Yugoslav society, held together for 45 years by Communists, began to disintegrate in the 1980s. Disintegrative processes have brought in their wake the rise of nationalism as the younger generations, led by a new privileged class of technobureaucrats, could not ride any more on the worn-out ideology of self-managing socialism. The transition from nationalism to ethnic cleansing proved to be very easy and short because ethnic cleansing is not a new phenomenon in the Balkans. During World War II, both the Croatian nationalists, Ustashas, and the Serbian royalists, the Chetniks, used this genocidal method—the Ustashas, to “purify” Croatia of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, and the Chetniks, to “cleanse” Muslims from eastern Bosnia. In fact, it is a Balkan tradition to use genocide in order to create pure ethnic territories. This article explores the concept of ethnic cleansing in its broader meaning as cultural genocide or ethnocide and in its narrower connotation as genocidal annihilation of group members.
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References
1.
1. This phrase is taken from Jean-Paul Sartre, “On Genocide,”Ramparts (Feb. 1968). It was used in Sartre's description of the life of a colonized population.
2.
2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, as quoted in Robert Bierstedt, ed., The Making of Society (New York: Modern Library, 1959), p. 88.
3.
3. Karl Mannheim's phrase.
4.
4. The U.S. government, as the leading Western democracy, by its foreign policy has indirectly contributed to Yugoslav disintegration. It was reported that the Central Intelligence Agency actively worked on the destabilization of socialist Yugoslavia, and as is well known, Germany has actively spearheaded, among the members of the European Union, the recognition of separatism in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
5.
5. Other influential ideologies in modern times are major religions, Marxism, democracy, and conservatism.
6.
6. Irving Zeitlin, The Social Condition of Humanity (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 101.
7.
7. Irving Zeitlin, The Ideology and Development of Sociological Theory (New York: Prentice Hall, 1990), p. 288.
8.
8. It is also important to stress that it was not the Slovenes, the Croats, and the Muslims who were oppressed in the Second Yugoslavia but the Croatian, the Serbian, and the Slovenian nationalists, and in view of the damage done by these nationalistic forces to the working classes of Yugoslavia, that oppression appears justified.
9.
9. In this group belong Serbian leader S. Milošević; Slovenian leader I. Kučan; Croatian president F. Tudjman; and Macedonian leader K. Crvenkovski. Some members of the political leadership in Croatia were persecuted under the old socialist regime and imprisoned—for example, S. Džodan and S. Mesić—while still others were living in emigration.
10.
10. Shortly before the real conflict between Serbian and Croatian nationalists broke out, the head of the Croatian Roman Catholic church, Archbishop Franjo Kuharić, and Serbian Orthodox Vladika Pavle met in 1991 and issued a joint declaration demanding a peaceful resolution to the mounting confrontations in Yugoslavia.
11.
11. Zeitlin, Ideology and Development of Sociological Theory, p. 315.
12.
12. U.N. Convention on Genocide, art. IV.
13.
13. In the first phase of the war, the Croatian town of Vukovar was completely destroyed. The mass killing of some 200 persons buried in the mass graves near Vukovar is attributed to Serbian forces. Similar mass graves are also being excavated in Pakračka Poljana, near Pakrac. More recent genocidal massacres are reported to have occurred in October 1993 in the vicinity of Gospić and perpetrated on civilians by Croatian forces. Several villages—Divoselo, Citluk, and Počitelj—with some 500 houses have been reported completely burned down in a scorched-earth policy.
14.
14. This analysis is completely consistent with, and corroborated by the views expressed by Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging (Toronto: Viking, 1993).
15.
15. The foregoing expressions taken from Karl Mannheim are borrowed from Zeitlin's interpretation in his Ideology and Development of Sociological Theory, pp. 314-315.
16.
16. For this expression, I am indebted to Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide (New York: Free Press, 1979).
17.
17. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 23.
18.
18. Ibid.
19.
19. Quoted according to Viktor Novak, Magnum crimen [The great crime] (Belgrade: Nova Knjiga, 1986), p. 605.
20.
Reprinted also among the documents cited in ibid, p. 18.
21.
The book is in Serbian with summaries in French and English. A more recent study is by Vladimir Žerjavić, Opsesije i megalomanije oko Jasenovca i Bleiburga [Obsessions and megalomanias about Jasenovac and Bleiburg] (Zagreb: Globus, 1992).
22.
22. Edwin Lemert, Social Pathology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), was the last book in American sociology published under such a title.
23.
23. Vytautas Kavolis, “A Universal Criterion of Pathology,” in The Study of Social Problems, 4th ed., ed. Earl Rubington and Martin S. Weinberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 37-41.
24.
24. Ibid., p. 38.
25.
25. Interview with Prof. dr. Svetozar Livada in Arkzin (Zagreb), no. 6, p. 11 (Oct. 1993).
