The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

220 annihilating difference
erations for the former Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR). In 1993 I visited Bosnia with a Granada
film crew in connection with the filming of the documentary We Are All Neighbours; the film
depicts the descent of one village into war. This article is based in part on a paper entitled
“Power, Fear and Ethnicity in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Or Forging National Communities
through War,” which I presented at a seminar at the Weatherhead Center for International
Studies at Harvard University in April 1999. While working on the article, I enjoyed the
friendly hospitality and inspiring atmosphere of the U.S. Institute of Peace, where I was a
guest scholar. I dedicate this article to Peter Galbraith, who acted to make the voices of the
survivors of genocide heard when others failed, and who worked hard to prevent another
Srebrenica.
1. The concept of nationality in the socialist multiethnic states such as Yugoslavia differed
significantly in meaning from that used within Western European discourse. Although
in Western Europe citizenship and nationality are synonyms and nationality refers to the
relation of a person to a state, in the multiethnic former socialist states national identity
was different from, and additional to, citizenship. Thus, for instance, everybody held Yugoslav
citizenship, but no one held Yugoslav nationality. The term nationality is still used to
refer to one of three collective identities—Bosniac, Croat, or Serb—and not to citizenship
in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the breakup of Yugoslavia. This particular use of the concepts
of nationality and nation is perhaps particularly confusing to native speakers of American
English, since nation and state are often used interchangeably. (For a more lengthy discussion
of the nationalities system in the former Yugoslavia, see Bringa 1995:22–26.)
2. Schabas points to the problem in defining the ethnic, religious, etc. group referred to
in the Genocide Convention: “At the heart of the definition, it would seem, is the fact that
it is the perpetrator who had defined or identified the group for destructions” (1999:3). And
thus, I would add, who belongs to that group and who does not.
3. UNPROFOR is the acronym for the United Nations Protection Force in the former
Yugoslavia.
4. At its peak, the airfield was dotted with tents that housed more than twenty thousand
refugees from the Srebrenica area. About seventeen thousand were subsequently moved to
collective centers outside the base. At the time I was there, approximately six thousand
refugees remained at the airfield.
5. During the war in Bosnia, I learned that people who portray themselves as victims of
atrocities that have not taken place, or that did not involve them, use language characterized
by vagueness—particularly as far as time, place, and personal pronouns are concerned.
They also will use a vocabulary and syntax that stylistically are not their own but are more
reminiscent of a politician’s language, or of a propaganda report in the nationalist media.
6. The number of Muslim men and boys who went missing after the Bosnian Serb Army
takeover of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, is believed to be 7500 or more. At the moment of
writing, approximately four thousand bodies have been found in various mass graves by U.N.
exhumation teams, but only seventy of those have been positively identified.
7. See in particular David Rhode’s book Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica; the
1999 BBC documentary “A Cry from the Grave” by Leslie Woodhead; and the U.N. Srebrenica
Report (Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to General Assembly Resolution
53/35–1998).
8. The U.S. ambassador in Zagreb, Peter Galbraith, in the meantime had cabled a
strongly worded report repeating the Srebrenica survivor’s account of the mass executions
and names of some of the places where they had taken place, to the U.S. secretary of state,