Weaning Hearts and Minds

Present-day British and American colonialists in Iraq and Afghanistan, with all the bullshit rhetoric about 'winning hearts and minds' could really learn something (about not invading countries) from the Partisan example. The only real victory in war is 'moral' victory, and after more than five years - longer than WWII - neither conflict (Afghanistan/Iraq) is over. Here are a couple more interesting bits from Hoare's book, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943:

"The Serb Partisan Ilija Vukoman recalls that in Central Bosnia: 'The Muslim women used to hide themselves - they wore the veil. I passed hundreds of times by the house of Muharem Baric and his wife without ever seeing her face. When the uprising began and work for the People's Liberation Movement got underway, Muharem's wife and many other Muslim women ceased hiding themselves from us.' [footnote omitted]"

"Zaga Umicevic-Mala recalls a young Muslim woman she met in Banja Luka, Nazifa Isakovic, who was recruited into the NOP by her brother Zaim, a Communist. Nazifa worshipped her brother and would carry out any task for the movement that he asked of her but, she told Umicevic-Mala, 'the only thing I could not do would be to take off my veil'. Two years later Umicevic-Mala met Nazifa again, as a Partisan and without her veil. 'Her blonde hair was flowing in the wind and her big blue eyes were happily gazing at the world around her.' Umicevic-Mala asked: 'Naza, what's happened to your veil? Do you remember what you said to me at Banja Luka?' Nazifa replied: 'I did not know how wonderful it is to gaze at the world without a headscarf'."...(287)

Yep, that's what happens when you actually inspire people. And guess what, boys - you don't inspire people by invading and demolishing their countries and homes, terrorising them, murdering their relatives, putting them in prison, cuffing them, stuffing them full with McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King and bullshit rhetoric about democracy and human rights, and shoving ballots in their faces. Nope. Capitalism inspires fuck all.

Partisan Women: Bloodthirsty Harpies of National Liberation?

Since I started writing about my communist partisan grandparents, I have done some casual research into Yugoslav/Bosnian WWII history. One interesting recent book I came across covers the period 1941-43, and in particular the 'civil war' between the Partisans on one side, and the Chetniks - Serbian nationalist/royalist paramilitaries, predecessors of contemporary Serbian nationalists. The Chetniks, on account of very effective propaganda through a long-established and influential Serbian lobby in the West (descendants of the Royal family reside in England to this day)**, actually received Allied support until 1943, when Allied spies dispatched to both sides reported that the Chetniks were in fact collaborating with the Germans while the Partisans were fighting against them. The Allies officially (and grudgingly, given the Partisans' communist agenda) switched their support at the Tehran conference.



The feats of the Yugoslav Partisans in WWII are the stuff of legend. These were not mere warriors - they were a representative cross-section of the society that spawned them. They even included some of the greatest artists and writers of 20th century Yugoslavia, who immortalized the struggle in literature, film, and fine art. For those of us who grew up with these stories the names of places and battles reverberate with a mythological power - The Battle of Sutjeska, The Igman March, the Battle of Neretva...Through the haze of childhood recollection the protagonists of these tales are endowed with an almost super-human strength and cunning in overcoming their far more powerful Nazi opponents. But what if there is indeed a real dimension of this struggle that is, well, not super-human, but super-(man)?

It is generally accepted that in spite of their technological and military weaknesses early in the war, the Partisans had two main advantages over their enemies:
1. a small but very effective cadre of Spanish Civil War veterans from the International brigades who, unlike even many German troops, had valuable experience of modern warfare (the Spanish Civil War is arguably the first truly modern war, at least on European soil), and
2. broad popular appeal due to the fact that their founding aims were political rather than ethnic or religious, allowing them to draw recruits across national, ethnic, religious, and other boundaries.



There is one under-explored dimension of this second point: the role of women. Many people don't realize just how radical Tito and co's project of national liberation was, and how deliberate they were in taking measures to reshape society from top to bottom. Here is one interesting passage from Hoare's book:

"...The group of Bosnians most excluded from political life prior to the Axis invasion was the female half of the population, which represented a larger proportion of the country's inhabitants than Serbs, Muslims, or Croats. In his seminal study of the Chetnik movement, Jozo Tomasevich noted the role of women in the Partisan victory: 'One of the fundamental differences between the Chetnik and Partisan movements was in their attitude toward women. The participation of women in Partisan fighting ranks and mass organisations of the Partisan movement was of such importance that all Partisan officials agreed that without the women the Partisans could never have won.' [footnote omitted] ...Male supremacy over women was as much a part of traditional rural society as religious semi-segregation. In overturning the one the KPJ helped to undermine the other, for the dissolution of traditional boundaries between men and women and between Orthodox, Muslims, Catholics, and Jews was part of the same process of turning 'peasants into Bosnians', a process inimical to the Chetnik project that upheld traditional social distinctions." (Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943, 285-86.)

