Journalist Peter Lippman--Travel Journal to Bosnia-Herzegovina Part V

Bosnia-Herzegovina journal #5: End of the Queer Festival

I was hoping to get back to Sarajevo from Srebrenica and Bratunac in time to observe at least part of the "Queer Sarajevo Festival," scheduled for September 24th through 27th. I didn't make it, because the festival ended almost as soon as it began.

Checking my e-mail on my way out of Srebrenica on the morning of the 25th, I read with concern that visitors to the opening event, an exhibition of photographs, had been physically attacked upon leaving the exhibit. When I arrived in Sarajevo that afternoon, I called my friend Edo, who had been a participant in the festival. Breathlessly, he told me that he had barely gotten away from the melee in one piece. A crowd of angry people, Edo said, assaulted visitors leaving the Academy of Fine Arts on the banks of the Miljacka River. Two people suffered broken nose. Attackers followed people leaving the event in taxis. Some of them were chanting "Allahu Ekber." Edo ended by saying, "I am scared, but I can't be scared. I lived through the war, so I have to go on."

Further news reports said that between 300 and 400 people attended the photograph exhibit, including special invitees from foreign embassies. On the outside, a hostile crowd numbering between 70 and 100 gathered on both sides of the Miljacka, next to and directly opposite the Academy. The crowd grew as visitors were arriving. Some were bearded "Wahabis," orthodox adherents of Saudi-style fundamentalism. Some young women with scarves incited the attackers. Others who joined in the fray, perhaps just because it was exciting to them, were simply street hooligans, of the type that fill out the ranks of soccer fan clubs throughout ex-Yugoslavia (and, for that matter, from England to Russia).

The exhibit opened peacefully, and inside it was crowded. Some menacing Wahabis tried to enter the exhibit hall, but the police prevented them. But when the event was over, people in the crowd outside attacked those who were leaving, chasing them down on the side streets. Attackers photographed the visitors and even followed their taxis to distant neighborhoods. Off in Hrasno they forced one taxi to pull over and, with the butt of a handgun, broke glass in the vehicle. Then they broke the nose of one of the passengers. The taxi driver then took him to the hospital.

Among those attacked were people who just happened to be on the street nearby at the wrong time. At least a dozen people were sent to the hospital, including two local journalists and a filmmaker from Denmark. He showed up at the hospital with an eye injury and a boot print on his face. One policeman was injured as well.

The police were hard put to control the situation. Three or four attackers were arrested. While the police were apparently helpful in bringing the injured to the hospital, they were otherwise severely criticized for "passivity" and lack of preparation for the event. In their report on the incident, the police stated that they took the event very seriously. They evaluated the attackers as a group of Wahabi associated with King Fahd mosque (a grandiose Saudi-built mosque a couple of kilometers out of the center of town), and said that the attack was "well-planned and thought-out."

Some commentators blasted the police department, saying that they were perfectly capable of protecting the public when they had the intention, as past events had shown. For example, at a protest of street violence staged against the cantonal administration, police cordoned off the cantonal government building for 150 feet in every direction. Ultimately, the public conclusion was that it was not the policemen on the scene who were at fault, but their commanders who failed to organize protection effectively.

The rest of the festival was cancelled due to concern for people's safety. A few events were to be held in secret locations, for participants only.

The mood among the more progressive, tolerant part of Sarajevo's population after the night of incidents was one of shock and depression. Commentators wrote that the attacks were a "slap in the face" of Sarajevo and Bosnia. One asked, "Should we worry now that people who want to hold cultural events in the future will be regulated by paramilitary gangs, which will determine which exhibitions we can visit, which films watch, and which pools we can swim in? Another person wrote, "This is a test to show whether a totalitarian system can be imposed on the citizens. It's fascist rhetoric [referring to threatening posters]...if you had seen the words "Jews" or "Gypsies" on those posters, you would have seen the program of Adolph Hitler."

Samir Sestan of Start magazine wrote, "The cancellation of the Queer festival is a defeat for this city and for the dream of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Bosnia...The world has been sent a picture of intolerance, extremism and religious exclusiveness, and the whole story about Sarajevo's famous tolerance and multi-culturalism has been reduced to a tragic-comic level."

Sestan further wrote ironically of the "witch hunt" organized by the "gangster publication" -- that being Fahrudin Radoncic's Dnevni Avaz -- which "presented itself as the defender of the Bosniak population, while doing business with the financier of genocide against that people" -- that being Miroslav Miskovic, whom I introduced in journal #1.

The media, with the exception of Avaz, predominantly condemned the attacks. Commentators in other outlets questioned Avaz's position that "the public" was opposed to the Queer Festival, noting that "all three main magazines, and the other two main dailies, supported the event, and religious leaders kept out of it; no one asked the Serbs, Croats, Jews, children of mixed marriages, etc...because it is known whose town this is."

Referring to the festival opponents' calling on Ramadan as an excuse to oppose the event, a writer in Dani magazine asked, "Who gave approval for the pre-election campaign to take place during Ramadan? And a session of the UN General Assembly?"

Finally, many of those who had beforehand opposed the festival, afterwards condemned the violence, but usually in compromised terms. For example, in an interview Bakir Izetbegovic, vice president of the SDA and son of deceased former president Alija Izetbegovic (see journal #1), said, "The violence is worse than any sexual depravity. But I think that it they [organizers of the Queer Festival] shouldn't do that in Sarajevo, you know, Sarajevo went through a lot of suffering, and that's a mainly Muslim population. This kind of thing makes them afraid."

Here Izetbegovic strings together some statements that are entirely irrelevant to gay rights, but they work together in classic fashion to depict the struggle for gay rights as something that threatens a beleaguered, oppressed population. Izetbegovic's and his colleagues' standard lie is that, first of all, Sarajevo is a Muslim city. Certainly Muslims, together with the Croat and Serb part of the city, suffered through the war; Izetbegovic uses this as a foil for his reactionary position. Then he says, "We are a conservative party, we defend traditional values... It's their [the gays'] business what they do, but they shouldn't popularize it, and display it as an innocent thing; that's a thing that spreads, if you let it. It should be kept behind four walls."

Bakir Izetbegovic is the leader of the Bosnian parliamentary delegation to Council of Europe. Soon after the attack on the festival, Izetbegovic attended a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. At that time the EU Parliament passed a resolution condemning the attacks against participants, organizers, and journalists, and another resolution that condemned discrimination and violence against the LGBT population.

The world-famous punk music star Iggy Pop was scheduled to perform at Sarajevo's largest venue, the Zetra Olympic sports hall, on October 1st. Just before that date, the local producer of the concert announced that it was cancelled. Ticket sales had been slow, but the producers emphasized the fact that they could not guarantee security for the show, due to fears of a recurrence of the recent violence. One commentator wrote in response, "Now we should expect only the most kitsch pop performers; we haven't deserved better than this. Normal people should condemn the behavior of the hooligans and Wahabis, beating innocent people. But they are doing so very quietly, somewhere behind four walls."

This mention of hooligans refers not only to the incident at the festival, but also to periodic violence committed by members of soccer fan clubs in many cities around Bosnia. As I was visiting a friend in the Ciglane neighborhood of Sarajevo towards the end of September, I noticed that the floor-to-ceiling windows of a popular café had just been entirely smashed. The police were on the scene, and workers were boarding up the place. This was the result of a brawl between fan clubs of Sarajevo's Zeljeznicar soccer team and Celik, a team from Zenica. It was never made clear who attacked whom first. But by the end of the fight, four cafes, two private apartments, two offices, five vehicles, and a police car were damaged, to the tune of at least 100,000 KM (around $70,000).

*

Meanwhile, reactionary clerics continued to lash out at the event retrospectively; Sarajevo mufti Husein ef. Smajic stated, "The joy of this Ramadan was disturbed by the provocation of the Queer Festival.... same-sex marriage is the ugliest sin towards God and human nature." Magazines that had supported the event received further threats, including one from an organization of demobilized war veterans.

Responding to the reactionaries, one letter-writer responded to an ignorant and hateful posting from an imam. He wrote, "We need the gay festival in order to open people's minds...For your information, in Western countries many gays are excellent parents, and if you think they will raise their kids to be gay, then it would be better for you if you don't express that opinion in public, to avoid being laughed at."

