Yugoslavia

Question 1

Ray (1999), nationalism’s flexibility

Answer 1

capacity to appear democratic or violent

National identity = an unstable hybrid of conflicting passions. National identity requires continual affirmation

Question 2

Ray (1999), conditions for genocidal nationalism

Answer 2

• lie in apparently routine rituals through which ‘nations’ are remembered and constructed
• Violent nationalism may appear where transmission of collective identities is infused w mourning and traumatic memory
• Unleashed in context of state crisis, where former loyalties replaced w highly affective commitment to rectification of imagined historical wrong

Question 3

Nairn (1975), nationalism

Answer 3

Standing back over passage to modernity looking desperately back to the past

Question 4

Ray (1999), ethnic cleansing

Answer 4

part of the usual process through which nations formed

Right to ‘cleanse’ can almost be asserted as essential part of national formation:
Banners on anti-NATO demonstrations in Belgrade - ‘Croatia has an ethnically pure homeland - why cannot we?’

Reference here is to Croatian ethnic cleansing of Krajina Serbs, in which internat community acquiesced

Question 5

Ray (1999), commonness of genocidal impulse

Answer 5

Genocidal impulse, to rid sacred national territory of problematic minorities, exists w/in many national discourses and practices

Nations are above all about sanctification of territory

Question 6

Anderson (1993), national identity

Answer 6

national identities are imagined and constructed

distinction between national identity (the stuff of love and poetry) and racism

Ray (1999) - this probs not tenable

Question 7

Calhoun, Bosnia

Answer 7

West found it hard to comprehend self-determination for the ppl of Bosnia bc they did not define themselves as mono-ethnic nation

Question 8

Ray (1999), language of nationalism

Answer 8

• Draws heavily on discourse of rights, grounded on traditional claims to space and common identity
• Legitimates itself in terms of the Good Cause

Question 9

Ray (1999), self-determination

Answer 9

Principle of ‘self-determination’ implicitly recognizes ethnic session

in 20th C, alleged right of a people (in the abstract) to ‘self-determination’ has overridden the rights of people qua individuals to life and security

Question 10

Ray (1999), mimetic violence

Answer 10

When claim to inalienable territory and destiny linked to specific and incompatible claims to territorial space, potential for what Girard (1977) calls ‘mimetic violence’, where v presence of the other is perceived as incompatible w one’s own existence

Question 11

Ray (1999), Serbian nationalism

Answer 11

claim to Kosovo grounded in myths of ‘Old Serbia’ (Stari Srbija), the birthplace of the Serbs and site of sacrifice of Count Lazar 1389

Question 12

Ray (1999), Albanian claims to Kosovo

Answer 12

regard historic ‘ethnic line’ reaching up to the Nis and dismiss idea of ‘Old Serbia’ as fabrication legitimating genocide

Question 13

Ray (1999), overview of theory of collective memory

Answer 13

Halbwachs (1941/1992) - questioned assumption that memory of one’s own life resides in the individual, since ways in which people remember their past are dependent on relationship to their community

Connerton - links between collective mem and public rituals

Lury - not only the remembered but also the forgotten that provides key to ‘rewriting the soul’

Watson - one group’s enfranchisement requires another’s disenfranchisement

Hacking - trauma provided point of entry into ‘psychology of the soul’ through which the forgotten could be therapeutically remembered

Question 14

Billig (1997), nationalism

Answer 14

‘banal nationalism’ routinely inscribed into the public practice and consciousness of all nation-states

Ray (1999) - These routine dispositions can be mobilized into affectively charged movements

Question 15

Rebecca West - quotes Serbian guide in ‘Old Serbia’ (Kosovo) in the 1930s

Answer 15

We will stop at Grachanitsa, church on edge of Kosovo Plain, but I do not think you will understand it, because it is v personal to us Serbs, and that is something you foreigners can never grasp…we are too rough and too deep for your smoothness and shallowness

Question 16

Kaplan (1993), traditional blessing for Serbian new-born

Answer 16

Hail, little avenger of Kosovo

Question 17

Durkheim, public rituals

Answer 17

sacred public rituals re-affirmed collective solidarity through a ‘collective effervescence’. Commemorative rites e.g. ancestor worship relived the mythical history of ancestors and sustained the vitality of beliefs by rendering them present

collective veneration affirms social solidarity

Question 18

Ray (1999), commemorative speech

Answer 18

Commemorative speech does not admit any interrogation of its discursive properties bc its meanings are already coded in canonical monosemic forms (e.g. oaths, blessings, prayers and liturgy) that bring into existence partic attitudes and emotions

If public discourse closes of poss for critical examination of identities, deep affects can be encoded and transmitted in ways not subject to critical scrutiny

Question 19

Durkheim, ‘sad celebrations’

Answer 19

piacular rights, fusing mourning and melancholy w sacrifice and violence

Generate anger and need to avenge the dead and discharge collective pain, manifesting in real or ritual violence

Context for piacular rites oft social crisis

Piacular rights - mourning, fasting, weeping, w obligations to slash or tear clothing and flesh, thereby renewing group to state of unity preceding the misfortune

the more collective sentiments wounded, the greater the violence of the response

Question 20

battle of Kosovo Polje (Field of Black Birds)

Answer 20

1389

Serbian prince Lazar defeated by Turkish Sultan Murat = piacular ritual

Question 21

Ray (1999), Serbian commemoration of battle of Kosovo Polje = piacular ritual

Answer 21

• Celebrated as ‘holy and honourable sacrifice’

- Sacrifice for Christian Europe - allowing Italy and Germany to survive by holding back the Ottoman advance

Question 22

Ray (1999), Milosevic and Battle of Kosovo Polje

Answer 22

• Milosevic made 600th anniversary of Battle of Kosovo, June 1989, the focal point of his ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ to displace polit opponents w/in Serbian ruling party
• The ‘coffin’ (w the alleged remains of Lazar) toured every village in Serbia followed by huge black-clad crowds of wailing mourners

Question 23

Monument to Lazar in meadow of Gazimestan

Answer 23

expresses vengeful sadness and defeat:

Whosoever is a Serb and of Serbian birth
And who does not come to Kosovo Polje to do battle against the Turks
Let him have neither a male nor a female offspring
Let him have no crop

Question 24

Ray (1999), Albanians and Islamic minorities in Serbian nationalism

Answer 24

substituted for ‘Turks’

Question 25

Ray (1999), civil war in Serbian and Croatian national imaginations

Answer 25

seen as replaying of ancient conflicts of west and east

Present genocide described as ‘Second Battle for Kosovo’

Question 26

Ray (1999), negative associations provoking violence from Serbian nationalism

Answer 26

• Communists = mass murderers of Ustasas and Chetniks
• Croatian fascist State of 1941-5 were murderes of Serbs
• Muslims were collaborators w Nazi Genocide
• New Croatian state under Tudjman diminished extent of Ustashe genocide thus provoking further trauma-rage

Each collective participant imagined themselves victims of unavenged historical wrongs

Question 27

Girard (1977), ‘violent contagion’

Answer 27

Arises from unresolved ‘sacrificial crisis’

Mimetic desire to acquire the wholeness of the other leads to feud between incompatible rivals

By simultaneously taking the other as model and obstacle they form ‘violent doubles’ locked in mutual destruction

Mimetic violence - desire to displace and become identical to the other - underlies all culture and sociality

Victims scapegoated by attrib to them violence just committed

Scapegoat mechanism etablishes in-group/ out-group differentiations that maintain communities’ structure and cohesion

Sacrificial expulsion is basis of all social order and ritual through which communities gain control over their violence

Question 28

Ray (1999), Girard’s theory in context of collapes of Yugoslav

Answer 28

Provoked sacrificial crisis

Previously contained mimetic desire generated multiple violent doubles

Krajina Serbs, looking to incorp in a Serbian homeland, resists Croatia’s nationalizing desire, while Milosovic insisted the Croatia could be independent only w/o Krajina

Kosovo - Serbian minority backed by the Serbian army resists independence and the desire for unity w an Albanian homeland

Conflict in Bosnia particularly exterminatory bc was a field of multiple doubles - Serb/ Croat, Islamic/ Serb, Islamic/ Croat - Brubacker - each struggling for incommensurable spaces

Question 29

Ray (1999), import of mourning and gried

Answer 29

constitute basis for desire for vengeful justice

Unresolved grief perpetuates stereotyped repetitions of thought and behaviour

Question 30

Ray (1999), Communist rule creating conditions resulting in mimetic desire producing violence

Answer 30

• Characterized by situation in which centralized power undermined norms of co-operation by eliminating negotiation from public life and undermining respect for anything other than official positions, which themselves came to be discredited
• Vicious cycle - low legitimacy, low trust, increasing reliance on clientelistic and informal networks, which create ideal conditions for reinforcement of particularistic identities

Question 31

Ray (1999), collapse of Communist rule creating conditions resulting in mimetic desire producing violence

Answer 31

• Created highly unstable situation in which past subject to deep and extensive revision
• In Yugoslavia, settling of scores w the communist period involved systematic attempts to re-draw national boundaries and undo the ethnic mix that had been created both in pre-communist Yugoslavia and in the Federation

Question 32

Ray (1999), role of state crisis

Answer 32

Where cultural traditions of ethno-nationalism are present violent national conflict is likely to be provoked when the hegemonic nation state is destabilized by legitimacy crisis

Ensuing social dislocation and reaction-formation draws on cultural reserves, solidifies ambiguous identities and activates the ‘memory’ of nationhood

Question 33

Ray (1999), violence and social life

Answer 33

Violence does not erupt into social life as some atavistic antisocial force but is embedded in certain kinds of routine social relationships

Question 34

Ray (1999), post-genocide

Answer 34

inescapable conditions exist for two further irreconcilable historical memories - in the mass graves of Kosovars and the Serbian civilian casualties

Question 35

Death of Yugoslavia documentary, Exec Producer Percy(1995), Tito

Answer 35

died 1980
35 yrs had held the 6 republics together
Any hint of nationalism crushed - policy called ‘brotherhood and unity’

7 yrs later Yug still united

Question 36

DoY, Milošević on Kosovo

Answer 36

all our hist is in Kosovo, all our monasteries

Question 37

Kosovo pre-genocide

Answer 37

Majority Muslim Albanians

Few remaining Serbs claimed being driven from ancient kingdom

Claims of Albanian atrocities believed

Milo sent by President to quell ethnic conflict. agreed to meet the nationalists - violating guiding principle of Tito’s Yugoslavia

M consulted trusted advisors about how to proceed - opportunity to exploit situation

Villasi, Albanian Kosovo leader - M sent private secretary and told Kosovo Serbs to fight police

Question 38

DoY, Serbian TV

Answer 38

Created Milo legend

Saw him stand up for Serbs in Kosovo at mtg w nationalists where they were complaining about treatment by Albanians

led w item on all 3 channels

Question 39

DoY, after M’s visit to Albania

Answer 39

accused of breaching party policy

Showdown few days later at mtg of Serbia’s top communists:

• M said crisis worse every day
• M accused Stambolić, President of Serbia (who had made M’s career), of acting like dictator and won vote to this effect
• Stam - he was carried away, enflamed explosive situation, Serbs everywhere saw as battle cry

Question 40

DoY, Milosevic enflaming Serbian nationalism

Answer 40

Bones of King Lazar paraded round Yug, inspiring Serbs to reclaim former glory

M - we’ll stop counter-revolution in Kosovo and reform polit system. Serbia will regain rightful territory

Question 41

DoY, Role of local nationalists

Answer 41

Solevic:

• Didn’t put him in power but made a real leader of him

Nationalists turned local discontent into pop revolution vs grey bureaucrats of old regime

Took only a word from M to finish the job

Question 42

DoY, first areas of Yug to fall to Serbia

Answer 42

• Vojvedina
• Montenegro
• by begin 1989, M controlled half of Yug

Question 43

DoY, Kosovo, Albanians strike back against M’s push

Answer 43

• Feb 1989, miners led strike, demanding Villasi be returned to power
• Villasi - best way to support me is to remain united, Albanians and Serbs alike

