1) The severity of the Serbian repressive apparatus vis a vis the Albanians, way back when Tito was alive.
2) They myth of the Serbs "against" fascism. Yes, the left Serbs (and others) under Tito fought fascism. But there was a royalist Serb partisan group (the Chetniks) that actually collaborated with the fascists against Tito. Their take was that active fighting against the Nazis was a poor idea because the Nazis tended to execute 100 Serbs for every German soldier killed and 50 for every German solider wounded. In one town 7,000 people were executed in 1940 or 1941. The Chetnik view was that it was better not to get so many folks executed and let the big powers take on Germany.
3) The myth of "Nazi Croatia." Not a complete myth, but this history is very complex. First, the Croats had bitterly opposed domination by the Hungarians, allied with the Serbs against same, and then fell under the domination of Serbia. In their view Serbia was the main enemy of national independence. Second, notwithstanding all that, the nationalist leadership of the interwar period could not be prevailed upon to lead under the Nazi occupation. That leadership was imported from a Croat in exile in Italy. Third, this Croat, Pavelic, was so bad that the Nazis had a bitter internal dispute about whether he was worth keeping. It was under him that some 300,000 Serbs were slaughtered. Fourth, with the allied victory some 100,000 Croats fled Croatia, to be turned back at the northern border by the British authorities, whereupon most and perhaps all of them were executed by Tito, who then proceeded to rule Yugoslavia with a Serbian military and policy force.
4) It was the Serbian dominance of military and police that had been one of the underlying causes for hatred of the SErbs to grow in the interwar period in the first place. This was never a very good recipe for accommodative politics.
5) Oneof the reasons the Nazis wanted to hang on to Belgrade was the Danube. Ya know, the whole Eastern Europe thing.
6) Tito went to the USSR in 1944 and negotiated their invqasion and liberation of Belgrade; they swung through the Danubian valley and headed up to points north, the course of the Danubian basin being one of the geographic keys to the conquest of E. Europe.
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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