The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

210 annihilating difference
tity). Tito regime’s had an ambivalent attitude toward ethnic relations. On the one
hand, it encouraged national identities through the political and administrative system,
since political representation and allocation of resources were on the basis of
ethnic identification (this system is still in force in Bosnia through the government
structures laid down by the Dayton Agreement). On the other, it ethnicized political
opposition: demands for more democracy were branded as outbursts of nationalism
and an anathema, a threat to the very existence of Yugoslavia (based on
the principle of Brotherhood and Unity), and therefore considered antistate and
prosecuted. (Several crackdowns and court cases involved current leaders who were
sentenced to prison terms for nationalist activities during Titoist rule.) Ten years
after Tito’s death, and a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, all the Yugoslav republics
decided to hold democratic multiparty elections.
The foundation for a political system based on ethnicity was already in place,
and thus it should have come as no surprise that the 1990 elections in the Yugoslav
republics swept to power nationalist parties and their leaders. During the elections,
a critical theme was the relations between majority populations (or so-called constituent
peoples) and ethnic minorities. People were worried about the outcome of
the free elections and the new divisions of power it would create. Since there was
no political tradition of democracy or pluralism, and resources and political office
traditionally had been allocated on the basis of ethnic or national identity, people
feared that to be a minority in a local community or political-administrative area
could mean having no rights or having reduced access to resources. (Under oneparty
rule, only those who supported the party—that is, the majority—had political
rights, so nobody wanted to be a minority.) The new nationalist leaders representing
aggressive nationalist parties played on these fears. Thus on the eve of the
elections there were the legacy of totalitarian one-party rule combined with the
ethnification of political representation and allocation of resources, plus a worry
about the change in status from a constituent people to a minority under the new
democracies.
In a process that started with the 1974 Yugoslav constitution (resulting in the
devolution of power to the republics), the “people-as-one” principle characteristic
of totalitarian rule was moved from the Yugoslav (federal) to the ethnonational
level (see Bringa, forthcoming). This element, together with the fact that
there was a tradition of viewing political conflict or competition in ethnic terms,
accounts for the branding of all people identifiable as belonging to a particular
ethnic group as political opponents. In the case of Milosevid’s political project
for a Greater Serbia (and later Tudjman’s for a greater Croatia), all non-Serbs
(or non-Croats, in Tudjman’s HDZ-controlled areas) were considered enemies
that had to be removed. That the war was primarily motivated by political ideology
(of which nationalism was the main ingredient) is clear from the fact that
Serbs who opposed the project (for example, who publicly expressed solidarity
with non-Serb neighbors) were targeted too; anyone who was against the nationalist
project was targeted. This meant that Bosnian Muslims (and other non-