The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

212 annihilating difference
The violent breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia into national(ist)
republics was both a revolt against the Titoist regime and the result of
conditions created by that regime, conditions that shaped developments and limited
the number of possible outcomes. The most significant break with the old
regime was the change in the transcendent from Brotherhood and Unity to its antithesis,
ethnonationalist “purity.” But structural and ideological traits of the old
regime remained, among which the ethnification of political life was crucial. Indeed,
the new ethnonationalist leaders relied on some of the previous regime’s key
political controlling mechanisms for their own hold on power.
FORGING NATIONS THROUGH TERROR AND WAR
As state structures crumble, institutions lose their legitimation, and there is no
money left, people feel lost (a way of life is disappearing); they worry about the
immediate future, which seems to hold only uncertainties. Insecurity and fear about
the present and the future motivates people to withdraw into safe “we groups” in
which you need not qualify to become a member—it is your birthright, and loyalty
and protection are taken for granted. This may be your kin group or your ethnic
group or your nation (the largest group of people using the idiom of kinship).
As persecution, assaults, and violence become personal experience, the individual’s
fear turns into hatred for the enemy and all the members of his or her group. Fear
and war help to coalesce populations into clearly defined nations. (I do believe that
for most people when this kind of manipulated fear disappears, the hatred goes.
The fear disappears when people feel safe again.)
The war experiences of individuals in turn serve to confirm the nationalist propaganda
of the need for “ethnic unity” and the threat from the “ethnic other.” War
experiences change the way people and communities think and feel about their
own identity and that of others. Indeed, the experience of violence and war seems
crucial for the strong ethnic and national identification people in most of the former
Yugoslavia developed (Povrzanovid 1997). In Bosnia in 1993, you could no
longer choose if you wanted to be a Bosnian rather than a Croat, or if you wanted
to be a Yugoslav rather than a Muslim (or Bosniac). Any category other than Croat,
Serb, or Muslim fell outside the dominant discourse (that is, the discourse of power).
This development toward closed and rigid nationality-defined communities in
Bosnia, should, as Gagnon has argued, be understood in the context of political
elites pursuing a strategy for restructuring political circumstances so that the only
way to obtain anything is by identifying oneself exclusively with one ethnic/national
community (see Gagnon 1995, 1996).
Opposition and resistance became impossible. If you opposed the harassment
or expulsion of your neighbor with, say, a Muslim name, you were a traitor; you
risked being killed (or were killed), or, even worse, the “ethnic cleansers” threatened
to kill (or killed) your son or another close relative. The brave persons who resisted
and opposed were, in other words, given impossible choices. The method the Ser-