Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

these foreign conditions. A small population of Melanesian descent remained in Australia,
mostly in Queensland and northern New South Wales, where they live today—a minority
within the minority black population of Australia.
Blaskic, Tihomir (b. 1960). A colonel in the army of the Bosnian Croats, and later a
general in the regular Army of Croatia, who was convicted by the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in March 2000 in connection with a massacre
in the Bosnian village of Ahmici, in which approximately one hundred Muslims were
killed by Croat forces. In 1996 Blaskic was indicted by the ICTY for a variety of crimes
committed by troops under his command. These included murder, attacks on noncombatants,
the taking of civilians as hostages, racial and religious persecution, and destruction
of property for nonmilitary reasons. Later, in 1996, he surrendered voluntarily to the
court. His trial began in July 1997, and, in March 2000, his conviction was handed down.
He was sentenced to forty-five years in prison. An appeal was launched immediately, on
the ground that not all documentation had been forthcoming from the Croatian government
regarding the chain of command. The former president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman
(1922–1999), had opposed cooperation with the ICTY and did little to assist defense
attorneys who sought access to government archives. The appeal stipulated that Blaskic
was not in charge of the forces who committed the war crimes for which he was convicted.
A strong campaign for his release was waged in Croatia, and on July 29, 2004, it was successful.
The appellate court of the ICTY reduced his sentence from forty-five years to nine
years, and he was released on August 2, 2005.
Blood Libel. The accusation that Jews engaged in ritual murder of Christians for religiously
prescribed reasons seems to have first emerged in England during the twelfth
century. The story of the events in 1144, in which a twelve-year-old Christian boy from
Norwich named William was allegedly tortured, crucified, and murdered during Passover
week, was the first of many in which Christian children were said to have been ritually
murdered by Jews at the time of Easter and/or Passover. The core of the accusation was
that Jews murdered Christian children at Easter in emulation of the crucifixion of Jesus;
over many centuries, widely spread folktales throughout Europe added that Jews also used
the blood of these murdered children for their Passover rituals, most often through mixing
the blood into matzo (the correct transliteration from the Heb. is matzah; the term
matzo is an Ashkenazic rendering that is becoming increasingly archaic) dough so that
the Jews would literally devour the Christian life force throughout the Passover festival.
The libel of a Jewish quest for Christian blood—oftentimes focusing on infants or small
children, at other times on virgin girls—became a central charge motivating peasant
reprisals in the form of pogroms and other acts of persecution. Given the proximity of
Easter and Passover, March and April became months in which anti-Jewish violence
often peaked in European countries. As Christians observed the death of Jesus (at the
hands of the Jews, as the Church taught) and his resurrection, stories that Jews were “still”
engaging in horrific practices against the innocent stirred up intense antagonism toward
them. (A practice emerged in some Jewish communities, as a result of these apocryphal
stories, to abstain from drinking red wine at their Passover meals so as to avoid the impression
that they were actually drinking blood.) In the modern era, blood libels took on an
added dimension; although the influence of the religious struggle between Christians and
Jews had begun to recede, racial antisemites built on the blood libel tradition in Europe
in order to harass, kill, and uproot a Jewish presence in lands developing modern forms of
BLOOD LIBEL
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