The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

206 annihilating difference
they said or wanted at the outset. To suggest otherwise would be to disregard social
processes completely. For instance, many (if not most) Bosnian Serbs who live
in the Republika Srpska entity of B-H “justify the ‘homeland war’ as righteous and
necessary, as an ultimately defensive measure to rescue Serbs from an Islamic state
reminiscent of Ottoman Turkish rule under which Serbs languished for centuries.”
28 Surely, a crucial question to try to answer is: What where the frameworks,
the social and political structures, that not only allowed and encouraged some people
to commit crimes against their neighbors but also resulted in those people being
seen as heroes by many of those who shared their ethnic affiliation?
YUGOSLAVIA AND BOSNIA’S DESCENT INTO WAR
For the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, the end of communism meant
that parts of the country suffered an almost five-year-long war that has completely
devastated the country and its peoples. It was the bloodiest regime transition in central
and eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. This is ironic, as Yugoslavia
was also the most open toward the West in terms of trade, foreign policy, less regulated
markets, and the possibility for Yugoslavs to travel and work in Western Europe.
Yugoslavia’s transition from a one-party state socialist system should have
been the least traumatic of all countries that rejoined democratic Europe after the
fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, the opposite was true.
Volumes have been written about the “fall,” “destruction,” “disintegration,”
“end,” and so forth of Yugoslavia since 1991, and I am sure new titles will be added.
Different authors stress different aspects of the developments that led to the wars:
the economic crisis, the stifling of democratic movements, the rise to power of one
man—Slobodan Milosevid—and his brand of nationalism, old ethnic antagonisms
dormant through communist times being reactivated, the role of the international
community (primarily Europe) or lack of such a role, and even a “clash of civilizations.”
29 Certainly, however, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars
cannot be explained by one factor, but only as the result of a combination of factors—a
series of circumstances whereby domestic and international structural
changes and certain political players came together at the end of the century in Yugoslavia.
TRANSITION OF AUTHORITY AND THE TITOIST LEGACY
I would like to examine one element in this web of factors that I believe has received
less attention than it should: namely, the problems entailed in the transition
from one form of authority to another. The premise for my discussion is that issues
of succession and political legitimacy following the death of Tito in 1980 were
not properly addressed by the Yugoslavs, and that no mode of authority other than
the one embodied by Tito was allowed to develop. 30 This was the “Tito we swear
to you” (Tito me te kunemo) model of paternal authority that Tito passed on, not to