The outbursts from some xenophobic Sarajevans reinforced RS prime minister Dodik's characterization of Sarajevo as "Tehran," a stereotypical description he is fond of using. The heated atmosphere in Sarajevo serves Dodik well, in that it further drives the two Bosnian entities apart from each other. What may not be clear to Westerners is that this serves the gangsters and corrupt lords of the Federation as well, because in division, there is profit for them as well as for Dodik and his gang. Whatever serves to keep the ethnicities herded into their respective corrals also serves to keep ordinary people passive and acquiescent before their ravenous "leaders."

There are clusters of Wahabi adherents in many cities in the Bosnian Federation. As a movement, they are small but strident, amounting, perhaps, to a few hundred followers in each town. Some are remnants of the mujahedin who came from North Africa and the Middle East during the war, but the majority now are now recruits from among the Bosnians. The movement recruits from among young criminals and intellectuals alike, focusing lately on students in the economics department of Sarajevo University.

Over the past few years Wahabi followers have tried with varying success to take over local mosques; in some notable instances they have been rebuffed and thrown out by the traditional practitioners. And they have been attempting -- since during the war -- to impose their orthodox version of religious observance on local populations, also with mixed success. In Hadzici, for example, there is an independent "morals police" that patrols some neighborhoods. The people who attacked the Queer Festival participants came from these groups. (Some of this information is from Slobodna Bosna #620, Oct 2, 2008)

A final outrage was the posting on YouTube of an animated clip of Wahabi adherents cutting off the head of one of the festival organizers. And adding to the injuries, Avaz published the full names and birth dates of all the participants who were injured and taken to the hospital.

However, supporters and organizers of the festival were not resigned. One organizer announced, "We're not giving up. The festival will continue until it happens just like an ordinary festival should happen. You can kill someone, but you can't kill an idea. Ideas are indestructible."

Some anonymous pro-human rights activists made their opinions known on the walls of Sarajevo's business establishments, spray-stenciling a hand throwing a swastika into a garbage pail. Elsewhere they wrote, "We're not giving up Sarajevo to the fascists!" Near the Ciglane open market someone wrote, "Suada and Olga [early victims of snipers in the opening days of the war and siege] didn't die for fascism!"

And for good measure, someone visited the shop purchased by Miroslav Miskovic, and wrote, "Death to fascism" on the front.

###

Next -- Bosnia-Herzegovina journal #6: Tuzla, the elections, more gangsters, and another scandal

Recent Story on "El Mujahid" Division

In light of the recent sentencing of Bosnian General Rasim Delic, this article from International Relations and Security Network is quite timely:

Al-Qaida's Bosnian War Move

Consider some of the details of his case, such as being mocked in court by some of the very mujahidin he was accused of being responsible for. And then read this recent article, by Marko Attila Hoare:

A Tale of Two Generals

The unfairness of this rankles, as does the fact that fugitive war criminal Ratko Mladic is the subject of biography entitled Ratko Mladic: Tragic Hero. It would be difflicult not to consider the possibility that Delic is a victim, not of a conspiracy, but a misguided and slightly dissonant effort to manufacture a semblance of "balance" where none exists.

At the same time, one cannot ignore that this is yet another example of how collusion with Islamic extremists compromised Bosnia's honor; the sad fact that 70 seemingly unarmed Wahabbi youth were able to violently disrupt a well-publicized gay festival despite plenty of advance warning suggests that thus-far secular Bosnia is not immune to the appeal of fundamentalism in a time of confusion and insecurity.

The Negative Role of Religion in the Balkans, continued.

Considering the fact that hatred of gays seems to be the only thing the leadership of Bosnia's main three religions can agree on, a violent incident involving spiteful, violent and stupid young men chanting religious slogans was almost inevitable at Sarajevo's first Gay Festival. And sure enough, some 70-odd Wahabbi thugs made sure that God's word would not be ignored:

Violence Mars Start of Bosnia Gay Festival

The fact that these were Wahabbi Muslims will, of course, provide plenty of ammunition for the revisionists and flat-out bigots eager to seize on any post de facto "proof" that Serbia was fighting against Islamic terrorism in the Balkans. While this troubles me and I will of course counter any such charges I come across, for the moment this inevitability is not my main concern.

I cannot help but point fingers at the "moderate" religious leaders of all three main religious organizations in Bosnia, who joined together in bigotry and intolerance, creating an atmosphere in which this outburst of medieval religious hysteria was almost inevitable. Hateful, homophobic, bigoted religious fundamentalists should be the ones who are fearful of being outed.

The Wahabbi thugs of course bear primary responsibility, but the rest of Bosnia's religious community is by no means off the hook.

Negative Role of Religion in the Balkans, continued

This story is depressingly predictable, given the track record of religious institutions in the region:

Croat Nurseries 'Should Teach Catholicism'

While I understand that the tradition of official state religions is well-entrenched in Europe and not peculiar to the Balkans, this intrusion of the Church into tax-supported state institutions ought to be opposed by any defender of secular democratic values. Given the role played by religious institutions in promoting and enabling national conflict in the region, this is especially true in this region.

Most troubling is this quote:

"Brankica Blazevic from the National Catholicism Office told Novi list that, in case there are non-Catholic children in a certain kindergarten group, “they should be moved to another group”."

This promotion of religiously-based segregation (especially troubling when one reflects that religious and national identity are tightly interwoven in the Balkans) should be vigorously resisted. Croatia has shown some troubling tendencies towards embracing, rather than rejecting, it's ultra-nationalist recent past; and we all know how events in Croatia and Serbia influence events and society in Bosnia.

The Negative Role of Religion in Bosnia Herzegovina

A few days ago, while reading one of many stories about religious objections to Sarajevo's first gay rights festival, I considered that perhaps the problem of religion in Bosnian society has been underexamined. So I was hardly surprised by this article: Outgoing Head of OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina Douglas Davidson: "Your Religious Leaders are also Political Leaders"

in which Mr. Davidson explains that "It is unusual that I have had more difficulty dealing with your religious leaders then I had dealing with political leaders." Perhaps one of the main factors making national identity such a tricky and potentially catastrophic issue in the Balkans is precisely because, as he notes, that ethnic/national identity and religious identity are so interconnected there.

Because religious belief is based on allegedly "received wisdom" and 'faith' is widely held to be immune from rational standards of proof and is all but exempt from criticism. This is a very shaky foundation for national identity, particularly in an of religious diversity.

Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Eastern America website

My recent post On "Islamophobia" prompted a brief but interesting exchange of comments on the issue of criticism of religion and belief.

In light of that hardly-resolved issue, it is worth examining the website of the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Eastern America to see what sort of information, viewpoints, and materials this particular American-based, tax-exempt organization is making available.

Well, in the "Archived News" section, there is a story dated July 10 on the "St. Elijah 31st Annual Summer Day Camp". And what is the theme for this years' camp? Why, "KOSOVO IS SERBIA" of course! Here is the synopsis of the events that week:

Each day began with morning prayers, followed by a history lesson on an era of Kosovo’s history:

Monday: Land of faith and tradition: Why Kosovo is important to us

Tuesday: 1389 ~ The Battle of Kosovo

Wednesday: Turkish Occupation, Independent Serbia, and Yugoslavia

Thursday: Yugoslavia breaks up, NATO bombs, the UN takes over

Friday: The Battle of Kosovo movie

In order to enhance each lesson, special activities were planned. The older campers rehearsed and performed a play The Battle of Kosovo (thanks to St. Luke in Washington, D.C. for providing the script and costumes). Mim Bizic shared her personal experiences in Kosovo and presented each camper with several gifts that helped to truly demonstrate the spirit of Kosovo. And of course, the camp t-shirts had the Maiden of Kosovo on them. We even incorporated the Kosovo theme into our “Serbian Survivor” game. Our teams were named for famous Serbian Orthodox monasteries or churches in Kosovo, each with a flag designed and made by the team to show a little of that church’s history and importance. The knowledge challenge questions were all about Kosovo, as we attempted to tie the daily lessons into a practical use – winning a prize!

No word on which kids got stuck playing the Turks. Or whether anyone bothered dressing up as any of the non-Serbs who fought on the Christian side; I'm quite certain that this recreation was scrupulous in its historical accuracy and even-handed presentation of events.

