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Genocide or Partition: Two Faces of the Same Coin?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Susan L. Woodward
Susan L. Woodward*
Affiliation:
Foreign Policy Studies Program, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
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Extract

Robert Hayden is not alone in wondering why the expulsion of Serbs from Croatia in 1991 and 1995 was labeled a population transfer and even justified by the logic of nation-states, while the expulsion of Muslims by Serbs in 1992-96 from an area of Bosnia and Herzegovina that the Serbs claim for their state was labeled genocide and justified establishing an international war crimes tribunal. Hayden wants to protect the term genocide, and its legal standing internationally, for truly exceptional instances—to wit, the Holocaust, and nothing else until, God forbid, there should be another such instance. By contrast, he argues, population transfers, even on a massive scale and forced, are not pathological. "Ethnic cleansing" of territory in the former Yugoslavia, whether of Croatia or of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is unexceptional, a normal part of the history of the twentieth century. Although final solutions are not inevitable—Hayden criticizes Croatian President Tudjman for writings that seem to have justified the Serb expulsion as such—"ethnic cleansing" is a part of the history even of states that now sit in moral condemnation of the Balkan horrors and the Bosnian Serbs.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , Winter 1996 , pp. 755 - 761
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1996

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References

1. David, Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Roy, Gutmann, A Witness to Genocide: The 1993 Pulitzer-Prize Winning Dispatches on “Ethnic Cleansing” of Bosnia (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Norman, Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of “Ethnic Cleansing” (College Station, Tex., 1996)Google Scholar; Ben, Cohen and George, Stamkoski, eds., With No Peace to Keep: United Nations Peacekeeping and the War in the Former Yugoslavia (London, 1995).Google Scholar

2. A powerful argument against this thesis is presented by Kumar, Radha in “The Troubled History of Partition,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 1 (January-February 1997): 22–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Sava Bosnitch, University of New Brunswick, has discovered a confidential memorandum drawn up in June 1944 by the research department of the British Foreign Office regarding the six possible solutions for Bosnia and Herzegovina after the war: (1) the restoration of the status quo ante 1939 (inclusion in a centralized Yugoslavia), or if Yugoslavia became a federal state, one of four options: (2) an autonomous member state (which occurred), (3) a partition of Bosnia (and the Serb-inhabited districts of Croatia) by plebiscite, (4) partition according to the Sporazum (1939 autonomy agreement), (5) partition based on geographical convenience along the Vrbas/Bosna/ Neretva line with some population transfers of the 700, 000 or so Croats and Serbs who “found themselves dissatisfied with their lot “; or, (6) “should Yugoslavia disintegrate, and separate States of Serbia and Croatia emerge, the solution of the Bosnian question would become much more difficult. The solution [5] would then appear to be the most reasonable, since it would give advantages to, and require sacrifices by, both parties and would provide Serbia with access to the sea. Any settlement of this kind would probably need forcible imposition by the Allied Powers.” From “Bosnia-Hercegovina,” Balkan States: Confidential (16619), 31 July 1944 (Section 5). I am grateful to Professor Bosnitch for providing me a copy from which these excerpts are taken.

4. David, Owen, Balkan Odyssey (London, 1995), 32–33.Google Scholar

5. John, J. Mearsheimer and Robert, A. Pape, “The Answer: A Three-Way Partition Plan for Bosnia and How the U.S. Can Enforce It,” New Republic, 14 June 1993, 22–28.Google Scholar

6. See Chaim, Kaufman, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars,” International Security 20, no. 4 (Spring 1996): 136–75Google Scholar; and Mearsheimer, John J. and Evera, Stephen W. Van, “When Peace Means War,” New Republic, 18 December 1995, 16–21.Google Scholar

7. This author proposed a third alternative in “America's Bosnia Policy: The Work Ahead,” Brookings Policy Brief, no. 2, July 1996.

8. The Honorable Antonio Cassese, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, speaking of the two functions he ascribes to the tribunal at the conference “A Year after Dayton: Has the Bosnian Peace Process Worked?” at Yale University Law School, New Haven, Conn., 16 November 1996.

9. This latter point was made by Ruth Teitl, professor at the New York University Law School, in her presentation at the Yale conference “A Year after Dayton. “

10. This is carefully chronicled and analyzed by Xavier Bougarel in “Bosnia and Hercegovina—State and Communitarianism,” in David A. Dyker and Ivan Vejvoda, eds., Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth (London, 1996), 87–115.

11. This appears to be the dominant view with respect to Slovenia and Croatia, as well as the Czech and Slovak republics and much of the former Soviet Union. Indeed, the popularity of Ivo Banac's attack on integrationist projects of the French and American model under the label of Jacobinism (The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics [Ithaca, 1984]) should be a warning to the Dayton optimists. The most recent contribution is Robert Wiebe, “Humanizing Nationalism,” World Policy Journal (Winter 1996–97): 81–88.

12. Huntington, Samuel F., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996).Google Scholar