On the point about 'turning peasants into Bosnians' my grandpa's story, as told in the previous post, is a case in point. How successful this was, well, my grandma may have a few things to say about it, but I think we're in overall agreement. (Apparently whenever people tried to psychologize my grandpa's behaviour, she would explain that, as a peasant at heart, he had no such thing as a 'psyche')



Nonetheless, it gets even more amusing. To anyone interested in this topic I would recommend reading the entire chapter in Hoare's book which chronicles, among other things, touching episodes of Muslim women shedding veils and other niceties in joining or collaborating with Partisan ranks. Here are some other interesting bits:

"The prominent role of women in the Partisan movement inevitably found a role in the demonology of its right-wing enemies. An Ustasha report on Partisan atrocities in Prijedor, following the capture of the town in May 1942, claimed: 'Women, both from Prijedor and from the surrounding area, played a particularly prominent role in these bestialities'. [footnote omitted]...The Ustashas' Department of Public Security claimed in an internal report of September 1942 that the Partisans 'are in many places bloodthirsty, particularly the female persons in their ranks.' [footnote omitted] For their part, the Chetniks distributed a pamphlet in eastern Hercegovina in late 1942 claiming that among the Communists were many 'fallen and unfortunate women and girls without morals' [footnote omitted]...Partisan women were therefore the polar opposite of true, martyred Serb women. In Draza Mihailović's view: 'Communist women are recognisable by the fact that they are immoral; using free love they approach and seduce our men, particularly those who place fun above duty.'[footnote omitted]" (288-89)



While I am having difficulty picturing my grandma as a bloodthirsty berserker harpy, I find it amusing to imagine the chill these fascists must have gotten to see women carrying guns and screaming communist slogans. One old Partisan anthem we all sang as kids is about a mlada partizanka - a young Partisan woman - who threw grenades at the enemy...

One could even argue that the presence of women helped turn the tide of the war not just quantitatively by inflating the ranks of the Partisans, but additionally in a qualitative way, by the effect on morale - building solidarity in the ranks irrespective of religious, ethnic, or gender differences, and demoralising their enemies, or simply scaring them shitless at the sight of this weird hybrid fighting machine.



This should in no way lead to any sympathy with the contemporary American project of nation-building or reshaping other societies: the partisans, who sought to reshape their own, were strategically precisely in the position of the mujahideen - the crucial difference being that they were fighting for unification and liberation, rather than segregation and imposition of strict religious codes. The crucial element lending to the effectiveness of their struggle, and to the unique position of Yugoslavia in the Cold War world after its break with the Soviet Union, is national self-determination.



Going back to the broader issue of political appeal and the enfranchisement of the excluded, does this not go some way toward explaining why the vast majority post-colonial national liberation movements worldwide - even those spawned without any direct outside superpower involvement - were communist or socialist? Doesn't any national liberation struggle, in order to be truly successful, require this kind of breaking-down of ethnic, religious, gender, and other boundaries?

This is precisely the way to unite the different struggles: workers, women, oppressed minorities... In order to effectively confront a common external enemy, a nation must first shed its own internal demons; and perhaps the reason why Yugoslavia broke apart in the end is because this work was never thoroughly completed. The decades of Tito's 'brotherhood and unity' only relatively froze the post-war breakdown, nationalism in particular was never properly dealt with...(And here it may be worthy to concede, grudgingly, Žižek's point about the Jacobins and revolutionary terror - the French republic they inaugurated remains intact 200 years later, and it looks like it will survive even Sarkozy - so perhaps the Partisans simply weren't extreme enough...)

One should equally not be deterred here by the fact that Capital - once the sole preserve of wealthy white men - has in the meantime found ways to accommodate, commodify, and even commandeer the rhetoric of multi-culturalism, human rights, equality, etc. This is in its nature, as Deleuze and Guattari argue - deterritorialization. Yet we should never forget that these are the fruits of hard-won battles against Capital - even against liberalism,in its earliest incarnation. Why simply give up on this legacy and allow liberal Capital to mediate its impact and reterritorialize the gains for political 'street cred'?