I have to say, in some ways I'm a little jealous--I was raised in a religious home, and I went to both Bible school and Church camp every summer, but not once were we allowed--encouraged, even!--to dress up in military costumes and play army! I wonder how much time these kids spent singing "Kumbaya"?

If sending your kids to a week of fetishistic indoctrination isn't quite enough, the Diocese although has a wealth of books available through the online Bookstore, where the interested and the devout can find such titles as The Orthodox Study Bible
, The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century, Introduction to the Serbian Orthodox Church History
, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, and Patristic Theology. Oh, and if reading church history and works of theology gets a little dull, you can always spice it up with titles like Media Lies and the Conquest of Kosovo, Media Cleansing. Dirty Reporting. Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia (by well-known Srebrenica-denier Peter Brock), and my personal favorite, Ratko Mladic--Tragic Hero, the long-awaited English-language biography by Milo Yelesiyevich.

I have said this about Islamists who sanction murder in the name of jihad, I have said it about creationists who want to stifle the teaching of science in public schools, and I'll say it about these sanctimonious, myth-peddling blowhards--believe what you will, but don't expect the slightest bit of deference or respect for your "beliefs" if they don't hold up to rational inquiry or moral scrutiny.

"The Nationalist Serbian Intellectuals and Islam: Defining and Eliminating a Muslim Community" by Norman Cigar

One of the two essays from the book The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy that explicitly addresses the plight of the Bosniak Muslims. Cigar is also the author of the essential work Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing and comes to the subject with a wealth of knowledge and a clear perspective.

The gist of Cigar's essay is most likely familiar to most readers of this blog, as the influence of Serbian intellectuals and writers like Cosic, Draskovic, Karadzic, Raskovic, Plavsic, and many others is well-known to even a casual student of the last Balkan wars. Here (in line with the theme of the book), Cigar focuses on the demonization of Islam and ethnic Muslims by Serb nationalists; the opening sentences of his essay:

"Recent events in Bosnia-Herzegovina provide significant material for a case study on the impact that external images of Islam can have on Muslims as a community and as individuals. Perhaps there was no more striking aspect in this process of creating images than the role that Serb intellectuals played as they exercised their craft of developing and disseminating knowledge and engaged in political activity."

Cigar goes on to show that Serb nationalist intellectuals were consistent in creating an "in-group/out-group" mentality regarding the Serbs versus the "others." What is of note in the context of this book is how Serbs tried to play to outside (particularly Western) sensibilities by playing off stereotypes about and fears of Muslims and Islam. What is also striking is how ridiculously crude and irrational much of this "intellectual" rhetoric was. Consider this quote from writer Dragos Kalajic, speaking of the allegedly "unmanly" nature of the (allegedly "Serb") converts to Islam after the Ottoman conquest:

"..it is appropriate to point out that effeminacy and symbolic or actual homosexuality are not the only means by which to escape from a manly nature that is threatened with violence, terror, or death. The Serbian experience shows that there are many other ways of avoiding duty and responsibility stemming from too onerous a fate, which history has imposed on the Serbs. Historically, the first and easiest path of avoidance from unavoidable fate was actually opened up by the Ottoman occupation...[and] drove many Serbs along the road to treachery"

This is, of course, a load of nonsense, but it's the sort of nonsense that people like Diana Johnstone and Julia Gorin take very seriously. To say nothing of the quote from Radovan Karadzic wherein he tries to distinguish which Muslims could still be converted to Orthodoxy--apparently, religious conversion is a matter of genetics:

"When it is a question of the Serbs of the Islamic faith, there was always a great divide that determined whether they were to be more Muslim or more Serb. Those in whom the religious element predominated, and orientation toward Islam's fundamentals, were lost forever to the Serbian nation."

It goes on, but even that short quote is enough to make the obvious parallels to the Nazi efforts to determine which people in the occupied East had sufficiently "Aryan" characteristics; Cigar rightly notes that in this day and age nationalist extremists know better than to express their beliefs in explicitly racist terms, but there is really no other way to interpret Karadzic's gibberish about collective memories and achieving "that level of development to become Serbs while also having the Islamic past of their families." These are the words of a man described with no little warmth by the 39th President of the United States as I noted last fall.

Cigar's analysis is keen, but it is difficult to do this essay full credit without all the quotes he includes; the above passages are typical, but hardly exhaust the range of crackpot theorizing, pseudo-science, mytho-romantic pontificating, and sheer psychopathic lunacy on display here. Cigar convincingly demonstrates that among Serbia's intellectual elite there was a strong tendency to portray Islam as a corrosive, and thoroughly evil force which fully defines all followers of that faith; Muslims are at all places and all times defined primarily if not exclusively as members of a vicious, violent, and implacably anti-Western (and anti-Serb) movement. No wonder Samuel Huntington was so popular among them.

"Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide" by Branimir Anzulovic [7]

CHAPTER FIVE: A VICIOUS CIRCLE OF LIES AND FEARS

Fictional Data and Real Hatreds

The previous chapter covered the revived Serbian Kingdom, and pre-Communist Yugoslavia. This chapter picks up the story from there, and begins with this paragraph:

"Yugoslavia would have been less susceptible to violent disintegration if, at the end of World War II, there had been a reconciliation between the nations and factions that had fought one another. All of them, and especially the two most guilty ones, Croats and Serbs, should have admitted the mistakes and crimes committed since they entered the Yugoslav union and taken the steps necessary to prevent another conflict in the future. The enormity of the crimes committed by various parties made such action urgent. The reconciliation of France and Germany was a good model, but it could not be followed because one basic condition was missing: freedom, including the very important freedom of information."

I could not have said it better myself; this concise observation serves as an effective rebuttal to the "Tito was the only guy who could keep the hatreds in Yugoslavia in check" revisionists.

Much of this section is concerned with numbers--specifically, different estimates of the total number of Yugoslav war dead from World War II as well as the casualties for each individual national and ethnic group. The government, for years, continued to maintain the lie that 1.7 million Yugoslavs had perished in the war, a number that was based on shoddy demographics and which continued to be the official line long after independent analysis and study refuted this high number. In fact, the government itself had produced a comprehensive list of war victims (not including victims of the Partisans, since the list was for the West German government in regards to a reparations settlement) from 1964-1966; the total number was just below 600,000. Yet official history stuck with the obviously inflated 1.7 million figure.

Two independent Yugoslavs--Montenegrin Serb Bogoljub Kocovic in 1985, and Croat Vladimir Zerjavic in 1989--separately came up with nearly identical figures of just slightly over 1 million total war victims. The fact that Kocovic, the Serb, actually came up with lower subtotals for Serbs killed in Croatia than the Croat Zerjavic was just one testimony to the impartiality both these men brought to their work.

One would think that the discrepancy between their data and the long-accepted official total would have dampened the use of competing statistics by nationalist parties; sadly, the result was instead that propagandists and demagogues from all ethnic groups laid claim to large numbers of these 700,000 "uncounted" phantom dead. Such activities were carried out by all ethnic groups, mostly being published overseas; however, the domination of the Federal government by Serbia meant that Serb nationalist claims were able to be widely disseminated.

While Tito was aware that this situation was threatening to Yugoslavia's stability, he was simply unwilling to consider the one real solution--total freedom of information. His death in 1980 loosened controls over publication, but this mostly opened the doors to competing nationalist propaganda and outright lies--before long, Serb academics and intellectuals were claiming there were well over a million Serbs killed at Jasenovac alone (the real number of Serb victims was probably around 50,000). Other researchers have validated Kocovic and Zerjavic, to no avail.

Another myth of the post-World War II was the demonization of the Roman Catholic Church, which was outside of the control of the Belgrade regime; the campaign against Cardinal Stepinac is the most infamous aspect of this extensive effort, which began in the immediate postwar period and never really ended. False stories of Church complicity with, and support for, the Ustashe and the NDH were projected onto the Croats as a whole, even though only a tiny minority of Croats supported the quisling regime. Catholicism was being portrayed as an implacable enemy of Orthodoxy, and Croatians as fundamentally fascist and anti-Serb in orientation.

Other hatreds being nurtured in the postwar era:

"Belgrade propagandists avoided mentioning such facts as carefully as they hid the extent of the Serbs' collaboration with the Nazi, including their participation in the Holocaust. Instead, they directed particular effort at portraying the Serbs as traditional friends and protectors of the Jews."

