the banality of 'ethnic war' - college of arts and sciences · 2017-06-27 · the...

The Banality ofldquoEthnic Warrdquo

John Mueller

On December 7 1941as it is commonly put ldquothe Japaneserdquo attacked Pearl Harbor No one of coursetakes this expression literally to suggest that the entire population of Japan oreven a major portion of it directly participated in the assault Rather it isunderstood to mean that some of Japanrsquos military forces ordered into actionby Japanrsquos government and perhaps supported to varying degrees by theJapanese population launched the attack In discussions of ethnic war bycontrast such distinctions are often missing When we say ldquothe Serbsrdquo andldquothe Croatsrdquo are engaged in ethnic war the implication frequently is that thosetwo groups have descended into a sort of Hobbesian war of all against all andneighbor against neighbor

In this article I assess the violence that took place in the former Yugoslaviaand in Rwanda in the 1990s and argue that the whole concept of ldquoethnicwarfarerdquo may be severely misguided Specically insofar as it is taken to implya war of all against all and neighbor against neighbormdasha condition in whichpretty much everyone in one ethnic group becomes the ardent dedicated andmurderous enemy of everyone in another groupmdashethnic war essentially doesnot exist I argue instead that ethnic warfare more closely resembles nonethnicwarfare because it is waged by small groups of combatants groups thatpurport to ght and kill in the name of some larger entity Often in fact ldquoethnicwarrdquo is substantially a condition in which a mass of essentially mild ordinarypeople can unwillingly and in considerable bewilderment come under thevicious and arbitrary control of small groups of armed thugs

I consider rst the violent conicts in Croatia and Bosnia These werespawned not so much by the convulsive surging of ancient hatreds or byfrenzies whipped up by demagogic politicians and the media as by the minis-trations of smallmdashsometimes very smallmdashbands of opportunistic maraudersrecruited by political leaders and operating under their general guidanceMany of these participants were drawn from street gangs or from bands ofsoccer hooligans Others were criminals specically released from prison forthe purpose Their participation was required because the Yugoslav armydespite years of supposedly inuential nationalist propaganda and centuries

International Security Vol 25 No 1 (Summer 2000) pp 42ndash70copy 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

42

John Mueller is Hayes Chair of National Security Studies Mershon Center and Professor of Political Scienceat The Ohio State University His most recent book is Capitalism Democracy and Ralphrsquos Pretty GoodGrocery (Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 1999)

of supposedly pent-up ethnic hatreds substantially disintegrated early in thewar and refused to ght

A group of well-armed thugs and bullies encouraged by and working underrough constraints set out by ofcial security services would arrive or bandtogether in a community Sometimes operating with local authorities theywould then take control and persecute members of other ethnic groups whowould usually ee to areas protected by their own ethnic rufans sometimesto join them in seeking revenge Carnivals of often-drunken looting destruc-tion and violence would take place and othersmdashguiltily or not so guiltilymdashmight join in Gradually however many of the people under the thugsrsquoarbitrary and chaotic ldquoprotectionrdquo especially the more moderate ones andyoung men unwilling to be pressed into military service would emigrate tosafer places In all this nationalism was not so much the impelling force assimply the characteristic around which the marauders happened to have ar-rayed themselves

To explore the possibilities for generalizing from the Yugoslav experience Iassess very briey the extreme case of Rwanda in 1994 when ethnic Hutusengaged in genocidal massacres of ethnic Tutsis In recent history this isprobably the instance in which the Hobbesian all-against-all and neighbor-against-neighbor idea of ethnic warfare is most likely to hold Neverthelesseven in this case it seems clear that the main momentum of the killings wascarried by a relatively small number of specially trained Hutus who allyingthemselves with often-drunken criminal and hooligan opportunists went ona murderous rampage coordinated by local ofcials acting on orders fromabove By contrast the vast majority of Hutus seem to have stood by inconsiderable confusion and often indifference

The mechanism of violence in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda thenis remarkably banal Rather than reecting deep historic passions and hatredsthe violence seems to have been the result of a situation in which commonopportunistic sadistic and often distinctly nonideological marauders wererecruited and permitted free rein by political authorities Because such peopleare found in all societies the events in Yugoslavia and Rwanda are not peculiarto those locales but could happen almost anywhere under the appropriateconditions On the other hand there was nothing particularly inevitable aboutthe violence with different people in charge and with different policing andaccommodation procedures the savagery could have been avoided

Because the violence in Yugoslavia and Rwanda was carried out chiey bysmall ill-disciplined and essentially cowardly bands of thugs and bulliespolicing the situation would probably have been fairly easy for almost any

The Banality of ldquoEthnic Warrdquo 43

organized disciplined and sizable army An extreme aversion to casualties anda misguided assumption that the conicts stemmed from immutable ethnichatreds however made international military intervention essentially impos-sible until the violence appeared to have run its course1

Ethnic Warfare in Croatia and Bosnia

Two explanations are commonly given for the wars in the former YugoslaviaOne is that elemental and ancient ethnic hatreds had only temporarily andsupercially been kept in check by communism and that with its demisemurderous nationalism erupted This perspective has been developed mostfamously and inuentially by Robert Kaplan who described the Balkans as ldquoaregion of pure memoryrdquo where ldquoeach individual sensation and memory affectsthe grand movement of clashing peoplesrdquo and where the processes of historyand memory were ldquokept on holdrdquo by communism for forty-ve years ldquotherebycreating a kind of multiplier effect for violencerdquo2 The other explanation holds

1 I am concerned here with ethnic violence and warfaremdasha condition in which combatantsarrayed along ethnic lines seek to kill each othermdashnot particularly with ethnic hatreds It isimportant to distinguish common knee-jerk and sometimes hateful ethnic slursmdashno matter howunpleasant and politically incorrect their expression may often bemdashfrom prejudice that is ex-pressed in violence As James D Fearon and David D Laitin have pointed out ethnic violence isactually exceedingly rare when one considers how many Archie Bunkers there are in the worldand how many opportunities there are for it to occur Fearon and Laitin ldquoExplaining InterethnicCooperationrdquo American Political Science Review Vol 90 No 4 (December 1996) pp 716ndash717 Someanalysts argue that ldquoconicts among nations and ethnic groups are escalatingrdquo Samuel P Hunt-ington ldquoWhy International Primacy Mattersrdquo International Security Vol 17 No 4 (Spring 1993)p 71 Others believe ldquothere is a virtual epidemic of armed civil or intranational conictrdquo See DavidA Hamburg Preventing Contemporary Intergroup Violence (New York Carnegie Corporation of NewYork 1993) But such wars and conicts did not increase in number or intensity in the 1990s SeeYahya Sadowski The Myth of Global Chaos (Washington DC Brookings 1998) Ernest J Wilsonand Ted Robert Gurr ldquoFewer Nations Are Making Warrdquo Los Angeles Times August 22 1999 p M2Steven R David ldquoInternal War Causes and Curesrdquo World Politics Vol 49 No 4 (July 1997)pp 552ndash576 and James D Fearon and David D Laitin ldquoWeak States Rough Terrain and Large-Scale Ethnic Violence since 1945rdquo paper presented at the annual meeting of the American PoliticalScience Association Atlanta Georgia September 25 1999 Rather what is new is that some of thesewars and conicts have taken place in Europe an area that had previously been free fromsubstantial civil warfare for nearly half a century However militant nationalismmdashwhether violentor notmdashmay well already have had its day in Central and Eastern Europe Hypernationalists (andeven some that are not so hyper) who sometimes appeared threateningly formidable at the pollsin the early 1990s have been reduced in elections in many places to the point of extinguishment2 Robert D Kaplan ldquoA Readerrsquos Guide to the Balkansrdquo New York Times Book Review April 181993 pp 1 30ndash32 See also Robert D Kaplan ldquoHistoryrsquos Cauldronrdquo Atlantic Monthly June 1991pp 93ndash104 and Kaplan Balkan Ghosts A Journey through History (New York St Martinrsquos 1993)For Kaplanrsquos more recent doomsaying now focused also on Africa see his ldquoThe Coming AnarchyrdquoAtlantic February 1994 pp 44ndash76 For a devastating critique of the argument see Noel MalcolmldquoSeeing Ghostsrdquo National Interest Summer 1993 pp 83ndash88 See also VP Gagnon Jr ldquoEthnicNationalism and International Conict The Case of Serbiardquo International Security Vol 19 No 3

International Security 251 44

that the violence was a reaction to continuous nationalist propaganda spewedout by politicians and the media particularly on Serbian television that playedon old fears and hatreds As a Belgrade journalist put it to an Americanaudience ldquoYou must imagine a United States with every little television stationeverywhere taking exactly the same editorial linemdasha line dictated by DavidDuke You too would have war in ve yearsrdquo3

the shallowness of militant nationalism in yugoslaviaActually support for militant nationalism in Yugoslavia was not all thatdeep even at the time of its maximum notice and effect in the early 1990sThe rise of some militant nationalists in elections during that period stemmedless from their wide appeal and more from their ability to manipulate thesystem and from the disarray of their opposition In their key victories in1990 Franjo Tudjmanrsquos nationalists in Croatia massively outspent the poorlyorganized opposition using funds contributed by well-heeled militants in theCroatian diasporamdashparticularly in North America And their success wasvastly exaggerated by an electoral system foolishly designed by the outgoingcommunists that handed Tudjmanrsquos party 69 percent of the seats with only 42percent of the vote In the same election less than a quarter of the Serbsin Croatia voted for their nationalist party The same sort of distortionsthough to a lesser degree took place in the elections in Bosnia In earlyelections in Serbia Slobodan Miloševi controlled the media and essentiallybought the vote by illegally using public fundsmdashhardly a sign of enormouspublic appeal and an act that was foolhardy as well because it greatly accel-erated the breakup of the country Moreover like Tudjmanrsquos party Miloševi rsquosparty was comparatively well organized and widely based and had an enor-mous advantage under the election rules Although it garnered less than half

(Winter 199495) pp 133ndash134 Russell Hardin One for All The Logic of Group Conict (PrincetonNJ Princeton University Press 1995) chap 6 Sadowski Myth of Global Chaos and Brian HallldquoRebecca Westrsquos Warrdquo New Yorker April 15 1996 p 83 For Kaplanrsquos more recent reections seehis ldquoReading Too Much into a Bookrdquo New York Times June 13 1999 p 4-173 Quoted in Noel Malcolm Bosnia A Short History (New York New York University Press 1994)p 252 On this argument see for example Christopher Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapse (NewYork New York University Press 1995) pp viii 10 242 Warren Zimmermann Origins of aCatastrophe Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers (New York Times Books 1996) pp 120ndash122 ChristopherCvii ldquoA Culture of Humiliationrdquo National Interest Summer 1993 p 82 Jack Snyder and KarenBallentine ldquoNationalism and the Marketplace of Ideasrdquo International Security Vol 21 No 2 (Fall1996) pp 25ndash30 Michael Ignatieff ldquoThe Balkan Tragedyrdquo New York Review of Books May 13 1993p 3 Noel Malcolm ldquoThe Roots of Bosnian Horror Lie Not So Deeprdquo New York Times October 191998 Tim Judah The Serbs History Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven ConnYale University Press 1997) pp 285 309 and Peter Maass Love Thy Neighbor A Story of War (NewYork Vintage 1996) p 227


the vote it gained 78 percent of the seats Miloševi rsquos fortunes were furtherenhanced because Kosovo Albanians boycotted the election allowing his partyto win that area4