Villasi - M phoned, v aggressive, sounded v worried

• Kosovo Serbs went to Belgrade and M asked Yugoslav state council to grant him emergency powers in Kosovo
• Kucan - M said Serbs will act in own interests. If this violates constitution we don’t care
• M granted powers

Question 44

DoY, Slovene defiance

Answer 44

Kucan, Slovene Communist Party leader:

Walked out and went straight home to Slovenia
That evening, spoke to his people - 27 Feb:

Albanians on strike are defending not just Albanian rights but defending Yugoslavia and every republic, including Slovenia

Question 45

Serb TV and Slovenia

Answer 45

Reported that Kucan delib provocative and defending separatism in Kosovo - and Slovenia

Broadcast brought ppl of Belgrade onto streets

Question 46

President of Presidency of Yugoslavia, Dizdarević, reaction to Serbian nationalist crowds in Belgrade

Answer 46

Talked about Yugoslavia - brotherhood and unity

Will not take path of national conflict

Brotherhood and unity

Failed to satisfy crowd

Question 47

DoY, Crisis in Slovenia

Answer 47

Mladina, youth magazine, regularly mocked Belgrade

published transcript of Yug party mtg at which Kuchan said military official had approached Slovenia’s civilian prosecutor to report that a number of political arrests were planned and that the Army was prepared to quell any resulting demonstrations

Army obtained enough evd to put journalists on trial and send to prison

Plan backfired - turned into anti-Army/ anti-Yug happening

Kuchan forced to side w Mladina. Announced wld change Slovene constitution to keep Belgrade out of his affairs

Kosovo Serbs mobilized but blocked access into Slovenia by Croatia

Question 48

M called extraordinary congress of Yug communist party following Slovenia crisis

Answer 48

• Slovenes put vast num of amendments
• Serbs voted all down, applauding each time
• Slovenes left congress
• acc to Croatian delegate, M desperate to stop Croats leaving
• Croat delegate - can’t accept Yugoslav party w/o Slovenes
• Croats left the congress
• beginning of Yug crisis

Question 49

DoY, Croatian nationalism 1990

Answer 49

• Milošević = first to enflame his ppl’s nationalism
• Croatia provoked. Tudjman chosen in 1st free elections as president
• revival of checkerboard flag of fascist Croatia - Hitler’s allies who had killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs

Question 50

DoY, Mesic, PM of Croatia

Answer 50

• We should have been more subtle and careful

- Knew we were driving away serbs who wanted to live at peace w croatia

Question 51

DoY, Southern Croatia

Answer 51

• high Serb population
• Martic, Police Inspector, Knin - Serb police in Croatia left in no doubt would have to wear same badges and uniforms worn by Croat wartime fascists
• T sent Juric, Interior Ministry, to Knin to appease
• mob outside, serbian nationalism rife, end of Croat authority in Knin
• Serbs from Knin demanded action from Yug army (under Serb control that yr) to stop independence of Croatia - when last independent, Croatia had committed genocide and ppl rly scared (According to chairman of Yug State Council, Jovic)
• Knin Serbs left in no doubt Serbia wld help them
• Yug army ordered Croat special forces to turn back from mission to disarm Knin Serbs
• 17 Aug 1990, Knin Serbs declared no-go area for Croats
• powerlessness in face of Yug army provoked Croats arming selves - deal done in Hungary to buy consignment of weapons

Question 52

DoY, Croatian arms smuggling

Answer 52

• T said would allow Yug army to arrest those implicated in smuggling
• Returned to Zagreb

-Passed a law giving ministers immunity
Chief arms smuggler appeared on TV - said film total fabrication

• Croat TV mocked Serbs’ impotence
• Chief arms smuggler appeared on TV - said film total fabrication
• Milosevic declared himself guardian of Yug
• Persuaded generals to mobilise army to disarm Croats
• Bosnia voted against action vs Croatia. Stymied army and the Serbs
• M announced Serbia and allies withdrawing from state council

Question 53

DoY, international community complicity in Serb aggression

Answer 53

General met w communists

Asked if Russians wld defend if West intervened

Soviet defence minister gave details of their intelligence reports, showing Yug army safe to act w/o fear of western intervention

Question 54

DoY, after Serbia’s exit from State Council

Answer 54

• General Kadievic hesitated, refusal to use army vs Croatia - dashed M’s plan
• T openly flaunting new weapons w/in weeks
• M+T summit to work out how to carve Yug up between them
• Jovic (M ally) - Decided to deploy troops in Serb areas of Croatia. Croats wld provoke war so we cld take those territories
• war 2 weeks later

Question 55

Srebrenica - A Cry from the Grave, director Leslie Woodhead, 1999, Srebrenica now

Answer 55

entirely Serb

Memory of massacre erased

Question 56

SACFTG, Srebrenica 1992

Answer 56

9000 pop. 3/4 pop Muslim

Question 57

SACFTG, Srebrenica at begin of war

Answer 57

• War came early to eastern Bosnia and Srebrenica - only 10 miles from border w Bosnia
• British reporter - Desperate situation of thousands of Muslim refugees in the town
• Nasa Oric - Muslim warlord and defender of Srebrenica
• Cvjetinovic, Serbian Journalist - Serb Christmas day, 1993, Muslims attacked the Kravica area, did terrible things to the ppl, killing women and children
• Great pressure for army to strike back and liberate

Question 58

SACFTG, UN arrives in Srebrenica

Answer 58

Arrival of UN general Philip Morier and his promise of rescue
Said this was protected zone

Jan 1995, Dutch UN peacekeepers arrived

UN didn’t have equipment or troop strength to enforce anything

Serbs tightened hold over area, cutting off convoys

Dutch starved of supplies, reduced to foot patrols

Question 59

SACFTG, lead-up to genocide 1995

Answer 59

• July 9, 30 Dutch peacekeepers taken hostage by Serbs
• Egbers, from Dutch Battallion,, Serbs said long as we have these soldiers, UN won’t risk anything
• July 10, Col Karremans files request for air support
• Serbs shell Dutch positions
• UN Commander Gen Bertrand Janvier rejects request for Air Support
• Janvier finally agrees air support at 9.40pm, but thenpostpones until morning
• July 11, still no shelling, then at 9am, col Karremans told that his request for Air Support was submitted on the wrong form
• Airborne since 6am, NATO planes must now return to Italy to refuel
• Janvier authorises Air Support, 4 hours after request
• 2 Dutch F16 fighters drop 2 bombs on Serb positions. Serbs threatened to kill Dutch hostages and shell refugees
• Further Air Strikes abandoned
• 4.15pm, Mladic enters Srebrenica to claim town for Bosnian Serbs

Question 60

SACFTG, genocide begins

Answer 60

Mlad - 
however old you are you will get transport
Women and children 1st
30 buses coming
You'll go on to Muslim territory

• Serbs began separating men aged 12-77
• 23,000 women and children deported over next 30 hours
• Serbs shell men fleeing through the mountains. Hundreds killed
• lots of soldiers lined road. Every 3-4m, two soldiers, facing route Muslims would come
• Serbs using stolen UN equipment trick men into surrender

-Kravica village, prisoners packed into warehouse
Serb soldiers fire and throw grenades into building
Hundreds die

Question 61

SACFTG, Srebrenica 1992

Answer 61

9000 pop. 3/4 pop Muslim

Question 62

SACFTG, Srebrenica at begin of war

Answer 62

• War came early to eastern Bosnia and Srebrenica - only 10 miles from border w Bosnia
• British reporter - Desperate situation of thousands of Muslim refugees in the town
• Nasa Oric - Muslim warlord and defender of Srebrenica
• Cvjetinovic, Serbian Journalist - Serb Christmas day, 1993, Muslims attacked the Kravica area, did terrible things to the ppl, killing women and children
• Great pressure for army to strike back and liberate

Question 63

SACFTG, UN arrives in Srebrenica

Answer 63

Arrival of UN general Philip Morier and his promise of rescue
Said this was protected zone

Jan 1995, Dutch UN peacekeepers arrived

UN didn’t have equipment or troop strength to enforce anything

Serbs tightened hold over area, cutting off convoys

Dutch starved of supplies, reduced to foot patrols

Question 64

Weitz (2003), Milošević and genocide

Answer 64

Genocide most likely not Milošević’s original intent

Genocide emerged at moments of extreme crisis, largely self-generated

Question 65

SACFTG, genocide begins

Answer 65

Mlad - 
however old you are you will get transport
Women and children 1st
30 buses coming
You'll go on to Muslim territory

• Serbs began separating men aged 12-77
• 23,000 women and children deported over next 30 hours
• Serbs shell men fleeing through the mountains. Hundreds killed
• lots of soldiers lined road. Every 3-4m, two soldiers, facing route Muslims would come
• Serbs using stolen UN equipment trick men into surrender

-Kravica village, prisoners packed into warehouse
Serb soldiers fire and throw grenades into building
Hundreds die

Question 66

SACFTG, Jean-Rene, Hague investigator, has built up detailed account of when killing became highly organised

Answer 66

• Routine of killing started July 14
• Bratunac became concentration spot for prisoners captured
• From there, evacuation starting

-1st convey transported prisoners to school, jammed into gym
Hundreds blindfolded and trucked to a field, lined up and shot

• Other prisoners to school of petcoshi
• Hundreds lined up near a dam and shot in the back
• Some executions not finished until next day
• Some wounded not finished off until day after
• More than 1000 men killed around Grbavci and Petkovci
• July 16, Bratunac transportation still going on - taken to farm for execution
• above 4000 killed in these conditions

Question 67

SACFTG, July 21st and beyond

Answer 67

• July 21, 1st reports of massacre now emerging
• Head of UN mission in Bosnia, Yasushi Akashi, fails to report evd of atrocities
• Col Karremans calls attack on Srebrenica an excellently planned military operation, making no mention of atrocities
• Killing goes on for weeks in mountains around Srebrenica

Question 68

SACFTG, total Srebrenica death toll

Answer 68

July 12-16, Bosnian Serb army slaughtered at least 7,414 Muslim men

Question 69

Weitz (2003), nationality under Tito’s Yugoslavia

Answer 69

• national sentiments to be represented within each republic but wld also be entwined w communist ideology and commitment to larger entity of Yugoslavia
• For official purposes, individuals free to choose own ethnic and national identity
• 1971 Muslim became officially recognised nationality
• Initial constitutions defined the republics as the political expressions of sovereign nations, to which the ethnic groups outside the republics also linked
• Within each republic, political positions distributed according to national criteria
• League of Communists of Yugoslavia and Yugoslav People’s Army maintained cohesion of the system
• institutional structure of communist Yugoslavia sustained and developed particular national identifications

Question 70

date of M’s mtg in Kosovo w local party leaders

Answer 70

24 April 1987

Question 71

Milošević speech near battle site of Kosovo Polje

Answer 71

24 April, 1987

Captured essential themes of nationalism:

• Timelessness of Serbian nat ident
• Call upon heroic ancestors
• Demands upon their descendants to fulfil their duty to the nation by defending their right to live in their historic homeland
• Sense of aggrievement, that the nation being oppressed by others
• Call to violent action to redress wrongs w the promise of a better future

Question 72

Prince-bishop Petar Petrović-Njegoš’s The Mountain Wreath:

Answer 72

• Epic poem
• Mid-19th C
• Glorified eternal struggle and ultimate redemption of the Serb people.Proverbially learned by every Serb schoolchild from the mid-19th C onward
• Story of hero Miloš Obilič, who fights alongside Serbian prince Lazar and kills Turkish sultan. Lazar faced w choice between losing life and betraying his ppl, chooses death at hands of Turks. Christian idiom - Lazar betrayed by Branković, Judas figure, and Lazar rises to heaven
• Powerful story, binding Serbian national idea to the Christian promise of redemption, but a redemption that can arrive only through struggle and martyrdom
• Also binds national idea to a defined place - battlefield of Kosovo Polje and more generally the Serb-settled lands around it
• Celebrated ethnic cleansing and violent vengeance against Muslims - ‘We put them all unto the sword’
• Mountain Wreath = one sign of emergence of modern nationalism in South Slav lands in 19th-C