[He then quotes Philip J. Cohen, author of Serbia's Secret War, on the subject; I will be reviewing this book in the very near future.]

"...ethnic Albanians were always a major target of defamation."

"The fear of the "Muslim Threat" was also used in the effort to mobilize Serbs in a nationalist front.."

And so on. Anzulovic wisely concludes this section with this depressing summary:

"The falsehoods spread by the Belgrade3 propaganda machine did not benefit anybody. The intention to obtain higher war reparation payments by means of inflated numbers of Yugoslav war victims failed; the tensions among various Yugoslav nationalities, caused by this and other lies, made life in the common state more difficult and contributed to its violent disintegration."

The Fear of Vanishing

"Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide" by Branimir Anzulovic [2]

INTRODUCTION

After noting that lamenting the loss of Kosovo has been a genuine element of Serbian culture for quite some time, the author further acknowledges that "significant loss of power is always a traumatic event." This is fair, as is the following observation that the "strong expansionist trend" Serbia displayed after gaining independence was typical of the countries which achieved independence as nation-states in the nineteenth century "after a long period of foreign domination or political fragmentation." It is important to maintain a measure of balance and to avoid demonizing an entire nation or group. One of the primary themes of this blog is the evil of collectivism, specifically collective guilt. Any attempt to deal with recent events in the former Yugoslavia, unfortunately, risks charges of being "anti-Serb" from various hysterical factions. I want to take special care not to lend any legitimacy to such charges.

At any rate, Anzulovic is careful to note that theories of a certain "fascist psychology" are wanting at best; the psychological impulse we need to understand is not some individual pathology shared by many members of a particular group but rather the universal trait of strong group membership, a trait which is not exclusive to our species but which in our case may have outlived its evolutionary usefulness. There is a pathology at work, but it is not an abnormal psychological trait peculiar to members of a particular group. The author notes:

"Thus, the primary driving force leading to genocide is not the pathology of the individuals organizing and committing the genocide, but the pathology of the ideas guiding them."

Anzulovic wants to examine how

"the old myth of an innocent, suffering Serbia, and the concomitant myth of foreign evildoers who conspire against its very existence influened the behavior of Serbs at the close of the twentieth century."

The rest of introduction summarizes each chapter rather neatly; if you ever come across a copy of this book while remaining unsure if you want to read it, I encourage you to at least read the Introduction, which serves to at least encapsulate the theme Anzulovic covers.

Islamic Fundamentalism in the Balkans

The latest development in a disturbing story:

Trial of Wahhabi Extremists in Serbia Begins

Before I go on, a disclaimer: I do not believe that most Muslims in southeast Europe are fundamentalists, or radical Islamists, or nascent jihadists. Not even close. Nor do I for a second believe there was any credence to Serb nationalist claims that they were fighting a defensive war against a revived caliphate inside Europe's own borders.

However, the danger from the ongoing presence of even a small group of militant Wahhabi fanatics in the region is greater than simply giving Balkan revisionists and anti-Muslim nationalists some post de facto justifications for the crazed rhetoric and worse of over a decade ago. The specter of radical Islam in the Sandzak and/or Bosnia could not only provide ammunition for Orthodox and Catholic nationalists, but could feed very real--and justifiable--fears among ordinary Christians who might not otherwise engage in or be responsive to nationalist hate-mongering.

And it is worth noting that these bearded thugs are, after all, on trial at least partially because they threatened to kill the mufti in the area. As always, the majority of the victims of Islamist violence are other Muslims. The rise of Wahhabi Islam in the region would only be bad for Slavic Muslims there.

So a thorough and unforgiving crackdown on these religious fanatics on the part of local Muslim authorities wherever they appear would not only send a strong, and comforting, signal to Serb, Croat, Macedonian, and other non-Muslims in the Balkans; it would also be doing their own societies a big favor. Violent religious extremists are simply outside the pale; it does a secular, liberal civil society no favors to attempt to compromise or negotiate with medieval fundamentalists. A fragile and vulnerable civil society like in Bosnia or the Sandzak simply cannot afford to waste too much time learning this lesson the hard way.

And while this story is from the Sandzak, not Bosnia, we should not ignore the stronger communal sense of "Muslimness" which was tempered in the fire of genocide over a decade ago. The ties between the two regions and two populations are not insignificant.

As the years pass, the foolishness and recklessness of the decision to allow foreign jihadists enter the country and fight for Islam during the darkest days of the Bosnian war becomes tragically clearer. It is true that the number of mujahideen and their military importance has been inflated by Serb nationalists and some Balkan revisionists; it is true that they often clashed with native Bosnian Muslims who were too secular and not properly "Islamic" enough to suit their jihadist guests; and it is true that their attempt to take over and remake Bosnian culture essentially failed. However, they managed to establish a small foothold. Now it appears that that small foothold is still holding on.

Bosnia's Muslims paid a dear price in their valiant struggle to preserve a secular, liberal, cosmopolitan democracy against a vicious assault by ethnoreligious fundamentalist fanatics. How cruelly ironic it would for their society to be corrupted by a religious fundamentalist movement from within.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [15]

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE BRIDGE

This short chapter eloquently makes a case not only for the legitimacy of Bosnian culture, but of its worth. Bosnia was a bridge, Sells argues; the Croat nationalists of "Herceg-Bosna" knew what they were doing when they destroyed the elegant Stari Most bridge in Moster. Ian Paisley, the thuggish Ulter Unionist leader, once contemptuously said (I am paraphrasing here) that "Bridges make traitors." If one is devoted to a diminished and sterile notion of culture and cultural identity--one in which the individual is defined primarily by membership to a group, and furthermore in which the group is defined by hard and fast distinctions versus the "other"--then this is true. Bridges lead to communication and exchanges, which then lead to intermingling and a loss of "purity." The desirability of "purity", then, must never be questioned.

The Wounding Sky

Bosnia has been defined for centuries by the mixture of different peoples and faiths; Orthodox, Catholic, and Bosnian before the Ottoman period, and then Orthodox, Catholic, Islam and then Judaism (both Sephardic and Ashkenazi) after. Sells describes the Bosnian tradition of the sevdalinka love lyrics, which were written in Cyrillac, Latin, and Adzamijski script. The complex mix of gender roles in the sevdalinka, in which a woman poses as a man singing to her male lover (and which were often actually performed by male singers) parallels the complex, multilayered development of this lyric tradition.

Sevdalinkas were composed in all the languages of the Empire--Persian, Turkish, Arabic, South Slavic--and were often translated from one to another. The precious manuscripts recording this unique aspect of Bosnia's heritage were destroyed when Serb gunners deliberately targeted the Oriental Institute.

Sells writes:

"Bosnia has a culture rich in transitions and translations. Those looking for the essence of culture and language in ethnic, racial, or religious purity will find Bosnia incomprehensible. On the other hand, those who see culture as a creative process that by its very nature involves intermingling and creative tension among different elements will treasure Bosnia-Herzegovina."

Unfortunately, many in the West failed to grasp this.

The Execution of Culture

"In the fall of 1995, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger proclaimed that "there is no Bosnian culture." The context for Kissinger's claim was his proposal that Bosnia should be partitioned between Serbia and Croatia and the Muslims (and presumably anyone else who did not want to be part of ethnically pure Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia) should be placed in a "Muslim state." Partitioning Bosnia and putting the Muslims in a religious ghetto was the original goal of the Serb and Croat nationalists."

Other than again supporting the axiom that one can never go wrong disagreeing with America's most distinguished indicted war criminal, what can one say in response to such dismissive rubbish?

Sells dryly notes that the strongest refutation of Kissinger's statement came from Karadzic, Mladic, and the Serbian nationalists themselves, who put a great deal of energy and resources into destroying all traces of this allegedly non-existent culture. Also, there is this story:

"A Serb army officer entered the home of a Sarajevan artist, who happened to be Serb. Among the works of art, he saw a piece that depicted a page from the Qur'an. Infuriated, he had all the artwork taken out into the street, lined up, and shot to pieces with automatic weapons fire."

