Serbia

The History of Modern Serbia

Serbia's Secret War

An entire piece of Serbian history is missing. And in the middle of the latest Yugoslav war - Europe's worst blood bath since World War II - Serbian politicians, propagandists, and revisionist historians have made a cynical attempt at replacing the missing piece by rewriting the Holocaust record. They claim that Serbs were not Nazi collaborators in genocide, but purely victims of the same atrocities that befell the Jews; and that Serbian aspirations for a Greater Serbia are not driven by a murderous, nationalistic hatred, but rather are propelled by a victim's desire to lay claim to a safe homeland, a Serbian Promised Land. Thus has the current spilling of blood been justified. Philip J. Cohen argues that the existence of such a propaganda campaign, emanating from Belgrade, began in the earliest days of the post-World War II era and, since then, has been reflected in the world media, as well as in popular commentary and scholarly analysis. More astonishing is that this campaign has been widely successful, particularly in Israel. Remarkable for its broad portrayal and penetrating examination of the Yugoslav social and political experience, Serbia's Secret War draws heavily on documents that have been previously unavailable to the West. Some of the written record has been translated and is published here for the first time. Destined to be regarded as an important contribution to the field, Cohen's careful study of the Serbian role in the Second World War will dramatically alter how scholars, policy makers, and the general public view the bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia - and how they will come to understand the reasons behind it.

Serbia

Serbias have come and gone, and their boundaries have moved about. This text, rather than being a history, is an attempt to look at the historical forces, actors, ideas and periods which have moulded the entities that go by the name "Serbia". These are the mediaeval rulers and the church; the principality and the kingdom of modern times; the imperial rule of Ottomans and Habsburgs; the two world wars; the unification with other Slav populations and territories; the ideology of the three-named Yugoslav kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; that of the brotherhood-and-union of Yugoslav nations in the communist federation; and the disintegration of Yugoslavia and its aftermath. Following Serbia's emergence from the ruins of Tito's Yugoslavia and of Milosevic's regime, Stevan Pavlowitch strives to get away from both the "doomed-to-violence" and the "doomed-to-martyrdom" explanations favoured respectively by some Western and some Serbian interpreters. He seeks to pose questions rather than to provide answers, and to move forward from the past rather than to look back to idealized ages or read history backwards.