One thing that some people today are shocked to hear, for instance, is that Swiss women - Switzerland being the darling of Global Capital, hosting a number of multinational corporations way out of proportion to its size - only gained the right to vote in 1971, by a national referendum in which one-third of the all-male electorate voted against suffrage. (One Swiss canton only granted women full suffrage in 1990!) And even after suffrage many discriminatory measures remained in place for years, such as husbands' control over their wives' property and capital, the husband's right to decide on the couple's place of residence, etc. Switzerland, until fairly late in the 20th century, is like some perverse modern capitalist version of the Taliban. Isn't this the best proof that modernity alone, not to mention its capitalist variant, is no guarantee of freedom, equality, human rights, etc - and that simply imposing 'democracy' is a hollow gesture when it comes to true liberation?



Without overemphasizing the value of the democratic vote - one always has to wonder why a particular freedom is being granted at a particular time and to what end the political credit gained by those in power is being deployed. The end of colonialism is often seen as merely the transition or sublation to another form of colonialism - a version of what Hardt and Negri call Empire, what others have called economic imperialism (although 'Empire' goes beyond political economy, as a new incarnation of old state sovereignty); similarly, one could say that democratic reform is permitted when the power elite has sufficiently insulated itself from it, and this is ultimately the problem with gradualism.

But the answer to this predicament is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is rather, keep the bathwater, and throw out the baby - insist on change, democratic or otherwise, but insist on it, as Martin Luther King did, now. Not when those in power find it suitable to throw some scraps from the table. Seize the revolutionary moment, intervene to change the very coordinates of what is deemed 'possible', to put it in Žižekian terms.

**This same lobby/propaganda machine has in recent years caused much of the confusion surrounding the Balkan wars of the 1990s, ironically pulling many Western leftist intellectuals (notably Chomsky and Parenti) into the ranks of apologetics for military aggression and ultimately genocide, under the banner of Serbian nationalism. This is largely due to the grossly mistaken impression that people like Milošević- a rabid nationalist who inaugurated his tenure in 1989, on the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, by annexing Kosovo and Vojvodina and thus giving Serbia 3 votes in the 8-member national council, prompting the walkout in protest of Croatian and Slovene members - were somehow carrying on the legacy of Tito's Yugoslavia, rather than actively working together with the West to destroy it. One prominent and oft-quoted (ironically even by Chomsky) figure in this project was Gen. Lewis Mackenzie, a Tory politician in Canada and commander of UN forces in Sarajevo early on in the war, who gave testimony before the US congress in 1992 arguing against any intervention - even humanitarian aid - in the conflict, saying that "all three sides were equally guilty". Mackenzie was later revealed to have been on the payroll of a Serbian-American lobbying group while on a speaking tour following the publication of his book on Bosnia. Similarly, Diana Johnstone, who published a book supposedly debunking Serb atrocities in Bosnia, was refused further publication by In These Times - a leftist paper in the US for which she had regularly written - when the editors discovered that she was an old college friend of Mirjana Markovic, Slobodan Milošević's wife. (For the sake of comparison, just imagine a supposedly objective journalistic account justifying the Iraq war, presenting 'evidence' that there were indeed WMD in Iraq, that the Abu Ghraib photos were faked, there was no torture, the civilian death toll was exaggerated, etc - written by an author who turns out to be an old college friend of, say, Dick Cheney's wife. I actually had an e-mail debate about this with Chomsky, and I gotta say, Noam, I know it's hard to admit you were wrong, let alone taken for a complete fool, but sometimes you just gotta do it.)

Panta Rei: My Grandpa's Rags-to-Socialist Glory Tale of War and Peace

My grandpa was an economist. He was recently mentioned by a former student - now a middle-aged magazine columnist - in a piece for Dani, a popular political weekly in Bosnia; this inspired me to write a few words about him. The above photo is of him and my grandma - my mom's parents - in Bosnia circa '68.

My grandpa was born in Donje Selo, a small village near Konjic, in Herzegovina, the southern bit of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This is a region known for its rugged, craggy landscape of rocky mountains and wild deciduous and evergreen forests dotted with limestone plateaus - and some very stubborn people.


Konjic, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Back in those days (between the world wars) and in that social milieu, education was not valued very highly; my great-grandpa preferred to have his children tending the sheep and goats rather than studying and doing homework, so my grandpa had to just take a book along when doing his chores around the pasture. Sometimes the goats chewed up his books, or the odd greasy page of homework.

As the village school only had two grades, education typically ended around age 9, and this was the fate of my grandpa's brothers and sisters. It was the village teacher who convinced my great-grandpa to send my grandpa to the city to be schooled further. This was initially arranged with some cousins in Mostar, who provided him with room and board in exchange for chores around the house; later he got his own place and supported himself by tutoring younger children in mathematics.

He graduated from the gymnasium (high school) in Mostar in 1942, and promptly joined Tito's communist partisans.