In order to justify the destruction of a people, you must first destroy their legitimacy. Sells recounts other episodes of genocide throughout modern history to illustrate the general truth of this observation. And then he concludes this section with a paragraph which manages to articulate something I have been grappling with for almost two years in this blog--the reason why Bosnia's fight should have been America's fight. One very big reason I believe American values were under attack in a small republic in southeast Europe in the first half of the last decade of the 20th Century. Allow me to quote the paragraph in its entirety:

"Like culture in the United States, Bosnian culture cannot be defined by the linguistic and religious criteria of nineteenth-century nationalism. Just as Americans share a language with the British and Australians, so Bosnians share a language with Serbs and Croats. Just as the United States has no single, official church, so Bosnia is made up of people of different religious confessions, and within those confessions, vastly different perspectives. If Bosnia has no culture, then the United States has no culture. If Bosnia should be partitioned into religiously pure apartheid states, then the same logic lead to the idea, proposed by the Christian Identity movement, that the United States should be divided into apartheid states of different races and religions."

Creation in the Fire

Sells recounts the art exhibition "Expo/Sarajevo 92" which was organized during the siege. He explains the great risks the artists had to take just to travel back and forth to the studio, and that the artists chose to make engravings because they are reproducible; a 'lucky' shell from Sarajevo's tormentors could destroy the display but not the works themselves. Those artists continued to create, to draw from Bosnia's rich, textured history and culture, and to celebrate life even while the world expected to nothing more than meekly survive and cower before those who wanted to carve the living body of Bosnia into neatly segmented, sterile, dead entities. The enemies of Bosnia, and the indifferent enablers of the West, wanted to believe that Bosnia would be defined by walls; those artists demonstrated yet again that it is rather defined by bridges.

A Dance

The book ends with this brief, almost poetic section. A Bosnian family--they are Serbs--living in North America throw a party for another Bosnian family who are moving to another city. The invite all the Bosnians they know--Serb, Croat, Bosniak. Everybody eats, drinks, talks, laughs. And then a sevdalinka is played. Dancing begins.

They are able to forget that they are Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim. In this bittersweet reunion mixed with farewells far from home, they reconnect with their culture. Away from the burden of being of one ethnoreligious group, they are free to be Bosnians.

--------------------

That is how the book ends. I highly recommend it; at only slightly over 150 pages it is a quick and easy read. It raises important questions about the role faith will, can, or should play in a secular, cosmopolitan democracy in the 21st Century. I suspect we will be revisiting these and related questions in my blog and in many other forums in the near future.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [14]

CHAPTER SIX: MASKS OF COMPLICITY [continued]

Passive Violence and False Humanitarianism

"Western policy makers also manipulated the language of pacifism to justify an arms embargo against the Bosnians while refusing to use force to help them."

This is well-known to any reasonably informed observers of the Bosnian war; Sells notes dryly that the same Western governments engaged in and authorized arms sales to countries all over the world. Furthermore, he rightly notes that those same governments had

"...a moral and legal duty to uphold Article 51 of the UN Charter guaranteeing the right of a nation to defend itself, as well as the 1948 Geneva Convention requiring all signatory nations not only to prevent genocide but to punish it. By refusing either to allow the Bosnians to defend themselves or to use NATO power to defend them, these leaders engaged in a form of passive violence, setting the parameters within which the killing could be and was carried out with impunity."

The outrage that informed such books as David Rieff's Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West was primarily fueled by similar observations. The slightly condescending indifference towards the practical and moral implications of this faux pacifism. Sells notes that most Western churches and religious groups were complicit in this campaign as well.

The catastrophic consequences of what Sells aptly terms "passive humanitarianism"--struggling mightily to get food to civilians while leaving them at the mercy of their heavily armed tormentors--is also discussed. And Sells briefly mentions a couple of infamous incidents--the use of Muslim rape camp slaves by UN officials, and the cooperation between UN peacekeepers transporting Dr. Hakija Turajlic and his murderers.

Moral Equalizing

I doubt any readers of this blog will need a refresher course on the moral equalizing ("There are no saints in this war"; "All sides share some of the blame") frequently indulged in my Western pundits and politicians in their never-ending efforts to avoid their moral and legal responsibilities. The list of incidents and statements Sells includes is damning but hardly comprehensive--Stoltenberg repeating the Serb nationalist line that Muslims were "really" Serbs; Owen claiming that 60% of pre-war Bosnia "belonged" to "the Serbs"; Susan Woodwards pseudo-objective claims that the entire conflict was due to impersonal factors and and organizational breakdowns; and so on. And of course Peter Brock's Foreign Policy article, which gave Bosnian revisionist an actual article in an actual, reputable mainstream publication which to cite ad nauseam.

National Interests

Sells notes that many Western leaders made the Kissingeresque realpolitik claim that the USA and other NATO members had no "national interest" in Bosnia. He notes how international indifference to the Palestinian problem in the wake of the 1947 war still haunts us today; he also argues that indifference in Bosnia most likely emboldened Hutu extremists in Rwanda (although, of course, the "realists" would most likely respond that we had no national interests in Rwanda, either). He also points out that indifference to the plight of Bosnia's Muslims almost certainly lent credibility to Islamist and jihadist claims about Western hostility to Islam and Muslims. And what is the cost of allowing religious violence to succeed?

He closes with an over-reaching claim that some arms-producing nations might actually welcome the instability that acquiescence in Bosnia's destruction might unleash. This smacks too much of paranoia and conspiracy theories for my taste; I would have preferred for Sells to have left this paragraph out of the final draft.

Not Two Cents

The title of this final section comes from Thomas Friedman's callous and stupid comment "I don't give two cents about Bosnia. Not two cents. The people there have brought on their own troubles." Sells' verdict on this statment is concise and accurate:

"It marks the logical end of moral equalizing, the equating of the victim and the perpetrator and the devaluing of both."

Sells notes that Friedman was only stating in bald terms what many in the West were implying with comments about "Let them keep on killing one another and the problem will solve itself." Sells' argues that the solution to such moral vacuousness is to replace the general with the specific, to give the suffering a human face, such as the famous picture of the young Bosnian woman who hung herself after the fall of Srebrenica. That picture was cited by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who had been against US involvement in the region. As Sells puts it:

"It was what the picture left unsaid that allowed the senator to look beyond the linguistic masks of "warring factions" and "guilt on all sides" to the reality that this young woman was most likely not warring, not guilty, not an ancient antagonist or hater, and that her act was "not the act of someone who had the ability to fight in self-defense." "

Sells concludes by noting that it is difficult to make moral distinctions in a religious genocide since so much of our moral thinking is grounded in religious teachings to begin with. Religious leaders and teachers, he concludes, have an obligation to

"...better understand and more clearly explain the full humanity of those who embrace other religions and the variety and richness within other traditions. Another response is to begin with a basic premise--that needless, willfully inflicted human suffering cannot and should not be explained away."

How sad that after thousands of years of organized religion, such simple and fundamentally decent proposals still need to be put forward.

-------------

This concludes Chapter Six. In my next post, I will consider the final chapter.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [11]

CHAPTER FOUR: MASKS OF OTHERNESS [continued]

The Serb Church and the Stepanic Syndrome

In Bosnia, the Serb Orthodox Church made the same mistake the Catholic Church made in Croatia during World War II; it became a servant of religious nationalist militancy. In many instances, Christian Serb clergy have supported the extremists who carried out the genocide in Bosnia and have given ritual and symbolic support to the programs of ethnic expulsion and destruction of mosques."

This section goes on to verify this strong opening statement for a very depressing and enraging several pages. Any student of the Bosnian war will know that the list of incidents and statement Sells provides--Orthodox clergy making racist claims about the true nature of Muslims, blessing troops after they had committed atrocities, visiting the sites of destroyed mosques, etc.--will be all too aware of similar incidents. Then again, this book was written in 1996; in 2008, no honest person can deny the involvement of the Serb Orthodox Church in Bosnia.

Sells closes this section by noting that Patriarch Pavle waited until very late in the war to speak out against human rights abuses committed by Serb forces, and then only in a very qualified manner, using the all-too-familiar "all sides are guilty" excuse. Sells wonders if this line of reasoning is somewhat based on the Christian notion of original sin, and if so, he posits this question:

"...if everyone is guilty, is anyone really guilty of anything specific? If everyone is guilty, is anything done to any person that is undeserved? Generalized guilt allows a convenient avoidance of the stubborn fact that in genocide, innocents suffer and their suffering is inflicted upon them deliberately."