Question 73

Weitz (2003), nationalism under Tito’s Yugoslavia

Answer 73

national sentiments to be represented within each republic but wld also be entwined w communist ideology and commitment to larger entity of Yugoslavia

Question 74

Weitz (2003), most extreme and exclusive strand of nationalism adopted by Milošević

Answer 74

Nationalism imbued w sense of aggrievement, resentment over all injustices supposedly perpetrated against Serbs by variety of forces - Croats, Slovenes and Muslims w/in the Yugoslav deferation, along w various Western powers, espp Italy, Austria, Germany and US, that supposedly had designs on Yugoslav territory and sought to destroy its form of communism

This kind of nationalist thought gaining ground in elite circles even before Milošević’s 1987 appearance in Kosovo

Question 75

Weitz (2003), manipulation of recent past in nationalist discourse

Answer 75

• WW2 Independent State of Croatia carried out genocides against Serbs, Jews, and Roma and Sinti at concentration and extermination camps - Jasenovac most notorious. Within living memory of many
• Milošević - elevat Jasenovac to exclusively Serbian symbol, second only to Kosovo Polje
• Serbian Orthodox patriarch Easter 1991 message - called on Serb ppl to combat all done to extinguish mem and underestimate the num of our victims

Question 76

Weitz (2003) Yug economic crisis

Answer 76

deepened late 1980s

Croats and Slovenes threatened to secede

Question 77

Weitz (2003), Kosovo

Answer 77

Serbs dominated state institutions and repressed the Albanian Muslims

nationalist Albanians exerted pressure and violence against Serb civilians

Question 78

Weitz (2003), 28th June 1989 Serbs commemorated 600th anniversary of defeat at Kosovo Polje:

Answer 78

• Prince Lazar’s bones carried to various monasteries around Serbia in preceding weeks - medieval pilgrimage recast in modern terms
• Processions accompanying relics became rallying point for Serbian nationalism
• Hundreds of thousands of Serbs gathered on the Field of Blackbirds
• Milošević - redemptive form of Serbian nationalism. Pledge to protect. If need be redemption of nation wld come through political violence
• By assuming Lazar’s as well as Tito’s mantle, Milošević rode wave of popular enthusiasm

Question 79

Weitz (2003), categorising population

Answer 79

• In highly mixed regions of Slavonia and Krajina in Croatia and in Bosnia generally, partic villages or neighbourhoods simply known as Muslim, others as Serb or Croat
• Oft names ident ppl as mems of one or another group
• State records ident ppl by nationality e.g. individ identity cards
• In midst of the conflict, Serb nationalists in Prijedor (in Bosnia) ordered Muslims to mark their homes w white sheets and then to wear white armbands

-Radical simplifiers, obliterating other forms of identity, like class or locality
Reduced all Muslims to a biological category from which there was no escape - had to be either driven out or killed

Question 80

Weitz (2003), factors in Yugoslav collapse

Answer 80

• Collapse of communism and incr power of globalised capitalism destroyed Cold War umbrella that had given Yugoslavia protected and privileged place in international order
• Economy stagnated and lacked flexibility to function effectively in the more competitive global markets of the late 20th C
• According to some calculations, real personal income declined by 1/4 1979-85
• 1980s, IMP and World Bank imposed austerity measures on Yugoslavia and demanded political and economic reforms in exchange for restructuring of Y’s extremely high indebtedness
• Results = mass unemployment, hyperinflation and steep slashes in social welfare programs, as well as substantial cuts in long-sacred defense budget

Question 81

Weitz (2003), Common Slav ancestry

Answer 81

Major South Slav groups share common ancestry

Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims all descend from Slavic tribes that migrated into area of the former Yugoslavia in late Roman period

Only in course of 19th C w emergence of political struggles vs Habsburg and Ottoman domination and of nationalisms throughout Europe did religious identities become fully intermingled w national ones, so that by definition Catholic was also Croat; Orthodox = Serb

Question 82

Weitz (2003), Bosnia, ethnic mix and national identity

Answer 82

many Slavs converted to Islam under Ottoman domination.

Nationalists from 19th C on asserted Bosnian Muslims simply wayward Serbs or Croats, descendants of those who had wrongly adopted Islam and now needed to be brought back into the fold

Question 83

Weitz (2003), categorising population

Answer 83

• In highly mixed regions of Slavonia and Krajina in Croatia and in Bosnia generally, partic villages or neighbourhoods simply known as Muslim, others as Serb or Croat
• Oft names ident ppl as mems of one or another group
• State records ident ppl by nationality e.g. individ identity cards
• In midst of the conflict, Serb nationalists in Prijedor (in Bosnia) ordered Muslims to mark their homes w white sheets and then to wear white armbands

Question 84

Weitz (2003), Yugoslav collapse

Answer 84

• Collapse of communism and incr power of globalised capitalism destroyed Cold War umbrella that had given Yugoslavia protected and privileged place in international order
• Economy stagnated and lacked flexibility to function effectively in the more competitive global markets of the late 20th C
• According to some calculations, real personal income declined by 1/4 1979-85
• 1980s, IMP and World Bank imposed austerity measures on Yugoslavia and demanded political and economic reforms in exchange for restructuring of Y’s extremely high indebtedness
• Results = mass unemployment, hyperinflation and steep slashes in social welfare programs, as well as substantial cuts in long-sacred defense budget

Question 85

Weitz (2003), why was Yug dissolution so dangerous?

Answer 85

bc unlike other communist socs in Eastern Europe, no viable, democratically minded civil society had emerged that stretched across the entire country, not just among a particular nationality

Only in Bosnia did Muslim leadership, along w a few Croat and Serb allies, try to maintain republic’s multinational character - stature as the true Yugoslavia

Only Slovenes, residing in a nearly homogenous republic, demanded just secession, not an expanded territory

Question 86

Weitz (2003), role of M in promoting nationalist cause

Answer 86

• Moved own supporters into positions deep w/in bureaucracy
• Serb leadership inflamed nationalist sentiments by staging pro-Serbian rallies
• Depicted in party-controlled media dangers faced by Serbs outside of Serbs
• Threatened military intervention if Serbian demands for greater authority within federation not (210) met
• Milošević carried out significant rapprochement w Serbian Orthodox Church, permitting Orthodoxy to be recognised as spiritual basis for national identity of Serbs

Question 87

Weitz (2003), ethnic cleansing

Answer 87

• Serb forces, once they had taken Vukovar, separated men from women and children
• Women and children asked whether wanted to be evacuated to Serbia or Croatia
• Those who chose Serbia allowed to leave, those who chose C turned over to Croatian authorities
• Some under Serbian control taken to detention centre and stripped and beaten
• Croats retaliated vs Serbian ethnic cleansing by driving out and in some instances massacring Serbs in towns in Croatian-held territory
• By end of Nov 1991, 500,000 Croats and 230,000 Serbs had been displaced from their homes, some fled in fear, others directly forced out

Question 88

Weitz (2003), international community and Yugoslavia

Answer 88

Shifting set of tacit alliances led to deliberate destruction of Yugoslavia, abetted by confused signals from US and outright support from Germany and other EC countries

Question 89

Slovenian and Croatian independence

Answer 89

25 June 1991, Slovenia, assured of German support, declared independence by a nearly unanimous vote of its parliament, and Croatia soon followed w a similar declaration

Question 90

Weitz (2003), outbreak of war

Answer 90

• JNA invaded Slovenia, bt this was sham war that lasted only 10 days
• Silber and Little - this was was a Serbian-Slovene pact, to facilitate secession of Slovenia, humiliate JNA and destroy what was left of Fed Govt
  Succeeded in all three respects
• Fighting spread rapidly into Croatia
• War over populations as well as territory, which became inextricably entwined w forced deportations and genocide:

-Summer and fall 1991, undeclared war raged Krajina and Slavonia
JNA, officers desperately searching for way to maintain prestige, resources, careers, was transforming into army of Greater Serbia

Question 91

Weitz (2003), ethnic cleansing

Answer 91

• Serb forces, once they had taken Vukovar, separated men from women and children
• Women and children asked whether wanted to be evacuated to Serbia or Croatia
• Those who chose Serbia allowed to leave, those who chose C turned over to Croatian authorities
• Some under Serbian control taken to detention centre and stripped and beaten
• Croats retaliated vs Serbian ethnic cleansing by driving out and in some instances massacring Serbs in towns in Croatian-held territory
• By end of Nov 1991, 500,000 Croats and 230,000 Serbs had been displaced from their homes, some fled in fear, others directly forced out

Question 92

Weitz (2003), mutual radicalisation

Answer 92

Serb activists on ground in Croatia as well as military and political leadership in Belgrade both pushing situation forward, supporting each other ideologically and materially

Question 93

Weitz (2003), Bosnia post-independence

Answer 93

• December 1990 to March 1992, uneasy truceSerb nationalists deliberately sought to make Bosnia ungovernable:
• Serb deputies boycotted sessions of Parliament and challenged legitimacy of Izetbegović, leader of Muslim party and president of Bosnia
• Serb paramilitaries seized control of villages and towns and declared them Serbian autonomous regions
• JNA hd large troop concentrations and supply depots in Bosnia. Under orders from Belgrade, non-Serb officers transferred out and replaced by Bosnian Serbs. By end of Dec 1991, JNA forces in Bosnia 85-90% Bosnian Serbs

Question 94

Bosnian Serb plebiscite

Answer 94

Autumn 1991

Demanded union w Serbia

15 Dec 1991, Bosnian Serb Assembly promulgated the Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which it declared independent on 9 January 1992

Question 95

Weitz (2003), Bosnian Serb nationalist ethnic cleansing

Answer 95

northern Bosnia:

Prijedor and other towns - Croats and Muslims allowed to leave Serb-controlled areas only after hd turned over any assets they held and hd signed documents surrendering in perpetuity their rights to their property

Some places - ppl packed into sealed trains

All over northern and eastern Bosnia, Serb paramilitaries, JNA, and Ministry of Interior forces laid siege to towns and villages, driving out Muslims brutally

Question 96

Weitz (2003) International community’s feeble response pre-Srebrenica

Answer 96

mediation efforts oft half-hearted, haphazard, ill-conceived

arms embago imposed 25 Sept 1991 easily evaded by Croatia and Serbia hd very substantial resources of the JNA, but embargo fatally hampered Muslims and the Bosnian Republic

1992 - Security Council finally established peacekeeping force (UNPROFOR, UN Protection Force)
Enforcement banned but force needed just for delivery of humanitarian aid that was express purpose of the mission

By providing safe routes and camps for refugees - intermittently, never adequately - UN then NATO also became party to ethnic cleansing

govt leaders believed only way to end conflict was to accept creation of more homogenous entities

However, UN sanctions, passed 30 May 1992, had sent Serbian economy reeling

Question 97

Weitz (2003), international intelligence

Answer 97

US govt and others hd intelligence reports on atrocities but tried to keep info secret to avoid being drawn into conflict

Question 98

Weitz (2003), role of reporters

Answer 98

Roy Gutman of Newsday described scenes he 1st encountered at Serb concentration camp Manjača

Karadžić invited jounralists to come to Bosnia to see that there were no concentration camps

Gutman, along w British television news station ITN and the Guardian, broke news of horrific conditions at Omarska concentration camp, where muslims constantly beaten and tortured, and executions a regular occurrence

Soon became clear there were at least three other concentration camps, and countless smaller temp camps

Question 99

Weitz (2003), Srebrenica

Answer 99

Now recognised as genocide by ICTY

political disaster for West and UN, which had been reluctantly drawn into conflict

point at which West finally intervened more forcefully in Yugoslav conflict

Question 100

Weitz (2003) International community’s feeble response pre-Srebrenica

Answer 100

mediation efforts oft half-hearted, haphazard, ill-conceived

arms embago imposed 25 Sept 1991 easily evaded by Croatia and Serbia hd very substantial resources of the JNA, but embargo fatally hampered Muslims and the Bosnian Republic

