Heavenly Serbia

Traces Serbia's nationalist and expansionist impulses to the legendary battle of Kosovo in 1389 As violence and turmoil continue to define the former Yugoslavia, basic questions remain unanswered: What are the forces behind the Serbian expansionist drive that has brought death and destruction to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo? How did the Serbs rationalize, and rally support for, this genocidal activity? Heavenly Serbia traces Serbia's nationalist and expansionist impulses to the legendary battle of Kosovo in 1389. Anzulovic shows how the myth of "Heavenly Serbia" developed to help the Serbs endure foreign domination, explaining their military defeat and the loss of their medieval state by emphasizing their own moral superiority over military victory. Heavenly Serbia shows how this myth resulted in an aggressive nationalist ideology which has triumphed in the late twentieth century and marginalized those Serbs who strive for the establishment of a civil society. Author interview with CNN: http://www.cnn.com/chat/transcripts/branimir_chat.html

In his book "Heavenly Serbia" in Croatia, Nenad Piskač reveals the world-view-ideological, political, normative and organisational structure of Greater-Serbian armed aggression on the Republic of Croatia, based on authentic RSK (Republic of Serbian Krajina) documents. The central part of the book are the RSK documents and sources, which have been entirely unavailable to the Croatian and foreign public until now. On the basis of these documents, the author reconstructs the ideology, goals and chronology of the establishment of the occupying Serbian Government on Croatian territory. He documents their radicalism, terrorism, anti-ecumenism and St. Sava fundamentalism in refusing any type of recognition of the Croatian state. The book also publishes for the first-time documents which undoubtedly show the systematic preparation of Serbian terrorists in Croatia for the evacuation of "all inhabitants unfit to fight" in the event of any reintegration of the occupied areas into the Croatian state. The book also contains corresponding commands issued by the Greater-Serbian terrorists on the eve of Oluja (Operation Storm) and the years-long operational plans for "evacuation" of Serbs from Croatia, thereby completely denying all accusations (made by Serbia, The Hague and Croatia) of alleged ethnic cleansing committed by the Croatian State (a "criminal organisation" according to Carl Bildt, Carla del Ponte, Savo Strbac, and others). The published documents most clearly give evidence of how thoroughly the Greater Serbian project was planned, led and carried out (from 1990 to 1995). By citing a great number of data also from authentic documents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Piskač concisely points out and identifies the 150 years of genesis and continuity of the Greater-Serbian Saint Sava ideology. The book emphasises the explicit conceptual, methodological and terminological, that is, qualitative identity of the Greater Serbian project, most of which was preserved unchanged also in the 21st century, - in spite of the immense heterogeneous changes in the entire world. The central characters are clearly differentiated - the aggressor and the victim, and the legal and political lack of objectivity of the constructions about the "civil war" and "balance of guilt", by which different interest groups try to place a strain on the Croatian future, are clearly shown. Readers, researchers, Government bodies in the Republic of Croatia and The Hague Tribunal can now find in one place a huge number of extremely useful data and references to authentic documents, with which the author gives, in form of a book, an expert, logical and easy-to-consult contribution to the understanding of the Greater Serbian ideology and practice at the end of the 20th century. For the first time documents are presented - from the preparation and implementation of the so-called "tree trunk" revolution [the Serbian blockade of the roads around Knin in 1990], the activities of the military and civilian occupational authorities, their widespread connection with similar processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina - to the connection with the source of all this evil, which could be found and can still be found in the institutions and the elites in the States "in the territory of the former Yugoslavia". Heavenly Serbia in Croatia does not limit itself in establishing the genesis and sequence of events in Croatia's recent past, but it rather shows, on the basis of authentic documents, how a community which is not familiar with its own past is condemned to its repetition. The author publishes documents from which it is evident that the systematic falsifying of the facts and interpretations of the past Greater Serbian armed aggression, among other things, had the purpose of ideological, political and staff amnesty of the aggressor, so that they would be established again in the institutions of the Croatian state and Croatian society with those same goals, staff and rhetor

Religious figures of remembrance served to consolidate dynastic rule and later nation-state legitimacy and community. The study illuminates the interweaving of (Eastern) Roman, medieval Serbian and Bulgarian, as well as Ottoman and Western European national discourses culminating in the sacralization of the nation.

This thoughtful book explores much of the background to the strife the globe faces today. In particular, Christopher Catherwood shows how religion and national pride, which are supposed to be positive forces, can become perverted ideologies that arouse hatred, slaughter, and war.