Only Unity Saves the Serbs

Sells notes the revival of the symbol of the Orthodox cross with the four Cyrillic 'S's ('C') representing the slogan "Samo sloga Srbina spasava"; "revival" in the sense that the symbol became used more prominently and much more frequently than it had for many, many years. Sells notes that it was

"...natural for a former communist official, raised in the personality cult surrounding Marshal Tito, to move easily into another kind of personality cult."

Milosevic presented himself as the spokesman of Serb "unity"; in Serbian ultranationalism, "unity" means for one ethnic group to remain apart from and opposed to neighboring national groups, all of whom are out to get the Serbs. Rather than appealing to what is noble and expansive and welcoming in Serb culture, this slogan appeals to paranoia, fear, and hostility.

Sells rightly notes that while Milosevic later abandoned nationalist and ethnoreligious iconography and rhetoric, it most certainly does not follow that he had not tapped into genuine religious sentiments before. What follows is a short discussion of the nature of religiosity in the context of this book and ethnoreligious nationalism; as well as the varieties of modern fundamentalism and a consideration of how Serb and Croat nationalism would fit within any possible definition of fundamentalism.

Some of the "explicitly religious ideology of the violence", as he puts it, is detailed; including some of the songs Muslim prisoners were forced to sing. Sells concludes by soberly noting that we Americans--with our history of "ethnic cleansing" against American Indians, living in a country where much of the wealth was originally generated with slave labor, are in no position to claim moral superiority to Bosnian Serbs. I would like to believe that this qualification is unnecessary--it is the ideology hostile nationalism and the specific perpetrators of war crimes and genocide we are concerned with, not an entire people or a culture. Sells wants to close his chapter by returning to the example he began with--the Oklahoma City bombing by Christian white supremists. Bosnia, he implies, is what happens when civil order breaks down and the forces of tolerance, secularism, and reason are swept away by violent sectarianism, religious fanaticism, and irrationality.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [10]

CHAPTER FOUR: MASKS OF OTHERNESS

In the opening section, Sells draws parallels between the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995 and the outbreak of genocidal violence in the former Yugoslavia a few years earlier. In broad terms, the two events were spawned by similar movements motivated by similar ideologies nursed in similar cultural/intellectual climates. The difference, Sells rightly notes, is that in the United States such extremist elements are, for the most part, highly marginalized, socially, culturally, and politically. In the former Yugoslavia, on the other hand, such elements had had access to--and even control of--mass media outlets; powerful backing in government and the military; and all too often the support of major religious institutions.

Creating the Perpetrator

Despite all that had been done to lay the groundwork for genocide, nationalists and their allies still needed to do more in order to unleash the monster of ethnic violence. Milosevic and his allies took many steps in the final months and years of Yugoslavia's existence to create the compliance and willingness needed in the general population.

The purge of the Serbian communist party, the betrayal of Ivan Stambolic, purges of the Yugoslav army in order to create a Serb-dominated (and nationalist-allied) force, and increasing support for and ties to paramilitary militias--these were some of the many steps taken at the Federal level in Belgrade.

At the grassroots level, the work of turning ordinary Serbs into soldiers for racial separation and hatred was carried out by more brutal and direct means. Sells documents a few incidents where ethnic Serbs were punished, imprisoned, tortured, and/or killed for refusing to commit acts of violence against their non-Serb neighbors, or for speaking out against the fascist violence. He also discusses the well-documented process by which Serb nationalists would try to provoke revenge killings by Muslims against Serbs in order to harden the divisions between the two groups.

Young soldiers were numbed to the violence they were ordered to commit by being plied constantly with booze. Muslim civilians were degraded by being held in concentration camps without adequate food, water, sanitation facilities or privacy. And, of course, the use of derogatory names such as "Turk" and "balije". The wide distribution of looted good tended to muzzle curiosity among Serbs about what was being done in their name since most people preferred not to think too deeply about where the looted goods in their homes came from. And the practice of opening concentration camps to local sadists with a grudge to settle spread the complicity in the killings throughout the community.

Militia leaders such as Arkan and Seselj weren't merely given extensive material and financial support; they were given control over civilian resources and markets as well, enabling them to muster support through patronage and access to staples and consumer goods.

Sells concludes this section by noting the ubiquity of masks and facepaint in the ranks of the Bosnian Serb army and its allied paramilitary squads--the masks:

"...transformed identities. Before he put it on, the militiaman was part of a multireligious community in which Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, Slavic Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, and others had lived together. These were his friends, his work colleagues, his neighbors, his lovers, his spouse's family. Once he put on the mask, he was a Serb hero; those he was abusing were balije or Turks, race traitors and killers of the Christ-Prince Lazar."

The Forgotten Serbs

Sells rightly notes that the nationalists did not speak for all Serbs--as the frequency of their violence against 'bad Serbs' who wanted no part of the war of violence being waged against their neighbors bears out. He lists many examples of Serbs who--often at risk to themselves--showed kindness to their non-Serb neighbors, and took actions which saved lives. Bogdan Bogdanovic, the mayor of Belgrade, is one example.

Sells also notes that in 1995, most Bosnian Serbs did not live in Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia--not an insignificant number were still in the government controlled remainder of the country, and many more were in Serbia proper. Milosevic allowed the Bosnian Serb military and the militias access to refugee camps so that 'disloyal' Serbs could be rounded up--these were often sent to the front lines without proper military training as punishment.

Sells concludes with this example, which I must confess I was unfamiliar with:

"In Bosnian government areas, the Serb Civic Council was formed to work for a multireligious society and to articulate the concerns of those Serbs loyal to a multireligious Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Civic Council pointed out that the total number of Bosnian Serbs living under the control of the Republika Srpska was less than 50 percent; over 150,000 lived in Bosnian government-controlled areas and some 500,000 had fled abroad. The council criticized the international community for treating the religious nationalist faction as the sole representative of the Serbian people."

How outrageous and depressing it is to reflect that, despite having followed events in Bosnia with interest at the time, I had never once heard of the Serb Civic Council or of its alternate view of Serb ethnic citizenship in Bosnia. Then again--the Bosnian war would not be the last time Western observers would dismiss civil violence in an unstable society by pointing to violent, armed extremist groups as somehow representative of the larger social group they claimed to speak for. Think about that the next time a news anchor on TV describes what "the Shiites" or "the Sunnis" in Iraq want.

--------------

I will conclude my review of Chapter four in my next post.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [8]

CHAPTER TWO: CHRIST KILLERS [continued]

Christoslavism

The "race traitor" theme of The Mountain Wreath was reiterated and strengthened in the 20th Century in the works of Nobel-Prize winning author Ivo Andric, most notably in his most famous work, The Bridge on the River Drinia. In that famous work, Andric memorialized an ideology which he clearly believed all his adult life--that conversion to Islam turned Slavs into Turks, and that those who converted were weak and greedy. The honest and hardworking remained Christian.

Andric's other writing also dwell on the "betrayal" of Slavic converts. Andric wrote admiringly of Njegos' work and on the ideology of The Mountain Wreath, which he described as communicating "the voice of the people." The people, he made clear, demanded the annihilation of Slavic Muslims.

The graphic description of the impalement of a Serb man is the centerpiece of the novel--a powerfully moving scene, although too many observers (not to mention far too many of Andric's Serb readers, and presumably Andric himself) overlook the fact that impalement was a form of punishment used by many Christian rulers and polities in the region as well--Vlad the Impaler being the most infamous example.

Sells give Andric credit as a creative writer--he acknowledges that the impalement scene has great power, and also notes that Adric is skillful at using folklore, nationalist myth, and his own narrative abilities to weave powerful works of fiction. The entombment of two Christian babies in the bridge of the title serves as a literary metaphor rather than a crude piece of anti-Turk baiting. If Andric had written crass pulp or sensationalist, kitschy dreck instead of substantial, well-crafted fiction, he wouldn't have had such a powerful and lasting impact on the continued development of modern Serb nationalism.