Question 101

International community acts more decisively

Answer 101

August 1995, another Serb mortar attack on Sarajevo finally led to major air strikes vs Serbian positions by mostly US planes operating under NATO command as a UN-designated force

Question 102

Croatia success in war, 1995

Answer 102

• Late July 1995, Croatian forces w tacit (and perhaps more active) US support, swept into Krajina and Slavonia
• Serb Republic of Krajina fell
• Serbs became subject to ethnic cleansing
• Close to 500,000 Serbs fled and were forcibly deported from Krajina

Question 103

Weitz (2003), forced deportations and genocide as social project

Answer 103

involved participation of many thousands

• Generally ethnic cleansing engineered from outside by armed units, not local residents
• Local pops quickly became complicit
• Krajina - local serbs took ovr property of Croats forced out
• When Serbs suffered similar fate 1995, Croats returned and did the same to Serbs
• Serbia made ethnic cleansing and genocide a cause not only of the state but of the population as well

Question 104

Weitz (2003), impact of Dayton Agreement

Answer 104

• Affirmed national identity and basis of polit organisation, granting the nationalists the essence of the programs, if not in fully flowered form
• Did not prevent one last campaign of ethnic cleansing by Serbia for Muslims in Kosovo
• Kosovo no mention at Dayton - continued repression/ discrimination against Kosovars
• Kosovo terrorist attacks on Serbs
• Serbia massive response, forced deportations of hundreds of thousands, many murders and rapes
• 1999 - 78 days of NATO air strikes in response, klling 2600 Serbs - more civilians than soldiers, and destroying gd part of Serbia’s infrastructure

Question 105

Weitz (2003), dehumanization

Answer 105

-Bosnian Muslims called balijas and dogs

• ‘Packages’
  (223) Roundups and separations, w beatings
• Extreme violence itself dehumanised
• dominant regime established conditions that gave individs free rein to enact sadistic tendencies

-fear essential part of killing process
Hague Tribunal reported some of soldiers at Srebenica dressed totally in black and walked around w dogs
Drina Wolves wore insignia depicting (226) wolf’s head

-Final act of dehumanisation in treatment of dead bodies. Scooped up by earth moving equipment and deposited into mass graves

Question 106

Weitz (2003), Serb efforts to destroy Muslim communities

Answer 106

• Violent actions had political meaning - designed to terrorise the Muslim pop, so that if not killed outright, they wld flee in terror from the areas Serbs claimed as their own
• Humiliation and degradation experienced by Muslims - also forced to inflict violence upon one another - cld only destroy (225) any sense of community among them
• Hague tribunal story of prisoners made to sing Serb songs then killed

Question 107

Weitz (2003), forced deportations and genocide as social project

Answer 107

involved participation of many thousands

• Generally ethnic cleansing engineered from outside by armed units, not local residents
• Local pops quickly became complicit
• Krajina - local serbs took ovr property of Croats forced out
• When Serbs suffered similar fate 1995, Croats returned and did the same to Serbs

Question 108

Weitz (2003), rape

Answer 108

• UN Human Rights Commission found evd of approx 12,000 rapes, majority committed by Serbs
• systematic component of Serb nationalists’ genocidal practices
• In convicting three Serbs for war crimes and crimes against humanity, judges declared - evd shows rapes used by mems of Bosnian Serb forces as instrument of terror. Detention centre for scores of Muslim women
• Rape = social act involving large nums of men
• Girls lent or rented out to other soldiers for sole purpose of being ravaged and abused
• Rapists seem never to have been disciplined by higher Serbian authorities
• Women taunted continually
• Rape as ultimate act of humiliation - inscribing Serb nationalism in masculine terms, making multinationality completely unthinkable, bc survivors wld always carry trauma w them

Question 109

Weitz (2003), Serb efforts to destroy Muslim communities

Answer 109

• Violent actions had political meaning - designed to terrorise the Muslim pop, so that if not killed outright, they wld flee in terror from the areas Serbs claimed as their own
• Humiliation and degradation experienced by Muslims - also forced to inflict violence upon one another - cld only destroy (225) any sense of community among them

Question 110

Butler, US intelligence officer and prosecution’s military expert

Answer 110

• Bosnian Serbs had prime opportunity to use Muslim men as bargaining chip w Bosnian govt and international community
• But that not their intent - point ws to annihilate physically signif proport of community

Question 111

Weitz (2003), diffusion of genocidal responsibility

Answer 111

Srebenica - Serbian bus drivers each ordered to kill at least one Muslim, ensuring wld not testify against soldiers and making killings a communal event that bound all serbs together

Question 112

Weitz (2003), rape

Answer 112

• systematic component of Serb nationalists’ genocidal practices
• In convicting three Serbs for war crimes and crimes against humanity, judges declared - evd shows rapes used by mems of Bosnian Serb forces as instrument of terror. Detention centre for scores of Muslim women
• Rape = social act involving large nums of men
• Girls lent or rented out to other soldiers for sole purpose of being ravaged and abused
• Rapists seem never to have been disciplined by higher Serbian authorities
• Women taunted continually

Question 113

Hague Tribunal

Answer 113

• Genocide verdict in one case
• Milošević indicted on array of charges, including genocide
• Concerted effort to kill a portion of the community satisfied the legal definition of genocide
• Presiding Judge Rodrigues - deliberate killing of around 8000 Bosnian men at Srebenica constituted genocide bc its results could only be the physical destruction of the community

Question 114

Weitz (2003), explanation for diff individuals’ participation in genocide

Answer 114

Revolutionary transformation of state and society in context of war offered all professionals and mid-level functionaries great opportunity to assume leadership roles

Gave followers a newfound sense of purpose e.g. Arkan’s Tigers absorbing gangs of soccer hooligans

Question 115

Weitz (2003), pursuit of homogeneity

Answer 115

Milošević and Tudjman pursued revolutionary transformation of society, seeking to create ethnically homogenous societies

Expansion, ethnic cleansing and genocide went hand in hand

Question 116

Weitz (2003), racialization of Muslims

Answer 116

Some ideologues asserted Bosnian Muslims were ‘really’ Serbs who had adopted the wrong religion. Theoretically cld abandon Islam and revert to being the Serbs they supposedly were in essence. But on the ground, seem to have been no such cases where Muslims offered choice of conversion

For all intents and purposes, they were categorised as a race

Question 117

Hague Tribunal

Answer 117

• Genocide verdict in one case
• Milošević indicted on array of charges, including genocide
• Concerted effort to kill a portion of the community satisfied the legal definition of genocide
• Presiding Judge Rodrigues - deliberate killing of around 8000 Bosnian men at Srebenica constituted genocide bc its results could only be the physical destruction of the community

Question 118

Semelin (2003), mass crime integrated into act of war

Answer 118

Mass crime as extension of war

e.g. massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane in France by SS division June 10, 1944, when military killed the pop of a village

Question 119

Semelin (2003), mass crime

Answer 119

• Destruction of large segments of a civilian pop, which would first appear to be random or w/o purpose
• follows a certain rationality, albeit delirious
• Prefer ‘mass crime’ to ‘mass murder’ as an expression - the former covers broader actions
• Mass crime denies some segments of population their status as mems of a society
• Mass not only implies quantification, but fact that group of individuals falls under a global criterion e.g. nationality, ethnicity..
• Implies eliminating an amorphous group of ppl, who, bc they have lost all specific traits, have been reified into some sort of threatening globality

Question 120

Semelin (2003), first of two dynamics of mass crimes

Answer 120

Submission of a group:

• Goal to annihilate part of a group to force the rest into submission
• Aims at capitulation of the group to impose a political will, e.g. in case of the civil war in Guatemala early 1980s
• Or, once submission attained, program of reeducation of survivors, and relationship between terror and ideology becomes central factor, e.g. in Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China

Question 121

Semelin (2003), second of two dynamics of mass crimes

Answer 121

Eradication of a group:

-elimination of group from a territory/ cleansing

two categories of this strategy:

1. goal to annihilate part of the group so rest is forced to flee. E.g. ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia
2. Goal to annihilate group completely, w/o any poss of escape. Notion of cleansing a territory secondary to that of annihilation - e.g. extermination of Jews by Nazis

Question 122

Semelin (2003), Mass Crime combined w war

Answer 122

• Mass crime in context of military confrontation
• Conflict creates ‘favourable’ conditions for mass crime
• Notable in case w Armenians in Turkey WW1 and Jews and Gypsies WWII

Question 123

Semelin (2003), Quasi-autonomous mass crime

Answer 123

• Mass crime still justified as reaction to perceived threat, and consequently act of war
• However, mass crime is the only act of war
• Ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia typical example

Question 124

Semelin (2003), development of collective psychosis

Answer 124

• series of massacres perp on Balkan ppl over past 2 centuries
• Vague feeling of fear served as basis for nationalistic propaganda
• Rumour early 1980s, as reported by Paul Garde, that ethnic Albanians demanded ethnically clean Kosovo
• Serb papers - warned vs their diabolical proliferation. Fear of dem growth seemed founded - ethnic Albanians now approx 90% of pop in Kosovo
• Irrational violence can devel rationally: To annihilate fear of being destroyed, one has to hit before being it
• conviction that they were serving the highest interests of the Serb nation, polit legitimacy of tis leader, and process of submission to authority - among factors that explain how the vast majority agreed to participate in such mass crime

Question 125

Semelin (2003), Yug media treatment of massacres of Ustase and Chetniks

Answer 125

Yugoslav media reported massacres of Ustase and Chetniks, but censored those perp by the partisans
Massacres described oft in general terms, paying homage to ‘victims of fascism’

Biased reporting did not satisfy those who, in Serbia, wanted it to be known that Ustase, who were Croats, had killed Serbs bc they were Serbs

Question 126

Semelin (2003), Milošević

Answer 126

product of evolution of Serb soc in 1980s

Power obtained by using fear and propaganda cleverly was part of flow of history

Question 127

Semelin (2003), Mass crime operations are rationally organized and based on:

Answer 127

1. Hierarchy in structure of command between actors and their respective tasks. Fragmenting of tasks = classical technique to make individs feel less reponsible
2. Sealed up theatre of operations. In restricted area, everything becomes poss and violence becomes boundless
3. Culture of impunity

Based on abolition of regular social order, w its rules and taboos

Question 128

Hassner, international community

Answer 128

Great Powers’ delays and procrastination interp by Belgrade as green light to pursue their ethnic cleansing campaign

Took passivity on Croatian situation as encouragement to engage in same kind of campaign in Bosnia

Question 129

Clark, Albania

Answer 129

in extremely difficult conditions, civil resistance managed to postpone war, maintain integrity of the Albanian community in Kosovo and its way of life, counter Serb pressure on Albanians to leave, and enlist internat sympathy

Question 130

Florence Hartmann (functional interp):

Answer 130

• Atrocities have strategic signification for the longer term
• Goal of ethnic cleansing = to annihilate all efforts by the diff communities to live peacefully together

Question 131

Semelin (2003) techniques to stimulate perp of murder

Answer 131

• propaganda convincing national group that they are the victims
• rewards - warlords composed of 80% prison inmates whom M had released w (367) promise they could help themselves to possessions of the victims they were instructed to kill/ chase
• group social pressures

-dehumaniation. Terminology can negate victims’ identity.
Frequently used insult ‘son of a Turk’ puts the death of the victim w/in context of century-old battle, w its political and religious connotations
Identity of victims can be militarized - ‘NATO did sure forget you!’. Action under aegis of military power. Mass crime masquerading as act of war

Question 132

Anthropologist Veronique Nahoum-Grappe (functional interp):

Answer 132

• ‘political use of cruelty’
• In Serbs’ case, enemy defined by blood ties that can go as far as race ties
• Physical destruction of mems of group will therefore not fulfil stated goal of eradication
• Mass rape and profanation of graves as destroying enemy’s identity

Question 133

Sofsky on perpetration

Answer 133

• perp of atrocities no other goal than itself
• Cruelty as goal in itself
• universal dynamic of extreme violence

