The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

genocide in bosnia-herzegovina, 1992‒1995 209
war fought for one state but for all nations within it) and were the military arm of
ethno-nationalist political parties. Tito, who had formed and headed both of the
state-bearing institutions, the communist party and the JNA, had been dead for
more than ten years when both of them disintegrated. It was the end of his state.
His image, which had been religiously kept alive for ten years, was not only fading
into the background but had also suffered from years of being debunked by the
popular media and opposition forces. The allegiance to a dead Tito and the slogan
“Tito we swear to you, we will not stray from your path” was no longer strong
enough to withstand the forces of disintegration—forces that were very much
helped by structures Tito himself had put in place. But what happened to the last
of Tito’s three ideological pillars—namely, Brotherhood and Unity?
BROTHERHOOD AND UNITY
This was the key transcendent of Titoist Yugoslavia: it was the idiom for solidarity
and cooperation between the different nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia. The
basis for this unity of the South Slav peoples was the common struggle (which cut
across ethnic affiliation) against fascism (German, Italian, and Croatian) led by
the partisans. It was the heartbeat of Tito’s creation. This idea, however, both
glossed over the animosities created by the communal fighting during World War
II and, as far as Bosnia is concerned, was a Titoist appropriation of its long tradition
of cooperation between the different ethno-religious communities. The new
regimes had to establish legitimacy (and a popular base of support) through destroying
the legitimacy of the previous regime, so multiethnicity was conveniently
seen by the new nationalist and separatist leaders as a communist legacy. Multiethnicity
would undermine their power base: the ethnically defined region or republic.
Its most poignant expression—interethnic marriage—was portrayed as the
ultimate communist invention. Indeed, it was considered (and probably rightly so)
as a threat to the mobilizing effect of nationalism. It so happens that Bosnia was
the region of the former Yugoslavia where so-called intermarriage was the most
common. Not only was multiethnicity portrayed as another word for Brotherhood
and Unity, but it was also an obstacle to creating homogenous nation states, both
in terms of demography and geography—villages and towns all over B-H were ethnically
heterogeneous—and from a political perspective. To better understand why
multiethnicity (or ethnically heterogeneous communities) were perceived by the
new ethno-nationalist leaders as a political obstacle to creating their desired new
nation-states, it is helpful to examine the way in which the political and the ethnic
were intertwined in Titoist policies.
In Tito’s single-party state, the only opportunity to express diversity was through
ethnicity. Indeed, in many instances political representation was based on ethnicity.
That is, every governmental body had to be represented by a member from each
of the ethnic groups in that republic (for example, in the rotating presidency that
Tito had designed, all seats were allocated on the basis of ethnic or national iden