AN article on the sudden death of Slobodan Milosevic by a former Pakistani diplomat brought a strong, if largely misinformed, rebuttal in the form of a long letter (Dawn, March 18). The letter outraged readers at home and abroad because it glossed over the terrible crimes against humanity that earned Milosevic the sobriquet of the ‘butcher of Balkans’.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia is one of those seminal events the consequences of which unfold over decades. The underlying causes were complex and need comprehensive understanding. Partisan oversimplification distorts history and is an obstacle to a correct appraisal of their import. The letter in question uncritically endorsed the view of the Serbian propagandists that western strategic plans for Central and Eastern Europe led to the fateful events of the period 1991-99. Describing the Bosnian leader, Alijah Izetbegovich, as an Islamic fundamentalist, the courageous Kosovo Liberation Army as a ‘thuggish army of paramilitaries’ and presenting Milosevic as defending his country against colonization by the World Bank and IMF is nothing but a misleading repetition of Serbian lies.

In fact, the West had dithered and prevaricated while Slobodan Milosevic implemented his project of ethnic cleansing. It offered poorly conceived initiatives to contain, not resolve, the conflict. By the time the United States made up its mind to destroy Milosevic’s evil war machine, the humanitarian factor and the strategic consideration had acquired an almost equal weight. Milosevic’s hordes led by maniacal killers such as the Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic had laid waste to more than 70 per cent of Bosnia and were on the verge of extending this genocide to Kosovo.

At the strategic level, the emergence of Greater Serbia, a mediaeval racist state, would have posed a grave challenge to the idea of a unified Europe and, for the Americans, a serious obstacle to the reclamation of the vast post-communist space stretching from the Danube to the Oxus. Military intervention had become necessary to save thousands of lives as well as facilitate the expansion of the European Union and Nato.

There was a poignant difference between the perceptions and plans of Bosnian Muslims and those of their Serb enemies. Muslim diplomats who like me served in Central Europe in 1992-93 would remember that their Bosnian contacts spoke invariably of multiculturalism and democracy as the ideals of a multi-ethnic Bosnian state. Even in the midst of untold atrocities against them, they attributed Milosevic’s insane campaign to his opportunistic lust for power rather than religious prejudice.

Izetbegovich had, indeed, written the treatise called “Islamic Declaration” in the 1960s — an offence for which he had once stood trial along with 12 other Muslims — but nobody who has read it can describe him as an Islamic fundamentalist. In fact, in the cauldron of passions that the collapse of communism in the region brought to a boil, the Bosnian Muslim leadership stood out as exemplars of tolerance and political pluralism. Serbs and Croats substituted rabid nationalism for Marxism while the Muslims yearned for enlightened coexistence.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, a jewel in the Ottoman crown, embraced Islam gradually as the Ottomans had no more proselytizing zeal than the Mughals of India. It sent a thousand youngsters to Constantinople to be brought up for elitist careers in the army and administration. Several Bosnians rose to become grand viziers. The Bosnians did not need conversion to enlist in the imperial armies during the fighting season. In his book Bosnia, a short history, Noel Malcolm recounts the crucial role played by the Dervish orders “in the two inter-related processes of Islamicization and the development of Muslim towns.”

Sarajevo was home to the most famous of dervish tekkes from 1463 onwards. “As well as being centres of local fellowship and piety”, he writes, “the tekkes were also part of a huge international network; members of the largest order, the Naqshbandi, might travel as far afield as Central Asia to seek out famous sheikhs”. Contemporary accounts describe Bosnians as a gentle people and note that “dignity, erudition, accurate understanding, sound deliberation, loyalty and trustworthiness are their characteristics.” The dervish factor, rather than ethnicity, seemed to have made the difference.

This European outpost of Islam probably did not evince an intellectual renaissance of the order of Muslim Spain but it certainly developed a culture that was held in esteem. Perhaps these quietist origins were partly responsible for the Bosnian procrastination about taking up arms in the face of mass murder in the early 1990s.

The waning of the Ottoman empire meant an existential crisis for this far flung Muslim province that has not been resolved to this day. By the mid-19th century, Constantinople’s grip on its European possessions had become weak. The Bosnians experimented with a mix of local autonomy and spiritual adherence to the Sublime Porte. The ever increasing resistance to the Ottoman rule was fuelling Christian passions and also local, ethnicity-based nationalisms. A long time later, Milosevic turned the Serbian sense of victimhood into an ideology of pure hatred that completely overshadowed the humane values of the Serbian society. The Bosnian Muslims were to pay a horrific price for his perverted exploitation of history.

