War in the Former Yugoslavia: Ethnic Conflict Or Power Politics?
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War in the Former Yugoslavia: Ethnic Conflict or Power Politics? Author: Gail Harmon Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/587 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2007 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College War in the Former Yugoslavia: Ethnic Conflict or Power Politics? A Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Department of Political Science Under the Direction of Professor Kathleen Bailey By Gail F. Harmon April 2007 Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………..………………………………5 Chapter 2: Literature Review……………………………………………………………...13 A Note on Terminology………………………………………………………………13 Modernization Theory and its Opponents……………………………………………15 Primordialism………………………………………………………………………..17 Elite Manipulation…………………………………………………………………...26 Moderates……………………………………………………………………………34 Emotion Theory………………………………………………………………………42 Rational Choice Theory……………………………………………………………...48 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...59 Chapter 3: Background of the Region…………………………………………………….61 The Origin of Ethnic Division in the Balkans………………………………………..61 The Expansion of Nationalism……………………………………………………….68 The Balkan Wars……………………………………………………………………..78 World War I………………………………………………………………………….81 The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes……………………………………86 World War II…………………………………………………………………………93 Tito’s Yugoslavia…………………………………………………………………...108 Slobodan Milosevic’s Rise to Power……………………………………………….132 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….143 Chapter 4: The Breakup of Yugoslavia………………………………………………….144 Yugoslavia’s Path to War…………………………………………………………..144 1 The War in Croatia…………………………………………………………………154 Prelude to War in Bosnia…………………………………………………………...162 The Bosnian War……………………………………………………………………168 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….198 Chapter 5: Events in the Balkans Post-Dayton………………………………………….201 Croatia After the Dayton Accords………………………………………………….202 Post-Dayton Serbia…………………………………………………………………219 The Dayton Accords………………………………………………………………...238 The Partition Debate………………………………………………………………..244 Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Wake of Dayton………………………………………..250 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….288 Chapter 6: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….290 Can a Conflict Ever Truly Be Ethnic? ……………………………………………..290 Elite Manipulation in the Balkans………………………………………………….293 Applying Gagnon’s Theory to Yugoslav History…………………………………...297 Lessons of the Yugoslav Conflict…………………………………………………...304 Yugoslavia’s Relevance to Iraq…………………………………………………….308 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….316 Historical Timeline……………………………………..……………………….…………318 Appendix A: Balkan Opinion Polls 1994-2006…………………………………………..322 Appendix B: Post-Dayton Election Results……………………………………………...327 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….342 2 Table of Maps Map 1: Europe 2006……………………………………………………………………….…60 Map 2: Boundaries of Serbia 1196-1389…………………………………………….………65 Map 3: The Balkans in the Nineteenth Century…………………………………...………...75 Map 4: Europe in 1915………………………………………………………………………84 Map 5: Central Europe After World War I………………………………………..…………87 Map 6: Europe During World War II………………………………………………………..97 Map 7: Europe After World War II………………………………………………………...109 Map 8: Balkan Ethnic Distribution in 1990………………………………...………………140 Map 9: Balkan Ethnic Distribution in 1994………………………………………...………189 Map 10: The Balkans in the Present Day…………………………………...………………200 Map 11: Bosnia and Herzegovina After Dayton……………………………………………239 3 Acknowledgements I would like to begin by acknowledging my advisor Professor Kathleen Bailey for her guidance throughout this process. She played an integral role in this project from inception to final product, always encouraging me to do more and think bigger. For her patience, enthusiasm, and ever-expanding vision of what this thesis could become, I sincerely thank her. I would also like to thank my parents for their enthusiastic support in all of my academic pursuits. Their continued belief in my abilities has been vital during this long, and at times stressful, process. Finally, I would like to thank the entire political science faculty of Boston College. Throughout my four years here I have been extraordinarily lucky to have some of the finest professors that the school has to offer—people who challenged and inspired me, and ultimately motivated me to do things I never knew I was capable of. Without them, this thesis would not have been possible. 