A Final Solution (The New Republic)

0n June 12, 1990, one of the most important Serbian intellectuals of the twentieth century was laid to rest in Belgrade. His name was Vasa Cubrilovic, and his funeral was attended by a who’s who of Serbian academia and politics. The dean of Belgrade University’s College of Philosophy and a member of the Serbian presidency, who spoke on behalf of Slobodan Milosevic’s government, gave eulogies. "The work that he left behind marks him as one of the giants of our era" said one official. "He was a man of understanding and negotiation. "The front-page obituary in the state-run newspaper Borba said Cubrilovic’s "name will be noted in his- tory as one of the most important people of this country." President Slobodan Milosevic couldn’t attend the funeral, but he did send a telegram to Cubrilovic’s family.

Who was Vasa Cubrilovic to receive all these honors?

Born in 1897, Cubrilovic was a 17-year-old member of the Serbian nationalist group that staged the 1914 assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Spared execution because of his age, Cubrilovic spent World War I in prison and then returned to Belgrade to study and work in the government of what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. By the 1930s, he was a professor of history at Belgrade University, where he taught for 40 years, eventually becoming the head of his department and later the director of the prestigious Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences Institute for Balkan Stud-ies. In that time, he assembled a body of historical research on Serbian political thought that has been hailed even by American academics. And Cubrilovic was the author of vicious plans to rid Yugoslavia of the Kosovar Albanians.

Cubrilovic first presented his ideas to the Serbian Cultural Club, an organization of Belgrade intellectuals. On March 7,1937, he submitted "The Expulsion of the Albanians" to the government as a secret memorandum. "From 1918 onwards it was the task of our present state to destroy the remainder of the Albanian triangle [Kosova]. It did not do this, Cubrilovic wrote. "The only way and the only means to cope with them is the brute force of an organized state." Cubrilovic suggested that Albania and Turkey would be the best places to ship Kosovar Albanians. But, if Tirana objected to the deportation, "the Albanian Government should be informed that we shall stop at nothing to achieve our final solution to this question." Cubrilovic explained that "to bring about the relocation of a whole population, the first prerequisite is the creation of the suitable psychosis.’ This, he said, .can be created in many ways’ "including bribing and threatening the Albanian clergy, propaganda, and "coercion by the state apparatus," a concept he explained at length:

The law must be enforced to the letter so as to make staying intolerable for the Albanians: fines, and imprisonment, the ruthless application of all police dispositions, such as the prohibition of smuggling, cutting forests, damaging agriculture, leaving dogs unchained, compulsory labor and any other measure that an experienced police force can contrive. >From the Economic aspect: The refusal to recognize the old land deeds,... requisitioning of all state and communal pastures,... the withdrawal of permits to exercise a profession, dismissal from the state, private and communal offices, etc., will hasten the process of their removal.... When it comes to religion the Albanians are very touchy, therefore they must be harassed on this score, too. This can be achieved through ill-treatment of their clergy, the destruction of their clergy, the destruction of their cemeteries, the prohibition of polygamy, and especially the inflexible application of the law compelling girls to attend elementary schools, wherever they are .... We should distribute weapons to our colonists, as need be.... In particular, a tide of Montenegrins should be launched from the mountain pastures in order to create a large-scale conflict with the Albanians in [Kosova]. This conflict should be prepared by means of our trusted people. It should be encouraged and this can be done more easily since, in fact, Albanians have revolted, while the whole affair should be presented as a conflict between clans and, if need be, ascribed to economic reasons. Finally, local riots can be incited. These will be bloodily suppressed with the most effective means.... There remains one more means, which Serbia employed with great practical effect after 1878, that is, by secretly burning down villages and city quarters.

"My first thought when I read [Cubrilovic’s 1937 memo]," says Charles Jelavich, a professor emeritus of history at Indiana University and an acquaintance of Cubrilovies since 1949, "was, my God, I think Milosevic read this and said, "I’m going to implement this plan." Still, some Slavic studies scholars and former acquaintances of Cubrilovic argue that, in light of what was happening in Europe and Russia in the 30’s, this ghastly vision was not as extreme as it sounds today. "I think most of these things should be put in the proper context," says Bosko Spasojevic of the Open Society Institute in Budapest, who was once a teaching assistant at Belgrade University, where he knew Cubrilovic. "At that time in Europe things like this were solved in very radical, cruel ways" Indeed, Cubrilovic wrote: "The world today has grown used to things much worse than this, and it should not be a cause for concern. At a time when Germany can expel tens of thousands of Jews and Russia can shift millions of people from one part of the continent to another, the shifting of a few hundred thousand Albanians will not lead to the outbreak of a world war."

