If you abuse minority populations; if you give special privileges to majorities or any “chosen” group in a society; if you fan the flames of nationalism for political gain; if devise political structures which systematically deny a voice to minority populations; if you seek to eliminate or marginalize certain ethnic groups within your territory… you are playing with fire.
Those frustrated with the ICJ over Kosovo are saying the ruling will cause more separatist groups around the world to seek independence. Perhaps it will. But sovereign nations have tremendous advantages at their disposal in this struggle. Those advantages can be defined (and then employed) by asking these questions:
have duly elected and effective representation at the federal, state, and local levels?
have legislative and executive control over the sub-territories where they are in a majority?
have access to and representation at all levels of the nation’s judicial mechanisms?
enjoy the full and equal benefits of your nation’s educational and health systems?
participate fully in an integrated economic system with a level playing field?
Sovereign governments which flinch at these questions are likely the same ones which felt a little queasy after hearing the ICJ ruling on Kosovo today.
*with apologies to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.
The second annual Sarajevo Queer Festival, “Just Like Any Other,” ended today after four days of virtual “celebration”–meaning no one walked down Marshal Tito street waving signs and shouting slogans; no one introduced films to throngs of movie fans; no one sang songs or serenaded the crowds because this year, for fear of being violently attacked once again, LGBT Sarajevans celebrated virtually on-line through its website, paying for public education ads that played on national television for one day and by plastering 100 billboards throughout the country.
Last year, in a small effort to celebrate queerness by exhibiting art and screening films, the Sarajevo Queer festival opening was disrupted in violence, attacked by unruly thugs who appeared to be in this Balkan state, fundamentalist Muslim men. Several LGBT persons attending opening night ended up in the hospital for medical treatment, as police failed to maintain public safety. A number of innocent people were beaten because of who they were. The opening night sadly ended last year’s festival.
There seems to be an ugly trend here: Violence in Belgrade in 2001 ended gay pride, only to be followed in 2009 with a cancellation by Serbian government officials for fear of violence on Sept. 19, which I posted here last week. Last year’s festival in Sarajevo also ends in violence, thus producing a “virtual pride” celebration this year. The situation has improved a bit in Croatia, allowing LGBT people to hold pride celebrations in public void of violence during the last couple of years, an improvement from earlier years. A dear friend who lives in Sarajevo, “Aida,” for the purposes of this blog, said that Association Q, the LGBT organization that sponsored this year’s festival said that the Association “decided not to make a ‘real’ festival because of the huge violence last year.” She also said that many people are scared now, very frustrated by the events of last year. Nonetheless, LGBT people in Banja Luka, the Serb entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina have recently formed a new queer organization there too. This exciting, but surprising development in the heart of macho Serbdom, reflects that Balkan queers are going to come out, despite the obvious threats of violence.
Nonetheless, I am so sad today for all my friends in Sarajevo who truly only want to be able to love without fear. As Aida told me: “We can only get together in groups of 5 or 6 to 10 people at a time for coffee.” Anything more than that would attract negative attention and one could certainly not engage in any public display of affection. So in solidarity, I am sharing their broken hearts with all of you taken from the art displayed on their website:
Signing off tonight in New York City, sending much love to my fellow Sarajevans.
It was a very unpleasant weekend for LGBT people in the city of Belgrade, who were “warned” it was too dangerous to participate in the second Belgrade Gay Pride march in less than a decade. Last Thursday, a French man had his head bashed in by football club hooligans. Four days later, they went after an Australian man, who allegedly “looked gay.”
The government was so intimidated by these Serbian skinheads and ultra-nationalists, who have for months have warned on Neo-Nazi websites (like Storm Front — see its Serbian thread) and in Serbian media (according to a Women in Black listserv that was provided to me) that they would do everything possible to prevent the march from happening.
Despite earlier statements to the contrary, Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic pulled the plug on the march early Saturday morning — twenty-four hours before it was supposed to take place — during a meeting with the Belgrade Gay Pride’s organizing committee.
