HISTORY IS RUNNING BACKWARDS

We secretly approve of ethnic cleansing in

Croatia, writes Anne McElvoy, even if

we do not admit it to ourselves

Zagreb FOUR YEARS ago, in the Serbian enclave of Knin, I came across Slava. She was bottle-blonde, wearing combat gear and an Orthodox cross around her neck. Across her back was a kalashnikov, in her eyes the fierce blaze of war. Beside her, on the rocky road, pranced a small brown bear. He was the mascot of the Knin mili- tia, which at the time was engaged in sav- aging Croatian villages unfortunate enough to be located in the disputed terri- tory. 'They will only get me out of here in a coffin,' said Slava. In the event, they got Slava and another 150,000 or so Serbs out of there in a dismal procession of cars, tractors and carts, a column of peasant misery, the largest single exodus of the war in the former Yugoslavia.

The bear must have been left behind. I had hoped that the returning Croats would treat him well, but had misgivings once I arrived in Croatia again. Anything which symbolised Serb rule in Krajina is being destroyed in a victorious rampage by the new masters. Zagreb television showed pictures of burning crops. It was not clear who had started the fire, but no one was making an effort to put it out. 'A strange thing to allow, given that they are your crops now,' I said to a patriotic Croatian friend. 'Yes, but the Serbs planted them,' he countered. 'The flames are cleansing flames. We have to start again.'

Cleansing: the most chilling word to spring into use during the violent disinte- gration of the former Yugoslavia. Every- one agrees that the Bosnian Serbs, with their sustained brutality against the Mus- lims and Croats in Bosnia, practised ethnic cleansing — it was their leader who casu- ally introduced the ghastly phrase into the European vocabulary of the 1990s. Last week, Michael Portillo, the Defence Sec- retary, used it to describe the routing of Serbs from ICrajina. But Croatia prefers the daintier description 'voluntary exodus' to describe the Serbs' flight from a territo- ry they have occupied since the 16th cen- tury, when they were encouraged by the Austro-Hungarian Empire to settle there as an Orthodox Christian bulwark against the Ottoman sphere.

Who is right? One of the most dispiriting aspects of the conflict is the extent to which evils have become relativised. The Croats are correct, on one level, to protest at being accused of ethnic cleansing, if by this we mean the terror tactics of mass execution and rape practised by the Bosnian Serbs.

The Croats have, however, aspired to, and partially achieved, the same goal as the Serbs: rendering their territory ethnically pure. In ICrajina, only a few elderly souls and social outsiders, too ill, dazed or resigned to flee, remain. Even in Zagreb, the traditionally tolerant Croatian capital, where mixed Serb-Croat marriages are commonplace, the Serb population has dwindled from 100,000 in 1991 to 40,000 today. In the city's Orthodox church, now branded with hostile graffiti, the priest hands out baptismal certificates to a stream of families preparing to leave. Many of those who are staying on are changing their children's names to Croatian ones, or con- verting to Roman Catholicism. History seems to be running backwards. Now we have the tactical conversions of the Cru- sades reproduced in modern Europe.

The Croatian government continues to insist that Serbs leaving Croatia are doing so of their own accord, but in terms which are a distinct disinvitation to them to stay. Nowhere does the gap between words and meaning loom wider than here. The televi- sion pictures accompanying the daily re- runs of the conquest are intermingled with footage of burning Croatian villages, of destroyed churches and wounded civilians from the fighting there in 1991, intended to stir up the visceral antipathies of the Croat- ian population. Anyway, what future did the residents of this Serb outpost realisti- cally have in a state which has made Croat- ian national pride its defining principle?

Suddenly, a kind of brittle clarity has descended on the map of the former Yugoslavia. In the West, the outcry about population transfers, voluntary or other- wise, is at best hollow, at worst cynical. The United States not only backed the Croat rearmament, but Madeline Albright, America's UN ambassador, has suddenly produced aerial photographs of mass burial grounds near Srebrenica, said to mark atrocities carried out by Bosnian Serbs. The decision to make this revelation just as Serb refugees were fleeing Krajina seemed calculated to focus the West's lim- ited supply of outrage on the reliably vil- lainous Bosnian Serbs — to the benefit of the Croats, whose sporadic harassment of the vanquished Krajina Serbs therefore went unnoticed.