Question 134

Semelin (2013), functional utility vs no meaning

Answer 134

Atrocities here clearly had functional role

Question 135

Hartmann (1999), Bosnia

Answer 135

Conflict ran April 1992-Nov 1995

Ethnic cleansing = goal of the war

not the inability of the different ethnic groups to live together that brought on the conflict, but the political aim of separating them

Question 136

Hartmann (1999), Croats entered war against Bosnia

Answer 136

1993

• Croats encouraged by M’s support for a Greater Croatia (which would include western Herzegovina and a part of central Bosnia, where a majority of 800,000 Bosnian Croats lived)
• Croats’ breaches of law on smaller scale than Serbs’

Question 137

Special Commission of Experts, chaired by Cherif Bassiouni of DePaul University in Chicago, reported to the UN 1994:

Answer 137

• ethnic cleansing defined as ‘rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area’
• Carried out in former Yugoslavia by means of murder, torture, arbitrary arrest, detention, extrajudicial executions, rape, sexual assault, confinement of civilian pop, etc
• 90% crimes committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina responsibility of Serb extremists
• 6% of Croat extremists
• 4% of Muslim extremists

Question 138

Hartmann (1999), ethnic hatreds

Answer 138

Key factor in incitement of ethnic hatreds = media under the thumb of country’s political leaders:

• Psychological conditioning
• Disguised the conflict in civil and ethnic terms by giving impression it would be imposs for the ppl of (70) former Yugoslavia to live together in same territory

Question 139

Vulliamy (1999), Bosnian Croat concentration camp, Dreteli

Answer 139

• Most prisoners locked away in dank darkness of two underground hangars, dug into facing hillsides
• Men locked in for up to seventy-two hours at a time, w/o food or water, drinking own urine to survive

Bosnian Croat authorities explained plan to UN High Commission from Refugees (UNHCR) at mtg in Makarska:

-Ship 50,000 Muslim men to transit camp (125) at nearby Ljubuski, and thence to third countries

Question 140

Vulliamy (1999), concentration camps in former Yug

Answer 140

media (me included) Cautious about using term ‘concentration camp’ directly after discovery of Trnopolje and Omarska bc of assoc w policies of the Third Reich

However, correct term:

• Civilian pops literallly concentrated - frog-marched in columns or bused to locations for illegal purposes of maltreatment, torture, etc
• UN independent Commission of Experts, year long study: Trnopolje was a concentration camp, and Omarska and Keraterm ‘de facto death camps’

Question 141

Vulliamy (1999), concentration camps - legal side

Answer 141

• unlawful confinement - grave breach of Fourth Geneva Convention
• In internal conflict, noncombatants may be interned but are entitled to humane treatment and judicial protections guaranteed by regularly constituted court

Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 regulates transfer of internees - Article 127 - shall always be effected humanely.
Detaining power should take interests of internees into account

Question 142

Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 regulating transfer of internees

Answer 142

Article 127 - shall always be effected humanely

Detaining power should take interests of internees into account

Question 143

Cohen (1999), ethnic cleansing

Answer 143

• More than 1.5 mil people shifted
• Most devastating burst of violence, April-August 1992, saw Serbs driving more than 700,000 Muslims from an area covering 70% of Bosnia

Ethnic cleansing = blanket term. No specific crime goes by that name, but practice covers a host of criminal offenses

Question 144

Cohen (1999), illegality of forced expulsions

Answer 144

Even if the Bosnian War viewed as civil war, forced expulsions contravene Article 3 common to the 4 Geneva Conventions, which applies to conflict not of an international character:

• People taking no active part in the hostilities shall always be treated humanely
• Prohibits humiliating and degrading treatment, and violence

Nuremberg Charter:

-Article 6, deportation = crime against humanity

Question 145

Rohde (1999), Perfidy

Answer 145

= making someone believe a falsehood

Bosnian Serbs’ use of UN emblems and matériel was war crime - 1977 Additional Protocol I to Geneva Conventions:

• Article 37 states ‘acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, w intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy’

Article 38 - explicitly prohibits the use of the distinctive emblem of the UN, except as authorised by that organization.

Question 146

Bos (2006), Yug as secular

Answer 146

most Serbs are Orthodox Christians, most Croats are Roman Catholics, and the Bosnians define themselves
as Sunni Muslim. Since most of the population was secular, these religious differences were of rather minor significance and constituted more a form of ethnic identity. Yet, through the nationalist rhetoric spun
by, in particular, Serb and Croat cultural and political elites, the different Yugoslavs would within a matter of a decade come to be defined as completely other in terms of ethnicity

Question 147

Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia, 1941-5 and 1992-5 - Robert M. Hayden

Answer 147

Bosnia was also the site of far greater mass killings in 1941–5, organized and effected in ways that seem much more clearly to fit the term ‘genocide’ than does the massacre in Srebrenica. From 1941–5, about 300,000 people were killed in Bosnia, about 65 per cent of them Serbs, and 18 per cent Muslims.5 However, invocation of this larger set of ethnically targeted mass killings has been seen by many analysts, myself included, as part of the late 1980s and early 1990s nationalist political mobilization of Serbs in hostility to Croats and Muslims

In regard to Bosnia, the invocation of the term ‘genocide’ is primarily a political process that, like the ‘invention of tradition’, creates essentialized images of a supposed past to serve the pur- poses of present-day political actors. The success of such a process depends not on the accuracy with which the images reflect the events they supposedly rep- resent, but rather with how well the images invoke an emotional reaction from the intended recipients.

magnitude of the causalities: approximately 100,000 in the 1992–5 war, the majority of them Bosnian Muslims, and about 300,000 in the 1941–5 war, the majority of them Bosnian Serbs

the effort to fit the ethno-national mass killings in the former Yugoslavia into a framework defined by the Holocaust has produced systematic distortions in the ways in which the conflict has been presented.

In Bosnia specifically, decisions by international political actors, supposedly grounded in morality and informed by the rhetoric of genocide, helped struc- ture the local configuration of civilian populations and military forces in Srebrenica in 1995 that put Bosnian Serb forces in a position to engage in what was by far the worst crime of the Bosnian conflict, the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslim males in the last months of the war. That mass slaughter may have put, finally, some accuracy into the charges of ‘genocide’ that had been made since the very start of the conflict, thus turning ‘genocide’ from politically inspired label to self-fulfilling prophecy.

What is striking about the demise of both Yugoslavias is that intense ethno- national conflict followed. But this conflict is a corollary of the logic of consti- tutional nationalism which is openly hostile to minorities and thus also tends to produce resistance from them.20 In both cases, 1941–5 and 1992–5, the demise of the larger state that was premised on the equality and fraternity of the Yugoslav peoples (and willing to sacrifice liberty to maintain the other two) led immediately to brutal conflicts in the most ethnically mixed regions, in efforts to establish the control of one group over the territory by expelling the members of the other group

: in the mid-1980s, two serious studies, one by a Serb and one by a Croat, found that slightly over 1,000,000 people had been killed during the war period in Yugoslavia. After a discussion of these studies and consideration of a major data source not available to these writers in the 1980s, Srdjan Bogosavljevic´ derived minimum and maximum figures: 896,000 and 1,210,000, respectively.23 Using results of a 1964 registration of war victims, he calculated that about 58 per cent of these victims were Serbs, 14 per cent Croats and 5.4 per cent Muslims. Of all killed in Bosnia, 72 per cent were Serbs

economic arguments were quickly transformed into positions claiming that the writer’s separate nation was threatened by other nations within Yugoslavia. This form of argumentation was common to the first direct challenges to the premise of Yugoslavia as unquestioned good for all Yugoslav peoples, the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU, from its Serbian acronym), and the Slovenian National Program. The SANU Memorandum quickly became notorious within Yugoslav and, once the wars began, widely condemned outside of the country.34 Whether it was read or not is another matter. As Michael Mann has noted,35 the first part of it was a critique of the economic failings of Yugoslav self-management socialism and elements of the structure of the Yugoslav federation; however, the second part depicts Serbs as victims of ‘genocide’ on the grounds that they were being forced out of Kosovo – a tendentious claim, and irresponsible rhet- oric that shows, however, the political attractiveness of the ‘genocide’ label for claims that one’s own group has been victimized

Serb intellectuals asserted victimization, claiming to be the ‘new Jews’

If Croats could not easily claim to be the new Jews victimized by Serb Nazis, however, Bosnian Muslims and their supporters were able to make effective use of both parts of this polarized pair of tropes. In part their success in this effort was indeed due to the Muslims having been brutally expelled from large parts of Bosnia by the much better armed and organized Bosnian Serbs, and the dis- proportionately high casualties suffered by Bosnia’s Muslims compared to other groups, especially at the start of the war. However, the success of the Nazi trope for Serbs and that of Holocaust victim for Muslims also benefited from the temporal coincidence of the start of the Bosnia conflict with the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the critical and com- mercial success of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, which brought these tropes into the centre of public discourse

The assertion of a parallel with the Holocaust was explicit: ‘from Auschwitz to Bosnia’.54 Making this case involved the frequent and explicit invocation of elements of the Holocaust as the proper frame of reference for understanding events in Bosnia, especially images of concentration camps, and even holding a contest to find a Bosnian Muslim surrogate for Anne Frank.

Just before his death, Bosnian Muslim leader (and first President of Bosnia and Herzegovina) Alija Izetbegovic´ acknowledged to Bernard Kouchner that he had known at the time that these comparisons were false, that ‘whatever horrors were there, these were not extermination camps’, although he acknowledged that he had used precisely that phrase in speaking with French President Mitterrand in 1993 in an attempt to precipitate bombing of the Serbs

One effect of the establishment of Holocaust imagery as the standard for geno- cide has been to focus attention on concentration camps as the sites of the greatest horrors. In the former Yugoslavia, this imagery was adopted by Serbs in reference to the massacres in the NDH. A highly tendentious book from the late 1980s by Vladimir Dedijer exemplifies this approach: The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican: The Croatian Massacre of the Serbs During World War II.64 The ‘Yugoslav Auschwitz’ was said to be the concentration camp at Jasenovac, with the methods of murder described in great detail.

Images of concentration camps firmly linked w the 1990s events in Bosnia August 1992, when two British TV journalists delivered stories, accomp by film, of Muslim prisoners in ‘detention centres’ run by Bosnian Serbs in northern Bosnia.

Daily Mirror - emaciated Bosnian Muslim prisoner on front page, w captions ‘Belsen ‘92’ and ‘Horror of the new Holocaust’

Question 148

Tudjman’s book, 1990, Horrors of War

Answer 148

• seems to question the total of 6 mil Holocaust victims
• asserted Jews actually controlled the internal management of the largest concentration camp in Croatia, Jasenovac, up until 1944 and thus Jews who influcted sufferings at Jasenovac on Roma and Serbs

The image problem that Tudjman’s book caused for Croatia can be seen in the favourable article on Bespuc´a in the Croatian version of the reader-edited on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia, which says that the book was translated ‘in a “cleansed” version because of its supposedly murky sections which offended the sensibilities of the Jewish community’. The article then notes that Tudjman cited Israeli and Jewish historians who problematized the numbers of those killed in the Holocaust, saying that the number was closer to 4,000,000 than 6,000,000, and that because of this, ‘and because he opened up the uncomfort- able theme of the Jewish kapos in the concentration camps (i.e. the “cooperation” between Jewish inmates with Nazi administrators …), and leaving aside the clumsiness of some of his formulations, Tudjman struck the “sacred cow” of the new Jewish national mythology ….’53 If Tudjman’s book still has this reputation in Croatia, it is easy to see why it was hard for Croatia under his leadership to dodge the Nazi label enough to pin it on other groups.

Question 149

Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo

Answer 149

hailed as the work of ‘the Bosnian Anne Frank’

Question 150

US Holocaust National Museum opened

Answer 150

22 April 1993

Question 151

Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia, 1941-5 and 1992-5 - Robert M. Hayden, Srebrenica and other cases as genocide?

