[ALBSA-Info] Balkans: Pride Of Place - NEWSWEEK

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

Balkans: Pride Of Place
A bubbling cultural stew boils over with nativist passions
By Rod Nordland
NEWSWEEK

In the Balkans, everyone is a minority somewhere or other. Croats are a 
majority in Croatia, but a large minority in Bosnia and Herzegovina and a 
tiny minority in Serbia, where they still live in fear of their lives. Serbs 
may dominate Serbia, but in Croatia they would have a rough time these 
days—if nearly all of them hadn’t already been chased out. Bosnian Muslims 
dominate in Bosnia, but only in 51 percent of it; the rest is practically 
deeded to Serb control under the Dayton peace accords. And Macedonia, the 
last to fall victim to ethnic strife, is a bewildering mixture of Muslim 
Slavs, Greeks, Turks, Egyptians, Romas, Macedonian Slavs, Serbs and 
Bulgarians. So many, in fact, that the word for a mixed-fruit salad in many 
European languages is “Macedonian.”       
 
ALL THESE MYRIAD GROUPS want their own ethnically defined nations, for 
self-protection as well as pride. All have vivid memories of oppression and 
glorious martyrdom. All have even greater reason to believe now, after a 
decade of violence, that safety lies only with their own kind—and in numbers. 

The reductio ad absurdum of all this is the historic struggle for 
self-determination and international recognition of the Vlachs. The Vlachs? A 
people linguistically related to Romanians rather than to Slavs, Vlachs are 
scattered throughout the Balkans, with a home turf along the south bank of 
the Danube. Before anyone rushes out to order flags, though, the Vlachs 
themselves are divided, between mountain Vlachs and alluvial Vlachs. How many 
are they? Who knows. Census-taking in the Balkans is a deeply controversial 
process; calling for one is enough to provoke threats of war by those groups 
who happen to be on the wrong side of a suspected demographic shift. Some 
countries in the region have gone so long without a census that no one really 
knows how much of what is where any longer.

This might all be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. The problem with rising 
ethnic aspirations is, of course, that no borders are redrawn peacefully. 
Irredentism is inevitably a violent process—and one that cripples the 
argument that peoples can and should live together with their differences. As 
everyone in the Balkans knows by now, that makes us all losers.