The state will do everything to protect people, whatever their national, religious, sexual or political orientation, and no group must resort to threats and violence, or take justice into its own hands and jeopardize the lives of those who think or are different.
And yet ultimately in the end, the state did not do everything it could to support the march. Nice words by Tadic, yet empty and completely unfulfilled.
In the end, a combination of poor planning (by Minister of Interior and Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dacic, who had promised adequate police protection for the Pride parade as early as August 24) and political spinelessness were enough to doom the event. Dacic went so far as to suggest that it would be better not to hold the pride parade altogether so as to prevent people from being hurt and property destroyed. He said the parade had not been banned, but simply postponed.
So much for human rights for all.
But Dadic did not reveal the full story, which is much more unsettling. The organizers, who had hired security expert Zoran Dragisic to prepare their own security plan in order to maintain order and assist the police in doing their job, were told that if they went ahead with the march without the government’s backing, they would be held responsible for any and all damage done to private and public property.
Comments from another list serve communication by “Ana” tells the full story:
The organisers commissioned a security risk study and worked intensively with the police and other state institutions in order to obtain their support for the purpose of guaranteeing the safety of the Pride participants. The importance of the safety issue cannot be overstated given that in the last month before Pride would have taken place. . .an aggressive hate-speech campaign was launched by. . .the neo-fascist groups Obraz[Honor] and Srpski narodni pokret 1389 [Serb Popular Movement 1389, a reference to the 1389 Battle of Kosovo].
I saw with my own eyes Belgrade covered with graffiti calling for a ban of the Pride [march], the murder of gay people, and the their expulsion from Serbia. “We are waiting for you” and “The streets of Belgrade will be covered with blood, but the Pride will not take place” are two examples of the [graffiti] message,s which [also] called for lynch[ing] of the people taking part in the Pride. So, not only [were] the people who wrote these. . .examples of hate-speech. . .not ready to allow their LGBT fellow-citizens the freedom of love, but they were even actively inciting violence against the LGBT population.”
The Pride committee was right when it said that “The Republic of Serbia has capitulated. We have not.”
This time around, ultra-nationalists openly celebrated their victory in stopping the march, gleefully pronouncing the cancellation of the march as “a great victory for normal Serbia.” The Serbian Orthodox Church also condemned the march, calling it a “Sodom and Gomorrah parade” but did not openly embrace violence. Nonetheless, march organizers believed that the church’s position could have helped incite violence.
The problem of violent ultranationalism, wrapped in the robes of an militantly reactionary Serbian Orthodox church, is a major problem for the Tadic government. Despite the government’s arrest of thirty-seven ultra-nationalists on Monday for assembling in the center of Belgrade in defiance of a recently passed law banning such gatherings (a law that is somewhat dubious from a civil libertarian standpoint), a much more pervasive problem remains that Serbian politicians and leaders must address head-on: the deeply embedded criminal legacy that exists in Serbian society as a consequence of the Slobodan Milosevic years.
Milosevic permitted para-military groups to proliferate and act with impunity. He supported — and often benefited politically from — ultra-nationalists like Vojislav Šešelj (who led the Serbian Radical Party and is now standing trial in the Hague for his alleged war crimes) and the notorious Željko Ražnatovic, (a.k.a. “Arkan,” who led “Arkan’s Tigers,” known for raping and plundering entire Bosniak villages and who was assassinated by other criminal elements in January 2000). The culture of hate Milosevic fomented and sustained continues to haunt Serbia to this day.
If Tadic really wants Serbia to join the EU on his watch, he will have to accomplish what no one else has before him has had the political will to do: clean up Serbia’s criminal and violent nationalistic elements once and for all.
Now is the time for Tadic to lead not by word but by deed. Only genuine and concrete enforcement of human rights for all Serbians — regardless of their sexual orientation — can begin to scrub away the stain that so permeates Serbian society.
Undip reader (and friend) Lorelei comments on my post on the late Alison Des Forges:
I saw Alison testify in the HIRC in 1994 when the genocide was escalating…I will always remember her saying–to insinuations about eternal tribalism and ancient feuds. She said something like.. “no gentlemen, this is not their fate. it cannot be their fate….” and I always loved her for that.
