only an announcement of something that possibly could be in the future; a new multicultural, multiconfesional world order, that expels every form of nationalistic and rascistic isolationism. It needed the help of Europe but as we know by now that help was refused and the patient got the advise to please hurry up dying. Who now still supports the idea of unification of Europe may hope the ominous example of Yugoslavia will not be an obstacle for it and it will not create a precedent for more serious future conflicts.
One thing is remarkable in all this: The enormous silence of the worlds leading progressive intelligesia. Those people reacted passionately on violation of freedom and human rights, even if it was in the most out of the way corner of the world like Vietnam, Chili, Middle America or South Africa.
But now, when a war with apocalyptic proportions is going on in the own back garden, all of a sudden radical left is very quite. Why? A possible answer could be found in the lack of ideological profit.“We know now that a big part of the South Slav people were not effected by the expansion of Croats and Serbs states, and for centuries there was a neutral Slavic zone; from Pannonia, via Bosnia to Dubrovnik.” Vladimir Dvornikovic wrote in his book ‘The character of the Yugoslavs”.
It is this Slavic neutral zone that was hid the hardest by the Serb-Croat war and there were the worst devastation. The cities and places that were always the ‘most Yugoslav, -that is to say, who stated themselves as ethnically ‘Yugoslav' during the last general nationwide census in 1991 like Vukovar (Slavonia), Sarajevo (Bosnia) or Mostar (Hercegovina)- were completely or almost completely destroyed.