As little as we in the West like to admit it to ourselves, we rather approve of the results of this latest round of ethnic cleansing. It has relieved us of the task of dithering over the fate of the Bosnian enclave at Bihac, since it stopped being an enclave when the Croats drove the Serbs out of neighbouring Krajina. It has evened up the balance of power between Zagreb and Belgrade, without which no peace plan can be enforced. Together, the Croat offensive and the Bosnian Serb conquest of the safe havens of Zepa and Srebrenica have rendered the dilemma over whether to use NATO air strikes irrelevant. Ethnic cleansing on both sides has wiped out car- tographically inconvenient pockets of minorities, using the most primitive, cul- turally destructive but efficient of means — the forced transfer of populations.

We have failed to find any other way to solve acute ethnic disputes in Europe. Fifty years ago this week, the exodus of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia was under way; refugees with the same, dazed looks in their eyes, clutching the same pathetic bundles of res- cued possessions, were reduced, overnight, from house-holders to recipients of Red Cross aid. It was believed at the time (and is still contended by some) that although Poland and the now Czech Republic suf- fered economically and culturally from the expulsion of their German population, the move helped stabilise the borders of post- war Europe. Arguably, the compulsory exchange of the Greek and Turkish minorities may also have prevented a war between those two powers.

But to encourage the practice to contin- ue is morally ambiguous, to say the least, particularly since our mainstream politi- cians are quick to condemn their col- leagues who preach the doctrine of 'Germany for the Germans,' or 'France for the French'. In the Balkans, upholding

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of, ethnic cleansing as a legitimate means of pursuing geopolitical goals, may also prove dangerous: it may be a difficult process to halt. Serbia and Montenegro have large Hungarian and Albanian minorities. Mace- donia has a strong Albanian minority. They cannot feel neutral about the emergence of states intent on being as 'nationally pure' as possible.

Even majority populations concentrated in provinces of these brave new territories, like the unfortunate Albanians of Kosovo, are at risk of increased repression as the tolerance of national minorities, never gen- erous in these parts, undergoes a formal decline. And the disenfranchisement of the Bosnian Muslims, encouraged in their goal of an independent state by the West through precipitate recognition, heralds future instability too. The betrayal of that dream and the experience of sustained vio- lence will not fade from their memories. It would be astonishing if the result were not some form of militant or terrorist reaction in the years to come.

The end of this war, whenever it does come, will present us with a whole new palette of problems and dilemmas, among them an overly-robust Croatia. With a prin- cipled rudeness rare in a Western leader these days, Austria's level-headed chancel- lor, Franz Vranitslcy, lambasted Croatian President Franjo 'Fudjman (who has taken to appearing in a Caudillo-style white and gold outfit) for 'prancing around in the sort of fantasy uniform not even seen in the Vienna opera these days.' President Tudj- man's strutting does bode ill for the Serb minority remaining in Croatia, as well as for the Muslims of Bosnia, over whom Zagreb is likely to hold sway when, as now seems likely, the Croat-Muslim regions of Bosnia have confederated with Croatia, and the Bosnian Serbs with Serbia.

In the ghostly town of Obrovac, on the road from the coast to Knin, the streets already belong to the Croatian militia.

They passed the first days of victory scrawl- ing their own graffiti over the Serb's slo- gans, as if trying to wipe out all vestiges of a population which has lived here for four hundred years.

• ti1Oldtdi man, a returned refugee, was 'ng h Zagreb fiancee where they wotfld live ,now that the fighting is over.

'We can take the apartment on the sixth 5oor in IT mother's block,' he said. 'It used to be" Serb.' Whoever said that you can't buildlappiness on the misery of oth- ers clearly hadn't spent long in the Balkans.

• IlkiPfitritht Serbian bear mascots, a Croa- tian militia commander, passing through to take supplies to his men in Knin, told me that they were still wandering the streets there, disconsolately looking for food and a new master. 'I feel sorry for them,' he said. 'But what would a Croat want with a Ser- bian bear?'

Anne McElvoy writes for the Times.