Lorelei’s comment (and her story about Des Forges) reminded me of two things that makes me absolutely freaking nuts everytime I see them in the media:
European ethnic groups are always identified as nations or peoples, while African ethnic groups are almost always identified as tribes.
Regardless of geography, a conflict between two peoples is almost always portrayed as the result of ancient ethnic [tribal] hatreds.
Both of these are utter nonsense. Tutsis and Serbs — to use just two examples — are both nationalities whose identity is based on a number of factors, including geography, language, religion, and self-selection. There’s no difference. And whenever you hear a broadcaster/pundit/blogger start blathering about ancient ethnic/tribal hatreds, you can bet that they have no idea what their talking about.
Take, for example, the Serb-Croat conflict in the 1990s. During the course of the war, you heard constant reference to the ancient ethnic hatreds trope, how these two groups had been fighting each other ever since Cyril and Methodius dissed the Latin alphabet.
There’s only one small problem, of course: it’s not true.
Serbs and Croats got along just fine until about 1929, when (Serbian) King Aleksandr proclaimed a dictatorship and changed the name of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to the Kingdom of Jugoslavia (Yugoslavia in English). A few years later, extreme Croatian nationalists murdered Aleksandr during a visit to Marseilles, and Hitler used Serb-Croat tensions to encourage those same extremists to establish a separate Croatian state (which arguably was second only to the Nazis in its passion for mass murder). After the war, Tito pulled the different parts of Yugoslavia back together and ruled it for the next thirty years, first as a Stalinist dictatorship and subsequently as a benign (but not entirely so) personal dictatorship with Communist trappings.
It was only after the death of Tito and the rise of Slobodan Milosevic that things started to fall apart again. But what’s forgotten is the fact that the grievances that Milosevic first exploited were not ethnic (with the exception of Albanians in Kosovo), but rather economic: he stoked resentment of the northern half of the country’s relative prosperity and its growing reluctance to provide a larger and larger percentage of the federal budget.
But of course disputes over money aren’t that sexy (except maybe on Divorce Court). So when conflict erupted — for only the second time in more than 600 years of Serb-Croat relations — it became all about the ancient ethnic hatreds. Which of course actually dated, at worst, to the 1920s.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Serbs and Croats have always been the most snuggly of neighbors. They haven’t. The Serbs usually resented the Croats’ wealth and the Croats usually resented first the Serbs’ independence from the Turks and later the Serbs’ relative dominance within both pre- and post-war Yugoslavia. And neither side ever really forgot what happened in World War Two. But it’s not like they never interacted with one another. Hundreds of thousands of people in what we now call the former Yugoslavia have both Serbian and Croatian blood.
So why do the media do this? It’s a way to break down a complex conflict into easy digestible bits. The problem is that doing so has a deeply pernicious impact on the way most people look at such conflicts: “Well, if it’s an ancient conflict, how the hell are we supposed to do anything about it? Just let them fight.” And of course, that means that the problem is far too old and complex and scary for us to do anything about it.
As Des Forges noted in that testimony, that is utter nonsense. It is never anyone’s fate to fight it out to the death. Real life is not an episode of Star Trek.
You want to know an example of an honest-to-goodness ancient ethnic hatred? One involving a conflict that, in different forms and with different actors, took place for over 1500 years? One that caused the deaths of millions of innocents and shaped much of the history of the past four centuries?
Given the increasingly heated rhetoric between India and Pakistan, two questions come to mind, one obvious, the other not so much. Will this spiral out of control and lead to war, including perhaps a nuclear exchange? And what will China do? Specifically, what happens if China comes in on Pakistan’s side?
Remember that the First World War began when a small group of Serbian nationalists committed an act of terrorism on Austrian soil (or at least Austrian-controlled soil). But things didn’t get out of hand until Russia came in on Serbia’s side and Germany did the same in the case of Austria-Hungary.
If I were President-elect Obama, I’d get Hillary on a plane now, preferably on a joint mission with The Condi. We can’t wait until January 20th to allow this thing to get completely out of control. Because the current crisis is no more about terrorism than it was in 1914.
