The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

genocide in bosnia-herzegovina, 1992‒1995 201
government was susceptible to international pressure. Also, the absence of a history
of violent conflict between Croats and Muslims, combined with the fact that
both were victims of Serbian aggression at the beginning of the war, provided the
Croat separatists with less fuel in their manipulation of fear and memory (although
plenty has been produced in the recent war).
More than five years passed after the signing of the Washington Agreement
before people expelled from their homes in the municipality of Kiseljak and other
central Bosnian municipalities in 1993 could return home safely. (Both the Washington
Agreement and the Dayton Agreement ensured the right for refugees and
displaced people to return to their homes.) In central Bosnia, Bosniacs and Croats
are again living together in towns and villages. This development in large parts of
the Bosniac-Croat Federation (one of two entities in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina
constituted by the Dayton Agreement) is strikingly different from the one
(or lack of one) in the Serbian-controlled part of Bosnia-Herzegovina (the Republika
Srpska entity). Here a much smaller number of Bosniacs and Croats have
moved back. The two developments reflect both the degree of ferociousness in the
ethnic cleansing campaigns (the fact that genocide—including mass rape—was the
defining crime against non-Serbs in the Serbian entity), and the different policies
pursued in central Bosnia (the Bosniac-Croat Federation) and in Eastern and Northern
Bosnia (Republika Srpska). Changes in policies in central Bosnia that facilitate
refugee return are due to, first, the absence of certain key military and political
leaders from positions of influence, and, second, continuous political pressure from
the international community combined with aid for reconstruction. The nationalists
did not, in other words, succeed in erasing the physical trait of “the other”;
houses are being rebuilt and so are mosques.
The war in Bosnia probably cost about 250,000 lives. 19 Thousands remain unaccounted
for. Out of a prewar population of more than 4 million, 1.8 million people
were displaced or became refugees (1,259,000 were exiled outside B-H), and
about 30 percent of all residential buildings were damaged or destroyed (65 percent
of those are in the Bosniac-Croat Federation, 35 percent in the Republika
Srpska entity). 20 In addition, public and civilian institutions were destroyed, such
as schools, libraries, churches, mosques, and hospitals—in Sarajevo the hospital
was frequently targeted by shelling, and the National Library was one of the first
buildings to go up in flames. Cultural monuments such as mosques and libraries
associated with the Ottoman Muslim heritage were also prime targets for shelling,
both by the Bosnian Serb and the Bosnian Croat armies.
“ETHNIC CLEANSING” AND THE
RHETORIC OF “ANCIENT HATREDS”
The two phrases “centuries-old hatred” and “they cannot live together,” and the
term genocide, all referred to in the above-mentioned speech by the Serb nationalist
leader Karadzid (a few weeks before the barricades were set up in Sarajevo and