A poll conducted throughout Yugoslavia in the summer and autumn of 1990even as nationalists were apparently triumphing in elections more accuratelyindicates the state of opinion after centuries of supposed ethnic hatreds andafter years of nationalist propaganda The question ldquoDo you agree that every(Yugoslav) nation should have a national state of its ownrdquo elicited the follow-ing responses completely agree 16 percent agree to some extent 7 percentundecided 10 percent do not agree in part 6 percent and do not agree at all61 percent5

At times particularly in Serbia during the rise of Miloševi militant nation-alists were able to orchestrate huge public demonstrations which have oftenbeen taken to suggest their popular appeal But in general it is unwise to takelarge noisy crowds which clearly are heavily self-selected as representingpublic opinion more generally6 Moreover much of the crowd behavior inYugoslavia in the early 1990s was manipulatedmdashMiloševi rsquos party often paidmobs with free food transportation and liquor7 And if crowd behavior is tobe taken as indicative of wider attitudes it should be pointed out that even

4 On Tudjmanrsquos spending see Susan L Woodward Balkan Tragedy Chaos and Dissolution after theCold War (Washington DC Brookings 1995) pp 119 229 Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapsep 199 Lenard J Cohen Broken Bonds Yugoslaviarsquos Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition2d ed (Boulder Colo Westview 1995) p 95 Marcus Tanner Croatia A Nation Forged in War (NewHaven Conn Yale University Press 1997) p 222 and David Binder ldquoGojko Susak ldquoDefenseMinister of Croatia Is Dead at 53rdquo New York Times May 5 1998 p A25 On Tudjmanrsquos electoralsuccess see Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapse p 127 Woodward Balkan Tragedy pp 117ndash119Laura Silber and Allan Little Yugoslavia Death of a Nation (New York Penguin 1997) p 90 andCohen Broken Bonds pp 99ndash100 On the Serb vote in Croatia see Gagnon ldquoEthnic Nationalismand International Conictrdquo p 155 and Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapse p 127 Somewhatsimilarly a large portion of those Serbs in Bosnia who lived outside areas controlled by Serbnationalists voted with the Muslims for independence from Serbia in a 1992 referendum seeGagnon ldquoEthnic Nationalism and International Conictrdquo p 163 On Bosnia see Steven L Burgand Paul S Shoup The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina Ethnic Conict and International Intervention(Armonk NY M E Sharpe 1999) pp 50ndash51 57 On Serbia see Gagnon ldquoEthnic Nationalismand International Conictrdquo p 154 Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapse p 121 Brian Hall TheImpossible Country A Journey through the Last Days of Yugoslavia (New York Penguin 1994) p 48Woodward Balkan Tragedy pp 130 448ndash449 Mladjan Dinkic The Economics of Destruction (Bel-grade Video Nedeljnik 1995) pp 30 61ndash66 see also Judah The Serbs p 260 On vote percentagessee Cohen Broken Bonds p 158 On the Albanian vote see Woodward Balkan Tragedy p 1215 Laslo Sekelj Yugoslavia The Process of Disintegration (Highland Lakes NJ Atlantic Researchand Publications 1992) p 2776 Thus because anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in the 1960s in the United States were predomi-nantly young most commentators came to hold that young people were more opposed to the warthan older people yet poll data clearly show the opposite to have been the case John MuellerWar Presidents and Public Opinion (New York Wiley 1973) pp 136ndash1407 Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapse p 98


the poorly organized opposition was able to mount massive demonstrationsin 1991 and 1992 in Zagreb Belgrade and Sarajevo8

Finally the casual notion that each ethnic or national group in Yugoslavia(or indeed anywhere) is united by deep bonds of affection is substantiallyawed Serbs in Serbia have expressed little affection for the desperate andoften rough rural Serbs who have ed to their country from war-torn Croatiaand Bosnia9 Indeed as Christopher Bennett argues in profound contrast withKaplan after World War II the ldquogreat divide within Yugoslav society wasincreasingly that between rural and urban communities not that betweenpeoplesrdquo10

armed thugs and the banality of ldquoethnic warfarerdquo in yugoslaviaThe violence that erupted in Yugoslavia principally derived not from a frenzyof nationalismmdashwhether ancient or newly inspiredmdashbut rather from the ac-tions of recently empowered and unpoliced thugs Politicians may have startedthe wars and they may have whipped up a fair amount of hatred But theeffective murderous core of the wars were not hordes composed of ordinarycitizens ripped loose from their repression or incited into violence against theirneighbors Rather the politicians found it necessary to recruit thugs and hoo-ligans for the job

Signicantly the Serbian (or Yugoslav) army substantially disintegratedearly in the hostilities There may well have been hatreds and there surely was

8 On Zagreb see ldquoYugoslavia Death of a Nationrdquo Discovery Channel 1995 On Belgrade seeGagnon ldquoEthnic Nationalism and International Conictrdquo pp 157ndash158 Silber and Little Yugoslaviachap 9 Judah The Serbs p 174 and Chuck Sudetic Blood and Vengeance One Familyrsquos Story of theWar in Bosnia (New York WW Norton 1998) p 85 On Sarajevo see Judah The Serbs p 211 andRobert J Donia and John VA Fine Jr Bosnia and Hercegovina A Tradition Betrayed (New YorkColumbia University Press 1994) p 19 Christine Spolar ldquoLesser Serbs in Greater Serbia Refugees of Croatia Fighting Find LittleWelcome from Fellow Serbsrdquo Washington Post May 15 1995 p A36 Woodward Balkan Tragedyp 364 Stephen Kinzer ldquoYugoslavia Deports Refugee Serbs to Fight for Rebels in Bosnia andCroatiardquo New York Times July 6 1995 p A6 and Roger Cohen Hearts Grown Brutal Sagas ofSarajevo (New York Random House 1998) p 29610 Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapse p 63 See also Woodward Balkan Tragedy pp 238 241Ignatieff ldquoBalkan Tragedyrdquo p 4 John R Bowen ldquoThe Myth of Global Ethnic Conictrdquo Journal ofDemocracy Vol 7 No 4 (October 1996) pp 3ndash14 and Sadowski Myth of Global Chaos pp 78ndash80Interestingly in his discussion of the Bosnian war Peter Maass observes that ldquoto a surprising extentthis was a war of poor rural Serbs against wealthier urban Muslims a Deliverance scenariordquo MaassLove Thy Neighbor p 159 Donia and Fine note that it was the ldquorelatively uneducated armedhillsmen with a hostility toward urban culture and the state institutions (including taxes) that gowith itrdquo who proved ldquosusceptible to Serbian chauvinist propagandardquo ldquoallowed themselves to berecruited into Serb paramilitary unitsrdquo and formed a signicant portion of those shelling Bosniarsquoscities Donia and Fine Bosnia and Hercegovina p 28 See also Fearon and Laitin ldquoWeak StatesRough Terrainldquo


propaganda But when ordinary Serb soldiers were given an opportunity toexpress these presumed proclivities or to act in response to the ingenioustelevised imprecations in government-sanctioned violence they professed theydid not know why they were ghting and often mutinied or deserted enmasse11 Meanwhile back in Serbia young men reacted mainly by determineddraft-dodging Some 150000 or more quickly emigrated or went undergroundIn one city only two of the 2000ndash3000 ldquovolunteersrdquo expected in a call-upshowed up and in several towns there were virtual mutinies against conscrip-tion Overall only 50 percent of Serbian reservists and only 15 percent inBelgrade obeyed orders to report for duty12

Because Serbs from Serbia proper were unwilling to ght outside their ownrepublic Belgrade had to reshape its approach to the wars in Croatia andBosnia in major ways As a Serbian general put it modication of Belgradersquosmilitary plans was made necessary by ldquothe lack of success in mobilisation andthe desertion rateldquo13 Part of the solution involved arming the locals particu-larly in Serb areas of Croatia and Bosnia14 But in general the ghting qualityof the militaries especially initially was very poor There was a lack of disci-

11 Norman Cigar ldquoThe Serbo-Croatian War 1991 Political and Military Dimensionsrdquo Journal ofStrategic Studies Vol 16 No 3 (September 1993) pp 317ndash319 Woodward Balkan Tragedy p 238Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapse p 167 Ed Vulliamy Seasons in Hell Understanding BosniarsquosWar (New York Simon and Schuster 1994) p 19 Miloš Vasi ldquoThe Yugoslav Army and thePost-Yugoslav Armiesrdquo in David A Dyker and Ivan Vejvoda eds Yugoslavia and After A Studyin Fragmentation Despair and Rebirth (London Longman 1996) p 128 Burg and Shoup War inBosnia-Herzegovina p 51 Gagnon ldquoEthnic Nationalism and International Conictrdquo p 162 Silberand Little Yugoslavia p 177 Tanner Croatia p 269 and Judah The Serbs pp 185 18912 Jasminka Udovicki and Stojan Cerovic ldquoThe Peoplersquos Mass Murdererrdquo Village Voice November7 1995 p 27 Stipe Sikavica ldquoThe Collapse of Titorsquos Armyrdquo in Jasminka Udovi ki and JamesRidgeway eds Yugoslaviarsquos Ethnic Nightmare (New York Lawrence Hill 1995) p 138 CigarldquoSerbo-Croatian Warrdquo p 315 Tanner Croatia p 270 Judah The Serbs p 185 and Burg and ShoupWar in Bosnia-Herzegovina p 51 See also Silber and Little Yugoslavia p 177 and Gagnon ldquoEthnicNationalism and International Conictrdquo p 162 See also Silber and Little Yugoslavia p 177 In allcommunist countries certainly including Yugoslavia people were determinedly subject to decadesof communist propaganda in the media Yet as history has shown manymdashprobably mostmdashfailedin the end to be convinced by it If media promotion could guarantee lasting impact all Yugoslavswould today be worshiping Tito and all Americans would be driving Edsels For a discussionsee John Mueller Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1994)pp 129ndash136 Warren Zimmerman observes ldquoMy most difcult task has been to convey theconviction that all Yugoslavs werenrsquot the bloodthirsty extremists so ubiquitously visible in Westernnews accounts Most of the people my wife and I met in six years of living in Yugoslavia werepeaceful and decent without a trace of the hostility on which nationalism feeds What amazedme was how many Yugoslavs resisted the incessant racist propagandardquo Zimmerman Origins of aCatastrophe p xi see also pp 209ndash21013 Tanner Croatia p 269 See also United Nations Commission of Experts Final Report of theUnited Nations Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992)Annex IIIA Special Forces ed M Cherif Bassiouni December 28 1994 par 2914 Burg and Shoup War in Bosnia-Herzegovina p 130 and Judah The Serbs pp 170ndash172 192ndash195


pline ineffective command and control and especially in the case of the Serbsa reluctance to take casualties Such deciencies as Steven Burg and PaulShoup observe ldquoled all sides to rely on irregulars and special unitsrdquo15