Given everything going on around the election — lipstick, pigs, sex, wolves, seals and all sorts of other so very important matters — you might have missed this little gem, from yesterday’s White House press briefing:
Perino’s claim that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, not Osama bin Laden, was the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks is so staggeringly and blatantly a lie that it’s hard to know where to start. For the Administration to cover up its failure to capture bin Laden by arguing the detention of KSM somehow matters more, is akin to suggesting that Radovan Karadzic’s arrest absovled Soblodan Milosevic of any responsibility for what happened in Bosnia.
Whenever any leader makes a decision, there are two levels of responsibility: strategic and tactical. The person who identifies the direction that an organization or country or business is going to take determines the strategy. The person who designs and implements the actions necesssary to implement the strategy determines the tactics.
In this case, Osama bin Laden chose the strategy — attacking the United States. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed decided the tactics — how and where to make the attack a reality. It is just mind-boggling that the Bush Administration doesn’t understand — or is pretending not to understand — the difference.
Just in case it’s the former, permit me to remind Ms. Perino and her boss what Osama bin Laden said in his first interview (with Taysir Alluni, al-Jazeera’s Afghanistan bureau chief) after the September 11 attacks. The transcript is from Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden:
As far as concerns [America's] description of these attacks as terrorist acts, that description is wrong. These young men, for whom God has created a path, have shifted the battle to the heart of the United States, and they have destroyed its most oustanding landmarks, its economic and military landmarks, by the grace of God. And they have done this because of our words — and we have previously incited and roused them to action. . . . And if inciting for these reasons is terrorism, and if killing those that kill our sons is terrorism, then let history witness that we are terrorists. . . .
Making connections is easy. If this implies that we have incited these attacks, then yes, we’ve been inciting for years, and we have released decrees and documents concerning this issue, and other incitements which were published and broadcast in the media. So if they mean, or if you mean, that there is a connection as a result of our incitement, then that is true. So we incite, and incitement is a duty. . . .
I say that the events that happened on Tuesday September 11 in New York and Washington are truly great events by any measure, and their repercussions are not yet over. . . .These repercussions cannot be calculated by anyone due to their very large — and increasing — scale, multitude and complexity, so watch as the amount reaches no less than $1 trillion by the lowest estimate, due to thise successful and blessed attacks. We implore God to accept those brothers within the ranks of the martyrs and to admit them to the highest levels of Paradise.
Now I know that Ms. Perino is not a lawyer, neither is President Bush. I’m not either. But unlike me, they’re surrounded by some of the top legal minds in the country. One of them just might want to explain to Bush and Perino the concepts of conspiracy and incitement. It just might clarify things a little.
Then again, those are the same lawyers who told Bush that torture was okay. So maybe not.
We congratulate the Government of Serbia, and thank the people who conducted this operation for their professionalism and courage. This operation is an important demonstration of the Serbian Government’s determination to honor its commitment to cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The timing of the arrest, only days after the commemoration of the massacre of over 7,000 Bosnians committed in Srebrenica, is particularly appropriate, as there is no better tribute to the victims of the war’s atrocities than bringing their perpetrators to justice.
Imagine the impact were the White House to say something similar about the ICC indictment of Bashir….
Reuters is reporting that former Bosnian Serb Republic President Radovan Karadzic, was arrested today in Belgrade today. Reuters is also reporting joyous celebrations on the streets of Sarajevo. I wish I could be there with them.
Karadzic , along with General Ratko Mladic, was responsible for authorizing and overseeing the murder of 8,000 Bosniak (Muslim) men at Srebrenica in 1995, among other crimes. He faces two counts of genocide before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia — one for his role at Srebrenica and the other for authorizing the shooting of civilians during the 43-month siege of Sarajevo.
Kudos to Serbian President Boris Tadic for making this happen. Now let’s hope he can finish the job and grab Mladic as well.
Photo: Remains of some of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre, via Solidarity Srebrenica
An important message from the entire Kosovo-Serbia experience, highlighted by today’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling is this: treat your minorities well*.
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