Although parts of Cubrilovic’s plan were put into effect during the 30’s, World War II temporarily interrupted any mass deportation. But, after Soviet troops liberated Belgrade in late 1944, Cubrilovic, who spent part of the war in a German prison camp, submitted another plan to Yugoslavia’s new Communist leader, Josip Broz Tito. This second document, "The Minority Problem in the New Yugoslavia," advocated the expulsion of not just Kosovar Albanians but all of Yugoslavia’s minorities. "Yugoslavia can achieve peace and ensure development only if it becomes ethnically pure" he wrote. The army should "systematically and without mercy cleanse the minorities of these regions, which we want to settle with our own national element." He advocated taking advantage of the war chaos to help "ethnically conquer" Kosova: "That which in peaceful times takes decades and centuries in time of war will be accomplished in a matter of months and years." He also called for concentration camps, the development of a complicated government bureaucracy to conduct ethnic cleansing, and stressed that "[t]he hatred and irresistible wish of our masses to do away with minorities must be utilized in a constructive way," for "[i]t may be that we might never again have such an opportunity in order to make our state ethnically pure."

It tells you something about the sincerity of Tito’s "brotherhood and unity" slogan that he invited Cubrilovic to serve as a federal minister from 1945 to 1951. During this period, the Tito government did send tens of thousands of Albanians to Turkey and, according to some estimates, executed tens of thousands more.

Yet some say that, by the time of his death in 1990, Cubrilovic had mellowed and no longer believed in the brutal solutions he had once advocated. "I think he was afraid of what [post-Tito nationalism] would unleash, " says Norman Cigar, who is completing a study of the infamous 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the intellectuals’ manifesto that became the inspiration for Milosevic-era Serbian nationalism. "He was dead against the memo’ "says Cigar. "He said it was going to lead to bloodshed " However, at the same time Cubrilovic was predicting that the memorandum would break up Yugoslavia, he also threatened that blood would be spilled if Kosovar Albanians sought independence.

Whatever intellectual shifts he may have gone through at the end of his life, Cubrilovic had created an ideological monster he could no longer control. Shortly after his death, The Collected Historical Studies by Vasa Cubrilovic was trotted out by nationalist Serbs to bolster the case for the wars that Milosevic later launched.

Confronted today with more than half a million deportees and reports of unspeakable violence, many in the West wonder at the lack of dissent among Serbian intellectuals. But, as Cubrilovic’s work shows, the historical rationale for ethnic cleansing has been provided by some of the most respected academics in Serbia. The present generation of Belgrade scholars is hardly different. As Miranda Vickers, the author of Between Serb and Albanian, puts it, "The more educated the Serbs are, the more nationalist they become."

During the Milosevic era, Dusan Batakovic, a Belgrade University historian, has emerged as the leading advocate for the minority Serb population in Kosova. Like many nationalist writers, though, his scholarship seems clouded by a wildly chauvinistic reading of Serbian history. He notes that the Kosovar Albanian intelligentsia consists of "semi-intellectuals capable of taking in only a limited number of ideas. " He writes that during World War II some 100,000 Albanians immigrated to Kosova under a secret Italian resettlement policy. (The Axis powers occupied Albania during the war.) In Kosova: A Short History, however, Noel Malcolm exposes this assertion as "pure fantasy." He writes, "No evidence of any such mass migration during the war can be found in any of the documents of the occupying powers’

Writing about the deportation of Kosovars to Turkey in theories, Batakovic insists that mainly ethnic Mirks were sent and that the number of Albanians was "negligible. " He fails to mention that, before the deportation, Albanians were coerced into declaring themselves as Turks (the number of "Turks" in Kosova increased by 2,500 percent in six years). Today, this spurious "researcher" is a widely respected historian, and it is said he will likely follow in Cubrilovic’s footsteps and be named director of the Institute for Balkan Studies.

Yet Cubrilovic’s true legacy may be what is now happening in Kosova the enactment of his decades-old blueprint for ethnic cleansing through Milosevic’s meticulously planned Operation Horseshoe. "NATO didn’t realize that this ‘Cubrilovic syndrome of the 1930s was still active in the 1990s, says Vickers. "But the Serbs have always said, "We don’t