The appearance in the wars of the paramilitaries was caused in part by thecollapse of army morale but their presence may also have helped to aggravatethat collapse An internal Yugoslav army memo from early in the conict foundthem to be dangerous to ldquomilitary moralerdquo because their ldquoprimary motive wasnot ghting against the enemy but robbery of private property and inhumantreatment of Croatian civiliansrdquo16

The most dynamic (and murderous) Serbian units were notably composednot of committed nationalists or ideologues nor of locals out to get theirneighbors nor of ordinary people whipped into a frenzy by demagogues andthe media but rather of common criminals recruited for the task Specicallythe politicians urged underworld and hooligan groups to get into the actionand it appears that thousands of prison inmates promised shortened sentencesand enticed by the prospect that they could ldquotake whatever booty you canrdquowere released for the war effort17 Thus to a substantial degree the collapse ofthe army led to a privatization of the war and loot comprised the chief formof payment The releasees together with other criminals and like-mindedrecruits generally worked independently improvising their tactics as theywent along However there does seem to have been a fair amount of coordi-nation in Serb areas mainly by Miloševi rsquos secret police The army such as itwas enforced an overall framework of order and sometimes directly partici-pated in the deprivations as well18

Some of the thugs and hooligans joined and bolstered what remained of theYugoslav army According to Miloš Vasi a leading Serb journalist howeverldquothey behaved in a wholly unsoldierly way wearing all sorts of Serb chauvinistinsignia beards and knives were often drunk (like many of the regular

15 Burg and Shoup War in Bosnia-Herzegovina p 137 There were at least eighty-three of thesegroups operating in Croatia and Bosnia fty-six Serb thirteen Croat and fourteen Muslim with36000ndash66000 members See UN Experts Final Report par 1416 UN Experts Final Report par 10017 Julian Borger ldquoThe Presidentrsquos Secret Henchmenrdquo Guardian Weekly February 16 1997 p 8Cohen Hearts Grown Brutal pp 192 410ndash411 UN Experts Final Report par 3 30 and DavidFirestone ldquoSerb Lawmaker Is Called Vicious Killerrdquo St Louis Post-Dispatch January 3 1993 p 1ASee also Woodward Balkan Tragedy pp 238 249 265 Vasi ldquoYugoslav Armyrdquo p 128 Udovickiand Cerovic ldquoPeoplersquos Mass Murdererldquo and Michael Ignatieff The Warriorrsquos Honor Ethnic Warand the Modern Conscience (New York Henry Holt 1997) p 13218 Vasi ldquoYugoslav Armyrdquo p 134 Borger ldquoPresidentrsquos Secret Henchmenldquo Silber and LittleYugoslavia pp 177ndash178 Tanner Croatia p 245 Judah The Serbs chap 9 and UN Experts FinalReport par 18 24


soldiers too) looted and killed or harassed civilians Ofcers rarely dareddiscipline themrdquo19

Others joined semicoherent paramilitary groups like Vojislav Šešeljrsquos Chet-niks20 and Arkanrsquos Tigers organizations already heavily composed of crimi-nals adventurers mercenary opportunists and in the case of the Tigers soccerhooligans Arkan (Zeljko Ra njatovi ) had been the leader of Delije the ofcialfan club of Belgradersquos Red Star soccer team which not unlike other soccerclubs had become a magnet for hoodlums and unemployable young men theTigers seem to have been built from that membership 21 Arkanrsquos forces seemto have functioned essentially as mercenaries As one Bosnian Serb govern-ment ofcial put it ldquoHe is very expensive but also very efcientrdquo22

Still others seem to have gone off on their own serving as warlords in theareas they came to dominate These independent or semi-independent para-military and warlord units estimates Vasi ldquoconsisted on average of 80 percent common criminals and 20 per cent fanatical nationalists The latter didnot usually last long (fanaticism is bad for business)rdquo23 There were also manyldquoweekend warriorsrdquo men who joined the war from Serbia and elsewhere onlyintermittently and then mainly to rob and pillage enriching themselves in theprocess24 Similarly the initial ghting forces of Bosnia and of Croatia werealso substantially made up of small bands of criminals and violent opportun-ists recruited or self-recruited from street gangs and organized mobs25

19 Vasi ldquoYugoslav Armyrdquo p 12820 One of the most fanatical of Serb nationalists the political scientist Šešelj who spent a yearteaching at the University of Michigan in his younger years later seems to have become mentallyunbalanced as the result of the torture and beatings he endured while in prison in Yugoslavia forcounterrevolutionary activities One academic colleague described him as ldquodisturbed totally lostand out of his mindrdquo See UN Experts Final Report par 107 108 see also Judah The Serbs p 18721 UN Experts Final Report par 129 Judah The Serbs p 186 and Sudetic Blood and Vengeancep 98 The overlap between soccer hooligans and criminals seems to be very high See Bill BufordAmong the Thugs (New York WW Norton 1991) p 28 Also associated are racist attitudesa proclivity for extreme right-wing politics a capacity to imbibe huge amounts of liquor astrident and vicious boorishness a deep need for camaraderie and for being accepted by theldquoladsrdquo and an afnity for even a lusting after the thrill of violence On the war-anticipatingpitched battle between supporters of the Zagreb and Belgrade soccer clubs in 1990 see TannerCroatia p 22822 UN Experts Final Report par 23 2623 Vasi ldquoYugoslav Armyrdquo p 13424 Sikavica ldquoCollapse of Titorsquos Armyrdquo p 137 There was one paramilitary group identied asldquoThe Weekendersrdquo that ventured from Bijeljina to Br ko each weekend over a three-year periodto plunder and vandalize See UN Experts Final Report par 31725 Particularly in the case of Croatia as Bennett notes many of the most extreme ghters wereemigreacute adventurers from abroad See Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapse p 165 See also HallImpossible Country p 11 David Rieff Slaughterhouse (New York Simon and Schuster 1995) p 66Tony Horwitz met German skinheads in Zagreb who had come ldquofor a bit of graduate trainingrdquoSee Horwitz ldquoBalkan Death Trip Scenes from a Futile Warrdquo Harperrsquos March 1993 p 41


Arkan began as a juvenile delinquent and later developed into a skilled bankrobber plying his trade mostly in northern Europe (dashingly he often left thetellers bouquets of roses) He also became a prison breakout artist escapingfrom jails in Belgium the Netherlands and Germany Returning to Belgradethe fugitive became a respected member of the criminal underground enjoyeda special relationship with the police and with the internal affairs ministry andran a successful ice cream and pastry shop26 Another Serb paramilitary leaderwho called himself ldquoCaptain Draganrdquo had reportedly been a pimp in theSydney underworld (working in the Knin area his men were known asldquoKnindjasrdquo after the cartoon characters)27 For their part the Muslims wereprotected by Celo a convicted rapist and by Juka a former mob boss racket-eer and underworld thug28 And the Croats had Tuta a former protectionracketeer the mere mention of whose name could ldquocause an entire village topanicrdquo29

As Warren Zimmermann observes ldquothe dregs of societymdashembezzlers thugseven professional killersmdashrose from the slime to become freedom ghters andnational heroesrdquo Robert Block notes that ldquogangsters outlaws and criminalshave had a special place in the war in the former Yugoslavia Their skills inorganizing people and their ruthlessness made them natural choices for Balkanrabble-rousers looking for men to defend cities or serve as nationalist shocktroopsrdquo And David Rieff points out that ldquoone of the earliest deepest and mostpervasive effects of the ghtingrdquo was ldquoto turn the social pyramid on itshead Simple boys from the countryside and tough kids from the townsfound that their guns made them the ones who could start amassing theDeutschemarks and the privileges sexual and otherwiserdquo30

26 UN Experts Final Report par 125ndash128 see also Sudetic Blood and Vengeance pp 97ndash98 He wasassassinated gangland-style in Belgrade in January 200027 UN Experts Final Report par 206 and Tanner Croatia p 245 There was also a group identiedas the ldquoKnind a Turtlesrdquo but it is not clear whether this is the same band as the one led by CaptainDragan See UN Experts Final Report n 493 For completeness it should be reported that aparamilitary unit in Bosnia was led by a man calling himself ldquoCommander Turtlerdquo See ibid par31128 Cohen Hearts Grown Brutal p 280 Robert Block ldquoKillersrdquo New York Review of Books Novem-ber 18 1993 p 9 UN Experts Final Report par 74 and Maass Love Thy Neighbor p 3129 Block ldquoKillersrdquo p 9 On these issues see also Anna Husarska ldquoRocky-Road Warriorrdquo NewRepublic December 4 1995 pp 16ndash17 Tanner Croatia p 245 Rieff Slaughterhouse pp 131ndash132Vulliamy Seasons in Hell pp 314ndash316 Ignatieff Warriorrsquos Honor p 131 Burg and Shoup War inBosnia-Herzegovina pp 137ndash139 and Sadowski Myth of Global Chaos p 16330 Zimmermann Origins of a Catastrophe p 152 Block ldquoKillersrdquo p 9 Rieff Slaughterhouse p 130Reportage by Peter Maass is peppered with such phrases as ldquodrunken hillbilliesrdquo ldquodeath andthuggeryrdquo ldquothey donrsquot wear normal uniforms they donrsquot have many teethrdquo ldquothe trigger ngersbelonged to drunksrdquo ldquothe Bosnians might be the underdogs but most of their frontline soldierswere crooksrdquo ldquobulliesrdquo ldquoa massive oafrdquo ldquoa foul-smelling warlordrdquo ldquomouthing the words rsquoBang


There was also Rambo-like affectation Each ghter dressed as if ldquohe hadbeen cast as a thug by a movie directorrdquo observes Block Indeed one Serbianparamilitary unit called itself ldquothe Rambosrdquo and went around in webbed masksand black gloves with black ribbons fetchingly tied around their foreheads31

Naser Ori a muscular and charismatic former bodyguard who became theMuslim warlord of Srebrenica and until 1995 its protector liked to wearleather jackets designer sunglasses and thick gold chains Members of theMuslim paramilitary group the ldquoBlack Swansrdquo which sometimes served as thebodyguard for Bosniarsquos president when he ventured outside Sarajevo wore around patch depicting a black swan having intercourse with a supine woman32

