Each Sunday this summer, we’re sharing an essay from the archives that provides a rare first-person account of history as it unfolded. This week, we’re resurfacing a gripping firsthand account of Yugoslavia’s slide into civil war in the early 1990s by Warren Zimmermann, who served as the last U.S. ambassador to the country. “The breakup of Yugoslavia is a classic example of nationalism from the top down,” Zimmermann wrote. “A manipulated nationalism in a region where peace has historically prevailed more than war and in which a quarter of the population were in mixed marriages.”
President George H. W. Bush appointed Zimmermann, a career diplomat, as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia in 1989. He arrived in the country that spring with a commitment to support Yugoslavia’s democratic unity and an abiding love for the place and its people that he had nurtured decades earlier. “Belgrade was an acquired taste, and I had acquired it,” he wrote. But the character of Yugoslav politics had changed in his absence: “Slobodan Milošević, an ambitious and ruthless communist party official, had clawed his way to power several years before.”
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as it was officially known, was established in 1945, in the aftermath of a brutal occupation by Nazi Germany. The federation was made up of six republics, including modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia. The country’s leader, Josip Broz Tito, had suppressed the latent forces of nationalism within the country through sheer force of personality during his rule, which stretched from the end of World War II until his death in 1980.
When Zimmermann landed in Belgrade, he was alarmed to find that nationalist movements were on the rise throughout Yugoslavia, fueled by leaders including Milošević. “He is a man of extraordinary coldness,” Zimmermann wrote. “I never saw him moved by an individual case of human suffering; for him, people are groups (Serbs, Muslims) or simply abstractions.” As Milošević’s nationalist rhetoric grew more aggressive, Zimmermann began to fear for the future of Yugoslavia: “The ethnic hatred sown by Milošević and his ilk and the mixture of ethnic groups in every republic except Slovenia meant that Yugoslavia’s shattering would lead to extreme violence, perhaps even war.”
In the 1990 elections, ethnic separatist parties came to power across the country. “The age of naked nationalism had begun,” Zimmermann wrote. By 1991, with Slovenia and Croatia pressing for secession, “the aggressive nationalism emanating like noxious fumes from the leaders of Serbia and Croatia and their even more extreme advisers, officials, media manipulators, and allies had cast the die for disintegration and violence.” Zimmermann particularly lamented the role of the media in fueling ethnic animosity. He recalled one local reporter saying to him, “You Americans would become nationalists and racists too if your media were totally in the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.” In 1992, Zimmermann was recalled to the United States in protest against Serbian aggression in Bosnia. By then, war was tearing Yugoslavia apart, as groups who had previously lived together peacefully began killing one another. By the time the Yugoslav wars ended in 2001, over 100,000 people had been killed.
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