THE RESILIENCE OF MAN

This is the medieval walled city of Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian Coast of the Adriatic Sea, an arm of the Mediterranean across from Italy.  The English playwright George Bernard Shaw declared on a visit here in 1929, "If you want to see heaven on earth, come to Dubrovnik."

Over a million visitors a year from all over the world agree with Shaw, marveling at its huge fortress walls…

 …swimming in the sparkling clear Adriatic, choosing which hidden restaurant in a myriad of tiny alleys to enjoy marvelous food and wine, and partying all night at the Troubador Jazz Café owned by my friend Marko Breskovic.

Only the smallest fraction of them pay any attention to this sign affixed to the stones at the city’s entrance:

It’s a overhead diagram of Dubrovnik riddled with hundreds of black triangles and squares.  The triangles are where the roof of a building was destroyed, the squares where a street was hit, by Serbian artillery shells.  The areas of red mark massive fires caused by the shelling.

Thus, most of the beautiful red tile roofs you see in the first picture are new, much of the masonry of the massive walls in the second rebuilt.  This ancient city has been reconstructed since the 1991-92 Siege of Dubrovnik, and so well that few of its tourist hordes are aware of it.

The Dalmatian Coast was originally occupied by a Bronze Age people the ancient Greeks called the Dalmatae.  The Romans ruled it as their province of Illyricum.  With the collapse of the Roman Empire, a migration of Slavs moved from Central Europe into the Balkan Peninsula and along the coast.  Sometime in the 500s, a group of them founded the settlement of Dubrava.

By the 1300s, it had become the Republic of Dubrovnik, an independent thalassocracy – a government of the sea (thalassa meaning sea in Greek) like the ancient Minoan Greeks or Phoenicians.  Conquered by Napoleon in 1808, it was absorbed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1815.

The most remarkable achievement of the Republic of Dubrovnik was not being conquered by the Moslem Ottoman Empire.  The Ottoman Turks  had seized Constantinople in 1453 (later re-named Istanbul) from the Byzantine Christians, and conquered Anatolia (modern Turkey), all of North Africa, all of the Middle East, and surged through all of Eastern Europe and southern Russia.

The Turks controlled the mountain interior of the central Balkans and had Moslemized its people – but somehow, via alliances with Venice and other strategies, Dubrovnik and the Dalmatian Coast managed to stay free and Christian.

By 1529, the Turks, led by their Emperor Suleiman, were on their way to conquering Western Europe when they were stopped and defeated at Vienna.  This set the stage for the centuries’ long struggle between Christian Europe, led by the Hapsburg rulers of Austria, and the Moslem Ottoman Empire.

It is an epic saga, with colorful characters like Barbarossa (1475-1546), the Ottoman pirate who controlled most of the Mediterranean, and great Christian victories like the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 which destroyed the Ottoman fleet, and the Battle of Vienna in 1683 which ended the Moslem threat to Western Europe.

The Ottomans retreated into the Balkans where the politico-religious tectonic plates of the Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Moslem Ottoman Empire ground together.  By the mid-1700s, they lost the northernmost Balkan regions of Slovenia and Croatia to the Hapsburgs.

The map of Croatia with its strange crescent border with Bosnia today reflects the old Austrian-Ottoman border.  Note Dubrovnik way at the bottom:

The Slovenes and Croats were Catholic Christians who had resisted Ottoman Moslemification, and were overjoyed to gain Hapsburg protection.  But caught in between the two empires of Catholic Hapsburgs and Moslem Ottomans was another Balkan people, Slavs who had migrated from southern Russia, the Serbs.

The Serbs were Orthodox Christians who had been defeated by the Ottomans at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.  A great many Serbs subsequently converted to Islam, particularly in a region called Bosnia, while others were able to keep their religion by hiring themselves out as mercenary soldiers fighting for the Ottomans against the Hapsburgs.

As Ottoman power steadily declined after 1683, the Serbs developed an alliance with an emerging power from their original homeland, Czarist Russia, with whom they shared a common Orthodox Christian religion.

By 1878, Vienna (the seat of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire) was strong enough to occupy Bosnia, the westernmost Ottoman province neighboring Croatia, and to formally annex it in 1908.  This infuriated the Orthodox Serbs and Russians, who now saw Serbia as the next target of Hapsburg imperialism.

The Russian secret police, Okhrana (forerunner of the Soviet KGB), organized a Serbian independence movement called Crna Ruka – the Black Hand. 

In June of 1914, the heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie visited Bosnia to open a museum in the Bosnia capital of Sarajevo.  On June 28, as their open car passed by the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo, a Black Hand agent, Gavrilo Princip, ran up to the car with a pistol and fired a bullet into Sophie’s abdomen and another into Ferdinand’s neck.  Both shots were fatal.

The Archduke’s last words were Sopherl! Sopherl! Sterbe nicht! Bleibe am Leben für unsere Kinder! ("Sophie dear, don’t die! Stay alive for our children!")

The Austrian government accused the Serbian government of complicity in the assassination, which refused to fully cooperate being supported by Russia.  Austria then declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, and World War I began.

Russia mobilized to protect Serbia, Austria’s ally Germany threatened war, Russian mobilization continued, Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, Russia’s ally France threatened Germany, Germany declared war of France on August 3 (an act of impossible German stupidity), which caused Russia’s and France’s ally Britain to declare war on August 4.