During their thirteen years in power, Slobodan Milosevic and his cohorts plunged Yugoslavia into wars of ethnic cleansing, leading to the murder of thousands of civilians. The Milosevic regime also subverted the nation's culture, twisted the political mainstream into a virulent nationalist mold, sapped the economy through war and the criminalization of a free market, returned to gender relations of a bygone era, and left the state so dysfunctional that its peripheries--Kosovo, Vojvodina, and Montenegro--have been struggling to maximize their distance from Belgrade, through far-reaching autonomy or through outright independence. In this valuable collection of essays, Vjeran Pavlakovic, Reneo Lukic, and Obrad Kesic examine elements of continuity and discontinuity from the Milosevic era to the twenty-first century, the struggle at the center of power, and relations between Serbia and Montenegro. Contributions by Sabrina Ramet, James Gow, and Milena Michalski explore the role of Serbian wartime propaganda and the impact of the war on Serbian society. Essays by Eric Gordy, Maja Miljovic, Marko Hoare, and Kari Osland look at the legacy of Serbia's recent wars-issues of guilt and responsibility, the economy, and the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague. Sabrina Ramet and Biljana Bijelic address the themes of culture and values. Frances Trix, Emil Kerenji, and Dennis Reinhartz explore the peripheries in the politics of Kosovo/a, Vojvodina, and Serbia's Roma. Serbia Since 1989 reveals a Serbia that is still traumatized from Milosevic's rule and groping toward redefining its place in the world.

Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović (1881–1956) is arguably one the most controversial figures in contemporary Serbian national culture. Having been vilified by the former Yugoslav Communist authorities as a fascist and an antisemite, this Orthodox Christian thinker has over the past two decades come to be regarded in Serbian society as the most important religious person since medieval times and an embodiment of the authentic Serbian national spirit. Velimirović was formally canonised by the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2003. In this book, Jovan Byford charts the posthumous transformation of Velimirović from 'traitor' to 'saint' and examines the dynamics of repression and denial that were used to divert public attention from the controversies surrounding the bishop's life, the most important of which is his antisemitism. Byford offers the first detailed examination of the way in which an Eastern Orthodox Church manages controversy surrounding the presence of antisemitism within its ranks and he considers the implications of the continuing reverence of Nikolaj Velimirović for the persistence of antisemitism in Serbian Orthodox culture and in Serbian society as a whole. This book is based on a detailed examination of the changing representation of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović in the Serbian media and in commemorative discourse devoted to him. The book also makes extensive use of exclusive interviews with a number of Serbian public figures who have been actively involved in the bishop’s rehabilitation over the past two decades.

Balkan Holocausts? compares and contrasts Serbian and Croatian propaganda from 1986 to 1999, analyzing each group's contemporary interpretations of history and current events. It offers a detailed discussion of holocaust imagery and the history of victim-centered writing in nationalism theory, including the links between the comparative genocide debate, the so-called holocaust industry, and Serbian and Croatian nationalism. No studies on Yugoslavia have thus far devoted significant space to such analysis.

Who are the Serbs? Branded by some as Europe's new Nazis, they are seen by others—and by themselves—as the innocent victims of nationalist aggression and of an implacably hostile world media. In this challenging new book, Timothy Judah, who covered the war years in former Yugoslavia for the London Times and the Economist, argues that neither is true. Exploring the Serbian nation from the great epics of its past to the battlefields of Bosnia and the backstreets of Kosovo, he sets the fate of the Serbs within the story of their past. This wide-ranging, scholarly, and highly readable account opens with the windswept fortresses of medieval kings and a battle lost more than six centuries ago that still profoundly influences the Serbs. Judah describes the idea of "Serbdom" that sustained them during centuries of Ottoman rule, the days of glory during the First World War, and the genocide against them during the Second. He examines the tenuous ethnic balance fashioned by Tito and its unraveling after his death. And he reveals how Slobodan Milosevic, later to become president, used a version of history to drive his people to nationalist euphoria. Judah details the way Milosevic prepared for war and provides gripping eyewitness accounts of wartime horrors: the burning villages and "ethnic cleansing," the ignominy of the siege of Sarajevo, and the columns of bedraggled Serb refugees, cynically manipulated and then abandoned once the dream of a Greater Serbia was lost. This first in-depth account of life behind Serbian lines is not an apologia but a scrupulous explanation of how the people of a modernizing European state could become among the most reviled of the century. Rejecting the stereotypical image of a bloodthirsty nation, Judah makes the Serbs comprehensible by placing them within the context of their history and their hopes.