In Europe

in a huge protest movement. But here, however, the anti-communist rebellion also led to new conflicts along old ethnic divides. Under Tito the expression of nationalist sentiments had been strictly taboo, but some Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian intellectuals continued to foster such ideas on the sly. To remain in power, therefore, the former communist apparatchiks once again conjured up the ideals of nationalism, and with considerable success.
    During summer 1988, Yugoslav news reported day after day on mass demonstrations calling for Serbia to re-establish its authority over the ‘autonomous province’ of Kosovo. That, it was claimed, was the Serbian people's historic right: after all, Kosovo had been sacred ground to them ever since they had lost the battle against the Ottomans at the Field of the Blackbirds (
Kosovo Polje
) on St Vitus’ Day in 1389. The Serbs had, in their own view, been more or less harassed out of Kosovo: ninety per cent of the population there was now Albanian. The demonstrators turned that same rage effortlessly on the former communist ‘office hogs’, speaking of an ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ and ‘the people's movement’. The communist leader Slobodan Miložsević had suddenly undergone a complete metamorphosis: he now promoted himself as the ‘national’ alternative, and showed great verve in trading in his communist rhetoric for new views and new enemies.
    The communist leaders from the other federal republics, particularly Croatia and Slovenia, kept a watchful eye on the developments in Belgrade. Not Kosovo but Miložsević himself was their worry. They saw, and not without reason, the Serb complaints as a pretext for their re-establishing power over the Yugoslav federation. With the help of the army, consisting largely of Serbs, this would amount to the reinstatement of a centralist, authoritarian Yugoslavia dominated by Belgrade.
    The Serbs were disappointed by their Slovenian and Croatian brothers’lack of solidarity concerning Kosovo. Things came to a head in 1990. The Slovenian and Croatian leaders withdrew from the Communist League of Yugoslavia, both republics stopped paying taxes to the federal government in Belgrade, and in spring 1991 the federation fell apart.
    The American anthropologist Bette Denich has described how, during her visits to Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s, Tito's policy of integration and modernisation was setting the tone throughout the country, and how the pan-Yugoslav identity continued to gain strength. No one would have dreamed of bringing that process to a halt. Even after Tito's death, in May 1980, Yugoslavs to a man sang along with the pop song ‘After Tito – Tito!’:
    So now what, my southern land?
If anyone asks
we'll tell them: Tito again,
After Tito – Tito!
    Denich was all the more amazed, therefore, when she returned in the late 1980s. ‘Belgrade, as I knew it in the 1960s, was emphatically the capital of Yugoslavia, an administrative and intellectual centre that drew in people from the other republics to assume governmental and other functions. Now, instead of that, I found a Belgrade that emphatically presented itself as the capital of Serbia.'The fronts of buildings and houses had been cleaned and repainted with Old Serbian motifs, bookshop windows were filled with new works dealing with Serb history, literature and other national legacies.
    Looking back on this time, Bette Denich saw an almost psychopatho-logical process taking place in Yugoslavia, a rampant spiral of projections between ‘us’ and ‘them’, full of ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’: each participant in the conflict represented himself as a victim or a potential victim, and the other side as a threat or a potential threat. ‘And by reacting, mutually, to the other side solely as a threat, both parties of course became truly more threatening.’
    In Café Sax in early 1993, I had been introduced to the writer László Végel, an amiable, square-built man. He had just returned from Budapestand was sitting at a table, mulling over the future. He was wearing a new grey jacket, and his friends teased him a bit about it. Earlier that week, as part of the political purges being rushed through by the new government, he had been dismissed as director of Novi Sad's television broadcasting organisation. Before he went home, the writer György Konrád had advised him to begin by buying a new coat, to keep up his spirits and show those people in Novi Sad