Answer 151

In regard to Srebrenica, this definition is more problematical than non- lawyers might realize. The original 1946 UN resolution defined genocide as ‘a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups’, and it was said at that time that the victim of genocide was not the individuals killed but the group.94 But what counts as ‘the group’ in this case? The Prosecution was inconsistent, referring at various times to the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica and the Bosnian Muslims of Eastern Bosnia. The Trial Chamber agreed with the Defence that the proper group was the Bosnian Muslims, leav- ing then the question of whether the destruction of a part of that group would qualify as genocide.95 Having made this determination, however, the Trial Chamber then contra- dicted itself by saying that the killing of all members of the part of a group located within a small geo- graphical area … would qualify as genocide if carried out with the intent to destroy the part of the group as such located in this small geographical area. Indeed, the physical destruction may target only a part of the geographically limited part of the larger group because the perpetrators of the genocide regard the intended destruction as sufficient to annihilate the group as a dis- tinct entity in the geographic area at issue.96 Yet even annihilation of a small local group seems unlikely to threaten the larger ‘group as such’, already defined as the Bosnian Muslims, that is, the group itself (rather than the individuals that comprise it)

Bosnian Serb Army did not try to kill all mems of the group - only males between 16 and 60

In this connection, the Trial Chamber referred to ‘the catastrophic impact that the disappearance of two or three gen- erations of men would have on the survival of a traditionally patriarchal society’, thus incorporating into its reasoning stereotypes about Bosnian society.97 Strangely, the Trial Chamber also referred to the strategic location of Srebrenica and noted that by killing the men, the Serbs ‘precluded any effective attempt by the Bosnian Muslims to recapture the territory’98 – strange, because this rea- soning seems to acknowledge a military strategic reason for killing the men of military age. Through this reasoning, the Krstic ´ trial chamber extended the definition of ‘genocide’ from acts made with the intent to cause the physical ‘destruction of a group as such’, to covering acts made to remove an ethnic or religious com- munity from a specific territory, especially one of strategic importance

A subsequent ICTY trial chamber expressed ‘some hesitancy’ about adopt- ing this reasoning, ‘which permits a characterization of genocide even when the specific intent extends only to a limited geographical area, such as a municipality’. This Trial Chamber was ‘aware that this approach might dis- tort the definition of genocide if it is not applied with caution’.99 The Stakic´ court cited a law review article that had argued that if such a definition pre- vails, local mass killings might be taken to indicate that there was not a plan on a national level. Carrying this logic further, Tomislav Dulic´ notes that if local mass killings are defined as genocide, even the Holocaust becomes composed in part of many ‘individual genocides’, or local massacres.

At that stage, the possibility arises of seeing reciprocal or ‘retributive’ genocides when forces of antagonistic racial, ethnic or religious groups each commit a local massacre of the other’s people, even of their military forces.101 Yet at that point, what distinguishes ‘genocide’ from other ethnic, racial or reli- gious mass killings?

Appeals Chamber dismissed the Appeals, but in doing so made the issues less rather than more clear. In regard to ‘part’ of a protected group, the Appeals Chamber simply said that all that was necessary was that ‘the alleged perpetrator intended to destroy at least a substantial part of the protected group.’ ‘Substantial part’ was left undefined, but the Appeals Chamber then introduced a purely political consideration: ‘If a specific part of the group is emblematic of the overall group… that may support a finding that the part qualifies as substantial’

extraordinary statement, because it conditions ‘genocide’ on the purely political determination that even a relatively small portion of a pro- tected group is either so politically prominent or so strategically located that its removal from a territory, rather than physical annihilation, would symbolize the vulnerability of the larger group.

The question of whether genocide occurred in Bosnia became even more complicated with the decision of the trial chamber in the case of Momcilo Krajisnik, one of the most important political actors among the Bosnian Serbs from 1990 throughout the war. According to the indictment against him,106 Krajisnik had de facto control and authority over the Bosnian Serb Forces and Bosnian Serb Political and Governmental Organs and their agents, who participated in the crimes alleged in this indictment. He was indicted, and convicted, of crimes based on his political responsibility.

Krajšnik found not guilty of genocide or complicity in genocide, despite condemnations for other crimes e.g. extermination, murder

Thus far, the international legal decisions in regard to the allegations of genocide in Bosnia are ambiguous at best - only Srebrenica held to be genocide

Krstić decision seems to accept genocide as the universal phenomenon that Tudjman envisions

relativises concept of genocide to the point at which it equates conceptually the strategic killing of small nums of ppl w actual efforts at the extermination of entire groups

Question 152

Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia, 1941-5 and 1992-5 - Robert M. Hayden conclusions

Answer 152

What is to be gained by declaring after the fact that not only Turkey but Poland, Czech Republic, Croatia, India, Pakistan etc founded on ‘genocide’?

the invocation by Serb politicians in 1990–2 of the mass killings of Serbs in the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (and thus in Bosnia) 50 years earlier was indeed a call to mobilize the descendants of those Serbs against the descendants of those said to have killed them, in order to justify aggressive Serb political actions (and later, military ones) against those Others. But the invocation of the short-lived camps of northern Bosnia in 1992–3 and the mass killing at Srebrenica in 1995 as ‘genocide’ has equally been a call to mobilize the international community, and also Bosnian Muslims, against Serbs. The suit by Bosnia against Serbia in the ICJ is primarily a tool by which Bosniak political forces are trying to undermine the Bosnian Serbs, even to eliminate the Republika Srpska.115 Yet the war in Bosnia was driven by the rejec- tions by Bosnian Serbs and Herzegovinian Croats of inclusion in a unitary Bosnian state, and they still reject this.

politics of mutual recrimination are dangerous politics, which produced new corpses, and not only because of the actions of ex-Yugoslavs themselves

In regard to Srebrenica, a U.S. official told me that while the U.S. government knew that at the end of the war, Srebrenica would be part of the Serbian territory, they would not, ‘for moral reasons’, urge the Izetbegovic ´ government to evacuate the town. This ‘morality’ left the Muslims of Srebrenica in place,119 where they were massacred by Bosnian Serb forces a year later. This does not exculpate the Serb forces of responsibility for the mass killing, but it is discomfiting that concerns about a ‘genocide’ that had not actually taken place might have helped set the stage for these larger massacres later. Perhaps the labelling of mass killings in Bosnia as ‘genocides’ should give pause.

The term ‘genocide’ may not fit all mass killings. Invoking that term may well be a tactic for inciting hostility between the descendants of putative victims and alleged victimizers.

It may serve to preclude diplomatic efforts on supposedly ‘moral’ grounds

Finally, forcing accounts of ethnic conflict into the framework of the Holocaust distorts perceptions of the real causes and trajectories of the conflict, thus not only hindering understanding of the con- flict itself, but also obstructing efforts to establish new forms of relations between the groups involved.

Question 153

Katherine Verdery

Answer 153

‘entire battalions of [massacre victims] served as “shock troops” in the Yugoslav breakup.’117 While her specific refer- ence in this passage is to the mobilization of the dead of World War II, her model includes those of the later wars: ‘the concern with corpses continues, as the fighting produces even more graves. Their occupants become the grounds for mutual recrimination … and means of a politics of blame, guilt and accountability.’

Question 154

Tomislav Dulić (2006) Mass killing in the Independent State of Croatia,
1941–1945: a case for comparative research, Journal of Genocide Research

Answer 154

What happened to the Serbs in the NDH might border on genocide, but a final
answer remains a matter of establishing plausible thresholds insofar the percentage
of destruction is concerned. If one believes that the perpetrators’ aims and the level of destruction was of such dimensions that one can indeed speak about “substantial”
intended and achieved destruction, then genocide was probably committed. It
is on the other hand possible to argue that the killings served the purpose of forcing
the Serbs to flee the NDH territory, in which case what happened perhaps should
be characterized as ethnocide (or “ethnic cleansing”). Alternatively, one might
argue that the Ustasˇe initially intended but did not achieve substantial destruction,
in which case the result would be “attempted genocide.”

As for the Cˇ etniks, it is important to conclude that they wanted to “ethnically
purify” their future utopian state through the commission of massacres as well
as by forcing the undesirables out of a future “Homogenous Serbia” and—in the
case of the Muslims—Yugoslavia. Consequently, the Cˇ etnik aim was different
from the Ustasˇes’ vis-a`-vis the Jews and Roma. Using wide definitions of genocide,
one can perhaps argue that genocide was committed in the Cˇ etnik cases as well. On
the other hand, it might be claimed that neither the Muslims nor the Croats were
destroyed to an extent when it would seem plausible to speak about genocide.
Even if the Cˇ etniks had aimed at substantial destruction, which is debatable,
their inability to achieve this

There is little evidence supporting the view that the Ustasˇe initially did not
intend the killings, but along the lines of Mann’s model turned to “murderous
cleansing” after repression had failed. Instead, they began organizing the persecution
within days after coming to power and the first massacres happened in Croatia
proper in late April. Moreover, the deportations that were agreed upon with the
Germans targeted whole sections of the Serbian population throughout the
country at a time when there was no organized opposition to the regime.

Above all, the “cultural purification,” the killing of women, children and the
elderly and the destruction of the Jews and Roma—who did not pose any threat whatsoever—shows that ideology was a key factor in both the Ustasˇa and Cˇ etnik
terror.

The
importance of motives and ideology is perhaps best illustrated by a comparison
between the Ustasˇes’ attack on the Serbs and their almost total destruction of
the Jews and Roma. Since it was Jewish and Roma “race,” not their culture,
that threatened to “defile” the Croatian (including Muslim) racial stock, they
were “objectively” inassimilable in the eyes of the Ustasˇe and therefore had to
perish. The other Ustasˇa and Cˇ etnik victims could be deported or—in the case
of the Serbs—assimilated

. On the basis of empirical evidence, I posit
that the destruction of the NDH Jews was different in kind and not merely in
degree from the terror that affected the Serbs, Croats and Muslims, since the killings continued unabated until they de facto were all but extinct from Bosnia and
Croatia. In that sense, the Holocaust in the NDH indeed represented a final solution,
since it irreversibly changed the cultural and religious character of cities
such as Sarajevo and Zagreb.

Question 155

Cathie Carmichael (2006) Violence and ethnic boundary maintenance in Bosnia in the 1990s, Journal of Genocide Research,

Answer 155

occurrence of violence that I want to examine in some detail is the often reported phenomenon of forcing Muslims to eat pork or desecrating holy places by either letting pigs roam in them or leaving pieces of pigs’ bodies there. There are many similar incidences of this type of marking of religious and ethnic boundaries. In 1992, in Novo Selo, when Bosnian Serb troops “rounded up 150 women, children and old people and forced them at gunpoint into the local mosque. In front of the captives they challenged the local community leader to desecrate the mosque…they told him to make the sign of the cross, eat pork and finally have sexual intercourse with a teenage girl… (he) refused all these demands and was beaten and cut with knives.

A second incident occurred when a Muslim returned to his house after it had been looted in 1995. He found that “(a) long stake was put in the middle of the room, resting on the window frame with a pig’s head impaled on it.

Some writers have interpreted the symbolic use of violence as primarily the reinvention of tradition. Serb anthropologist Ivan C ˇ olovic ́ employs a phrase taken from the work of the ethnographer Veselin C ˇ ajkanovic ́ ,klicanje predaka (the cheer of ancestral voices), to illustrate how the dead are summoned up to serve the political purposes of the living. 12 Croat writers Ivo Z ˇ anic ́ and Dunja Rihtman-Augus ˇ tin have also discussed the way in which tradition was effectively reconfigured and mobilized in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia

Dras ˇ kovic ́ and his contemporaries drew upon the complete litany of prejudices about Islam and the Ottoman past. Prior to the massacre at Srebrenica in Bosnia, in which thousands of Muslims men were executed and dumped in the surrounding killing fields, Ratko Mladic ́ appeared on Bosnian Serb television on July 11, 1995 (the same evening of the pig slaughtering outside the Hotel Fontana), telling viewers that the moment for revenge against the “Turks” had finally come

Of course the war in Bosnia also served to break down barriers. A Serb family who had no other source of fat cooked in lard and served bacon to a Muslim boy they were sheltering. When they explained what had happened to the boy’s father, he broke down: “Thank you so much for feeding my boy. If it weren’t for you he’d have nothing to eat.” 64 In Bosnia ethnic boundary maintenance was weak under the communist period and individuals such as Emir Karabas ˇ ic ́ did eat pork with their Serb neighbours and would probably have bought cevapc ˇ ic ˇ i of mixed pork. and beef from vendors in Sarajevo. Thus, the violence of the 1990s will certainly have created new barriers between groups and “magnified mutual gaps,” 65 making it unlikely that the surviving members of the families will ever sit down and eat together again. Violence thus destroyed 500 years of sharing the same space, even if some practices did differ

Each confessional community in Bosnia perpetrated atrocities, which were in some way linked to their religious identity or discovered ethnic boundary markers that had scarcely been observed before 1992.

