Friday, October 28, 2005
Crossing the Line
Even now, six years after the cessation of NATO bombing in the former Yugoslav republic, I am astonished by both the gruesomeness of the atrocities and the lingering misapprehensions about the nature of the conflict. Reading the horrible accounts of what former neighbors and friends and even family did to each other after the collapse of civil society during the breakup of the federation, I am reminded, to a degree, of what Americans perpetrated on each other in our civil war.
But much of the brutality that took place, in Bosnia especially, was between civilians, not soldiers, and much of the genocide there entailed something more akin to what the Nazis did to German and Polish Jews, while their neighbors looked on in silence or with gleeful approval. In fact, something Bosnian Muslims have in common with Eastern European Jews is a legacy of managerial status from previous centuries that left them vulnerable to the prejudices of the Eastern Orthodox/Roman Catholic peasantry's hostile resentment.
But what has gone mostly overlooked in the even now well-documented Balkan genocide of the 1990s, is that it was not an "ethnic cleansing", despite this term having now become part of the popular modern lexicon. Ethnically speaking, the Muslims and Orthodox and Catholics, that once comprised the six republics of Yugoslavia, were all Slavic, indigenous, and--in the case of Bosnia--intermarried. Most of the large cities and governing bodies were roughly half Serb, half Muslim, but these people spoke the same language, looked the same, ate the same food, listened to the same music.
Granted, old political/religious grievances were still present--much like they are in the US and elsewhere--but the abandonment of their longstanding willingness to coexist harmoniously, seems to be rooted more in wild opportunism unleashed by the systematic simultaneous pandering to bigotry and to economic dissatisfactions built up during the 1980s. And once the cycle of violence began--usually at the behest of unregulated paramilitary militias--no one was immune to the lure of fear, hate, and revenge.
The 1949 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide--to which the US is a signator--defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." The dithering over intervention by the US and Western European countries during 1992--while Serb-occupied Bosnians experienced first, employment discrimination, then demolition of their four hundred-year-old UN-designated world historic monument mosques in cosmopolitan cities like Banja Luka, and finally deportation, torture, and murder by the newly-formed Serbian Bureau for the Removal of Populations--is nearly incomprehensible.
Then again, the Bosnian tragedy was largely a case of well-armed Christians killing mostly unarmed Muslims. Not quite so difficult to imagine in the current context of Iraq.
But much of the brutality that took place, in Bosnia especially, was between civilians, not soldiers, and much of the genocide there entailed something more akin to what the Nazis did to German and Polish Jews, while their neighbors looked on in silence or with gleeful approval. In fact, something Bosnian Muslims have in common with Eastern European Jews is a legacy of managerial status from previous centuries that left them vulnerable to the prejudices of the Eastern Orthodox/Roman Catholic peasantry's hostile resentment.
But what has gone mostly overlooked in the even now well-documented Balkan genocide of the 1990s, is that it was not an "ethnic cleansing", despite this term having now become part of the popular modern lexicon. Ethnically speaking, the Muslims and Orthodox and Catholics, that once comprised the six republics of Yugoslavia, were all Slavic, indigenous, and--in the case of Bosnia--intermarried. Most of the large cities and governing bodies were roughly half Serb, half Muslim, but these people spoke the same language, looked the same, ate the same food, listened to the same music.
Granted, old political/religious grievances were still present--much like they are in the US and elsewhere--but the abandonment of their longstanding willingness to coexist harmoniously, seems to be rooted more in wild opportunism unleashed by the systematic simultaneous pandering to bigotry and to economic dissatisfactions built up during the 1980s. And once the cycle of violence began--usually at the behest of unregulated paramilitary militias--no one was immune to the lure of fear, hate, and revenge.
The 1949 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide--to which the US is a signator--defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." The dithering over intervention by the US and Western European countries during 1992--while Serb-occupied Bosnians experienced first, employment discrimination, then demolition of their four hundred-year-old UN-designated world historic monument mosques in cosmopolitan cities like Banja Luka, and finally deportation, torture, and murder by the newly-formed Serbian Bureau for the Removal of Populations--is nearly incomprehensible.
Then again, the Bosnian tragedy was largely a case of well-armed Christians killing mostly unarmed Muslims. Not quite so difficult to imagine in the current context of Iraq.
