1. 1
Meghan Cochran
Dr. Lawoti
PSCI4500
Final Term Paper
11 April 2006
NATIONALIST RESENTMENT AND ETHNIC CONFLICT IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
Although nationalist fervor and sentiment had been building up in Yugoslavia
throughout the 1980s, in 1989 it reached heights unseen during Tito’s Communist regime. In
1989, Slobodan Milosevic revoked the autonomous status of the Kosovo and Vojvodina
regions in Serbia, effectively putting them under the social, political, and economic thumb of
the Republika Srpska (the Serbian-majority section of Bosnia). The collapse of the Soviet
Union, of which Yugoslavia was a part, inspired a swift succession of independence
movements throughout the Balkans. What was once the Socialist Federative Republic of
Yugoslavia became Slovenia (1991), Croatia (1991), Macedonia (1992), Bosnia and
Herzegovina (1992), Serbia and Montenegro (1992, who still operated under the term
‘Yugoslavia’ until formal separation in 2003) . The overarching theme of ‘unity and
brotherhood’ in Yugoslavia as proclaimed by Tito throughout his life collapsed within five
years as ethnic and religious differences caused former neighbors to enact brutality and
viciousness upon each other, unseen in Europe since World War II. As the international
community failed to reasonably and equally assess legitimacy and sovereignty claims from
these breaking states, Croatia and Serbia began to mobilize and militarily/economically
support shared kin groups across the region.[1]
The level of bloodshed associated with independence from Yugoslavia largely
depended on the ethnic makeup of the country itself. Slovenia, for instance, was ethnically
homogenous and only suffered a ten-day war, (the War in Slovenia or the Ten Days War).
Similarly, Macedonia seceded without major incident. Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, on the
other hand, were very heterogenous societies with longstanding historical grudges and
feelings of mistrust that eventually exploded into one of the worst human rights crises of the
20th century.
Difficulties between Serbs, Croats, and others stem largely from the shared similarity
of all groups involved. Peoples have been coexisting in the Balkans for nearly a millenium and
this manifests itself in similar dress, language, food, and physical characteristics. However,
historical and geopolitical differences leave room for misunderstanding and stereotyping –
Croatia, for example, was ruled by Vienna and Budapest, making it the easternmost corner of
the Hapsburg and Austro-Hungarian empires.[2] Croats are Latinized, Catholic, and are
disinclined to associate with the Orthodox and Muslim citizens farther east, who are assumed
to be ‘backwards.’ Similarly, the Serbs speak a similar language as do Croatians, but spell
words with Cyrillic letters. They tend to look east, to Russia, and most are Orthodox
Christians. Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia are less industrialized and politically developed
then are Croatia or especially Slovenia.
As stated before, the people of the former Yugoslavia are relatively similar in many
ways. This is negated, however, by the shadows of history, especially in the Battle of the
Kosovo Polje (1389) and World War II (regarding fights between the Serbian Chetniks and the
Croatian Ustaše that entailed hundreds of thousands of death camp casualties); that has bred
a fierce paranoia among Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats regarding each other and their
collective ability to maintain social/ethnic relevance as well as land and culture.[3] This is
explained by Joane Nagel as follows: "Culture and history are the substance of ethnicity. They
are also the basic materials used to construct ethnic meaning. Culture and history are often
intertwined in cultural construction."[4] Thus, the atrocities of the Wars of Yugoslav

2. Succession throughout the 1990s can be partially attributed to internalized interethnic
conflicts based on shared history and glorification of violent conflict.[5] This sense of ethnic
identity is a sense of being tied to the land of one’s fathers in an unbreakable chain of
ownership and stewardship. According to Veljko, a young Yugoslav, "I can trace my family
heritage back to the eleventh century in Montenegro, with only a fifty-year break. We are the
true Serbs."[6] This is a widespread phenomenon in which placement and history are
unbreakable and manifested in everything from community organization to pop music.
An inability to come to terms with this shared land and language resulted in, from
1991-1995 in huge, traumatic ethnic wars. These wars included forced migrations,
internment, brutalization, rape, murder, mass execution, and official military campaigns. For
instance, an estimated 60,000 Bosnian Muslim women were raped throughout the course of
the conflict.[7] Croatian feminist journalist Slavenka Drakulic wrote that Serbian men were
“generally encouraged to do so because it is an efficient way to frighten and intimidate
people, which certainly was the aim of the Republika Srpska forces in Bosnia.”[8] Indeed,
Bosnia has seen some of the worst crimes against humanity and egregious wartime atrocities
throughout the course of the conflict. In Srebrenica, 1992, 8,500 Muslim men (aged 11-65)
were executed by Serbian paramilitary firing squads over six days.[9]
Srebrenica was by no means the singular massacre during the course of the
Yugoslav Wars; rather, there were several highly predicible modes of operation on the part of
the Serbian paramilitary units (Jugoslav National Army, or JNA). First, the units would
blockade and surround a town, preventing all access to food, supplies, and other imports.
