From the Archives War in the Balkans splits Czech political opinion
While the split of Czechoslovakia happened quietly and almost unnoticed, the situation in Yugoslavia could hardly have been more different. There had always been close links between the two countries, and Czechs and Slovaks were deeply shocked as Yugoslavia sank into civil war. In an interview for Radio Prague in 1993, the head of the Euro-Atlantic Section of the Czech Foreign Ministry, Ivan Bušniak, pointed to some of the two countries’ historical bonds:
“Yugoslavia was the only [Socialist Bloc] country - along with
Romania - that strongly
protested against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. It was
Yugoslavia, through the territory of which quite a lot of citizens of the
then Czechoslovak Socialist Republic emigrated to the West. It was a
country that had strongly protested against the Munich Agreement of 1938,
before being occupied herself by the Nazis. So from this point of view I
think there is something common and very close between the two
countries.”
During the series of Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, political opinion in the Czech Republic was starkly divided over what the international community should do. When Croatia and Slovenia broke away from the Yugoslav federation in 1991, Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister was Jiří Dienstbier. Unlike President Havel, he was a bitter opponent of the German-led initiative to recognize the two countries, as he told Radio Prague in an interview a couple of years later:
Jiří Dienstbier
“I fought against it to the last moment, because, in my view, for
the
solution of Yugoslavia there was only one chance – to treat the Balkan
question, the Yugoslav question, as a whole, in complete unity of the
international community. It was the only chance. The moment some countries
started to force the salami tactic, it was the beginning of the end,
because a fight between Serbs and Croats was on a definable line, and it
would be possible to send United Nations forces to set these clear
territories. But the moment Croatia was recognized, I told them: If you
recognize Croatia, you will blow up Bosnia and Herzegovina and it will be
without end.”
By the time of that interview in October 1993, Bosnia and Herzegovina was in the midst of civil war. In the Czech Republic political differences remained over what the international community should do next. President Havel argued for the use of force against the Bosnian Serbs to prevent Bosnia being carved up. But the Foreign Minister Josef Zieleniec shared the caution of his predecessor, Jiří Dienstbier. At the time, the ministry, here in the words of Ivan Bušniak, played down these differences:
Sarajevo in 1992, photo: Mikhail Evstafiev, Wikipedia
“President Havel said some time ago that having the Bosnia case
settled
along the lines of the ethnically ‘clean’ three entities is not
acceptable. I would say basically that this is an idea to which we
subscribe too in the ministry, but we rather prefer to express it in more
general terms, namely that we would agree to any non-military solution of
the Bosnia problem, which is acceptable to all three parties concerned,
and
which, because of the consent of these three parties concerned has the
qualities of being a really viable and lasting solution.”
But the war dragged on and no agreement between the three parties was in sight. In the end the Srebrenica massacre tipped international opinion in favour of the policy of intervention preferred by President Havel, and after NATO strikes against Bosnian Serb positions, a fragile peace was achieved in December 1995.