Question 156

Ben Lieberman (2006) Nationalist narratives, violence between neighbours
and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Hercegovina: a case of cognitive dissonance?, Journal of Genocide
Research

Answer 156

reports of war and flight depict suspicion, intense animosity, and even
hatred between the different peoples of Bosnia, but they also provide strong evidence
of cordial relations across ethnic and religious boundaries. This article will
argue that one key to understanding ethnic cleansing in Bosnia lies in analysing
this important contradiction. These multiple eyewitness accounts suggest that
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was a crime of cognitive dissonance

Nationalist narratives experienced a strong revival during the last decades of
Yugoslavia, though not because of the work of any single individual or institution.
Intellectuals during the 1970s were the first to construct a narrative of eternal Serb
victimhood and selected politicians along with the media joined in during the
1980s. Jasna Dragovic´-Soso provides a detailed guide to the Serb nationalist
revival of intellectuals, most notably the Serb novelist Dobrica C´ osic´, whose
four volume epic Vreme Smrti and a later play based on part of the epic anchored
the story of Serb heroism and catastrophe from the First World War in the narrative
of the Serb as victim.40 The next and best-known step in rebuilding a Serb
national narrative came in the 1980s with commemoration of the 1389 Battle of
Kosovo, the site of a much-mythologized Serb defeat to the Ottoman Turks.

In Bosnia-Hercegovina and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, national hate
narratives repeatedly played a central role in generating ethnic cleansing. It is
tempting, though probably impossible, to compare the power of this particular
type of nationalist thinking as a motive for ethnic cleansing against other material
or psychological motives. However, national hate narratives should not be viewed
in isolation from such motives as the desire for loot or the possible thrill of joining
in violence. In the ethnic cleansing in the 1990s, nationalist narratives of victimization
united and blended together such other motives for attacking and driving
out neighbours of a different ethnic or religious identity

The antecedent hate structures inherent in national hate narratives made populations
more receptive to calls for ethnic cleansing, but these ideas did not simply
predispose people to consider and take up violence. In the wars in Yugoslavia,
national hate narratives acted as a powerful accelerant. It was not simply generalized
antipathy to groups of Bosnian Muslims that legitimized violent attack, but
specific narratives identifying the targeted group as traitors to a nation. Along with
leadership by activist groups or publicity, events that reinforced the themes of
these national narratives were critical in launching a final surge toward violence
and revenge in the name of the nation.
Nationalist narratives repeatedly transformed the relationship between the past
and present. They remake the past, and provide a framework for interpreting personal
experience that goes far beyond interactions of daily life.

Paradoxically,
when most powerful, they fuse together the present and the imagined historical
past while disconnecting the present from an actual personal past. For the individual, the new reality of ethnic violence created during periods of crisis is often
almost impossible to explain by reference to prewar inter-ethnic relations:
friends are enemies, and enemies are friends.

Question 157

Paul B. Miller (2006) Contested memories: the Bosnian genocide in Serb and
Muslim minds, Journal of Genocide Research

Answer 157

nothing in the UN Genocide
Convention that says the intent to destroy a specific group, in whole or in part,
must entail murdering members of both sexes

both because of the international community’s
clear responsibility for the enclave’s fall and the Muslims’ justified
outrage that the Serbs would do the unthinkable, Srebrenica has quickly become
a preeminent symbol of the war, its tenth anniversary a pageantry of memory
attended by political leaders, journalists, and ordinary people the world over.
Whereas well through the 1970s Holocaust survivors in America, Israel, and
other countries were insensitively told to put the past behind them and get on
with their lives, Srebrenica victims, including those who survived physically,
have already become the centre of a veritable cult of commemoration. From the
parade of trucks that processed through Sarajevo bearing the remains of 610
newly identified genocide victims, to the miles of traffic heading into the Potocˇari
Memorial Complex, there seemed to be something of the spectacle to this solemn
occasion, more political rally and media event, really, than funeral. P

What worries me are the ways in which a surfeit of memory about Srebrenica
could become hardened and politicized into dogma about the past

chamber of horrors committed against Serbs in the last century. Its highlights
include: bloodied “Serb” faces with a caption indicating that Vukovar was a
Croatian crime; side-by-side beheading images from 1942 (Ustasˇa) and 1992
(Mujahadeen); recruitment posters for the Bosnian Muslim SS division in the
Second World War; and lists of Mujahadeen fighters from the last war. Utterly
devoid of context and explanation, and often completely ahistorical (the Handzˇar
SS division was formed after the majority of Ustasˇa crimes), the historical narrative
presented at Kozara is even given a title—“The three genocides against the Serbian
people in the twentieth century”—connecting not only the Second World War with
the recent conflict, but the First World War as well. The not-so-implicit subtext, of
course, is that Srebrenica could not possibly measure up to that.
The purpose of the Kozara exhibit, in short, is not to document war crimes and
human rights violations against Bosnian Serbs, which certainly did happen in the
twentieth century, particularly during the anti-Serb Ustasˇa campaign of the
Second World War. The purpose is to paint their adversaries, the Croats and
above all the Muslims, as monstrous barbarians. Certainly no kind of animals
you would ever want as your neighbours. This “museum,” in short, is not
simply another example of Serb nationalism, self-pity, and counter-memorialization.
It is a blatant appeal to a most vile racism.

The Srebrenica genocide, whether you call it that

or not (and some scholars, not including this one, don’t), was unique and tragic
enough in its own right. Turning it into the Bosnian Muslim Holocaust, in a
country which remains forty percent Muslim, seems to me to be manufacturing
a fixed and didactic narrative that leaves little room for exploring the broader
context of both the recent war and of Bosnian history generally

Question 158

Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans: nationalism and the destruction of tradition - Cathie Carmichael, Askews and Holts 2002

Answer 158

Nationalism and creation of nation states was an ideological model that ran counter to complex traditions and daily realities for most Balkan peoples

ethnic cleansing from the 18th C

Rise of nationalisms

Question 159

Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of Genocide - Bette Denich 1994

Answer 159

During the early 1980s, a play called “The Pigeon Cave” (Golubnjaca)1 was banned after
being performed in Serbia. The drama portrays peasant life in a Dalmatian mountain village in
the region known as Krajina, where both Orthodox Christian Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats
live along the border that once divided Christian realms from the Ottoman Empire.2 In the
background of the village looms the limestone cavern that the villagers call the pigeon-cave,
which conceals pigeon nests and the skeletal remains of the villagers’ relatives who were
massacred during the Second World War. The villagers are Serbs; their relatives were massacred
by Croats from neighboring villages who had joined the nationalist Ustasha movement that
ruled the so-called Independent State of Croatia, established in 1941 under the wing of Hitler.
That Croatian state extended the Nazi genocidal policy to remove from its territory Serbs, in
addition to Jews and Gypsies. The banning of the play represented the policy of Titoist
Yugoslavia to suppress reminders of that vicious interethnic conflict, in the interests of a
multiethnic state

t was well known that a melange of anti-Communist and collaborationist fighting forces had
retreated from Yugoslavia at the end of World War II, joining the streams of displaced persons
and eventual political emigrants. But it was a dark secret that the British had repatriated tens of
thousands of these prisoners across the Austrian border, where they were executed by
Communist-led Partisan troops. Among those executed were Croatian Ustashas and home guard
recruits, along with Slovenian home guards and Serbian nationalist Chetniks. The gruesome
narratives of survivors and witnesses paralleled the descriptions of the Ustasha massacres
against Serbs (although lacking the sadistic variety of Ustasha atrocities), as unarmed prisoners
were herded into caves and shot, their deaths and burial sites to remain secret to the Yugoslav
public until 1990.32
The publication of these revelations led to the discovery of actual burial sites. In June, word
reached the Zagreb media of a cave called Jazovka. Like the pigeon-caves of massacred Serbs,
its existence had been known to nearby villagers, who now revealed the secret. The media in
Croatia published pictures of the 40-meter-deep cavern, piled with killing-field relics

The head of the renamed Communist Party of Croatia proposed a peacemaking ritual to be
performed by both Croatian and Serbian leaders at the newly found Jazovka site and at the site
of a major massacre of Serbs. Serbian leaders rejected this equation: whereas the Ustasha had
massacred whole villages of noncombatant men, women, and children, the Jazovka skeletons
included Ustasha perpetrators of those same massacres. However, the manner in which the
caves were discovered and the grim contents presented to the public effectively recast all the
murdered captives as victims, their skeletal remains being indistinguishable

In addition to emphasizing the “chessboard” emblem, the new government revived the
long-abandoned linguistic innovations of the wartime Ustasha state, issuing lists of words coined
to exaggerate the minor distinctions between the Croatian and Serbian variants of the literary
language

The linguistic revisions provided an identity marker for “good Croats,”
who were also expected to shed regional attachments in favor of a Croatian culture both unitary
and non-Serbian. Regional identities were eliminated: Dalmatia was renamed “southern
Croatia.”

5 July 25, 1990, the day that the
new government of Croatia officially took office, turned into a public ritual of division and ethnic
opposition. As the official ceremony celebrated the fulfillment of the “thousand-year aspiration
of the Croatian people for their own state,” it also ritualized the exclusion of non-Croats. Far
from separating church and state, the Roman Catholic Cardinal of Zagreb was given a role in
inauguration ceremonies co-equal to that of the republic’s new president

e emotional peak
of the ceremony held in Zagreb’s main public square was the flag-raising ceremony that replaced a flag with a red star emblem with a flag bearing the “chessboard” coat-of-arms, with
its dual meanings for Croatian nationalists, in opposition to those who associated that emblem with the Ustasha state

Trouble started when the new government in Zagreb acted swiftly to install the symbols of
its domination throughout Croatia, starting with the new “chessboard” emblem. In Knin, a largely Serbian town in the Dalmatian mountains, local policemen objected to renaming the
militia with the resurrected Ustasha term redarstvo and refused to replace the red stars on their
caps with the hated “chessboard” insignia.

These extraordinary events comprise what David Apter has called a “disjunctive moment”
of history, when relations of power are transformed through reformulations of ideology that
combine theory with myth

myth. The political effect of mythical thinking is to polarize. In a disjunctive moment, “Spectators, citizens, participants, are forced to take sides…. Events of confron
tation take on metaphorical and metonymical significance. Sequence is then interpretation.
Narrative and text combine, reinforcing each other” (Apter 1987:303).