4 Chapter 1: Introduction The breakup of the former Yugoslavia was a bloody ordeal which spanned four years and killed just under one hundred thousand people. The conflict was given a great deal of attention while it was unfolding, but after peace was established in 1995 study of the region was in large part abandoned. The Croatian and Bosnian wars are both relevant and important to studies of conflict today, but because little attention has been paid to them since the mid- 1990s they remain largely misunderstood. This paper seeks to rectify the situation, setting forth a thorough investigation of the causes of violence in the former Yugoslavia by examining events in the region before, during, and after the conflict. The Yugoslav wars may have ended eleven years ago, but it is precisely this distance and its accompanying hindsight which allow the Balkan example to be so instructive for future conflicts. The Yugoslav dissolution began as a war of secession. In 1991, Croatia opted to declare independence and leave Yugoslavia because it felt that Serbs were overly dominant in the federation. Serb and Yugoslav troops moved into Croatia to compel it to reenter the union, but by 1992 it became clear that Croatia’s independence was nonnegotiable. At this point, fighting between Serbs and Croats moved to Bosnia where both nations claimed territory because of the presence of their respective ethnic groups in the region. The Bosnian War pitted neighbors against neighbors and friends against friends as this formally multi- ethnic society was fractured along ethnic and religious lines. Soon three distinct groups emerged: the Bosnian Serbs, supported by Serbia, the Bosnian Croats, supported by Croatia, and the Bosnian Muslims. As the war spread and intensified, so did the violence. It soon became clear that the wars in the former Yugoslavia would be the most brutal that Europe had seen since World War II. 5 During the conflict, ethnic groups were targeted for elimination via military tactics and concentration camps. The term “ethnic cleansing” was coined in May 1992 in reference to Serb attacks on Bosnian Muslims which were aimed at driving the Muslims from their home territories.1 As many as six thousand Bosnian Muslims were incarcerated by Serbs at the Omarska camp where guards “regularly and openly killed, raped, tortured, beat, and otherwise subjected prisoners to conditions of constant humiliation, degradation, and fear of death.”2 Tragically, this behavior is not shocking to readers today because it is reminiscent of the Holocaust. In fact, Goran Jelisic, commander of one notorious Serb concentration camp in Bosnia, actually described himself as the Serbian Adolf.3 However, the intense brutality exhibited in the former Yugoslavia went beyond ethnic cleansing and forced labor camps, reaching extremes that may actually have surpassed the grave crimes of the Nazis. As just one example of such unprecedented and inhumane behavior, rape was used as a weapon in Bosnia. This crime was committed by actors on all sides of the conflict, but most often Serb paramilitary officers were the perpetrators and Muslim women the victims. The rapes were intended to induce families to flee and never come back, not just for their lives but for the honor of their women…Interviewed women described how they were gang raped, taunted with ethnic slurs, and cursed by rapists who stated their intention to forcibly impregnate women as a haunting reminder of the rape and an intensification of the trauma it inflicts. The forcible impregnating of Muslim women and in some cases the incarceration of pregnant women in order to compel them to carry the pregnancy to term was part of the torture to which they were subjected. All this so that the women would bear “little Chetniks.”4 The importance of female purity among Muslims makes these actions particularly abhorrent, as many of these women would not be welcomed back into their homes and families after 1 Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2. 2 Ibid., 160. 3 Ibid., 166. 4 Ibid., 167-168. 6 they had been sexually abused. Perhaps most disturbing is the insistence that these women give birth to “little Chetniks,” a reference to Serb nationalists who committed atrocities against Croats and Muslims during World War II. The Serbs did not simply want Muslims to leave the territory they saw as rightfully belonging to Serbia; they wanted to humiliate Muslims, to violate them physically and emotionally, to literally penetrate them with hatred and force them to raise a child who would theoretically loathe them to the same degree as their rapist did. Rape was not used to express frustration by thoughtlessly hurting a stranger. Rather, it was perpetrated in an organized and premeditated way in so-called rape camps, where women were held captive and raped repeatedly throughout their stay. One 38-year-old Muslim reported that her 19-year-old former neighbor, who helped her