It is not possible here to chronicle the decline of Ottoman power and its impact on Bosnia. However, the years 1877-78 were a defining moment in this narrative. Russia declared war on Turkey in 1877 in competition with Austria on sharing out the Balkan territories of Turkey. The Congress of Berlin held in July 1878 acted strongly to limit the gains made by the Russian proxy, Bulgaria, and to build up Austria by permitting it to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina under nominal Ottoman suzerainty. The Bosnian resistance to Austrian occupation did not last long. Austria carried out outright annexation of Bosnia in October 1908 when it felt that its occupation might be challenged by the emergence of the Young Turks in Turkey.

What was most relevant to the tragedy of 1992-93 was that the Austrian annexation led to a reactive assertion of Serb and Croat claims on Bosnia. Secret Serb societies committed to a pan-Serb homeland sprang up everywhere. Animosity to Bosnian Muslims became a continuous strain of the growing Serb literature. Nikola Pasic, one of the prime ministers of the Yugoslavia of 1918-41, wrote in 1880s that the Serbs “strive for the unification of all Serb tribes on the basis of tradition, memory, and the historical past of the Serb race. Croats on the other hand, see their Triune kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia as the centre of unification.” In the forefront were the rival Serb and Croat nationalisms; the Muslims only became a “problem” for Europe.

Tito’s Yugoslavia which was the last experiment to subsume Serb, Croat, Slovenian and Bosnian nationalism in a federation of autonomous republics never quite succeeded in curbing this dangerous drift of Serbian chauvinism. In the power struggle in the post-Tito Yugoslavia, Milosevic and the Croat leader, Franjo Tudjman, both relied on nationalism to create the founding myths for a Greater Serbia and greater Croatia. The Muslims alone stuck to their vision of new multi-ethnic democratic republics.

Milosevic did not invent the idea of exterminating Muslims; he implemented it with unprecedented passion. He turned history into mythology that transformed a large number of ordinary Serbs, many of them urban gangsters led by criminals like Arakan, into a killing machine. It was monstrous opportunism that brought Milosevic to the battlefield, where 600 years ago — in 1389, to be precise — the Ottomans had defeated a huge Serbian army determined to roll them out of the Balkans. He whipped up nationalist hysteria against Kosovo and Bosnia.

It has been said that Radio and Television Belgrade should figure high in the list of war criminals as it ceaselessly incited Serbs to indulge in indiscriminate killing of defenceless men, organized rape of women, selective extermination of Muslim professional classes and planned destruction of mosques, museums, libraries and historical monuments. Milosevic simply wanted to erase centuries off the history of Balkans.

Europe had not seen anything like it since Hitler presided over the extermination of Jews, gypsies and Slavs. In a tragic shift of focus, its statesmen opted for the old Balkan games of realpolitik rather than a decisive humanitarian intervention. Many of them looked at the bloodbath through the prism of late 19th century politics and sought to appease Milosevic. The Americans saw more clearly the strategic implications of Greater Serbia but waited too long before denting Serbian power.

The US-brokered Dayton Accord was built on compromises. It did not ask for a regime change in Belgrade. Milosevic was eventually ousted by fellow Serbs who had finally understood that he only brought them tragedy. The Bosnian state included a virtually independent Serb entity, Republika Srpska, which still resists integration. Kosovo escaped the fate of Bosnia and was allowed only a gradual and calibrated journey to what is now described as “conditional independence”.

Two monumental events are etched into the memory of Bosnian people — the great saga of the siege of Sarajevo that tested their faith to its limits and the cold blooded massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica. The latter would rekindle thoughts of revenge but Sarajevo, the city of a 100 or more mosques of antiquity and the dervish tekkes beckons the people to reconstruct their lives according to higher principles. They have reconstructed most of the mosques and some of the great historical monuments such as the Ottoman bridges. Villages have been rebuilt though as yet not enough people live in them. Half of Bosnia’s population was displaced by war; a significant proportion of it is now part of the international diaspora with its implication of serious brain drain.

