Flag on the Mountain: A Political Anthropology of War in Croatia and Bosnia

Myths arose in Europe about far-flung exotic lands – particularly Serbia and Montenegro – based on the nineteenth-century heroic epic poetry of the South Slavs. These were lands populated by ‘noble savages’ for whom freedom and martial honour were of supreme importance, and they filtered down into the formation of the first and second Yugoslav states (1918-41 and 1945-89), which utilized themes from patriarchal popular culture and the anti-Ottoman epics for their own political ends.Ivo Žanić reveals how, during the last decade-and-a-half of the twentieth century, military and political leaders in Belgrade followed this pattern of selecting and manipulating cultural motifs in order to justify their repression of Kosovans, and their aggression...