Thus as Susan Woodward notes ldquoparamilitary gangs foreign mercenariesand convicted criminals roamed the territory under ever less civil controlrdquo Andldquowar crimesrdquo observes Norman Cigar were their ldquoprimary military mis-sionrdquo33 Vladan Vasilijevi an expert on organized crime says that most of thewell-documented atrocities in Bosnia were committed by men with long crimi-nal records And a United Nations (UN) commission notes a ldquostrong correla-tionrdquo between paramilitary activity and reports of killing of civilians rapetorture destruction of property looting detention facilities and mass graves34

yoursquore deadrsquo through rotten teethrdquo ldquoan unshaven soldier would point his gun at a desired itemand gruntrdquo ldquoonly drunks and bandits ventured outsiderdquo ldquogoons with gunsrdquo ldquoSerb soldiers orthugsmdashand the difference is hard to tellrdquo See Maass Love Thy Neighbor pp 6 7 16 30 42 48 6169 77 79 80 85 Reporter Ed Vulliamy describes them as ldquoboozy at their best wild and sadisticat their worstrdquo or as ldquotoothless goonsrdquo with ldquoinammable breathrdquo See Vulliamy Seasons in Hellpp 19 4631 Block ldquoKillersrdquo UN Experts Final Report par 291 and Cohen Hearts Grown Brutal p 12632 Burg and Shoup War in Bosnia-Herzegovina p 137 and UN Experts Final Report at par 14233 Woodward Balkan Tragedy pp 254 356 485 and Cigar ldquoSerbo-Croatian Warrdquo p 323 See alsoMischa Glenny The Fall of Yugoslavia The Third Balkan War (New York Penguin 1993) p 185Chuck Sudetic ldquoA rsquoWild Eastrsquo Revival in Serbian-Held Croatiardquo New York Times September 211992 p A6 Cheryl Benard ldquoBosnia Was It Inevitablerdquo in Zalmay M Khalilzad ed Lessons fromBosnia (Santa Monica Calif RAND Corporation 1993) pp 18ndash25 Vulliamy Seasons in Hellpp 307ndash316 and Bob Stewart Broken Lives A Personal View of the Bosnian Conict (LondonHarperCollins 1994) pp 318ndash319 See also Rieff Slaughterhouse p 83 Ignatieff Warriorrsquos Honorp 131 and Sikavica ldquoCollapse of Titorsquos Armyrdquo p 138 Vulliamy quotes Reuters reporter AndrejGustin i ldquoGangs of gun-toting Serbs rule Fo a turning the once quiet town into a nightmarelandscape of burning streets and houses Some are members of paramilitary groups fromSerbia self-proclaimed crusaders against Islam and defenders of the Serbian nation others arewild-eyed local men hostile towards strangers and happy to have driven out their Muslimneighbors No one seems to be in command and ill-disciplined and bad-tempered gunmen stopand detain people at willrdquo See Vulliamy Seasons in Hell pp 90ndash91 Many of the ldquowild-eyed localmenrdquo according to another report were local criminals who ldquodonned uniforms and took partenthusiastically in the subsequent lootingrdquo See Julian Borger ldquoFriends or Foesrdquo Guardian WeeklyJanuary 19 1997 p 23 Similarly the town of Bosanski Novi was ruled by ve roaming Serbianarmed groups the most brutal of which was a well-known local maa known as the ldquoSpare Ribsrdquothat had donned uniforms See Judah The Serbs p 22734 On Vasilijevic see Firestone ldquoSerb Lawmaker Is Called Vicious Killerrdquo UN Experts FinalReport par 21


the stages of war and ethnic cleansingWhat passed for ldquoethnic warfarerdquo in Bosnia and Croatia thus seems to havebeen something far more banal the creation of communities of criminal vio-lence and pillage35 In the end the wars rather resembled the movie images ofthe American Wild West or of gangland Chicago and often had far less to dowith nationalism than with criminal opportunism and sadistic cruelty oftenenhanced with liquormdashliquid courage There seem to have been four stages tothe process takeover carnival revenge and occupation and desertion

takeover Recruited and encouraged by leading politicians and operatingunder a general framework of order provided by the army a group of well-armed thugsmdashor skinhead or redneck or soccer hooligan or Hellrsquos Angelstypesmdashwould emerge in an area where the former civil order had ceased toexist or where the police actually or effectively were in alliance with them Asthe only group willingmdashindeed sometimes eagermdashto use force they wouldquickly take control Members of other ethnic groups would be subject toviolent intimidation at best atrocities at worst and they would leave the areain despair Because there was no coherent or unbiased police force to protectthese victims their best recourse was to ee and it would not take muchpersuasion to get them to do somdashindeed rumors or implied threats could oftenbe sufcient Once the forces of Arkan and Šešelj had established their mur-derous reputations for example the mere warning that they were on their waywas often enough to empty a village of its non-Serb residents36

Any co-ethnics who might oppose the thugsrsquo behavior would be subject toeven more focused violence and would either be forced out killed or cowedinto submission One unusually candid Croatian ex-militiaman recalled thathis unit had killed mostly Serb civilians but also unsympathetic Croats37 And

35 A partial exception to this pattern was the slaughter of thousands of Muslim men by Serbsafter they successfully invaded the ldquosafe areardquo of Srebrenica in 1995 a seemingly calculated andrather orderly massacre that was carried out by what appears to have been the regular army Onthis issue see Sadowski Myth of Global Chaos p 133 Given that the army had become increasinglythuggish by this time a formal distinction with less-organized bands of thugs may be somewhatstrained Nevertheless this murderous episode does seem to show more method and less madnessthan the more capricious and improvisatory killings that had taken place during the main periodof ethnic cleansing in 1992 As was typical in this war however the killing squads at Srebrenicawere often shored up with generous quantities of liquor See Judah The Serbs p 241 Although inno way excusing the massacre it may be relevant to point out that the Serbs were deeply bitterbecause although they had allowed the city to become a UN safe area in 1993 under an agreementthat it would be demilitarized it had repeatedly been used as a base for attacks on Serb civilians David Rohde Endgame The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica Europersquos Worst Massacre since World War II(New York Farrar Straus and Giroux 1997) pp xvi 215ndash216 40936 UN Experts Final Report par 10437 Chris Hedges ldquoCroatianrsquos Confession Describes Torture and Killing on Vast Scalerdquo New YorkTimes September 5 1997 p A1


a UN report notes ldquoIn places where the local Serb population was initiallyfairly friendly once Arkanrsquos thugs arrived the situation changed and they wereintimidated into ostracizing the Muslims and behaving toward them withhostilityrdquo38

In many cases the dominating forces could be remarkably small The Bos-nian town of Višegrad on the Drina River for example was substantiallycontrolled for years by a returned hometown boy Milan Luki and somefteen well-armed companions including his brother a cousin and a localwaiter who often went barefoot Using violent and often sadistic intimidationthis tiny band forced the 14500 Muslims in the town to leave and suppressedany expressions of dissent from local Serbsmdashmany of whom took advantageof the situation to prot from the Muslim exodus39 Then there is the town ofTesli controlled it is estimated by ldquove or six men well placed and willingto use violence 40 The violence that in 1992 tore apart Srebrenica a town of37000 people was perpetrated by no more than thirty Serb and Muslimextremists Ori the Muslim warlord who controlled Srebrenica for severalyears (and who was mysteriously absent with his gang when Serb forcesoverran the town in 1995) led an armed band with a nucleus of only fteenmen41 Arkanrsquos much-feared forces consisted of a core of 200 men and perhapstotaled no more than 500ndash100042

The most common emotion among ordinary people caught up in this cy-clone of violence and pillage seems to have been bewilderment rather thanrage Working with Muslim refugees early in the Bosnia war Cheryl Benardfound them ldquoto be totally at a loss to explain how the hostility of the Serbswas possible All of them without exception say they lived and worked withand were close friends with Serbsrdquo Far from seeing the violence as the delayed

38 Quoted in Husarska ldquoRocky-Road Warriorrdquo p 16 see also Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapsep 191 Mike OrsquoConnor ldquoNationalism Checkmates Pawns Too in Bosniardquo New York Times March28 1996 p A3 Rieff Slaughterhouse p 110 Judah The Serbs p 195 and Peter Maass ldquoIn BosniarsquoDisloyal Serbsrsquo Share Plight of Oppositionrdquo Washington Post August 24 1992 p A1 39 Chris Hedges ldquoFrom One Serbian Militia Chief A Trail of Plunder and Slaughterrdquo New YorkTimes March 25 1996 p A1 Ed Vulliamy ldquoBloody Train of Butchery at the Bridgerdquo GuardianMarch 11 1996 p 9 Maass Love Thy Neighbor pp 12ndash14 157 UN Experts Final Report par246ndash250 540ndash556 Sudetic Blood and Vengeance pp 120ndash125 Luki is reported to be spending thepostwar years in Serbia a wealthy man Vulliamy ldquoBloody Train of Butcheryrdquo Other reportshowever indicate that he has sought psychiatric care has become unhinged sleeps with all thelights on and drives around in a different car all the time Still he claims to be proud he killedso many Muslims in the war and says he has an almost uncontrollable urge to kill again SudeticBlood and Vengeance pp 355ndash356 35840 Mike OrsquoConnor ldquoModerate Bosnian Serbs Plot in Secrecy for Unityrdquo New York Times July 311996 p A341 Rohde Endgame pp xiv 60 354 35542 Vasi ldquoYugoslav Armyrdquo p 134 and UN Experts Final Report par 92 138


eruption of ancient hatreds and as evidence of the strength of ethnic tiesBenard suggests that ldquoone could argue that Bosnia shows how weak and howuid political identity really isrdquo43

carnival The thugs often exercised absolute power in their small efdomsand lorded it over their new subjects Carnivals of looting and destructionwould take place as would orgies of rape arbitrary violence and murder androaring drunkenness pay often came in the form of alcohol and cigarettes44

Sadists may make up a small percentage in any population but in thesecircumstances they rose to the occasion and reveled in it In a number ofplaces notes Tim Judah ldquoreal psychopaths were rampaging across the coun-tryside indulging in cruel bizarre and sadistic killingsrdquo Peter Maass reportsldquoan odd enthusiasm on the part of the torturers who laughed sang and gotdrunk while inicting their crimes They werenrsquot just doing a job they weredoing something they enjoyedrdquo and ldquothere were plenty of Serbs who enjoyedkilling civilians and eagerly sought the opportunity to do so These killersnever had so much funrdquo45

In the words of a UN ofcial in this unrestrained new world run byldquogunslingers thugs and essentially criminalsrdquo others might opportunisticallyjoin the carnivals and orgies After all if the property of a local Muslim is goingto be looted and set are (like the store of a local Korean during the LosAngeles riots of 1992) it may seem sensible to somemdasheven rationalmdashto jointhe thieves No high-minded moral restraint about such vulture-like behaviorwill do the departed owner any good Additionally various adventurersmercenaries and revenge-seekersmdashoften belonging to the policemdashmight joinin And so might some of those (particularly teenagers) who nd excitementcomradeship clarity and theatricalitymdashnot to mention material protmdashin warand in its terrifying awesome destructiveness46 In the process many ordinaryresidents might become compromised sometimes willingly For example oneBosnian Serb policeman used his position Schindler-like to save the lives of

