So, I went to see Eric Hobsbawm, and he was fascinating, learned, charming — but with a blind spot made of boot leather when it comes to communist regimes. I asked him, amongst other things, whether we can hope to reverse ethnic cleansing, once it has got under way …
You say it shouldn’t be accepted, but can we hope to roll it back? To take a practical example — when you look at Kosovo, is there any way in which a fractured, formerly multi-ethnic society can be put back together?
EH: Well it was done. It was done in Yugoslavia under Tito, so the fact is it can be done. If you start splitting them, if you start splitting societies, that is the safest recipe for ethnic cleansing — whether it’s multi-national societies or multi-national empires, that’s what happens — so my answer would be avoid splitting societies.
AB: Because I don’t see that the United Nations could ever use Tito’s methods. Or should, actually.
EH: What was Tito’s method in this respect?
AB: Well I mean he ran … he ran a full on Stalinist dictatorship which did indeed suppress an awful lot of … an awful lot of inter-ethnic bad feeling, but at a price which I don’t think that the United Nations could possibly pay.
EH: I think you make a mistake there. You see I mean he believed … Tito believed in fact in Yugoslavia as a mixture or a federation of equal nations. The only really bad feeling he created was against the Serbs, who had been used to being rather predominant. And when Tito fell, in fact it was very largely the Serbs and the Croats who broke the thing up, and that’s what did it. But otherwise there’s much you can say against Tito indeed, but not that he oppressed nations or that …
AB: No, I said that he oppressed impartiali — impartially without regard to nationality, but I think he oppressed on a scale which the United Nations could not do.
EH: [suddenly fierce] The United Nations can’t do anything anyway because United Nations depends on the force which is given to it by the Security Council. So the United Nations isn’t ? isn’t in the business.
Now, I spent part of my childhood in Belgrade, so the horrors of the Second World War there, and the brutality of the subsequent settlement, are part of my mental furniture. In the early Sixties there were still bullet-pitted buildings to be seen when we drove down through Bosnia to the coast.
Tito’s slave labour camps and secret police were quite as ghastly as anyone else’s, though it is true he was better than what came after. He wa a great dictator, and good for his country, but his methods were Roman in their brutality.
The day before this interview, we had been talking to Cathie Carmichael, a Balkan specialist at UEA, who brought up one horror I didn’t know about. Before the war, there were about half a million ethnic Germans in Jugoslavia, as part of the centuries-old settlements of Easter Europe. By 1946 there were none, as there were virtually none anywhere in Eastern Europe. What I hadn’t realised was that Tito only expelled half of them. The rest — a quarter of a million people — were simply shot, she says.
No, I don’t think the UN could use those methods of nation-building. Not even Paddy Ashdown …