Peace will come to the region when the battered successor states of the Yugoslav Federation anchor themselves in a new order offered primarily by the European Union. It is particularly important for Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Arab-Islamic world did whatever it could to assist the Bosnians in their great ordeal. It can continue to lend a helping hand by deepening economic and cultural relations while remaining fully sensitive to the European provenance of a resurrected democratic Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Sarajevo’s Islamic legacy turned out to be indestructible and it can seek renewal from enhanced intellectual contacts with the growing Muslim communities in Europe and the larger Muslim world. Bosnia can still demonstrate that the Muslim world is not a monolith. A global faith can seek unity only in diversity.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.
Email: tanvir.a.khan @gmail.com

NEW DELHI is a gratifying place to visit these days for a Pakistani activist working for peace in the Pakistan-India-Kashmir region. He feels most encouraged in his conversations with decision makers or their friends in the formidable Indian establishment.

The visitor notices that the days of a confrontationist attitude towards Pakistan are past. No one takes a position that the entire former state of Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of the Union of India and the only option available for Pakistan is to vacate the area it calls Azad Kashmir. Also complaints about “cross-border terrorism” are on a far lower scale.

Another welcome change: Civil society in India is ready to discuss the substance of possible solutions of the Kashmir issue. Talk abounds of “autonomy” for what India calls “Pakistan occupied” and Pakistan terms “India held” Kashmir. One consistently hears of the discussions the Indian leadership is holding with those leaders of Jammu and Kashmir who have spent long years in Indian jails. All this amounts to a fundamental and welcome change in the attitude of the people of India and their government. The relations between Pakistan and India have never been as good as they are today.

However, the visitor senses that there is much distance yet to be traversed to reach the goal the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had in mind of establishing the same relationship between India and Pakistan as exist between the United States and Canada. However, India and Pakistan are well on their way. All speed to them.

It is clear that at the back of the current peace process are positive forces more powerful than those of the governments of India and Pakistan. These forces — comprising the industrial and finance capital of India and Pakistan — had come to surface in Pakistan when in the mid-80s, the military dictator, General Ziaul Haq had appointed Dr Mahbubul Haq as finance minister. In India the entry was executed by prime minister Narasimha Rao through the appointment of Dr Manmohan Singh as finance minister of India.

The appointment by the respective governments of two eminent economists, generally favouring free market and finance regimes, was made in perceived national interests. The corporate and the ruling political elites of the two countries welcomed the appointments. The capitalist world also reacted enthusiastically. The road was clear for initiating basic structural changes in the economy through privatisation, deregulation and globalisation. The “reforms” undertaken produced welcome results for large sections of the middle classes and enormous riches for the rich and the influential class. The course has been vigorously pursued on both sides of the Wagah border.

During the last decade the political influence and economic power of capitalists, traders and high-tech entrepreneurs has increased. The economic dividends of establishing permanent peace between Pakistan and India have become increasingly manifest. Simultaneously, the overwhelming support of the masses of the two countries for peace and friendship has had a decisive political impact. The way was cleared for the politicians to open the doors of negotiations to improve relations. The peace process got a roaring start to the extent of being labelled “irreversible”, as the leaders of the two countries have publicly stated. For the advance of the process, the red light has changed into amber; the green light is still awaited.

In the way of changing the signal from amber to green, something defying logic and bordering on the mysterious seems to be coming in the way. For thousands of years India has been a land fertile, rich and prosperous with an advanced culture and civilisation, far ahead of the bulk of the rest of the world. For ages it has been an object of loot, plunder and occupation by aggressive neighbours from mountainous, arid and poor lands.

It is only natural that in the deep layers of the psyche of the peoples of India should reside serious apprehensions about their security from the direction of the north-west. India’s desire to have jurisdiction of its defensive armed might extend as far west as possible is a logical outcome of such apprehensions.

No wonder that in the context of the resolution of the issue of Kashmir with Pakistan and the people of J & K, India should want to retain the right to defend its borders at the Line of Control. While the call of the psyche deserves to be respected, the call of logic should have the upper hand.

During the last 59 years Pakistan has proved to be a solid bulwark for the defence of India from the north-west. Even today, it is Pakistan, without any apparent help from India, which is facing the militants infiltrating across the Durand Line to create disorder in Pakistan.

The same was the case when Pakistan helped Afghanistan to face the Soviet military might that crossed the River Amu. India watched from a distance. There is no reason to doubt that Pakistan shall not continue to do in future what it has done in the past.

The demand of the peoples of the former state that both India and Pakistan should not have any military role within the borders of the former state deserves to be respected in full. The role of their armies should be restricted to the Ladakh and Khunjrab border.

Any role for the military of India and Pakistan at the Line of Control shall amount to a division of the former state, a proposition most unlikely to be accepted by the peoples of the former state and on that account by President General Pervez Musharraf. Pakistan and the international community should do all they can to remove India’s security apprehensions along the LoC.