43 Benard ldquoBosniardquo p 24 See also Malcolm ldquoRoots of Bosnian Horrorrdquo Halina Grzymala-Moszczcynska a Polish sociologist working with Muslim refugees in Poland reports that therefugees she has interviewed never refer to their persecutors as ldquoSerbsrdquo but always as ldquocriminalsrdquoPersonal conversation44 Woodward Balkan Tragedy p 24945 Judah The Serbs p 233 and Maass Love Thy Neighbor pp 52 111 See also Julian Borger ldquoDayof Reckoning for the Men of Deathrdquo Guardian Weekly July 20 1997 p 746 Woodward Balkan Tragedy p 249 and Sudetic ldquoA rsquoWild Eastrsquo Revivalrdquo On the phenomenonmore broadly see John Mueller Quiet Cataclysm (New York HarperCollins 1995) chap 8 J GlennGray The Warriors Reections on Men in Battle (New York Harper and Row 1959) William BroylesJr ldquoWhy Men Love Warrdquo Esquire November 1984 pp 55ndash65 and Dave Grossman On Killing ThePsychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston Little Brown 1995)


several Muslims but under the extraordinary conditions of the time he alsoprobably raped two or more of themmdashin at least one instance after proposingmarriage47

revenge Some among the brutalized might wish to ghtmdashand to seekrevenge againstmdashtheir persecutors In general they found that they were bestadvised not to try to improvise local resistance but rather to ee with theirfellow ethnics and then to join like-minded armed bands in more hospitableparts of the country Thus the special Muslim unit Black Swans was suppos-edly made up of volunteers aged twenty to twenty-two who had been or-phaned by the war And the Muslimsrsquo ldquoeliterdquo Seventeenth Krajina brigade waslabeled ldquothe angry army of the dispossessedrdquo though questions have beenraised about how adequately it actually fought48

Members of each group would quickly nd sometimes to their helplessdisgust that their thugs at least were willing to ght to protect them from themurderous thugs on the other side Often the choice was essentially one ofbeing dominated by vicious bigots of onersquos own ethnic group or by viciousbigots of another ethnic group Given that range of alternatives the choice waseasy

occupation and desertion Life in areas controlled by the thugs could bemiserable as the masters argued among themselves and looked for furtherprey among those remaining whatever their ethnic background49 As Rieffobserves the involvement of gangsters on all sides meant that the ldquopoliticalaims of the war became hopelessly intertwined on a day-to-day level withproteering and black market activitiesrdquo50

Corruption and nepotism in the Serb areas of Croatia and Bosnia includingthe Bosnian Serb capital of Pale were so endemic that the war effort wassubstantially harmed51 Meanwhile in the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica menloyal to Ori controlled the few jobs in town lived in the larger homes and

47 Borger ldquoFriends or Foesrdquo48 Burg and Shoup War in Bosnia-Herzegovina p 13749 Some of this behavior surfaced earlymdashin the ghting in Croatia in 1991 As one Serb from thearea recalled ldquoI donrsquot deny that I myself did some shooting but the worst crimes were committedby the irregulars who came in from Serbia First they looted the homes of Croats When they cameback a second time they started looting Serb houses because the Croat houses had already beenrobbed cleanrdquo Another Serb from the same village reports that after defending their homes for sixmonths (and never seeing a single regular army ofcer or soldier) they were ordered togetherwith some of their Croat neighbors who had joined them in home defense to evacuate forresettlement in Bosnia On the way they were all robbed by the Serbian forces of Šešelj EjubŠtitkovac ldquoCroatia The First Warrdquo in Udovi ki and Ridgeway Yugoslaviarsquos Ethnic Nightmare p16050 Rieff Slaughterhouse p 13251 Judah The Serbs pp 221ndash223 252ndash255


had more food than others They prospered by exaggerating the popula-tion size in order to get excess humanitarian aid and then hoarding it to driveup prices before selling it on the black market at a killing When three oppo-nents to this feudal arrangement come forward they were ambushed and inone case killed Because the refugees were essentially being used as humanshields to protect the property and income of Ori and his men Muslims werenot allowed to leave yet little effort was made to improve the lives of thepeople especially the refugees unless it brought personal prot to the rulinggang52

In war-torn Sarajevo Jukarsquos men who had defended the city from the Serbsin 1992 soon began plaguing the defended without regard to ethnicity Theystole automobiles extorted money and valuables abducted abused and rapedcivilians and looted the cityrsquos warehouses and shops making off with 20000pairs of shoes in one venture In addition they monopolized the black marketthat made up the cityrsquos only trade earning fortunes in a city where manypeople spent their days scavenging for water and bread53

Gradually many of the people under the thugsrsquo arbitrary and chaotic ldquopro-tectionrdquo especially the more moderate ones and young men unwilling to beimpressed would manage to emigrate to a safer place And in time the size ofthe ldquoprotectedrdquo group would be substantially reducedmdashby half or more54 Theremnants ever more disproportionately consisted of fanatics economic ma-rauders militant radicals common criminals opportunistic sycophants embit-tered revenge-seekers and murderous drunks55

52 Rohde Endgame pp 107ndash109 and Sudetic Blood and Vengeance pp 223 24453 UN Experts Final Report par 84 86 John F Burns ldquo2 Gang Leaders in Sarajevo FaceCrackdown in Bosniardquo New York Times October 27 1993 p A6 and Maass Love Thy Neighborp 3154 Vasi ldquoYugoslav Armyrdquo p 133 Woodward Balkan Tragedy p 246 Charles G Boyd ldquoMakingPeace with the Guilty The Truth about Bosniardquo Foreign Affairs Vol 74 No 5 (SeptemberOctober1995) p 29 Noel Malcolm ldquoBosnia and the West A Study in Failurerdquo National Interest Spring1995 p 9 Judah The Serbs pp 223 237 296 Chuck Sudetic ldquoSerbs of Sarajevo Stay Loyal toBosniardquo New York Times August 26 1994 p A6 and Maass ldquoIn Bosnia rsquoDisloyal Serbsrsquo SharePlight of Oppositionrdquo The population of the once thoroughly integrated city of Mostar declinedfrom 130000 to 60000 Chris Hedges ldquoA War-Bred Underworld Threatens Bosnia Peacerdquo NewYork Times May 1 1996 p 8 Sarajevo declined from 450000 to something close to 280000including some 100000 refugees from ethnically cleansed areas of the country Chris Hedges ldquoWarTurns Sarajevo Away from Europerdquo New York Times July 28 1995 p A4 By September 1992 onlynine months after their brief war for independence had ended the number of Serbs from theKrajina section of Croatia who had moved to Serbia was reaching ldquodisastrous proportionsrdquoaccording to a Belgrade daily a situation it blamed on the endemic corruption of Krajina ofcialsTanner Croatia p 28355 For a portrait of the clearly deranged Branko Gruji a Serb who reigned as the mayor ofZvornik after the Muslim majority had been driven from the city see Cohen Hearts Grown Brutalpp 296ndash298


Those in the right positions quickly discovered a lucrative opportunity totrade with the enemy and hundreds of millions of Deutschemarksrsquo worth ofweaponry ammunition fuel and goods were exchanged across the front linesThe Serbs in Bosnia after all enjoyed a major military advantage in thatbecause of the deft manipulations of Miloševi and crew early in the war theyinherited masses of weaponry from the Yugoslav national army Once the warsettled down a bit many of the Serb leaders in Bosnia went looking for buyersand found them nearby The Croats and the Muslims were eager for weaponswith which to attack the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia (and for a time eachother) There were opportunities in the other direction as well the speaker ofthe Bosnian Serb assembly for example made millions buying fuel fromCroatia and then selling it to Croatiarsquos Serb enemies in Bosnia One seniorSerbian commander in Bosnia sold a Muslim village some heavy artillery andthen retired with his family to Serbia Croats could sometimes rent tanks fromthe Serbs at a going rate of DM 1000 per day56 Whether they had to pay extrafor insurance is not recorded

The relationship of such banal behavior to ldquonationalismrdquo and ldquoethnic ha-tredrdquo ancient or otherwise is less than clear as is its bearing on the notionof ldquoclashing civilizationsrdquo Its relation to common criminality however isevident57

A Comparison Rwanda

I have stressed the importance of vicious and opportunistic but often substan-tially nonideological criminals and criminal-like elements in the developmentof the wars in Croatia and Bosnia This approach seems much sounder thanones that seek to explain the wars as conicts in which murderous communalrage exploding from pent-up ancient hatreds or the cynical manipulation of

56 Judah The Serbs pp 242ndash252 and Ed Vulliamy ldquoCroats Who Supped with the Devilrdquo Guard-ian March 18 1996 p 8 See also Burg and Shoup War in Bosnia-Herzegovina p 138 and SudeticBlood and Vengeance p 90 Serbia itself was also substantially criminalized during the war JudahThe Serbs pp 255ndash25657 Although there are differences the Serb rampages in Kosovo in 1999 often resembled thoseseen earlier in Bosnia and Croatia The army provided a sort of generalized support it participateddirectly in some areas and it hardly escapes blame for the results in any case But as one reportputs it ldquoin hundreds of interviewsrdquo Kosovo Albanians ldquohave said that nearly all the killings ofcivilians were committed by Serbian paramilitary forces and not by the regular armyrdquo BlaineHarden ldquoReservists a Crucial Factor in Effort against Milosevicrdquo New York Times July 9 1999 pA1 Released criminals formed an important component of Serb forces See Michael R GordonldquoCivilians Are Slain in Military Attack on a Kosovo Roadrdquo New York Times April 15 1999 p A1and Charles Ingrao ldquoIt Will Take More Than Bombs to Bring Stabilityrdquo Los Angeles Times April12 1999 p B11


malevolent shortsighted politicians induces a Hobbesian conict of all againstall and neighbor against neighbor There are doubtless instances however inwhich the Hobbesian vision comes closer to being realized The 1994 genocideinicted by ethnic Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda may be a case in pointCloser examination however suggests a number of similarities with the warsin Croatia and Bosnia

Much of the writing about the genocide in which some 500000 to 800000perished in a matter of weeksmdashmostly by being hacked to death with machetesor hoesmdashgives the impression that the conict was one of all against all friendsagainst friends neighbors against neighbors even Cain against Abel Friendsand neighbors (and even brothers perhaps) did kill each other but it seemsthat by far the greatest damage as in Croatia and Bosnia resulted from therampages of murderous thugs

Far from a spontaneous eruption the basic elements of the genocidal processhad been planned for years by Hutu extremists who were substantially incharge of the ruling party the government bureaucracy and the police58

Throughout the country Hutus and Hutu police were urgedmdashor orderedmdashtoengage in the killing and many do seem to have responded enthusiasticallyJoining was the Presidential Guard numbering 700ndash1500 men and the Hutuarmy which consisted of some 50000 men most of them hastily recruited inthe previous few years from landless peasants the urban unemployed andforeign drifters who had chiey signed up not for ideological reasons butrather for the guaranteed food and drink (each man was entitled to two bottlesof beer a day a luxury by Rwandan standards) and for the opportunity to lootbecause pay was low and irregular59

