June 18, 2015--Yugoslavia

Anyone following Behind knows that for years I have been an advocate for a redrawing of national borders in the Middle East. From the political borders imposed on Arab and Islamic people by the victorious Western superpowers at the end of the First World War to others that take history, culture, ethnicity, and religion into consideration.

Broadly speaking, for what we now call Iraq this would minimally mean separate countries for Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds.

Some readers who have communicated with me say it would never work, that rivalries and blood-hatred is so intense that Sunnis would continue to fight with Shia and Turks with Kurds.

That may be but we have been seeing an alternative, deadly scenario playing out with millions either killed or made homeless, stateless.

Others have said to me that they might agree if there were current examples of the successful redrawing of borders.

There very well may be.

Take Yugoslavia as an example.

There is no historic, ancient Yugoslavia. It was a political construct that came about after the chaos of the First World War when territories of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire were fused to become the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. That monarchy was overthrown at the end of World War II and a new "country" emerged, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, which for decades was dominated and kept from disintegrating by strongman Josip Broz, better known as Marshal Tito.

After Tito died, civil war broke out as Christian Serbs and Croats fought Bosnian Muslims. Many atrocities were committed, especially "ethnic cleansing" by Serbs of Bosnians.

By the mid 1990s, European members of NATO, recalling that World War I begin in Sarajevo, in what was to become Yugoslavia, and also concerned about the slaughter of Bosnians, began to mobilize peacekeeping forces, including eventually convincing President Bill Clinton to participate in bombing Serb forces.

In 1995, through Clinton's leadership, the contesting parties were convened in Ohio and spent weeks in effect confined there until they reached the historic Dayton Accords that once again redrew the map of the Balkans, this time more culturally than politically.

For 20 years, with U.S. and NATO troops still stationed on the ground as peacekeepers, the Accords have more or less held. There is reason to be optimistic that a version of peace will prevail.

This, then, is my best example of what might be possible in the long run in the Middle East if the parties there, left alone by outsiders--very much including the United States, were to stay out to the region and let the natural forces of history unfold and reach, to them, some sort of acceptable resolution.