The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

218 annihilating difference
sometimes go back several generations in a single family. Here the socioeconomic
strata a person belonged to was more important than was his or her nationality”
(Bringa 1995:4).
In some villages relationships between members of different ethnoreligious
groups were friendly and relaxed; in others there were tensions, mutual distrust,
and separation. In many cases, tensions were due to injustices during or immediately
after World War II that had not been addressed, or to neighborhood quarrels
that had mobilized people along kinship lines. And this brings me to the point
about the emotional appeal of nationalist rhetoric. In rural Bosnia (which is where
the nationalist appeal is perhaps the strongest), kinship networks are important—
kinship is the primary bond of loyalty. In rural areas, ethnic intermarriage is rare
and therefore kinship overlaps with ethnicity. In other words, kin are also members
of the same ethnic community. This fact may help explain a mobilizing potential
in conflicts based on the rhetoric of nationalism, because nationalist ideologies
use the idiom of kinship. 37 It is, in other words, kinship and not ethnicity
that holds the primary emotional appeal and is the mobilizing factor. Nevertheless,
it should be remembered that for most civilians on all sides mobilization was primarily
based on fear (and therefore perceived in defensive terms) and the need to
protect one’s family and kin. Indeed, it could be argued that the level of fear and
violence needed to engage people (or rather to disengage people—that is, to silence
their opposition) is an indicator of the weak power of ethnic sentiment as a mobilizing
factor (see Gagnon 1996). Furthermore, for the perpetrators of crimes the
motivation was often economic gain (through extensive looting), power, and prestige.
Prestige was forthcoming because acts that in a functioning state governed by
the rule of law would be considered criminal were now considered heroic by those
in whose name and on whose behalf the crimes were committed; they were portrayed
as acts in defense of the nation.
As this nationalist rhetoric of “ethnic solidarity” takes hold, it becomes almost
impossible to resist, because, as has already been argued, national identity becomes
the only relevant identity, nationalism the only relevant discourse, and people who
resist are exiled, treated as traitors, or forced to become accomplices to crimes committed
in the name of the group.
A FINAL WORD
Each July 11 on the anniversary of the start of the Srebrenica massacre, survivors
and relatives of those who were killed travel to Potocari (the site of the 1995 U.N.
compound where men were separated from women) to mourn the dead. This is as
close as these Bosnian Muslims come to “returning” to their prewar homes. In a
tunnel near Tuzla north of Srebrenica, four thousand unidentified bodies are kept
in body bags, and thousands more are dispersed in unmarked and undetected mass
graves in the mountains and fields around Srebrenica. No memorial has been
erected on any of the execution sites. 38 But more important, there is no public ac-