Finally there was the Interahamwe militia bands that had been created andtrained by Hutu extremists As Philip Gourevitch points out the Interahamwehad its genesis in soccer fan clubs and it recruited jobless young men whowere ldquowasting in idleness and its attendant resentmentsrdquo and who tended tosee the genocide as a ldquocarnival romprdquo60 Moreover their ranks were expandedby hordes of opportunists once the genocide began Geacuterard Prunier notes thata ldquosocial aspect of the killings has often been overlookedrdquo As soon as thekilling groups ldquowent into action they drew around them a cloud of even

58 Geacuterard Prunier Rwanda Crisis History of a Genocide (New York Columbia University Press1995) p 169 and African Rights Rwanda Death Despair and Deance rev ed (London AfricanRights 1995) pp 51ndash5259 Prunier Rwanda Crisis pp 113 242ndash243 and African Rights Rwanda pp 49 6560 Philip Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our FamiliesStories from Rwanda (New York Farrar Straus and Giroux 1998) p 93


poorer people a lumpenproletariat of street boys rag-pickers car-washers andhomeless unemployed For these people the genocide was the best thing thatcould ever happen to them They had the blessings of a form of authority totake revenge on socially powerful people as long as these were on the wrongside of the political fence They could steal they could kill with minimumjustication they could rape and they could get drunk for free This waswonderful The political aims pursued by the masters of this dark carnivalwere quite beyond their scope They just went alongrdquo61 ldquoDrunken militiabandsrdquo notes Gourevitch ldquofortied with assorted drugs from ransacked phar-macies were bused from massacre to massacrerdquo62 There were about 1700ldquoprofessional Interahamwerdquo who received training and uniforms and thou-sands or tens of thousands joined up (sometimes under coercion) after thegenocide began63

As in Yugoslavia criminals were released from jail to participate in thedestruction64 and the prospect for enrichment by looting was vastly escalatedduring the genocide and was used as a specic incentive by the leadersmdashmanyof whom were happy to take booty as well65 The killers were fully willing tomurder fellow Hutus suspected of not being loyal to the cause and they oftenforced other Hutus on pain of instant death to join the killings66 Othersparticipated by manning roadblocks or by pointing out local Tutsis to themarauding geacutenocidaires ldquoI didnrsquot have a choicerdquo one cooperating priestpointed out ldquoIt was necessary to appear pro-militia If I had had a differentattitude we would all have disappearedrdquo67

Many Hutus however did hide and protect Tutsi neighbors and sometimesstrangers despite the pressure and despite the fact that the punishment forsuch behavior could be instant brutal death68 The number of Hutus who didso probably was as high as the number who under pressure from the often-drunken and always-murderous geacutenocidaires indicated where some Tutsismight reside or be hiding69 Most of the others it appears simply withdrew

61 Prunier Rwanda Crisis pp 231ndash232 See also Allison Des Forges ldquoLeave None to Tell the StoryrdquoGenocide in Rwanda (New York Human Rights Watch 1999) pp 11 26162 Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You p 11563 African Rights Rwanda pp 55 61ndash62 11464 Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You p 24265 African Rights Rwanda pp 55 61ndash62 11466 Prunier Rwanda Crisis p 247 African Rights Rwanda chap 14 and Gourevitch We Wish toInform You pp 307 30967 Prunier Rwanda Crisis pp 253ndash254 and Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You p 13668 African Rights Rwanda pp 1017ndash102269 Prunier Rwanda Crisis p 253 and Des Forges ldquoLeave None to Tell the Storyrdquo pp 11 260ndash262


whether in approval or disapproval of the cataclysm surrounding them ldquoWeclosed the door and tried not to hearrdquo said one70

Although an extensive study by Human Rights Watch ventures no directestimates it does suggest at various points that the killers numbered in theldquotens of thousandsrdquo71 A study by African Rights in London amasses a detailedlisting of those in the Hutu elite who directed the genocide and comes up with600 or 700 names72 As indicated earlier the Presidential Guard comprisedsome 700ndash1500 the army perhaps 50000 and the Interahamwe militias an-other 50000 A year after defeating the genocidal regime Tutsi forces had33000 people incarcerated under suspicion of participating in the genocidemdashagure that later rose to at least 12500073

It may be reasonable to suggest from all this that there were some 50000 hard-core killers This would easily be enough to have accomplished the genocideIf each of these people killed one person a week for the course of the 100 dayholocaust more than 700000 would have perished This number would rep-resent some 2 percent of the male Hutu population over the age of thirteenThat is 98 percent of the male Hutu population older than thirteen was not inthis group

It is possible that 200000 participated in the massacres though this is likelyto be a rather high gure that would include people who under pressure fromthe hard-core geacutenocidaires did nothing more than point out where local Tutsilived or simply manned roadblocks under orders This would still representless than 9 percent of the Hutu male population over the age of thirteen(Though by all accounts very much outnumbered by men and boys womenand girls did join in the genocide In addition boys younger than thirteen alsooften participated74 If these groups are added to the base the percentageswould be much lower)

In some sense of course these are astoundingly high gures In a normalyear by comparison the proportion of males older than thirteen who commit-ted murder in Rwanda was probably something like 1 in 2000 Nonethelessa situation in which more than 90 percent of the over-thirteen male Hutupopulation did not participate in killings hardly seems to justify the notionthat the situation was one of all against all or neighbor against neighbor As

70 Des Forges ldquoLeave None to Tell the Storyrdquo p 26271 Ibid pp 2 16 260 26272 African Rights Rwanda73 Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You p 24274 Bill Keller ldquoIn Mozambique and Other Lands Children Fight the Warsrdquo New York TimesNovember 9 1994 p A14


in Croatia and Bosnia the chief dynamic of the depredations seems to havebeen furnished by marauding bands of violent opportunistic and oftendrunken thugs

Conclusions

This analysis of the experiences in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda suggeststhat ethnicity is important in ldquoethnic warsrdquo more as an ordering device thanas an impelling force that the violence would probably have been fairly easyto police that the wars did not necessarily derive from the ethnic peculiaritiesof those regions and that the wars were by no means inevitable In additionsome of the warslsquo key dynamics may have considerable applicability to otherviolent conicts

ethnicity is important only as an ordering deviceMichael Ignatieff compares the conditions that prevailed in the former Yugo-slavia to a Hobbesian state of nature75 But the experience in Yugoslavia andin Rwanda calls this image into question People did not descend into the warof ldquoevery man against every manrdquo that Hobbes so vividly depicted and soardently abhorred What happened in Croatia Bosnia and Rwanda did resem-ble a Hobbesian state of nature but it came about not because people generallygave into murderous enmity but because they came under the arbitrary controlof armed thugs Ethnicity proved essentially to be simply the characteristicaround which the perpetrators and the politicians who recruited and encour-aged them happened to array themselves It was important as an orderingdevice or principle not as a crucial motivating force

The same sort of dynamic could hold if the thugsrsquo organizational principlewere class or ideological allegiance or even handedness or loyalty to a specicsoccer team If they took control in a town determined to cleanse it violentlyof say left-handers or of supporters of an opposing team those in that groupwould quickly nd it in their interest to leave Meanwhile right-handers orfans of the thug-favored team would often reluctantly come to recognize thatthe thugs had become their only protection against revenge-seeking thugs ofanother group And as they hunkered down behind their protecting thugs oras they sought gradually to ee the war zone members of each group wouldprobably reect in bewilderment from time to time that before the thugs camethey often did not even know the handedness or the soccer loyalties of their

75 Ignatieff ldquoBalkan Tragedyrdquo


friends neighbors and schoolmates Under such conditions identity as ChaimKaufmann notes ldquois often imposed by the opposing group specically by itsmost murderous membersrdquo76

None of this is to argue that no neighbor ever persecuted a neighbor inthese conicts Some locals did join in the process sometimes out of ethnicloyalty sometimes to settle old scores most often it seems opportunisticallyto pursue prot in the chaos In many cases the war conditions did bringout the worst in some people and victims did sometimes know their victim-izersmdashthough this is something that happens in most civil wars not justethnic ones And of course once the thugs took over former cross-ethnicrelationships were often warily broken off because the thugs were likely topunish such sympathies The crucial dynamic of the wars however wasnot in the risings of neighbor against neighbor but in the maraudings ofcomparatively small groups of thugs recruited and semicoordinated bypoliticians

international policing could probably have been effectiveHobbesrsquos greatest mischief comes from his solution to the problem he inventsHe assumes that every person is at base ldquoradically insecure mistrustful ofother men and afraid for his liferdquo Therefore the only way out of the mess isfor everyone permanently to surrender to an authoritarian ruler one whoprimarily values glory and stability over doctrinal orthodoxy or ideologicalpurity and one who will maintain the necessary force to keep all people fromonce again giving in to their natural proclivities for isolation hostility andinsensitivity to the rights of others77

But the experience in the former Yugoslav and Rwanda suggests thatthis monumentalmdashperhaps even impossiblemdashtask is hardly required Mostpeople most of the time do not have much difculty getting along and creat-ing useful rules and patterns of conduct that allow them to coexist peace-fully78 Police may be needed even necessary to maintain order but they neednot normally be numerous Nor does their control need to be Leviathan-likebecause they mainly need simply to protect the many from the few rather thaneveryone from everyone else as Hobbes would have it

76 Chaim Kaufmann ldquoPossible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Warsrdquo International SecurityVol 20 No 4 (Spring 1996) p 14477 Robert P Kraynak History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca NY CornellUniversity Press 1990) pp 165 176 17978 On this issue see Bruce L Benson ldquoThe Spontaneous Evolution of Commercial Lawrdquo in DanielB Klein ed Reputation Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct (Ann Arbor Universityof Michigan Press 1997) pp 165ndash189 Robert C Ellickson Order without Law How Neighbors Settle


It follows that policing the situation in Yugoslavia and in Rwanda would nothave been the major challenge often anticipated Essentially the intimidatingopportunistic thugs were successful mainly because they were the biggest bul-lies on the block But like most bullies (and sadists and torturers) they sub-stantially lacked organization discipline coherent tactics or strategy deepmotivation broad popular support ideological commitment and essentiallycourage79 Consequently if confronted by a military force with these qualitiestheir most likely reaction would be to ee And to a considerable degree thisseems to be what happened both in Yugoslavia and in Rwanda

While Serb forces remained criminal-dominated their opponents began todevelop real armies Unprepared and badly outgunned at the beginningindependent Croatia despite an international arms embargo gradually builtup and trained a conventional military force using Western advisers80 And animportant step in building its army was the Bosnian governmentrsquos risky butsuccessful military operation in October 1993 to destroy the criminal gangs inSarajevo that had helped defend the capital in 1992 but that had then takencontrol in various areas of the city terrorizing non-Muslims and Muslimsalike81

As early as January 1993 only a year after Serbs had effectively partitionedthe country the new Croatian army launched an attack on several importanttargets in Serb-held territory in Croatia and encountered little resistance82 InMay 1995 it achieved the same success in another Croatian area taking controlin thirty-two hours Then over three or four days in August using plans partlydevised by retired American generals the army pushed from most of the rest