People from Herzegovina, as I said - and Bosnians in general - are known to be very stubborn, or 'hard-headed' (literally and figuratively); so it is no surprise that almost all the key battles on the Yugoslav front in WWII took place in and around this area. It is also notable that Yugoslavia was liberated with little or no direct British, American, or Soviet involvement and spawned the first, largest, and most successful resistance movement in WWII - a ragtag multi-ethnic band of Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Jews, men and women, unified under the command of Marshal Tito. By the end of the war they numbered around 650,000 combatants, of which around 100,000 were women (impressive representation for any army, even by today's standards).


"Death to fascism-freedom for the people."

They won in spite of seven major German offensives, over 1 million civilian and military casualties (the second-highest in Europe, after Poland), mass executions, ruthless Nazi 'anti-terrorist' tactics, and the combined anti-Partisan efforts of the Wehrmacht, the SS, fascist Italy, Croatian nationalist Ustaše, Serbian nationalist-royalist Chetniks, as well as Hungarian and Bulgarian collaborationist forces. Phew!

According to historians, the partisans' ideological appeal - which cut across ethnic and gender lines - was a key competitive advantage in terms of morale and popular support for the struggle.



My grandpa was wounded in the Battle of Neretva, the 4th Anti-Partisan Offensive. There is an Oscar-nominated feature film about it, starring Yul Brynner and featuring an original poster by Picasso. In the battle, the far-outnumbered, under-nourished and ill-equipped partisans manage to thwart the Nazis' aims by an elaborate and very clever ruse. It is a true modern-day David and Goliath story.



My grandpa carried to his grave (at age 82) several pieces of shrapnel in his chest from the injury. During the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, which we both spent mostly under siege in Sarajevo, my mom teased him saying he must be bulletproof, what with all that metal in his body... It never gave him trouble though, and he never had any health problems until prostate cancer hit him in his late 70s. (That should make you wonder about all the chemicals generations since have ingested that our grandparents weren't exposed to.)

After WWII he was appointed president of an administrative court in Konjic, although he had no legal training, or any kind of post-secondary education for that matter; the Party just didn't have enough qualified personnel.

It was there that he met my grandma, Olga, who was a middle class city girl from Trebinje and had also taken part in the underground resistance during the war, as part of a SKOJ unit in Mostar. SKOJ (pronounced SKOY) was the youth wing of the partisans, and stands for Savez komunističke omladine Jugoslavije, or Communist Youth League of Yugoslavia.


My grandma Olga (right) with a friend and fellow resistance member in Mostar, 1942. The Nazi Scourge had never yet encountered such a tough nut.

She was the court secretary, and according to my grandpa, regularly paid secret home visits to the pre-war judge whom my grandpa had replaced - a trained professional from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia - to get tips on handling cases, which she passed on to my grandpa. It would have been a disaster had the Party got wind of their scheme.

Sadly, my grandma died when I was about seven years old, so my memories of her are very vague and infused with an aura of childhood ethereality. I do know that throughout their marriage she teased my grandpa mercilessly for his peasant ways, on account of certain habits he just never could shake, I guess. "Peasant!" she cried. (Or, "Seljak!" in Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian.)


Olga and Momir circa 1947, near Konjic, with my aunt Dubravka as a baby.

As a public official in charge of the Jablanica dam construction project, my grandpa was responsible for the flooding of the Neretva valley, including the orchard that my dad grew up in with his aunt. (I'm not kidding) This is about twenty years before my parents met while they were both studying philosophy at the University of Sarajevo; they only later discovered the coincidence. And yes, it's the same river on which my grandpa was wounded in battle.



Prior to the flooding my great-aunt, Danica - we called her 'grandma' because my dad was an orphan and she pretty much raised him - made a living selling the apples and pears in her orchard. Every year she loaded the produce on a truck and took it to the market in Dubrovnik, on the Croatian coast. My dad talked about evenings spent reading or just hanging out in her attic, laying on a bed of apples.

When they evacuated the valley, she was given a cramped flat in Konjic as compensation. The rest of her working life she spent as a waitress, which certainly didn't help the varicose veins she ceaselessly complained about in old age. (Before she died, though, she passed on to yours truly her best-kept secret - her recipe for šape, the tastiest mold-baked walnut cookies ever.)

After a couple of years working for the court, my grandpa enrolled in classes at the Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade. The Party considered this a bourgeois move, and reprimanded him. Despite this he continued his studies, because he figured the Stalinist mood wouldn't last, and that the country would need a trained professional cadre. He was soon proved right when Tito broke with the Soviet Union in 1948.

