The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

genocide in bosnia-herzegovina, 1992‒1995 207
one successor but to six in a rotating presidency. (Each successor represented the
special interests of his or her republic and its people—with the exception of the
representative from Bosnia-Herzegovina, who had to represent the interests of all
three peoples living within it.) The issue of the successors to Tito deals with the
macro level of the beginning of the end for Yugoslavia. The challenge is to connect
events on the macro level to what eventually happened locally in villages, townships,
and urban neighborhoods. This is an area where research is still needed.
But I would like to propose some possible connections.
After the end of the Cold War, both the institutions at the base of the Yugoslav
state structure and the ideological organizing principles were discredited (became
illegitimate), made irrelevant, or were restructured. I will look at these in turn: The
two main institutions were the league of Yugoslav communists (the party) and the
Yugoslav People’s Army ( JNA). The ideological pillars were Self-Management,
Nonalignment, and Brotherhood and Unity.
After Tito’s death in 1980, the Yugoslav Communist Party was further propelled
into a process of decentralization (which had begun with the 1974 constitution).
Decisions were increasingly being made at the local/republican level, and the Croatian,
Serb, Slovenian branches of the party were representing the interests of the
republics and not those of a unified Yugoslavia (see Denitch 1994). With the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the discrediting of communism, the era of the communist party
in Yugoslavia, too, was coming to an end. In some areas communists reinvented
themselves as nationalists (for example, Milosevid in Serbia). This was not necessarily
a radical ideological change, as communism and nationalism have some important
traits in common. According to Zwick (1983), both communism and nationalism
emerge in transitional societies and are as such an “expression of social
collective grievances.” Furthermore, he argues, they have both “quasi-religious
characteristics,” and they are “millenarian world views in that they promise secular
deliverance and salvation in the form of a perfect world order and their followers
are willing to justify virtually anything in the name of their millenarian
goals” (ibid.:11–12). Both movements arise as a reaction to an (imagined) enemy or
enemies. Although in the case of communism another class and the capitalist “foreign”
Western world are depicted as the enemy, in the case of nationalism the primary
enemy is the other nation (see ibid.:11). The dissolution of the Cold War polarization
between the capitalist West and the communist East (and the
disappearance of a so-called Soviet threat) not only removed traditional enemy categories
from the repertoire of the Yugoslav state; it also deprived it of the rationale
for its geopolitical status and identity—its “non-aligned” status. Backed up by
nationalism as the new ideology of the Yugoslav republics, the successors to Tito
redefined the enemy from being the outside foreign capitalist or Soviet powers to
becoming the other competing “Yugoslav” nations within.
“Self-management” was the distinguishing feature of Tito’s own brand of socialism,
permeating all levels of official institutions and work places. The self-managing
system “meant the installation of a multiple hierarchy of assemblies, from