Disputes (Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 1991) and John Mueller Capitalism Democ-racy and Ralphrsquos Pretty Good Grocery (Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 1999) chap 479 Judah observes of Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladi that ldquohis war was a cowardrsquos war Hefought few pitched battles but managed to drive hundreds of thousands of unarmed people outof their homesrdquo and he also questions Mladi rsquos mental stability Judah The Serbs pp 230ndash231 Onthis latter issue see also Robert Block ldquoThe Madness of General Mladicrdquo New York Review of BooksOctober 5 1995 pp 7ndash9 and Jane Perlez ldquoA Grim Turn for 2 Embattled Serb Leadersrdquo New YorkTimes December 15 1995 p A180 Vasi ldquoYugoslav Armyrdquo pp 134ndash135 Silber and Little Yugoslavia p 360 Ken SilversteinldquoPrivatizing War How Affairs of State Are Outsourced to Corporations beyond Public ControlrdquoNation July 28August 4 1997 pp 11ndash17 and Tanner Croatia p 28481 Vasi ldquoYugoslav Armyrdquo p 136 Judah The Serbs pp 217ndash218 Maass Love Thy Neighbor p 33Chris Hedges ldquoPostscript to Sarajevorsquos Anguish Muslim Killings of Serbs Detailedrdquo New YorkTimes November 12 1997 p A1 Burg and Shoup War in Bosnia-Herzegovina pp 138ndash139 Burnsldquo2 Gang Leaders in Sarajevo Face Crackdown in Bosniardquo and John F Burns ldquoBosnian Forces KillReputed Gang Chief in Sarajevo Gunghtrdquo New York Times October 27 1993 p A6 See also RieffSlaughterhouse p 13282 Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapse pp 228ndash229 and Silber and Little Yugoslavia p 353Tanner Croatia p 288


of Croatia the remaining Serb opposition which for the most part followed theexample of its erstwhile ldquoprotectorsrdquo and simply ran As Marcus Tanner putsit ldquoAs soon as the bombardment started the Serb troops ed the frontlinesprovoking a panicked ight into Bosnia by thousands of civilians who lefttheir houses with washing on the lines and meals half eaten on kitchen tablesrdquoSimilar results were soon achieved in neighboring Bosnia by organized Croatand Bosnian forces83

As in Yugoslavia the marauders in Rwanda were put down fairly easilywhen confronted with a reasonably coherent military force Several thousandrefugees were saved in a Kigali stadium because the United Nations AssistanceMission to Rwanda which Prunier characterizes as ldquothe powerless UN lsquomili-taryrsquo forcerdquo simply forbade the murder squads entry And when the Tutsiseventually were able to get their comparatively capable army into the countrythey had to battle for the capital city but took over the rest of the country witha minimum of ghting For the most part Hutu authorities like their counter-parts in the former Yugoslavia simply ordered their forces to ee when con-fronted with military force84

Thus it seems likely that a large impressively armed and well-disciplinedinternational policing force could have been effective in pacifying the thug-dominated conicts in Yugoslavia and Rwanda The approach could haveresembled the technique used to suppress riots in US cities or those success-fully applied by the US military in Haiti in the mid-1990s or by Australianand other international policing troops in East Timor in 1999 Well-armed anddisciplined troops would occupy an area the thugs would either ee or blendback into the population and the troops would then gradually be reduced innumber The thugs would still exist of course and many might remain in thearea as they do in US cities But insofar as they remained unpacied thethugs would be reduced to sporadic and improvised crime and violence nottown mastery

There seem to be two reasons why such a force was never put together byconcerned members of the international community First they assumed thatthe wars were essentially inexplicable Kaplanesque all-against-all conflictsrooted in old hatreds that could hardly be ameliorated by well-meaning but

83 Tanner Croatia pp 294ndash297 Silber and Little Yugoslavia pp 353ndash360 see also Vasi ldquoYugoslavArmyrdquo p 135 In victory however the discipline of the Croat forces often broke down in arsondestruction and looting Tanner Croatia p 29884 Prunier Rwanda Crisis pp 254 268 377 Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You pp 156ndash157 andAlan J Kuperman ldquoRwanda in Retrospectrdquo Foreign Affairs Vol 79 No 1 (JanuaryndashFebruary 2000)pp 94ndash118


innocent and naiumlve outsiders85 As the discussion above suggests this expla-nation so convenient to those favoring passivity was substantially awed Butas Brian Hall observes ldquoLiterary clicheacutes do not die easily especially wheninformed by supercialitiesrdquo86

Second the international community had and has an extremely low toler-ance for casualties in peacekeeping ventures in which clear national interestsdo not appear to be at stake The international mission to Somalia in 1993 savedmany lives but US policy there is held to be a ldquofailurerdquo in large part becauseeighteen Americans were killed in the process In essence when Americansasked themselves how many American lives peace in Somalia was worth theanswer came out close to zero87 The general reluctance to become involved inthe ghting in Bosnia (despite incidentally years of the supposedly action-impelling ldquoCNN effectrdquo) suggests that Americans and others reached a similar

85 On this issue see also Malcolm ldquoBosnia and the Westrdquo pp 4ndash5 and Sadowski Myth of GlobalChaos pp 24ndash25 66ndash68 On President Bill Clintonrsquos seduction by Kaplanrsquos book see ElizabethDrew On the Edge The Clinton Presidency (New York Simon and Schuster 1994) p 157 on hisbelated regretful public recantation in 1999 of the Kaplan perspective see Katharine Q SeelyeldquoClinton Blames Milosevic Not Fate for Bloodshedrdquo New York Times May 14 1999 p A12 Talkingabout the Bosnian conict on national television on June 5 1995 Vice President Al Gore hadallowed as how the tragedy had been unfolding ldquosome would say for ve hundred yearsrdquoClinton not to be outdone opined in the same interview that ldquotheir enmities go back ve hundredyears some would say almost a thousand yearsrdquo Cohen Hearts Grown Brutal pp 397ndash398 Theexact identity of the hyperbolic ldquosomerdquo was not specied but one source perhaps was HenryKissinger who has noted authoritatively that ldquoethnic conict has been endemic in the Balkans forcenturiesrdquo (as opposed to gentle trouble-free Western Europe presumably) and patronizingly andabsurdly that ldquonone of the populations has any experience withmdashand essentially no belief inmdashWestern concepts of tolerationrdquo Henry Kissinger ldquoNo US Ground Forces for Kosovordquo WashingtonPost February 22 1999 p A15 At the source of many of these perceptions is Rebecca Westrsquostwo-volume Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (New York Viking 1941) The work was written after theauthor had made three visitsmdashthe longest of which lasted less than two monthsmdashto Yugoslaviabetween 1936 and 1938 and it often propounds views that are essentially racist For a superbassessment see Hall ldquoRebecca Westrsquos Warrdquo86 Hall Impossible Country p 68 In the case of Yugoslavia outsiders also tended vastly tooverestimate the ghting tenacity of the defenders under the assumption that Serbs in particularwere fanatically dedicated ghters This notion derives from a World War II myth that maintainsthat the occupying Germans confronted with a dedicated guerrilla opposition were forced todivert a huge number of forces to maintain their control in Yugoslavia Even assuming thesituations are comparable the Germans occupied the country in a matter of days and rarely foundthe Yugoslav occupation much of a diversion Bennett Yugoslaviarsquos Bloody Collapse pp 49ndash50 andJP Mackley ldquoThe Balkan Quagmire Myth Taking On the Serbs Would Be More Grenada thanVietnamrdquo Washington Post March 7 1993 p C3 In Bosnia suggests Mackley no Yugoslav combatunit regular or irregular could successfully compete with the US military ldquoin anything but adrinking contestrdquo87 John Mueller ldquoThe Common Senserdquo National Interest Spring 1997 p 83 On the other handthis is not such an unusual position for humanitarian ventures If Red Cross or other workers arekilled while carrying out humanitarian missions their organizations frequently threaten to with-draw no matter how much good they may be doing Essentially what they are saying then is thatthe saving of lives is not worth the deaths of even a few rescuers


conclusion for that trouble spot By 1997 after Spain had suffered seventeendeaths policing the Bosnian conict it withdrew from further confrontationSimilarly when ten of its policing troops were massacred and mutilated earlyin the Rwandan genocide Belgium abruptly withdrewmdashand to save faceurged others to do the same It seems clear that policing efforts will bepolitically tolerable only as long as the cost in lives for the policing forcesremain extremely lowmdashand perhaps not even then88

what happened in yugoslavia and rwanda could happen anywhereIf my assessment is essentially correct it suggests that what happened inYugoslavia and Rwanda is not unique but could happen just about anywhereThe Serbian writer Aleksandar Tisma has gloomily concluded from his coun-tryrsquos tragedy that ldquothere are civilized people and less civilized people Here inthe Balkans people donrsquot belong to the civilized but to the less civilizedrdquo89

But the wars in Yugoslavia did not break out because the peoples there areldquoless civilizedrdquo When criminals and sadists are given free rein they can easilydebase the conditions of life

And thugs are everywheremdashat least in small numbersmdashand only smallnumbers are necessary if the conditions are ripe England may seem rathertranquil and well ordered in many respects but it is also the home of some ofthe worldrsquos most notorious soccer hooligans Canada often seems to be a nationof eminently reasonable people but that is not the conclusion one would drawfrom watching a hockey game Denmark may today remind people mainly ofHans Christian Andersen and little mermaids but it once was the home ofworld-class marauders and it seems unlikely that that propensity has been

88 On Spain see Chris Hedges ldquoOn Bosniarsquos Ethnic Fault Lines Itrsquos Still Tense but World IsSilentrdquo New York Times February 28 1997 p A1 On Belgium see Des Forges ldquoLeave None to Tellthe Storyrdquo pp 618ndash620 Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You pp 114ndash150 and African Rights Rwandap 1112 Poll data demonstrate that President Clinton (in part because he confronted vocal Repub-lican opposition on the issue) was never able to increase the numbers of Americans who sawwisdom or value in sending US policing troops to Bosnia even though it was expected that therewould be few casualties In fact six months after the venture began support for it had still notrisen even though it was completely successful Bosnians had stopped killing each other (even ifthey had not come to love each other) and most important no Americans had been killedAmericans have a deep concern for US casualties and very little for foreign ones and they havenever had much stomach for losing American lives in humanitarian ventures On the other handit seems likely that if they are not being killed US troops can remain on peacekeeping missionsalmost indenitely See Mueller ldquoCommon Senserdquo and John Mueller ldquoPublic Opinion as a Con-straint on US Foreign Policy Assessing the Perceived Value of American and Foreign Livesrdquopaper presented at the annual convention of the International Studies Association Los AngelesCalifornia March 14ndash18 200089 Quoted in Jane Perlez ldquoBalkan Voice of Reason and Despairrdquo New York Times August 14 1997p B1


fully bred out of the race in the intervening centuries90 Moreover as variousstudies have suggested it is often possible to get ordinary people to participatein acts of considerable cruelty when they are placed voluntarily or involun-tarily in a supportive environmentmdashideological or ethnic hatred is by nomeans necessary for this capacity to emerge91 Under the right conditionsthugs can rise to a dominant role others can lend a hand or withdraw intoterried isolation or studied indifference and any place can degenerate into aBosnia or a Rwanda

what happened in yugoslavia and rwanda was not inevitableThe catastrophes that engulfed Bosnia Croatia and Rwanda did not have tohappen They emerged not out of inevitable historic necessities but wereinstigated and orchestrated by designing politicians and local extremists whohowever often did not know how to control the violent processes they had setinto motion