Time and the Passion Play

Vuk Karadzic's descendant, Radovan Karadzic, frequently enjoyed making a display of his professed love for Serb folk culture as well as his pride in his famous ancestor. Ignoring the fact that gusle epics were a common feature of both Muslim and Serbian folk culture, he frequently appeared with a gusle player and Serb soldiers to sing folk songs about Kosovo and Serb unity. He claimed those songs as belonging to "his" people, which certainly excluded Muslims. He lauded his famous ancestor Vuk Karadzic, who had

"...reawakened the spirit of the Serbian culture that had been buried in the memory of the Serb people during long centuries of Turkish occupation."

Nationalist myths employ a circular logic, retroactively claiming direct ties to a mythic past and then showcasing stylized elements of that idealized past as 'proof' of an ostensibly organic connection. The rather more recent genesis of that mythology is then recast as a rebirth or rediscovery of a long-dormant continuity.

But how was this admittedly potent national myth able to tie Slavic Muslims to the curse of Kosovo in the 1990s? Such toxic myths alone are not sufficient to explain the explosion of genocidal fury against Bosnian Muslims. In the next chapter, Sells examines events in Kosovo in the 1980s, and how those very contemporary tensions were fused with nationalist mythology.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [7]

CHAPTER TWO: CHRIST KILLERS [continued]

Extermination of the Turkifiers

This section examines the famous masterwork of 19th Century Serb literature, The Mountain Wreath by Njegos. This lengthy poem celebrates the slaughter of Slavic Muslims on Christmas Eve, most likely based on a actual event from the previous century.

Njegos' work begins with Bishop Danilo

..."brooding on the evil of Islam, the tragedy of Kosovo, and the treason of Vuk Brankovic>"

The poem repeatedly refers to Slavic Muslims as "Turks," by which it is implied that by converting to Islam they have changed their race--and, therefore, betrayed their own. Bishop Danilo is slowly convinced to unleash his warrior by the chorus, which reminds him of the essentially evil nature of Islam and Muslims, and of the betrayal of Brankovic. Interestingly, one of the "temptations" which must be overcome is the actual character of the Muslims he knows. The character of the individual does not matter--the Muslims are blasphemous by nature of what they are, irregardless of their individual character.

After the slaughter, the warriors go directly to communion--they are not required to first take communion. The annihilation of an entire community of Muslims is not a sin which needs to be forgiven, but a sacred act itself. As Sells points out, usually the concept of a "baptism in blood" refers to the victim being baptized. In The Mountain Wreath, however, the killers are the ones who are sanctified by the shedding of blood. The victims are damned.

So by the second half of the 19th Century, Slavic Muslims were trapped between two incompatible conceptions--on the one hand, they were considered "Serb" since Karadzic had defined all speakers of what he considered "Serbian" to be Serbs; yet the popularity and influence of Njegos' powerful poem ensured the rapid growth of the belief that all Serbs were, by definition, (Orthodox) Christians.

At the same time, the feast day of Saint Lazar was recognized as an official saint day and was included in church calendars. Shortly thereafter it was combined with the feast day of Vid.

The process by which the religious, the cultural, and the historical would be combined into one unified mythology was well underway.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [4]

CHAPTER TWO: CHRIST KILLERS

The Christ-Prince Lazar

Sells discusses the centrality of the Good Friday story to Christianity, and then describes the long-standing tradition of Passion Plays, which bring the suffering of Jesus alive to his believers and which serve to break down the temporal barriers between the audience and the events being enacted. The strong emotions evoked were often directed at the actors portraying Jesus' betrayers, and these passions have often been harnessed for both good and evil throughout history. All too often, those passions have been directed at Jews, who were blamed by the masses and the Church in Medieval times for killing Christ.

Serb nationalism, as Sells then notes, is built on a mythology which portrays Slavic Muslims as Christ killers. Considering that Islam was founded a good six centuries after the Crucifixion, how is this possible? The answer is in the myth of Prince Lazar, the Christ-King of medieval Serbia.

I will assume that any reader of this blog knows the story of the Battle of Kosovo and the attendant mythology. At this point, it becomes even clearer that Sells is well-attuned to the real issue--rather than spend time on the actual historical record (such as it exists) or attempting to create a believable, fact-based account, Sells realizes that the crux of the matter lies in more recent history. Specifically, in 19th Century Serbian nationalism and the mythology created to support it. As he writes:

"During the nineteenth century, Serbian nationalist writers transformed Lazar into an explicit Christ figure, surrounded by a group of disciples, partaking of a Last Supper, and betrayed by a Judas. Lazar's death represents the death of the Serb nation, which will not be resurrected until Lazar is raised from the dead and the descendants of Lazar's killers are purged from the Serbian people. In this story, the Ottoman Turks play the role of the Christ killers. Vuk Brankovic, the Serb who betrays the battle plans to the Ottoman army, becomes the Christ killer within. In the nationalist myth, Vuk Brankovic represents the Slavs who converted to Islam under the Ottomans and any Serb who would live with them or tolerate them."

-------

I will leave off here and pick up my review of this chapter in the next post. As an aside, I will note--and I very much doubt that this insight is original to me--that one problem of the former Yugoslavia is that the different national groups suffer from very bad history. All too often, observers glibly note the historical baggage and grievances in the Balkans, without going on to acknowledge that more often than not the "history" under which the people of that region labor is heavy on myth and light on objective, rational, fact-based analysis. As a personal anecdote, I have spent quite a bit of time in Bulgaria, where people--including academics, historians, and politicians--routinely talk about the Ottoman or Turkish "yoke," meaning the centuries of Ottoman rule. It is clear to an outsider that this characterization represents 19th century nationalism more than actual historical experience; yet this is the "history" which young Bulgarians are still raised on. The nearly-forgotten Bulgarian campaign against its ethnic Turkish minority in the early 1980s was a precursor of the much bloodier breakup of Yugoslavia less than a decade later, and was a product of the same type of mystic, paranoid, racist "history" which fuels contemporary Serb nationalist determination to avenge imagined medieval atrocities.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [3]

CHAPTER ONE: FIRE IN THE PAGES [continued]

Who Are Bosnians?

Keeping in mind that this book was written for an audience not necessarily well-versed in the subject--this section is not a history of pre-Yugoslavia Bosnia, but rather a brief explanation of post-WW II Yugoslav history, an explanation of the republics, and the different main populations of Yugoslavia. Sells does a good job of focusing on the key issue in modern Bosnian history--the competing claims of Serb and Croat nationalism on the Orthodox and Catholic populations outside of their respective republics. Also, he notes that both Serbian and Croatian nationalism are explicitly religious--being a "Serb" means being an Orthodox South Slav, in other words.

What Cannot Be Said

In this section, Sells considers how the very enormity and awfulness of the crime of genocide makes it less, rather than more, likely we will be able to acknowledge it and confront it. He points out that the final wave of ethnic cleansing against Muslims occurred in the Banja Luka area in late 1995, after the international outrage over Srebrenic and after NATO had already committed to assisting the joint Croat-Bosnian government offensive against the Bosnian Serb army. Sells notes that NATO could have spoken out against these new, last-ditch atrocities, but chose not to.

The Euphemism

The "euphemism" is the word "ethnic" in "ethnic cleansing". Sells reminds the reader that Serbs, Croats, and Slavic Muslims all descended from the same tribes which settled the area in the sixth century. Religious identity is the sole determiner of "ethnicity."

Sells also notes that the identification as "Muslim" was extrinsic. The victims at Omarska were not there for any particular actions, beliefs, or statements. Nothing they did condemned them in the eyes of Serbian nationalists; they were Muslims, and that was guilt enough. Sells concludes this section by writing:

The term "ethnic" in the expression "ethnic cleansing," then, is a euphemism for "religious." It entails a purely extrinsic yet deadly definition of the victim in terms of religious identity; the intrinsic aspect--in the form of religious mythology--becomes the motivation and justification for atrocities on the part of the perpetrator."

The Realm of Omarska

This section details the methods of ethnic cleansing, the extent, and points out the fact that unlike the seige of Sarajevo and the infamous massacre at Srebrenica, most ethnic cleansing went on in isolated rural areas and town and cities behind Serb lines, where international observers and reporters were kept out. Little in this section would be new or novel to any reader of this blog, but for the intended audience, in 1996, this perspective was important to keep in mind.

Gynocide

The title of this section makes the subject clear--this is a brief account of the use of deliberate mass rape and rape camps in the genocidal program against Bosnian Muslims.