As the kind of work he eventually did in government mostly had to do with the economy, at some point he completed a PhD in economics and became a full-blown economist. He later worked at the UN for a few years, in Iran and Indonesia, before taking up a teaching post at the university of Sarajevo. My mother claims that somewhere she has a photograph of him meeting Indian president Jawaharlal Nehru on a state visit, however I have yet to see it. (Yugoslavia became part of the non-aligned movement during the Cold War - the only European country to do so - and had strong ties to other non-aligned countries)

Among many crazy stories from that time that come to mind, one that my mom once told me was of the two of them driving through the desert to Tehran when she was about 18. My grandpa hadn't slept and the journey was long; my mom couldn't drive. Nonetheless, since the road through the desert was pretty much straight for hundreds of miles, he put her at the wheel and fell asleep. Hours later, the city emerged from the dunes like a mirage...



Once, while on a Ford Foundation fellowship lecture tour in the US, extolling the virtues of Yugoslav self-management, my grandpa was blacklisted and later barred from entering the United States. He eventually cleared that up with the help of his friend, the American Ambassador in Jakarta. Yugoslavia wasn't part of the Soviet bloc, but it was a socialist country...



The McCarthyite censors must have gotten spooked when they realized the idea of workers councils voting on management decisions in non-state but socially-owned and run enterprises - something between workplace democracy and institutionalized/constitutional unionism - might actually sound kind of nice to populist American ears. You can't really dismiss that as 'evil empire' stuff. At the same time, I can think of no better real-world embodiment of Marx's 'factories to the workers' premise. (The fact that it was screwed up reflects more than anything the incompetence of generations since who inherited this great idea...)



One summer at the seaside, my grandpa gave me a swimming lesson. He pushed me off into the deep water with my inflatable, which he had first unplugged, so that the air would slowly escape as I got further and further out. Needless to say my parents were horrified, as I struggled to stay afloat kicking and screaming, but looking back on it I kind of like the guy for that.

At other times, us kids climbed on his back and rode him like a donkey, so it wasn't all that one-sided.


From left to right: grandpa, my brother Igor, me, and my cousin Jelena.

One long-time colleague of his referred to him as 'Moby Dick' - because he "swam alone". I wonder what it must have been like for him to see another war at home, having lived through WWII already and having grown up in the aftermath of WWI. I never got to ask him that, or at least I don't remember him ever talking much about it. (Though he was quite keen on reminiscing about a lot of other things, in particular our family history.)

We left Sarajevo together two years into the siege, in 1994. Although there was a ceasefire, only those too old or too young to join the army were allowed to leave. After being delayed just outside of Sarajevo in the town of Visoko for two days, we spent another 2 days on the bus to Zagreb, usually a 10-hour journey. I vomited a lot by the end of it.

After a couple of weeks staying with friends in Zagreb, my sister and I joined him at his house in Orebić, on the Dalmatian coast.



It was a welcome change for all of us, except when he and I argued; we were all pretty stressed out and traumatised by the war, I suppose.

One day, he took me out fig-picking. There were some figs in our yard and some neighbours also kindly offered theirs. I climbed trees and picked the figs and handed them to him, and he put them in a basket. We took them home and he made a horrible jam out of them - so hard you could stick a knife into it and it would stand up straight. It was practically sugar candy, and the taste was awful. He made us eat it for breakfast - there were jars and jars of it - until even he couldn't handle it any more and agreed to buy some decent jam from the shop. He was just no good at cooking, and he finally had to accept it.

Anyway, so there was this piece in Dani by the columnist Svetlana Cenić, a former student of his. In the column she recounts an anecdote that might get you, the odd reader, to appreciate my grandpa - and the note of socialist self-criticism - even more than you already do (my translation):

"I remembered my professors who even in those days debunked the demagoguery of power...I remember well what Momir Ćećez once told a colleague of mine, who during an oral exam stood on all fours to unreservedly sing the praises of the economic system of SFRJ [Socialist Yugoslavia]... Professor Ćećez then asked her what her mother says when she comes back from the market. Confused, my colleague replied that her mother curses, swears, moans about high prices, and so forth; at this the professor, handing back her indeks [a marking booklet], simply informed my colleague that while mother would most certainly have passed the exam, her daughter, at least in this term, would not."

Yep, that sounds like grandpa. A hard-nosed old bastard he was, but we loved him. And he had a point - he wanted critique. You kiss ass, you fail. Here's to you, grandpa. I hope that the socialist dream you took all that shrapnel for isn't totally dead, yet.


In Pittsburgh, USA, 1961.Momir Ćećez (10 December 1923-4 June 2006)