Yahya Sadowski nds that cultural strife is found about as much in devel-oped countries as in poorer ones but that such strife is less likely to turnviolent in prosperous societies From this he concludes that economic advance-ment tends to reduce cultural violence92 But it seems rather that the actionsof leading politicians and police organizations are most important in keepingethnic and cultural conict from leading to major violence Prosperous societiesdo seem to do better in this regard than poorer ones (which in fact is probablyone of the reasons for their comparative prosperity) Prosperity may thereforebe benecial if it helps to develop competent governments and police forcesbut wealth itself is not the key operative factor Thus it is entirely possible toimagine Bosnian-like chaos in prosperous Quebec or Northern Ireland if theCanadian or British authorities had attempted to deal with cultural conictsby encouraging murderous rampage rather than through patient policing andpolitical accommodation

90 On the murderous rivalries of motorcycle gangs in tranquil Denmark see Stephen KinzerldquoBiker Wars in the Land of rsquoThe Little Mermaidrsquordquo New York Times May 6 1996 p A4 In this casehowever the thugs are taken to be an aberrant ldquosocial pathologyrdquo and they are not held to betypical of the entire national spirit as so often happens in Kaplanesque discussions of the Balkans91 Stanley Milgram Obedience to Authority An Experimental View (New York Harper and Row1975) Philip G Zimbardo Craig Haney Curtis Banks and David Jaffe ldquoThe Mind Is a FormidableJailerrdquo New York Times Magazine April 8 1973 pp 38ff Christopher R Browning Ordinary MenReserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York HarperCollins 1998) andFred E Katz Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil A Report on the Beguilings of Evil (Albany StateUniversity of New York Press 1993)92 Sadowski Myth of Global Chaos pp 174ndash176


On the other hand because of sound political policies ethnic violence hasbeen avoided in Bulgaria and Romania even though those countries are hardlymore developed than Serbia or Bosnia And the experience in Macedoniawhere political leaders have sought calm accommodation suggests that thedisasters in the more prosperous areas of the former Yugoslavia far from beinginevitable could almost certainly have been avoided if politicians and policehad behaved more sensibly93

extrapolationsThe degree to which this analysis can be transferred to the dozens of ldquoethnicwarsrdquo taking place in any given year remains to be seen But ideas developedin an analysis of the wars in the former Yugoslavia do have at least somebearing on the extreme genocidal war in Rwanda This suggests that anapproach that applies as a crucial mechanism the elite-encouraged rampagesof opportunistic and often drunken thugs may in many cases more adequatelyexplain what passes for ldquoethnic warrdquo than one that envisions such conicts asHobbesian all-against-all upheavals stemming from previously suppressedancient ethnic hatreds or from media- or politician-induced mass frenzies

Michael Ignatieff nds the ldquonew architectsrdquo of ldquopostmodern warrdquo in ldquotheparamilitaries guerrillas militias and warlords who are tearing up the failedstates of the 1990srdquo Similarly Martin van Creveld has proclaimed that we haveentered a ldquonew erardquo in which ldquowar will not be waged by armies but by groupswhom we today call terrorists guerrillas bandits and robbersldquo94 Banditry and

93 In 1991 Robert Kaplan declared that ldquoMacedonia is once again poised to erupt Never in halfa century has there been so much anger in Macedonia as its people wake up from a Communist-imposed sleep Unable to stand on its own like its more populous and historically groundedneighbor Serbia Macedonia could implode under the pressures of Albanian nationalism from thewest and Bulgarian nationalism from the east And this is to say nothing of the pressures of Greeknationalism from the south The various popular convulsions in the Balkans are inexorablyconverging on Macedonia It is a tragic yet fascinating development Rarely has the veryprocess of history been so transparent and cyclicalrdquo Kaplan ldquoHistoryrsquos Cauldronrdquo p 104 See alsohis ldquoGround Zero Macedonia The Real Battlegroundrdquo New Republic August 2 1993 p 15Inspired by such wisdom applications of the now-popular notion of ldquopreventative diplomacyrdquowould have concentrated on exactly the wrong place in the early 1990s On Bulgaria see VenelinI Ganev ldquoBulgariarsquos Symphony of Hoperdquo Journal of Democracy Vol 8 No 4 (October 1997) pp125ndash139 On Romania (and also Slovakia) see Robert H Linden ldquoPutting on Their Sunday BestRomania Hungary and the Puzzle of Peacerdquo International Studies Quarterly Vol 44 No 1 (March2000) pp 121ndash14594 Ignatieff Warriorrsquos Honor pp 3 5ndash6 and Martin L van Creveld The Transformation of War(New York Free Press 1991) pp ix 197 On banditry in Chechnya see Anatol Lieven ldquoA Trapfor Russiardquo New York Times November 30 1999 p A31 On the connection between crime andthe Irish Republican Army see Linda Grant ldquoWhere Hard Men Face Hard Choicesrdquo Guardian


depredations by roving militias are hardly new of course but Ignatieff and vanCreveld may be correct in suggesting that regular soldiers are no longerengaging in combat nearly as much as they used to It is not as van Creveldwould have it that low-intensity conict has risen to ldquodominancerdquo Rather itis that increasingly warfare of that sort is the only kind still going onmdashwarby thugs is the residual not the emerging form95

Moreover if some states (like Serbia Croatia Bosnia and Rwanda) came todepend on irregulars it is not because they nd this approach preferable butbecause they are unable to muster an adequate number of recruits to eld areal army And if again like Serbia and Rwanda but unlike Croatia and Bosniathey continue to rely on such corrupt opportunistic inept and often cowardlyforces they are likely eventually to go down in pathetic defeat

In the end the basic operationmdashand the fundamental banalitymdashof muchethnic violence is neatly summed up in a Bosnian expression ldquoTeško narodukad pametni u ute budale progovore a fukare se obogaterdquo That is ldquoIt isdifcult for the people when the smart keep quiet fools speak out and thugsget richrdquo96 The mistakenmdasheven racistmdashnotion that an entire ethnic group isdevotedly out to destroy another ethnic group can in such cases shatter anyability to perceive nuance and variety and it can be taken to suggest that effortsto foster elite accommodation are essentially irrelevant and therefore bound toprove futile Further the all-against-all image can discourage policing becauseit implies that the entire ethnic groupmdashrather than just a small opportunisticand often cowardly subgroupmdashmust be brought under control

Weekly April 26 1998 p 32 on connections in Algeria see Stathis N Kalyvas ldquoWanton andSenseless The Logic of Massacres in Algeriardquo Rationality and Society Vol 11 No 3 (August 1999)p 268 On the role of criminals alcohol drugs and armed children in war in Mozambique seeKeller ldquoIn Mozambique and Other Lands Children Fight the Warsldquo in Cambodia see Stephen JMorris ldquoPol Potrsquos Lingering Inuencerdquo New York Times April 17 1998 p A25 in Liberia seeHoward W French ldquoLiberiarsquos Teen-Age Soldiers Find Civil War Is Over but So Is Hoperdquo New YorkTimes September 11 1995 p A1 and in Sierra Leone see Judith Miller ldquoUN Monitors AccuseSierra Leone Peacekeepers of Killingrdquo New York Times February 12 1999 p A10 See also DavidKeen The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars Adelphi Paper No 320 (London InternationalInstitute for Strategic Studies 1998) and Edward C Baneld The Unheavenly City Revisited (BostonLittle Brown 1970) chap 995 Van Creveld Transformation of War p 205 On the trend see also John Mueller Retreat fromDoomsday The Obsolescence of Major War (New York Basic Books 1989) and Mueller QuietCataclysm chap 9 Those seeking to identify a truly new form of war might better focus on theeconomic warfare that has become more effective because the end of the Cold War allows majorcountries to coordinate their efforts more fully See John Mueller and Karl Mueller ldquoSanctions ofMass Destructionrdquo Foreign Affairsrdquo Vol 78 No 1 (MayJune 1999) pp 43ndash53 and John Muellerand Karl Mueller ldquoThe Methodology of Mass Destruction Assessing Threats in the New WorldOrderrdquo Journal of Strategic Studies forthcoming96 Cohen Hearts Grown Brutal p 297


of supposedly pent-up ethnic hatreds substantially disintegrated early in thewar and refused to ght

A group of well-armed thugs and bullies encouraged by and working underrough constraints set out by ofcial security services would arrive or bandtogether in a community Sometimes operating with local authorities theywould then take control and persecute members of other ethnic groups whowould usually ee to areas protected by their own ethnic rufans sometimesto join them in seeking revenge Carnivals of often-drunken looting destruc-tion and violence would take place and othersmdashguiltily or not so guiltilymdashmight join in Gradually however many of the people under the thugsrsquoarbitrary and chaotic ldquoprotectionrdquo especially the more moderate ones andyoung men unwilling to be pressed into military service would emigrate tosafer places In all this nationalism was not so much the impelling force assimply the characteristic around which the marauders happened to have ar-rayed themselves

To explore the possibilities for generalizing from the Yugoslav experience Iassess very briey the extreme case of Rwanda in 1994 when ethnic Hutusengaged in genocidal massacres of ethnic Tutsis In recent history this isprobably the instance in which the Hobbesian all-against-all and neighbor-against-neighbor idea of ethnic warfare is most likely to hold Neverthelesseven in this case it seems clear that the main momentum of the killings wascarried by a relatively small number of specially trained Hutus who allyingthemselves with often-drunken criminal and hooligan opportunists went ona murderous rampage coordinated by local ofcials acting on orders fromabove By contrast the vast majority of Hutus seem to have stood by inconsiderable confusion and often indifference

The mechanism of violence in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda thenis remarkably banal Rather than reecting deep historic passions and hatredsthe violence seems to have been the result of a situation in which commonopportunistic sadistic and often distinctly nonideological marauders wererecruited and permitted free rein by political authorities Because such peopleare found in all societies the events in Yugoslavia and Rwanda are not peculiarto those locales but could happen almost anywhere under the appropriateconditions On the other hand there was nothing particularly inevitable aboutthe violence with different people in charge and with different policing andaccommodation procedures the savagery could have been avoided

Because the violence in Yugoslavia and Rwanda was carried out chiey bysmall ill-disciplined and essentially cowardly bands of thugs and bulliespolicing the situation would probably have been fairly easy for almost any












































































A Comparison Rwanda
























Conclusions


























































































































A Comparison Rwanda
























Conclusions




































































Conclusions
















































the banality of 'ethnic war' - college of arts and sciences · 2017-06-27 · the...

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