Cathie Carmichael

Violence and ethnic boundary maintenance in Bosnia in the 1990s

This article examines the content of violence incidents in Bosnia with a view to assessing the relationship between religion, ethnicity and the escalation into violence. I have examined incidences of violence where it could be argued that there is a strong symbolic content. During the Bosnian war, as the Slovene sociologist Mitja Velikonja has argued, even previous non-believers became attached to the mythologies and rites of particular religions. The primary focus is upon violent acts committed by Serbs against Muslims. In terms of actual deaths, more Muslims were killed by Serb extremists than vice versa, although as the war developed Serbs also became victims of specific kinds of Muslim and Croat violence. The fighting in Bosnia, which was often described at the time as being between “warring factions,” was entirely initiated, organized and inspired by Serb radicals within the Serbian autonomous regions that sprung up from 1990 onwards. Their aim was ethnic cleansing, i.e. to drive as many Muslims out of key territories as possible by any means necessary, to create areas of land within Bosnia and Croatia that would be territorially linked to Serbia proper. This was hardly a case of spontaneous ethnic fury, if such cases ever take place, but a highly targeted war of strategy to gain territory. Nevertheless, in the course of the fighting, we see the development of practices linked to religious differentiation, which might in some circumstances be interpreted as traditional. Although rural parts of Bosnia might have been more traditional, the towns and most notably Sarajevo were characteristically heterodox, pluralist and tolerant before 1990 and had been for decades if not longer. The 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) Journal of Genocide Research (2006), 8(3), September, 283–293

The Violent Destruction of Community during the ‘Century of Genocide’

Much of the early criticism of colonial genocide and genocidal practices elsewhere came from Marxists such as August Bebel, Antonio Gramsci and Ho Chi Minh. The German Left were strong critics of the colonial policy that led to the genocide against the Nama and Herero peoples. When Marxist regimes came to power after the First and Second World Wars, they initiated population politics which were highly detrimental to historical ethnic communities. This has led to a serious crisis of legitimacy on the Left. Clearly, the legacy of debates of the early inter-nationalists is still relevant as we discuss genocide as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon, but it is also essential that we use the full range of new analytical approaches as well as the comparative approach to understand and even begin to prevent this phenomenon.

Introduction: The Yugoslav Communist Legacy

With its long and fortunate Adriatic Coast, Yugoslavia become a popular holiday destination and an attractive centre for students from the Non-Aligned countries with which the regime traded during ...

Genocide and Global and/or World History: Reflections

Genocide and Global and/or World History: Reflections Mohamed Adhikari, Cathie Carmichael, Adam Jones, Shruti Kapila, Norman Naimark and Eric D. Weitz Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa; School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK; Unit 8 / Political Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, Canada; Faculty of History, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, UK; Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, USA; The City College of New York, New York, USA

The Need to record the Past

In 1936, a left-wing democratically elected government attempted to modernize Spain but soon faced armed opposition from its own military and from the right more generally. These aspirations for change were captured in the works of art and literature of that generation and in every successive wave of creativity coming out of the Iberian Peninsula. In Manuel Rivas’s Galician novel O lápis do carpinteiro (1988), the new Spain is personified in the progressive, feminist, pro-worker doctor Daniel Da Barca. The tribulations of the population of Galicia are woven into a narrative of one man’s life. Although Da Barca improbably survives being shot in the face, the reality for most Spanish progressives in the 1930s was far grimmer. The right wing insurgency led by General Francisco Franco attempted to eliminate supporters of that movement completely and in so doing committed acts in excess of what would have been needed to capture Madrid from the government and maintain power. As Gerald Blaney puts it, ‘reactionary elements within the military and its civilian allies felt the need to eradicate the regime and its supporters’. Describing the bombing of civilians in València by Franco’s planes, Laurie Lee called it ‘an early essay in a new kind of warfare. . . inflicted on the bodies of his countrymen’. In The Spanish Holocaust, Paul Preston meticulously records the murder, torture and rape of people who supported the project to build a new democratic Spain. In doing so, Preston has assembled a vast ledger of evidence against Franco, his armed supporters and regime he established. In doing so he has challenged those who wanted to let these events remain in the past. This magisterial book has drawn a lot of criticism, not so much for the quality of the research, which is unassailable, but for its attempt to link the events in Spain to those happening elsewhere in the continent. Preston argues that antisemitism and a notion of racial elimination was a crucial element of right wing thinking in Spain and reminds the reader of Franco’s close associations with Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany. The extermination of populations is a notoriously hard subject for historians to tackle, not least because it involves examining human behaviour in extremis and in horrific detail. Through analysis, it is possible to discern universal patterns of

Josip Broz Tito and Yugoslav Communism: A Review of the Work of Geoffrey Swain

Many writers before and after 1980 have pondered Tito’s historical significance. What kind of Communist was he? He crafted an image of an alternative kind of socialism in which workers were self-ma...

Watch on the Drina: Genocide, War and Nationalist Ideology

The Drina is a long winding river in the western Balkans, with many prosperous old towns on its banks. It had a central place in the mythologies of both Croatian and Serbian nationalists in the twentieth century. The idea that the river and its environs were unambiguously part of one national territory has led to the violent exclusion of other nationalities. This article looks at the Drina valley with a particular focus on the 1940s and 1990s. History

From the Guest Editor: Neighbours and war: genocide in the Central Balkans

This special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research addresses questions that have preoccupied so many commentators. How do political campaigns to break up complex societies work in practice? What are the long-term consequences of these changes? The case studies in the articles are drawn from the Central Balkans (and in particular Bosnia and Hercegovina) in the 1940s and 1990s, which were both periods when state boundaries were drastically altered and groups that had lived as neighbours for centuries often became mortal enemies. All the contributors are historians and thus bring to their investigations a particular methodological approach. All acknowledge, however, that these questions cut through disciplinary boundaries and that they are indebted to the work of other scholars, including political scientists, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists. Paul Miller, a visiting scholar in Sarajevo, brings a very personal perspective to a complex and controversial subject, namely, the politics of genocide memorialization in Bosnia-Hercegovina. He has also included a photographic record of his experiences. Tomislav Dulić, author of a recent monograph on the subject, examines what occurred during the Second World War. This was a subject of great controversy during the Communist period in the former Yugoslavia, which also influenced the events of the 1990s. As the subject of wartime casualties was so heavily politicized during the Tito period, it falls to the current generation of younger scholars to look at the period from 1941 to 1946 from a more scholarly perspective. The historian Milorad Ekmečić, a Bosnian Serb and founder of the radical nationalist Srpska Democratska Stranka (Serbian Democratic Party), who lost 78 members of his family in 1941 in the village of Prebilovci, recalled that “(o)ver the years when I came to visit (the village) for weddings and funerals the stories they told were about the massacres during the war. They were possessed by the memories of 1941–45.” Their “possession” by memories of the war period was partly due to the horrific nature of the crimes committed, but also due to the fact that the Communist regime suppressed discussion of the war. The Communists feared nationalism and knew that it could divide the people of Yugoslavia and plunge them into further civil wars, but failed to provide a durable ideological alternative. The ideology of “brotherhood and unity” (“bratstvo i jedinstvo”), which they ruthlessly promoted, was too heavily dependent on the memory of Journal of Genocide Research (2006), 8(3), September, 249–254