This was followed by an immense and indiscriminate shelling siege and, ultimately, the killing
of civilians. Women, children, and the elderly were usually permitted to leave (generally
suffering various degrees of harrassment, torture, or expulsion to concentration camps in the
process), while men and older boys were murdered. It is estimated that of the 18,000 people
deemed missing after the course of the wars, over 92% of those people were military-age
males.[10]
The Serbs were not the lone perpetrators of such hatred and violence. In the Krajina
region of Croatia, Croatian president Franjo Tudjman “cleansed” the area of Serbs in 1995:
“In a matter of days, the entire population – known as the bset armed, most militant, and
proud-to-the-point-of-paranoia group of Serbs in the world – were subjected to… caravans of
tractors pulling flat-bed wagons packed high with abject refugees and their paltry belongings,
moving iinto exile.”[11] Since 1999, over 200,000 Serbs have been evacuated and 3,000
killed from Kosovo.[12] Most of the approximately 12,500 Serbs who attempted to return to
their homes in Kosovo (a disputed autonomous Serbian province) found that their homes had
been either destroyed, damaged, or occupied by Kosovar Albanian families.[13] This shows
that the horrors of the 1990s are not over, and that the proverbial ethnic tables can turn in
nearly any situation across the Balkans.
I would like to propose that these ethnic disagreements, which ultimately exploded
into terrible carnage, are the product of an internalized sense of shared culture and history,
not always pleasant, that simultaneously recognizes the similarity of the “other.” As Frankie
Wilmer said, “Threats to the destruction of self-other boundaries may, alternately, evoke the
most primal insecurities, since it is not only the boundaries but the self (itself) that is at risk of
being annihilated or assimilated into the other.”[14] Ethnic conflict served not only to maintain
the status quo of ethnic superiority in political institutions, but also served as a cohesion in the
chaos of a post-Communist world. Without the overblown and wholly unrecognized ideal of
the ‘new Yugoslav man’, ethnic anger as well as state borders fermented.
Although the horror of the Yugoslavian Wars were largely over by 2000 in a military
sense, the ethnic disagreements and widespread hostility still lie latant in the Balkans. Serbia
has been unhelpful in the return of war criminals such as Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic
(who supposedly knowingly committed the genocidal campaign at Srebrenica) to the UN
under the International Criminal Tribunal for the War in Yugoslavia, in spite of the fact that this
will help negotiate their ascension into the European Union.[15] Although people displaced by
the conflicts are encouraged to come back to their homes, the vast majority of refugees

3. (especially Bosnians) have not returned. Also in Bosnia, there is a high level of distrust
between Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims, that ‘the stronger central Muslim-dominated
institutions become, the weaker Republika Srpska will become.’[16] Partially out of fear and
partially out of the fact that many areas of the Balkans were ‘cleansed’, towns no longer have
the ethnic heterogenieity of the past, with separate enclaves segregating groups. As
suggested by Paula M. Pickering ,
…although the Dayton constitution supports interethnic cooperation, for example, by encouraging the
return of refugees to their homes, it also reinforces divisions among Bosnia's three constituent nations. It
institutionalizes ethnonational cleavages, Bosniak, Serb, and Croat, in a tri-ethnic collective presidency, ethnic-
based federalism (the Bosniak-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska), mutual veto, and ethnic keys in the
bureaucracy and state-owned companies. [17]
I believe, however, that there is sufficient background and a Balkan sense of
community building (known as komšiluk) throughout the Communist period in order to forge
social ties. It was a longstanding tradition in cities such as Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo for
neighbors of differing ethnic background to gather for coffee or drinks, sporting events, civic
activities and social clubs, and political opposition.[18] It is the hope that, eventually, the
Dayton Accord will ultimately succeed and the new Balkan states can enter the European
Union to enjoy political, social, and economic prosperity in multiethnic and multireligious
societies.
[1] Pickering, Paula M. “Generating Social Capital for Bridging Ethnic Divisions in the Balkans: Case
Studies of Two Bosniak Cities.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29: 1 (January 2006), 79-103.
[2] King, Charles. Beyond Bosnia. Fix this later.
[3] Wilmer, Franke. “Identity, Culture, and Historicity.”
[4] Wilmer, Franke. “Identity, Culture, and Historicity: The Social Construction of Ethnicity in
the Balkans.” World Affairs 160:1 (Summer 1997), 3-16.
[5] Wilmer, Franke. “Identity, Culture, and Historicity.”
[6] Goltz, Thomas. “An Anti-Ethnic Diatribe.” Washington Quarterly 22:4 (Autumn 1999), 113-25.
[7] Drakulic, Slavenka. They Would Never Hurt a Fly : War Criminals on Trial in the Hague. New
York : Viking Press, 2004.
[8] Drakulic, Slavenka. They Would Never Hurt a Fly.
[9] Carpenter, Charli R. “Women and Children First: Gender, Norms, and Humanitarian Evacuation in
the Balkans 1991-95.” International Organization 57:4, 661-694.
[10] Carpenter, Charli R. “Women and Children First.”
[11] Goltz, Thomas. “An Anti-Ethnic Diatribe.” Washington Quarterly 22:4 (Autumn 1999), 113-25.
[12] Steorts, Jason Lee. “Ethnic Cleansing, Continued.” National Review 57: 16 (September 2005),
30-31.
[13] Steorts, Jason Lee. “Ethnic Cleansing, Continued.”
[14] Wilmer, Franke. “Identity, Culture, and Historicity.”
[15] Joseph, Edward. “Back to the Balkans.” Foreign Affairs 84:1 (Jan/Feb 2005), 111.
[16] Joseph, Edward. “Back to the Balkans.”
[17] Pickering, Paula M. “Generating Social Capital.”
[18] Pickering, Paula M. “Generating Social Capital.”