Titoist system came to a sudden halt when the Communist party of Yugoslavia disbanded
in January 1990. The opening toward political pluralism and the effort to create “civil
society” within Yugoslavia’s republics then proceeded rapidly. During the first months of
1990, dozens of new political parties were organized

The HDZ’s ideological commitment to the Starcevii formulation of the Croatian nation
and its right to have its “own national state” was critical to the events that followed. Had a
democratic system been adopted in Croatia, ethnic dominance would not have been
realistically in doubt, considering that Serbs comprised under 1 5 percent of the population.
Insistence on the formulation that privileged Croats and excluded Serbs represented an
ideological stand from which power could be manipulated through the instrumentalization
of symbols that divided Croats from Serbs and restored the definition of Croat as non- or
anti-Serb. But dialectical models work both ways: the bifurcated ideology of Croatian
nationhood was mirrored in the extremist formulations of Serbian nationalism that swiftly
gained currency among the Serbs in Croatia, paralleling HDZ’s ascent to power

Also rediscovered was the Chetnik plan for ethnic “homogenization,”
originally designed in 1941 in response to the Ustasha genocide. The population exchanges
envisioned by World War II Chetniks would provide a blueprint for “ethnic cleansing” in
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during the civil wars of 1 991 and 1992

In the collapse of the Yugoslav political order, leadership was seized by those waiting in
the wings for a second moment in history, hoping to reverse the outcome of an earlier
defeat. The mass deaths of World War II, with its victims of all ethnicities, its memories lain
dormant, its grievances unrequited: these represented a reservoir of powerful emotion that
could be released in various ways

As the nationalist confrontation exploded to the surface
in Croatia, traumatic memories on both sides became instruments in the power struggle

Thus, victimhood submitted to the arena of conflict offered a key resource for those who
came forth to seize the “disjunctive moment.” Evoking the atrocities of the past, the
repressed memory of genocide like “the figure of torture [brought] together a complex of
power, truth, and bodies” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982:144). For both Serbian and Croatian
nationalists to knowingly revive the symbols associated with the World War II atrocities
was tantamount to releasing that disruptive “masked other,” reversing what had briefly
promised to be orderly progress toward the universalistic premises of constitutional democ
racy.44

Question 160

The manipulation of ethnicity: from ethnic cooperation to violence and war in Yugoslavia - Anthony Oberschall 01/2000

Answer 160

Yugoslavs possessed two ethnic frames in
their minds, an ethnic cooperation and peace frame for normal times, and
a crisis frame anchored in World War II memories. Élite contention and mass media propaganda awakened the dormant crisis frame, suppressed the normal frame, and spread insecurity and fear. I explain why ethnic manipulation
succeeded, people believed falsehoods, voted for nationalists, how moderates were purged and why men in militias killed innocent civilians.

Threats
and lies that were implausible and dismissed in the normal frame could
resonate when the crisis frame was switched on: they became persuasive, were believed, and inspired fear.
In the waning days of Communism, nationalists activated the crisis
frame on ethnicity by playing on fears of ethnic annihilation and oppression in the mass media, in popular culture, in social movements, and in election campaigns.

d. Once in
ofŽce, nationalists suppressed and purged both moderates in their own
ethnic group and other ethnics. They organized militias who perpetrated
acts of extreme violence against innocent civilians. They conducted war
according to the crisis script. Without the tacit, overt or confused support
of the majority, the nationalist leaders could not have escalated ethnic
rivalry and conict into massive collective violence.

Survey research on ethnic relations in mid-1990 found that in a national
sample of 4,232 Yugoslavs, only 7 per cent believed that the country
would break up into separate states, and 62 per cent reported that the
‘Yugoslav’ afŽliation was very or quite important for them (Cohen 1993, p. 173)

On ethnonational relations, in workplaces, 36 per cent characterized
them as ‘good’, 28 per cent as ‘satisfactory’, and only 6 per cent
said ‘bad’ and ‘very bad’

In my interview with a Serb refugee one can trace how the atrocities dis- course switched on the crisis frame: ‘We were afraid because nationalists
revived the memory of World War II atrocities . . . nationalist grafŽti
on walls awakened fears of past memories; it was a sign that minorities
[Serbs in Croatia] would not be respected and safe’.

There was grass-roots resistance to nationalism and to activation of
the crisis frame. A content analysis of news stories in Oslobodjenje for
1990 indicates that municipalities, youth and veterans’ organizations, and trade unions repeatedly protested against ethnic polarization and
hatreds. The municipal council of Vojnic organized a rally of brother- hood and unity; in Mostar, the Youth Association and a trade union
stated that ‘there is no place for the ghosts of the past . . . we condemn
the spread of nationalist hatred’; in Glamoc and Kladanj, the Socialist
Association of Working People sent a message to nationalists Tudjman, Draskovic and Seselj that it would not participate in civil war. Veterans’ organizations in Novi Pazar, Kladanj, and Banja Luka condemned
‘attempts to break up Yugoslavia’.

was countered by the spread of populist nationalism. Oslobodjenje in
1990 is full of afŽrmations of national symbols and identities: the
renaming of localities; the reburial of bones of atrocity victims from
World War II; nationalist grafŽti on churches, mosques, monuments and
in cemeteries; Žghts over ags, ethnic insults, nationalist songs, ethnic
vandalism.

Mass communications and propaganda research help to explain why
ethnic manipulation worked and why the crisis frame eclipsed the
normal frame. First, in a classic study on communication and persuasion, Hovland, Janis and Kelley (1963) found that fear arousing appeals, originating
in a threat, were powerful and effective in changing opinion and
belief. Furthermore, the most important reaction to fear is removing the
source of threat, precisely what nationalists were promising to do in
Yugoslavia. Second, studies of propaganda routinely Žnd that repetition
is the single most effective technique of persuasion. It does not matter
how big the lie is, so long as it keeps being repeated (Brown 1963). Third, much of what we know is vicarious knowledge and not based
on personal experience. We accept the truths of authorities and experts

Question 161

Oberschall, four common views on ethnicity and ethnic violence

Answer 161

Four views on ethnicity and ethnic violence are common.1 In the ‘pri- mordial’ view, ethnic attachments and identities are a cultural given and
a natural afŽnity, like kinship sentiments. They have an overpowering
emotional and non-rational quality. Applied to the former Yugoslavia,
the primordialist (Kaplan 1993) believes that despite seemingly cooperative
relations between nationalities in Yugoslavia, mistrust, enmity, even
hatred were just below the surface, as had long been true in the Balkans. Triggered by Žerce competition for political power during the breakup
of Yugoslavia and driven by the uncertainties over state boundaries and
minority status, these enmities and hatreds, fuelled by fear and retri- bution, turned neighbour against neighbour

Although the pri- mordial account sounds plausible, and it is true that politicians activated
and manipulated latent nationalism and ethnic fears, some evidence contradicts
it. Ethnic cleansing was more commonly militias and military against civilians than neighbour against neighbour

In seventeen assaults
against villages during the ethnic cleansing of Prijedor district in Bosnia
in May/June 1992, we found that the aggressors wore military and para- military uniforms and insignia. In fourteen assaults, the survivors did not
recognize any of the aggressors

. The pri- mordial theory omits the fact that ethnic hatreds can subside as a consequence
of statecraft and living together.

In the second, ‘instrumentalist’ view, ethnic sentiments and loyalties are manipulated by political leaders and intellectuals for political ends,
such as state creation (Rosens 1989). For Yugoslavia, the instrumentalist
explanation highlights Serb nationalists’ goal of a Greater Serbia
(Cigar 1995), and a similar Croat nationalism (Djilas 1995). Ethnic
cleansing resulted from a historical longing by Serbs for a Greater
Serbia, with deep cultural roots. Milosevic and Serb nationalists tried to
implement it when the opportunity arose in the late 1980s and early
1990s. Greater Serbia required ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs from areas
inhabited by a majority of Serbs and the corridors linking Serb population
clusters. Although there is evidence that ethnic cleansing was a
state policy, orchestrated by the highest authorities in Serbia and the
Bosnian Serb leadership, this explanation ignores that many Bosnian
Serbs did not want secession, that many Serbs in Croatia at Žrst backed
moderate nationalists, and that many Serbs evaded the draft (Milosevic
1997, p. 109). The instrumentalist view assumes an ethnic consensus that
initially does not exist.

The third ‘constructionist’ view of ethnicity and ethnic conict was
originally formulated by Kuper (1977). It supplements the insights of the
primordial and of the instrumentalist views. Religion or ethnicity are
very real social facts, but in ordinary times they are only one of several
roles and identities that matter. There is a great deal of variance in a
population on ethnic attachments and identities. In the words of Linz
and Stepan (1996, p. 366) ‘political identities are less primordial and
Žxed than contingent and changing. They are amenable to being constructed
or eroded by political institutions and political choices’. The
constructionist view offers insights but is incomplete. How are nationality
and ethnicity constructed and eroded by political mobilization and
mass media propaganda?

A fourth model of ethnic violence (Posen 1993; Gagnon 1997) centres
on state breakdown, anarchy, and the security dilemma that such con- ditions pose to ethnic groups who engage in defensive arming to protect their lives and property against ethnic rivals, which then stimulates
arming by other ethnic groups like an arms race between states. The
driving motivations are not ethnic hatreds but fear and insecurity

a. To this arsenal of
concepts and models for generating the dynamics of ethnicization and
collective violence, I add ‘cognitive frames’. Combining all, I seek to
explain how forty years of cooperative ethnic relations ended with collective
violence and war.

Question 162

Yugoslav crisis, Michael Ignatieff

Answer 162

Once the Yugoslav communist state began to split into its constituent
national particles the key question soon became: will the local Croat
policeman protect me if I am a Serb? Will I keep my job in the soap
factory if my new boss is a Serb or a Muslim? The answer to this
question was no, because no state remained to enforce the old ethnic
bargain.

Question 163

Oberschall, Prijedor

Answer 163

Muslims and Serbs had lived in peace before the conict erupted

Serbs were neither a numerical minority, nor discriminated against. They
not only had a share of power, but they had the biggest share

). There was no anarchy, no state breakdown
in Prijedor. The Serbs used the police and military of a functioning
government to subdue the non-Serbs.

the Serb parallel government was not only
an instrument for seizing power from non-Serbs but of stripping the
moderate Serbs of any inuence and authority

Question 164

Nationalist Mobilization and Stories of Serb Suffering: The Kosovo myth from 600th anniversary to the present - Florian Bieber 04/2002

Answer 164

The myth of the Kosovo battle resurfaced in mainstream Serbian political dis- course from the mid-1980s. Until 1989, it served to highlight Serbian suffering
in Kosovo, to provide a (pseudo-)historical context for Serbian migration
from the province and to legitimize the emergence of new nationalist political
leaders. The celebrations of 1989 marked the brief moment at which Serbian
nationalism appeared to have reached self-fulŽlment in achieving its goal of
total national unity and the myth was accordingly reworked to bolster Serbian triumphialism. In the Žrst half of the 1990s, the myth was only of
indirect relevance for the political programme of nationalists in Serbia. With
attention turned to Croatia and Bosnia, myths and remembrance of Serb
suffering during World War II at the hands of the fascist Ustasa regime in the
‘Independent State of Croatia’ provided a more powerful ideological under- pinning for Serbian aggression and warfare in the two countries. With the re- emergence of Kosovo as a site of conict between Serbs and Albanians in
1998, however, the Kosovo myth regained relevance. Until the loss of the
province after the NATO war in June 1999, it served to compensate for the
weakness of contemporary ethno-political and legal arguments for Serbian
control of Kosovo. With Kosovo as an international protectorate, the expulsion
of Serbs from the province coupled with the persecution of Serbs remaining
in situ and the destruction of Serbian symbols such as churches and
monasteries ensured that the Kosovo myth became again what it was in the
1980s – a symbol of Serbian suffering in the province.

. First, it helped to ensure that there was little room for compro- mise with Albanian claims in Kosovo. Thus in the early 1990s some Serbian
nationalist intellectuals such as Dobrica C´osic´ and Branislav Krstic´ did begin
to contemplate a historic ‘compromise’ between ‘historical and ethnical rights’ (Bieber 2001: 247–52, 546–8). But this purported compromise would
have rested upon a partition of Kosovo that would have granted Serbs a dis- proportionately large part of the province. Second, the myth with its
celebration of loss proved instrumental for ressentiment-based nationalism

The self-perception of victimhood in Serbian nationalism provided a forceful
motivation for mobilization for the wars. As Liah Greenfeld has pointed out
‘ressentiment not only makes the nation more aggressive, but represents an
unusually powerful stimulus of national sentiment and collective action, which makes it easier to mobilize collectivistic nations for aggressive warfare
than to mobilize individualistic nations, in which national commitment is
normally dependent on rational calculations’ (

e unresolved status of Kosovo
and the plight of its Serbs, as well as the surrender of Slobodan Milosevic´ to
the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague on Vidovdan 2001, could equally lend the myth a new lease of life as part of a metanarrative of
Serb persecution if the underlying socio-economic and political motivations
behind recent Serb nationalism are not addressed in the near future