Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

REVOLUTION AND GENOCIDE
366
The term has also been used in conjunction with events associated with the disintegration
of the former Yugoslavia, between 1991 and 1999. More specifically, its use
referred to incidents during the Serb-Croat war of 1991 and that which transpired during
the Kosovo conflict in 1998–1999. During the Croatian war of secession, Croatia, under
the leadership of President Franjo Tudjman (1922–1999), set out to expel its large Serbian
minority, located largely in Krajina and Slavonia. In turn, the Serbs, in their quest
for a Greater Serbia, engaged in a similar policy, first in Bosnia by forcibly expelling
minorities, including Croats. Commonly referred to as “ethnic cleansing,” this policy of
mass expulsion from ancestral territories characterized the actions of both combatants. As
one group engaged in such behavior, so did the other, setting in motion a dynamic of
lethal action followed by an equally lethal reaction.
The second example, that of Kosovo, relates to hostilities between Serbia and its Kosovar
Albanian minority in the former autonomous territory of Kosovo, a status unilaterally
abrogated by President Slobodan Milosevic (1941–2006). In order to accommodate
Serbian refugees driven out of Bosnia, Milosevic began to resettle them in southern
Kosovo along the border with Albania, to act both as a buffer zone and as a means to
overcome the ethno-demographic imbalance of the Serbian minority in the province—
where the Serb-to-Albanian ratio was 1:9. As a solution, Milosevic inaugurated a war of
terror to drive as many Albanians out of Kosovo as possible and to suppress their armed
secessionists, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The Serbian army and paramilitary
troops invaded Kosovo in 1998, and in response (and after months of negotiation),
NATO forces intervened militarily in order to stop the Serbian rampage being carried out
across Kosovo. Between March and June 1999, Serb actions saw the expulsion of up to
1 million Kosovars, representing over half the population of the territory. The NATO
intervention ultimately brought Milosevic’s campaign of massive displacement, murder,
and ethnic cleansing to a halt, allowing the refugees to return under the protection of
UN-sanctioned peacekeepers. Almost as soon as the Kosovar Albanians had returned, the
KLA attacked the Serbian minority of approximately two hundred thousand and drove
large numbers of them out of their homes and villages.
Revolution and Genocide. By redefining what the political community will be in
the postrevolutionary environment, revolutionaries cast certain groups (ethnic, occupational,
sexual preference) or classes (feudal, middle, working) into the role of
enemies of the new society. When such groups are then linked to real or potential
foreign enemies, the possibility of them becoming targeted for repression—or even
genocide—is heightened. Genocide scholar Robert Melson (b. 1937) has written
extensively about how revolution and war have served, in various situations, as key
factors in creating contexts that lend themselves to the creation of genocidal policies
in order to create a new society. His most important work in this regard, Revolution and
Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (1992), highlights
a number of ways in which revolutionary situations have led to international or civil
conflict and subsequently degenerated into genocide. For Melson, several notable cases
from history show that, in a revolutionary situation, war or internal conflict “proved
decisive for enabling ideological motivations to be translated into policies of
genocide.” These were the Armenian genocide (1915–1923), the Soviet man-made
terror-famine in the Ukraine (1932–1933), the Holocaust (1933–1945), and the
Cambodian genocide (1975–1979).