The result of World War I was the dismantlement of both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.  A Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was created by the victorious Allies that incorporated Bosnia, then renamed Yugoslavia (South Slav-ia).

When the Nazis conquered Yugoslavia in World War II, a Communist guerrilla movement arose opposing them called Partisans led by Josip Broz "Tito" (1892-1980), who established the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia after the war.

The capital was Belgrade, also the capital of Serbia.  So when the Soviet Empire began to collapse after the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989), the ruling Serbian elite of Belgrade tried to suppress the independence movements of the other republics.

Slovenia escaped first in 1990, with few Serbs in its population and the protection of neighboring Austria.  Croatia declared its independence in 1991, with the Serbian Army (called the JNA, the Jugoslav [‘J’ pronounced as ‘Y’] National Army invading to "protect" Serbs in an area of Croatia called Krajina.

Krajina was in northern Croatia.  There was no Serbian population in Dubrovnik.  Nonetheless, the JNA blockaded Dubrovnik in October 1991and demanded its surrender.  The people refused, living for months on food stores and water from the Onofrio Fountains built in 1438.

In a rage of sheer spite, for Dubrovnik had no strategic value to the Serbs, the JNA, led by military commander Miodrag Jokic and authorized by Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, began shelling the city indiscriminately with artillery from the mountains towering above.

The Serbs destroyed for the mere sake of undiluted destruction one of the most beautiful and historical cities in the world: a true "crime against humanity." *(See note below)

International pressure forced the Serbs to lift the siege in May, 1992.  The people of Dubrovnik emerged from the rubble with their city in ruins but their spirit unbroken.  They set to work to rebuild Dubrovnik as beautiful as it was before.

As any visitor to Dubrovnik today can see, they succeeded.

This is why Dubrovnik is such an inspiring example of the Resilience of Man.

A few hours’ drive from Dubrovnik, along the Neretva River in Bosnia, is another example.  Bosnia had followed Croatia in declaring its independence in early 1992, but it was such a mélange of Bosnian Moslems, Bosnian Serbs, and Bosnian Croats that it was easy for the JNA to get Bosnian Serbs to assist its invasion and commit vast atrocities upon the Moslems and Croats.

The symbol for this is the famous bridge of Stari Most ("Old Bridge") built over the Neretva at the town of Mostar in 1566.  When the JNA shelled Mostar, the Serb commanders purposefully targeted Stari Most just to destroy a beautiful historical landmark.

By the time the Serbs were forced to let Bosnia be free by the end of 1995, somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 Bosnians had been killed, including 8,000 men and boys slaughtered by the Bosnian Serb Army at Srebrenica on July 11, 1995.

Here’s an example of the Serb shelling of Mostar, left standing as a monument:

Like the people of Dubrovnik, those of Mostar were determined to rebuild their city and their famous bridge.  Here it is today:

Jackson’s Pink Floyd shirt turned out to be appropriate, for all those people in the foreground are attending a rock concert.  The band was good, daredevils jumped off the bridge to everyone’s applause, partying Bosnians were joined by visitors from all over Europe who now flock to Mostar.

Another example of the Resilience of Man.

Last week, Joel Wade in his Virtue of Happiness column, wrote a brilliant article entitled Agency.  "Agency" is a term in psychology, meaning the extent to which "people choose what they do and can act on what they choose."

A person with little or no agency sees himself as a victim, blames others for his ill fate, thinks it is the moral responsibility of those others to correct his fate, and passively waits around resentfully until they do.

The Palestinians are a good candidate for the world’s best example of people with no agency.

A person with high agency takes his fate, however ill-deserved, into his own hands, shrugs his victimhood aside, and actively does what he can to improve his situation.

The inhabitants of Dubrovnik and Mostar are excellent examples of people with high agency.

The human race owes its survival to people like them.  It can be depressing to study history, which, as one historian quipped, "is one damn thing after another," a seemingly endless procession of wars, plagues, barbarian hordes snuffing out civilizations, tyrants, religious lunacies and various other madnesses.

Yet at the same time, history is thrilling and inspirational.  For so very often, after still another disaster, people will reach into their souls to find the courage to build their lives anew.

It is this spirit of heroic resilience that overwhelmed me in Dubrovnik.  The people here did not allow themselves to wallow in hatred of their Serb destroyers.  They ignored and overcame them.  Now their city is again the heaven that George Bernard Shaw saw, they are prosperous, happy, and free.

Dubrovnik is a good place to take pride in being human, in being a member of a species so heroic, courageous, and resilient.  A species that can put the terror and injustice of the past behind it, and focus instead on creating a joyous future.

Ask Marko Breskovic what he thinks of Dubrovnik’s destruction and he will dismissively wave his hand.  "It doesn’t matter."  He will point to the hundreds of people sitting before him on the cobblestoned plaza enjoying Croatian wine or Long Island Iced Teas listening to his music.

"This is what matters," he says.  "Dubrovnik’s triumph is what matters."  Then he and his band start the next set at the Troubador Jazz Café.
 

*Note.  Miodrag Jokic surrendered to the International Court at the Hague (capital of Holland) in 2001.  After a trial lasting almost three years, in 2004 he was sentenced to seven years in prison for his commanding the shelling of Dubrovnik.  The story of how the Serbs have lost their Agency was told last June in Shrinking Serbia.