AS befits the MP for Hull, John Prescott has assumed William Wilberforce’s mantle and placed himself in charge of next year’s 200th anniversary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in British ships.

It promises to be a suitably august commemoration with an exhibition in Parliament Hall, renovated museums in Liverpool and Hull, and academic conferences. But if the anniversary is to have any lasting value, the heritage sector must say something more challenging about Britain’s multiracial past.

To historians such as Richard Beck, the story of the slave trade is a morality play with the British cast as evil knaves. Profits from the bloody trade secured the imperial hegemony of Georgian England. It was only brought to an end in 1807 because of the move from a colonial sugar trade to industrial capitalism. There was nothing noble about abolition and the proper response today is a comprehensive package of reparations.

By contrast, Whiggish champions of Britain’s imperial past point to 1807 as symbolic of our “good empire”. It was a heroic moment when idealism trumped materialism as the Royal Navy scoured the seas for illegal slave ships. This is the story of Rule Britannia, William Wilberforce and the Society of Friends.

Certainly, the slave economy underpinned the riches of 18th century society. It also had a dominating influence across the British politico-financial establishment. Institutional investors in slavery included the Hanoverian royal family, numerous Oxbridge colleges and even the Church of England.

This needs to be the starting point for any commemoration. As Professor James Walvin has commented: “My worry about 2007 is that there will be such a euphoria of nationalistic pride that people will forget what happened before, which was that the British had shipped extraordinary numbers of Africans across the Atlantic.”

And in what conditions. The barbarity of the Middle Passage often led to 30% mortality rates among the 10 million slaves shipped across the Atlantic. They were shackled together and laid back to back for weeks on end; suicide and self-mutilation were daily occurrences.

The lingering stench of vomit, sweat and faeces worked its way into the very planks of the ships. One escaped slave described how “the shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable”. The response of good, Christian British captains was to throw sick slaves overboard — and then claim insurance on the lost cargo.

Despite its barbarity, ending this lucrative trade was an uphill struggle. Few today would go so far as to hail it, as one contemporary did, as “the most altruistic act since Christ’s crucifixion”, but halting trafficking had serious economic costs. Yet the moral certitude of Wilberforce and his evangelical allies convinced MPs, many of whom had slaving interests, of the ethical case for abolishing “the foul iniquity”.

However, this had as much to do with purifying England from the taint of slavery as any great humanitarian concern for slaves. There was little sense of racial equality, and a new image of the ever-grateful black subject subsequently developed — seen to greatest effect in Josiah Wedgwood’s cameo of a slave kneeling in chains. The inscription read: “Am I not a man and a brother?” But few among Wilberforce’s Clapham Sect honestly thought so.

This is a complex, nuanced story for curators and councils to grapple with. What this must mean in terms of commemoration is a new emphasis on the black voice within the abolitionist movement. The contribution of such anti-slavery activists as Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho in mobilising society needs to be appreciated alongside the role of white parliamentarians.

The commemorations must also extend beyond the port cities. Slavery infected the Georgian economy as readily as oil underpins business today. The cotton mills of Lancashire and metal industries of the Black Country were seamlessly interwoven with the Atlantic trade, as were the riches of those aristocrats who dwelt innocuously in Mansfield Parks erected on the back of slave ships and sugar plantations.

So while the planned slavery museum in Liverpool is to be commended, similar themes need to be explored in the municipal galleries of Manchester and Glasgow as well as the industrial museums of the West Midlands. And I look forward to the Historic Houses Association putting its weight behind 2007.

Equally importantly, the anniversary should be a living one. Magnificently, Hull has long twinned itself with Freetown, Sierra Leone, the promised land for so many freed slaves. Next year will see a wealth of sporting and cultural exchanges between the cities.

Beyond such symbolism, 2007 offers a unique opportunity to say something new to a broad audience about our imperial and postcolonial past. For much of its modern history, Britain has stood at the hub of a series of global networks: religious, commercial, political. Much of it has been exploitative and racist. But it hasn’t all been one way. Ideas, people, and cultures have influenced the British metropolis as much as the colonies. Ours is a global history of migration and multiculturalism stretching back long before the arrival of the Empire Windrush.

So, while the unrivalled horror of the slave trade should never be diminished, John Prescott could use next year’s anniversary as much to enlighten 2007 as to commemorate 1807. 7 Tristram Hunt is the author of Building Jerusalem: the Rise and Fall of the Victorian City. — The Guardian, London