Genocide

The subject of this section is obvious. Unlike many well-intentioned but ill-informed observers, Sells not only has read the Genocide Convention, he also understands Lemkin's intent--he explicitly notes that genocide does not exclusively refer to campaigns of complete annihilation like the Holocaust. This key point--that the essence of genocide is that violence is directed against individuals "not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group"--is a crucial distinction which has tragically been blurred almost beyond recognition in the present day.

Therefore, Sells rightly notes that the international community dearly needed to believe that the war was the product of "ancient hatreds" or that all parties were equally guilty so that the true horror of what was going on every night on their TV screens did not have to be processed and understood for what it was.

Religion and the Ideology of Genocide

This concluding section is two paragraphs long. I will quote it in its entirety:
"Many deny a religious motive in the assault on Bosnia and upon Bosnian Muslims in particular and in the three-year refusal by the major powers of the Christian world (Britain, France, the U.S., Canada, Germany and Russia) to authorize NATO power to stop it or allow Bosnians to defend themselves. This book explores religious dimensions of the genocide. The focal point is a national mythology that portrays Slavic Muslims as Christ killers and race traitors. When that national mythology was appropriated by political leaders, backed with massive military power, and protected by NATO nations, it became an ideology of genocide.

"Ideology of genocide" means a set of symbols, rituals, stereotypes, and partially concealed assumptions that dehumanize a people as a whole, justify the use of military power to destroy them, and are in turn reinforced by the economic, political, and military beneficiaries of that destruction. It is the development and function of this ideology of genocide that the succeeding chapters will explore."

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [2]

CHAPTER ONE: FIRE IN THE PAGES

Rain of Ash

Sells begins his account of the Bosnian War not with Srebrenica, or Omarska, or with scenes of water-pail toting Sarajevans dodging sniper bullets; rather, he begins with the shelling of the National Library; the deliberate and systematic destruction of that repository of Bosnian history and culture. This is quite right, and very appropriate.

For anyone not familiar with this book, it needs to be kept in mind that it was published in 1996 and presumably was being written just as the war was drawing to a close. Coming after the end of hostilities, the book is not a piece of advocacy or reportage; neither is it work of history or retrospective analysis, since Dayton was still a relatively recent occurrence and there hadn't been time to collect information, documents, and interviews in the country. Rather, Sells was determined to illustrate the importance of religion and religious beliefs in the destruction of a mutliethnic/multi-confessional society; and also to debunk the conventional wisdom about "ancient hatreds" as well as other myths.

Keeping this in mind, I hope the reader will understand if I skim quickly through some passages in this book; not only did Sells write this book 12 years ago, he also wrote it as part of a series "Comparative Studies in Religion and Society". Therefore, his target audience cannot be expected to have had more than a cursory knowledge of events in Bosnia and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s outside of nightly news broadcasts and mainstream press coverage. Sells reiterates a lot of territory which will be old hat to anyone reading this blog. I shall not spend much time summarizing his account of events.

Back to the destruction of the national library...

To repeat--I think this is an excellent choice by Sells. While I certainly believe that human lives are more important than old books and that any innocent life is worth more than even the rarest manuscript, no aspect of the Bosnian war more starkly illustrates the genocidal nature of the assault against the sovereign nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina than the war against the physical manifestations of its history and culture.

It is telling that while revisionists like Diana Johnstone and Michael Parenti are often willing to consider civilian deaths in Bosnia (even though their analysis is rarely honest or complete), neither "Fools' Crusade" nor "To Kill A Nation" dealt at all with the systematic destruction of mosques in Serb-held areas, or with the deliberate destruction of first the Oriental Institute and then the National Library in Sarajevo. I think they know that bringing such incidents into their warped narratives would be a losing proposition for their revisionist project. While it is unfortunately possible to sell some people on the notion that widespread civilian deaths, while "unfortunate", were merely the inevitable product of ruthless "ethnic conflict" and inflamed hatreds rather than of a systematic campaign of destruction. It is much harder to explain away the dynamiting of every mosque in Serb-held areas after active combat had ceased, or to invent even a far-fetched rationalization for the intentional destruction of a library with no military value, but incalculable cultural worth.

The inferno and debris that resulted from that nihilistic act of barbarism is the "Rain of Ash" of this section's title. From page one, Sells is on the right track.

--------------

I will continue my review of Chapter One in the next post.

"Balkan Idols" by Vjekoslav Perica [26]

CHAPTER TWELVE: CONCLUSIONS [continued]

The Myth of the Three Evils of the Twentieth Century and Other New Myths

Perica writes:

"The most crucial single characteristic of the religion under consideration is worship of history. History as the principal object of worship entails myths that facilitate coming to terms with various historical controversies coupled with the worship of the nation (or ethno-religious community). I would single out three sets of new myths that most critically affected the period under consideration and are likely to exert significant influence on future events in successor states in the former Yugoslavia. These myths could be named as follows:

1. The Deep Roots Myth
2. The Jerusalem Myth
3. The Myth of the Three Evils of the Twentieth Century"

For anyone who has followed my review of this book--or, indeed, anyone who has read even a little on the Balkan wars--the first two myths probably need little elaboration at this point. For the first, Perica notes that Serbian and Croatian nationalism emphasized an imagined, mythologized ancient past and a continuity between the contemporary "true" nation and that past, irregardless of the intervening centuries. These "deep roots" trumped any other nationalism or national identity--whether Yugoslav or Bosnian. This insight is not original to Perica; his contribution has been to illustrate how fundamental religion and religious institutions have been in formulating and maintaining this myth.

I cannot improve on this paragraph, quoted in its entirety:

"In sum, architects of the Deep Roots Myth have labored to create a "visible" link between ancient ethnic communities and nation-states founded after the collapse of communism and disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. Their favorite word is "tradition," which they perceive as something immutable in ever-changing history, created centuries ago yet somehow coming to us intact and unaltered. As they make people conscious of these allegedly immutable things that resisted the power of historical change and invite the people to "wake up" and "return" to their "genuine" identities, their chief aim is to profoundly alter the current situation in the society, culture, economy, government, identity, and mentality of the people. In other words, ethnic nationalists say that nothing has changed since the Middle Ages in order to change everything today."

The second myth--the "Jerusalem Myth"--is obviously about Kosovo, but Perica also claims that the ideal of a mythic homeland. He writes:

"The ruins of the former Yugoslavia are full of tombs and monuments of all sorts and all ages, sites of martyrdom, wailing walls and sacred centers both above and under ground, to which the damned groups want to return but cannot. What the Jerusalem Myth really narrates is a story about a land of ceaseless resentment inhabited by eternal losers."

There is some bite to that analysis, and also much truth.

--------------

Perica was less successful at convincing me of the importance of the third myth, which he spends several pages arguing and yet in its essentials can be reduced to this--the Vatican, which throughout much of the 20th Century clearly supported many far-right and fascist regimes and opposed any left-of-center political movements as a secular threat to its own authority, has made a concerted effort in the post-Cold War environment to reinvent its past. The Vatican's revisionist strategy is to claim that the Church steadfastly opposed all totalitarianisms--communism, fascism, and Nazism--equally.

This is interesting, since it suggests that the beautification of Stepanic had little to do with intentional stoking of Croat nationalism but rather was part of a wider, global effort to rewrite history. Stepanic's martyrdom at the hands of Tito was the only thing which mattered; his actions during the Ustashe years simply did not compute.

However, Perica has thrown the net pretty wide here; he also gets bogged down in an attempt to determine whether or not the Vatican has maintained a double standard in dealing with right-wing versus left-wing movements and governments. It is a worthy subject of study, but it seems to come out of nowhere, and takes us far afield from the western Balkans. That is not to say he is wrong, or that there is no connection between this line of inquiry and the primary topic of his book, but the sudden turn to ideological debates within the Vatican is rather jarring. Oddly, Perica claims that this third myth is possibly the most important of the three he has outlined; I feel it is the least important, or more accurately the least directly relevant. Considering how much intellectual terrain Perica has mapped out in this book, he is entitled to an occasional wrong turn.

------------

I know I promised to wrap things up in this post, but the final section is several pages long, and I wish to give it enough attention and space, as well as adding some final thoughts of my own. I will review the final section of this last chapter in my next post.